A drone attack launched from Sudan has killed 17 people in Chad, according to the Chadian government, which has pledged to retaliate against any further strikes as the civil war in the neighbouring nation rages on. A spokesman for the Chadian government announced the death toll on Thursday from the attack on the border town of Tine, which had been targeted despite "various firm warnings addressed to the different belligerents in the Sudan conflict and the closure of the border". Local government sources said it was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, according to Reuters. Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby called a meeting of the defence and security council on Wednesday night, ordering the army to "retaliate starting from tonight to any attack coming from Sudan", according to a presidency statement. Early on Thursday, the government said Chad had strengthened its security presence at the border and could potentially carry out operations on Sudanese territory.

Pete Hegseth explodes at'Trump Derangement Syndrome' as he claims Iran war is an overwhelming success Pete Hegseth says world should thank Trump as US prepares to unleash'largest strike package' on Iran: Live updates RICHARD EDEN: Everything's going wrong for Harry and Meghan but the Royal Family are not laughing because they will have to take them back Dangerous virus with no treatment or cure is exploding across the US... now alarming new map reveals exactly who is at risk'There was just all this jam. We thought there'd be more to it': ALISON BOSHOFF reveals inside story of how'Meghan has been purged' by Netflix, truth about her'silencing' of Harry, and what the out-in-the-cold couple will do next... Trader Joe's vs Walmart: What your local store really does to your home value and the brand that could knock $17k off your house price Secret life of Heath Ledger's daughter Matilda: She's been hidden for 18 years - but now insiders finally tell of family'secrets'... whispers from ...

US rapper Afroman has defeated seven sheriff's deputies in a court case after they sued him for releasing songs and videos that mocked them and a raid they carried out on his home. The officers broke down the musician's door in 2022 as part of a drug and kidnapping investigation, but the raid didn't lead to any charges. Afroman, best known for his 2000 hit Because I Got High, responded by using home security footage in viral videos that ridiculed the deputies. His video for the song Lemon Pound Cake was inspired by a deputy apparently eyeing a cake in his kitchen, while another video attributed personal and sexual transgressions to the officers. They sued him for defamation, but a jury has sided with the colourful rapper after a three-day trial. Afroman yelled outside the Ohio court, surrounded by supporters, in a clip posted on social media after the verdict.

Will Gulf states join war? Game Theory: Are Iran's athletes political pawns? Game Theory Are Iran's athletes political pawns? While in Australia, members of Iran's women's football team found themselves at the centre of an international political storm. As several players choose to return home, difficult questions are being raised about athlete safety, agency and Western intervention.

Despite being declared the third-hottest year on record, 2025 was a relatively quiet year for climate disasters in the US. No major hurricanes made landfall, while the total number of acres burned in wildfires last year--a way of measuring the intensity of wildfire season --fell below the 10-year average. But starting this week, the West is experiencing what looks to be a record-breaking heat wave, while forecasting models predict that a strong El Niño event is likely to emerge later this year. These two unrelated phenomena could set the stage for a long stretch of unpredictable and extreme weather reaching into next year, compounding the effects of a climate that's getting hotter and hotter thanks to human activity. Beginning this week and heading into next, a massive ridge of high-pressure air will bring record-breaking temperatures to the American West.

Amazon's Alexa has had an AI upgrade. Now she's got more to say Amazon's Echo smart speaker - more commonly known as Alexa - is getting an AI-powered upgrade which will roll out across the UK. Alexa+ turns the digital assistant into a more chatty device which Amazon says will be able to follow threads and be more proactive in its responses. There has been criticism the Echo has stagnated since its launch in 2016, while AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have become much easier to communicate with. It will be interesting to see how users react to this - we expect this could be polarising, with some enjoying the more relaxed, familiar interactions while others may find it disconcerting, said Jessica Miller, head of data insights at FDM/CCS Insight. UK consumers will notice an immediate difference, she added.

Since the conflict in the Middle East began on Feb. 28, Emirates has cancelled more than 2,000 flights -- 54% of scheduled services, according to data from Cirium. As Emirates flight EK10 from London cruised over Saudi Arabia on Monday, news broke of a drone strike at its destination, Dubai. The aircraft turned back to Gatwick, flight data shows, completing a 9,100 km round trip -- one of dozens of flights to nowhere triggered by the Middle East war. Roughly 30 Emirates flights heading to Dubai International Airport were also ordered back or rerouted after Iranian drone attacks temporarily shut what is normally the world's busiest airport for international passengers. Passengers expecting a dawn landing in the glitzy United Arab Emirates port city were stunned. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Humour and science fiction may not seem obvious bedfellows but a history of cinema will tell you different. Think Spaceballs, Mars Attacks! and Everything Everwhere All At Once to name but a few. And now Ryan Gosling is hopping on board. The 45-year-old is both the lead actor and producer of Project Hail Mary, a space adventure film based on the 2021 Andy Weir novel of the same name. While Gosling has showcased his comedy chops in films such as Barbie and Nice Guys, he tells the BBC he's always struggled as an actor because I would want to bring humour to something but has found opportunities to be funny limited with some projects.

Understanding when learning is statistically possible yet computationally hard is a central challenge in high-dimensional statistics. In this work, we investigate this question in the context of single- and multi-index models, classes of functions widely studied as benchmarks to probe the ability of machine learning methods to discover features in high-dimensional data. Our main contribution is to show that a Noise Sensitivity Exponent (NSE) - a simple quantity determined by the activation function - governs the existence and magnitude of statistical-to-computational gaps within a broad regime of these models. We first establish that, in single-index models with large additive noise, the onset of a computational bottleneck is fully characterized by the NSE. We then demonstrate that the same exponent controls a statistical-computational gap in the specialization transition of large separable multi-index models, where individual components become learnable. Finally, in hierarchical multi-index models, we show that the NSE governs the optimal computational rate in which different directions are sequentially learned. Taken together, our results identify the NSE as a unifying property linking noise robustness, computational hardness, and feature specialization in high-dimensional learning.

Understanding the distance between human languages is central to linguistics, anthropology, and tracing human evolutionary history. Yet, while linguistics has long provided rich qualitative accounts of cross-linguistic variation, a unified and scalable quantitative approach to measuring language distance remains lacking. In this paper, we introduce a method that leverages pretrained multilingual language models as systematic instruments for linguistic measurement. Specifically, we show that the spontaneously emerged attention mechanisms of these models provide a robust, tokenization-agnostic measure of cross-linguistic distance, termed Attention Transport Distance (ATD). By treating attention matrices as probability distributions and measuring their geometric divergence via optimal transport, we quantify the representational distance between languages during translation. Applying ATD to a large and diverse set of languages, we demonstrate that the resulting distances recover established linguistic groupings with high fidelity and reveal patterns aligned with geographic and contact-induced relationships. Furthermore, incorporating ATD as a regularizer improves transfer performance in low-resource machine translation. Our results establish a principled foundation for testing linguistic hypotheses using artificial neural networks. This framework transforms multilingual models into powerful tools for quantitative linguistic discovery, facilitating more equitable multilingual AI.