Is the fall of Pokrovsk inevitable? Is Trump losing patience with Putin? At least 19 people have been killed and dozens wounded in Russian drone and missile attacks across Ukraine, according to the country's emergency service. The attack came overnight on Wednesday, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was due to arrive in Turkiye, where he hopes to revive talks over ending the war caused by Russia's full-scale invasion two years ago. Effective sanctions and assistance to Ukraine can change this," the president said in a social media post on Wednesday, calling for air defence missile aid from allies.

Nine people have been killed and dozens more wounded in a Russian attack on the western city of Ternopil, Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky has said. Nine-storey blocks of flats were hit in the strikes, as Russia fired more than 470 drones and 47 missiles at Ukraine overnight in a brazen attack, Zelensky said. Three districts of Ukraine's second city, Kharkiv, were also hit by a massive drone attack which injured more than 30 people, including children. Photos posted online showed buildings and cars ablaze. Power cuts are affecting a number of regions across the country, Ukraine's energy ministry said.

The UK lacks a plan to defend itself from military attack, a committee of MPs has warned. In a highly critical report, the defence committee says the UK is over-reliant on US resources and that preparations to defend itself and overseas territories in the event of attack are nowhere near where they need to be. The committee's chair, Labour MP Tan Dhesi, said: Putin's brutal invasion of Ukraine, unrelenting disinformation campaigns, and repeated incursions into European airspace mean that we cannot afford to bury our heads in the sand. It comes as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) identified parts of the country where six or more new munitions factories could be built. In June, Defence Secretary John Healey announced plans to move the UK to war-fighting readiness, including £1.5bn to support the construction of new munitions factories, which will be built by private contractors.

Is the fall of Pokrovsk inevitable? Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Russian drones struck two central districts - Slobidskyi and Osnovyansk - in Ukraine's second largest city Kharkiv, injuring five people in an apartment building and triggering a fire, authorities said. Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said 22 residents had been evacuated from one section of the damaged apartment building while another drone struck an area outside a medical facility, injuring a doctor and damaging the building and nearby cars. The Kharkiv region's governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said 11 drones were deployed in the attack and seven people were injured in total.

President Donald Trump criticizes 'Woke AI' and excessive state regulation while House Republican leaders consider including AI preemption language in defense legislation.

Recent advances in speech-enabled AI, including Google's NotebookLM and OpenAI's speech-to-speech API, are driving widespread interest in voice interfaces globally. Despite this momentum, there exists no publicly available application-specific model evaluation that caters to Africa's linguistic diversity. We present AfriSpeech-MultiBench, the first domain-specific evaluation suite for over 100 African English accents across 10+ countries and seven application domains: Finance, Legal, Medical, General dialogue, Call Center, Named Entities and Hallucination Robustness. We benchmark a diverse range of open, closed, unimodal ASR and multimodal LLM-based speech recognition systems using both spontaneous and non-spontaneous speech conversation drawn from various open African accented English speech datasets. Our empirical analysis reveals systematic variation: open-source ASR models excels in spontaneous speech contexts but degrades on noisy, non-native dialogue; multimodal LLMs are more accent-robust yet struggle with domain-specific named entities; proprietary models deliver high accuracy on clean speech but vary significantly by country and domain. Models fine-tuned on African English achieve competitive accuracy with lower latency, a practical advantage for deployment, hallucinations still remain a big problem for most SOTA models. By releasing this comprehensive benchmark, we empower practitioners and researchers to select voice technologies suited to African use-cases, fostering inclusive voice applications for underserved communities.

Microsoft and Nvidia plan to invest in Anthropic under a new tie-up that includes a $30bn commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft's cloud services, the latest high-profile deal binding together major players in the AI industry. Nvidia will commit up to $10bn to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5bn, the companies said on Tuesday, without sharing more details. The announcement underscores the AI industry's insatiable appetite for computing power as companies race to build systems that can rival or surpass human intelligence. It also ties major OpenAI-backer Microsoft, as well as key AI chip supplier Nvidia, closer to one of the ChatGPT maker's biggest rivals. "We're increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure and we'll go to market together," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video.

Rap star Nicki Minaj is celebrated by a human rights lawyer for using her platform to bring attention to the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

Trump braces for more Epstein fallout with House set to vote to release the files TODAY... what happens next?: Live updates The incredible new treatment that can cure liver cancer - without surgery, drugs or radiation. Roger had cirrhosis and thought he was going to die. Now he says: 'I'm so grateful' Cloudflare down live updates: Outage takes Claude, ChatGPT and thousands of other sites offline; 'Could you unblock me?' Trump brags of'Golden Age' at McDonald's event... but the grim reality threatens midterms wipeout North Korea executes'big shot' couple who became'arrogant' after the success of their business, accusing them of being'anti-republic' Movie icon'lost her virginity to her stepfather at 11', seduced her friend's 17-year-old son... but took a forbidden secret to her grave Trump is being utterly humiliated by a dead pedophile. MAGA and his legacy are collapsing. We're about to enter a blood pact with the devil.

Trump braces for more Epstein fallout with House set to vote to release the files TODAY... what happens next?: Live updates The incredible new treatment that can cure liver cancer - without surgery, drugs or radiation. Roger had cirrhosis and thought he was going to die. Now he says: 'I'm so grateful' Cloudflare down live updates: Outage takes Claude, ChatGPT and thousands of other sites offline; 'Could you unblock me?' Trump brags of'Golden Age' at McDonald's event... but the grim reality threatens midterms wipeout North Korea executes'big shot' couple who became'arrogant' after the success of their business, accusing them of being'anti-republic' Movie icon'lost her virginity to her stepfather at 11', seduced her friend's 17-year-old son... but took a forbidden secret to her grave Trump is being utterly humiliated by a dead pedophile. MAGA and his legacy are collapsing. We're about to enter a blood pact with the devil.