Africa
Scientists reveal the surprising age at which your brain reaches its peak - so, are YOUR best days behind you?
Nancy Pelosi explodes at reporter as she's escorted down Capitol Building steps Trump threatens'land strikes' on Venezuela as CIA begins covert operations in Latin American country and Maduro declares'No to coups' She's the dancer caught'going at it' in bed with Britney Spears. Bella Hadid's health battle takes dark turn: Loved ones reveal hellish new details about model... as ominous texts emerge Diane Keaton's cause of death revealed just days after actress' passing at 79 as her family pens emotional message to fans Emily Ratajkowski fans rejoice as she makes Victoria's Secret show debut at age 34 Murderer's final words and hearty last meal as he's executed after 30 years on death row Nepo babies dare to bare! Celebrity offspring leave nothing to imagination as they dominate Victoria's Secret show... what would their parents say? Victoria's Secret show 2025: Bella Hadid rules the runway after her health woes, Jasmine Tookes opens the show at nine months pregnant and Emily Ratajkowski makes her debut aged 34 as legendary Angels and nepo babies unite after failed woke rebrand Popular food can be used to fight resistant viruses ... and it costs just pennies Disney superfan, 31, vanishes from her Midwest home months after announcing pregnancy... then horrific discovery is made at Walt Disney World Chilling new footage shows knifeman on night he'stabbed Ukrainian refugee to death' on a train in murder that shook America Meghan-linked charity is hit by racism and sexism allegations as staff claim it is a'toxic' and'hostile' workplace Britney Spears unleashes on ex Kevin Federline AND her SONS - accusing him of'gaslighting' and claiming she's seen one boy for just 45 minutes in five years Jailed Diddy's harsh reality check as very unglamorous conditions rapper has to abide by after prison revealed Scientists reveal the surprising age at which your brain reaches its peak - so, are YOUR best days behind you? READ MORE: Actor Tom Hanks thinks 35 is the hardest age - but is he right? With each passing day, you may feel like you're getting further past your peak.
Britain has experienced its first official 'MEGA FIRE' - and scientists warn the devastating blazes could soon become the norm
Nancy Pelosi explodes at reporter as she's escorted down Capitol Building steps Trump threatens'land strikes' on Venezuela as CIA begins covert operations in Latin American country and Maduro declares'No to coups' She's the dancer caught'going at it' in bed with Britney Spears. Bella Hadid's health battle takes dark turn: Loved ones reveal hellish new details about model... as ominous texts emerge Diane Keaton's cause of death revealed just days after actress' passing at 79 as her family pens emotional message to fans Emily Ratajkowski fans rejoice as she makes Victoria's Secret show debut at age 34 Murderer's final words and hearty last meal as he's executed after 30 years on death row Nepo babies dare to bare! Celebrity offspring leave nothing to imagination as they dominate Victoria's Secret show... what would their parents say? Victoria's Secret show 2025: Bella Hadid rules the runway after her health woes, Jasmine Tookes opens the show at nine months pregnant and Emily Ratajkowski makes her debut aged 34 as legendary Angels and nepo babies unite after failed woke rebrand Popular food can be used to fight resistant viruses ... and it costs just pennies Disney superfan, 31, vanishes from her Midwest home months after announcing pregnancy... then horrific discovery is made at Walt Disney World Chilling new footage shows knifeman on night he'stabbed Ukrainian refugee to death' on a train in murder that shook America Britney Spears unleashes on ex Kevin Federline AND her SONS - accusing him of'gaslighting' and claiming she's seen one boy for just 45 minutes in five years Jailed Diddy's harsh reality check as very unglamorous conditions rapper has to abide by after prison revealed Britain has experienced its first official'MEGA FIRE' - and scientists warn the devastating blazes could soon become the norm READ MORE: Scientists warn that'FIREWAVES' will devastate UK cities Britain has experienced its first official'mega fire' - and scientists warn the devastating blazes could soon become the norm. Back in June, the Carrbridge and Dava Moor in the Scottish Highlands was devastated by the worst wildfire in living memory. The blaze burned over 11,000 hectares (42.5 square miles) of forest and peatland, killing thousands of animals in its path.
Early Signs of Steganographic Capabilities in Frontier LLMs
Zolkowski, Artur, Nishimura-Gasparian, Kei, McCarthy, Robert, Zimmermann, Roland S., Lindner, David
Monitoring Large Language Model (LLM) outputs is crucial for mitigating risks from misuse and misalignment. However, LLMs could evade monitoring through steganography: Encoding hidden information within seemingly benign generations. In this paper, we evaluate the steganography capabilities in frontier LLMs to better understand the risk they pose. We focus on two types of steganography: passing encoded messages and performing encoded reasoning. We find that current models are unable to encode short messages in their outputs without a monitor noticing under standard affordances. They can succeed, however, if given additional affordances like using an unmonitored scratchpad and coordinating on what encoding scheme to use. We additionally find early signs that models can perform basic encoded reasoning in a simple state-tracking problem. This includes some ability to reason with their own and pre-defined schemes, including encoding schemes such as Hexadecimal. Despite this, they can rarely hide reasoning subtly within a cover task to fool a monitor. Overall, our results indicate that current LLMs exhibit nascent steganographic capabilities. While these capabilities are likely insufficient to bypass well-designed monitors at present, this could change in the future.
RECODE: Reasoning Through Code Generation for Visual Question Answering
Shen, Junhong, Cai, Mu, Hu, Bo, Talwalkar, Ameet, Ross, David A, Schmid, Cordelia, Fathi, Alireza
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with precise reasoning for structured visuals like charts and diagrams, as pixel-based perception lacks a mechanism for verification. To address this, we propose to leverage derendering -- the process of reverse-engineering visuals into executable code -- as a new modality for verifiable visual reasoning. Specifically, we propose RECODE, an agentic framework that first generates multiple candidate programs to reproduce the input image. It then uses a critic to select the most faithful reconstruction and iteratively refines the code. This process not only transforms an ambiguous perceptual task into a verifiable, symbolic problem, but also enables precise calculations and logical inferences later on. On various visual reasoning benchmarks such as CharXiv, ChartQA, and Geometry3K, RECODE significantly outperforms methods that do not leverage code or only use code for drawing auxiliary lines or cropping. Our work demonstrates that grounding visual perception in executable code provides a new path toward more accurate and verifiable multimodal reasoning.
Assessing Web Search Credibility and Response Groundedness in Chat Assistants
Vykopal, Ivan, Pikuliak, Matúš, Ostermann, Simon, Šimko, Marián
Chat assistants increasingly integrate web search functionality, enabling them to retrieve and cite external sources. While this promises more reliable answers, it also raises the risk of amplifying misinformation from low-credibility sources. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology for evaluating assistants' web search behavior, focusing on source credibility and the groundedness of responses with respect to cited sources. Using 100 claims across five misinformation-prone topics, we assess GPT-4o, GPT-5, Perplexity, and Qwen Chat. Our findings reveal differences between the assistants, with Perplexity achieving the highest source credibility, whereas GPT-4o exhibits elevated citation of non-credibility sources on sensitive topics. This work provides the first systematic comparison of commonly used chat assistants for fact-checking behavior, offering a foundation for evaluating AI systems in high-stakes information environments.
I Am Aligned, But With Whom? MENA Values Benchmark for Evaluating Cultural Alignment and Multilingual Bias in LLMs
Zahraei, Pardis Sadat, Asgari, Ehsaneddin
We introduce MENAValues, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the cultural alignment and multilingual biases of large language models (LLMs) with respect to the beliefs and values of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, an underrepresented area in current AI evaluation efforts. Drawing from large-scale, authoritative human surveys, we curate a structured dataset that captures the sociocultural landscape of MENA with population-level response distributions from 16 countries. To probe LLM behavior, we evaluate diverse models across multiple conditions formed by crossing three perspective framings (neutral, personalized, and third-person/cultural observer) with two language modes (English and localized native languages: Arabic, Persian, Turkish). Our analysis reveals three critical phenomena: "Cross-Lingual Value Shifts" where identical questions yield drastically different responses based on language, "Reasoning-Induced Degradation" where prompting models to explain their reasoning worsens cultural alignment, and "Logit Leakage" where models refuse sensitive questions while internal probabilities reveal strong hidden preferences. We further demonstrate that models collapse into simplistic linguistic categories when operating in native languages, treating diverse nations as monolithic entities. MENAValues offers a scalable framework for diagnosing cultural misalignment, providing both empirical insights and methodological tools for developing more culturally inclusive AI.
VLURes: Benchmarking VLM Visual and Linguistic Understanding in Low-Resource Languages
Atuhurra, Jesse, Ali, Iqra, Iwakura, Tomoya, Kamigaito, Hidetaka, Hiraoka, Tatsuya
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are pivotal for advancing perception in intelligent agents. Yet, evaluation of VLMs remains limited to predominantly English-centric benchmarks in which the image-text pairs comprise short texts. To evaluate VLM fine-grained abilities, in four languages under long-text settings, we introduce a novel multilingual benchmark VLURes featuring eight vision-and-language tasks, and a pioneering unrelatedness task, to probe the fine-grained Visual and Linguistic Understanding capabilities of VLMs across English, Japanese, and low-resource languages, Swahili, and Urdu. Our datasets, curated from web resources in the target language, encompass ten diverse image categories and rich textual context, introducing valuable vision-language resources for Swahili and Urdu. By prompting VLMs to generate responses and rationales, evaluated automatically and by native speakers, we uncover performance disparities across languages and tasks critical to intelligent agents, such as object recognition, scene understanding, and relationship understanding. We conducted evaluations of ten VLMs with VLURes. The best performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an overall accuracy of 90.8% and lags human performance by 6.7%, though the gap is larger for open-source models. The gap highlights VLURes' critical role in developing intelligent agents to tackle multi-modal visual reasoning.
Is Microsoft's first ever handheld Xbox console worth the wait?
Is Microsoft's first ever handheld Xbox console worth the wait? For almost two decades, rumours have swirled about a handheld Xbox console to rival Nintendo and PlayStation. The ROG Xbox Ally has been released worldwide, putting an end to the speculation. It works natively with Xbox's Game Pass subscription service out of the box, meaning members will start off with hundreds of games in their library. But its big trick is that it's really a portable computer running Windows, meaning most digital PC games people already own will work too - so long as they don't need a keyboard and mouse to play.
Russia intensifies attacks on Ukraine's trains in 'battle for the railways'
Russia intensifies attacks on Ukraine's trains in'battle for the railways' Propped up in her hospital bed, railway conductor Olha Zolotova speaks slowly and quietly as she talks about the day her train was hit by a Russian drone. When the Shahed [drone] hit I was covered in rubble. I was in the second car. People pulled me out, she says. There was fire everywhere, everything was burning, my hair caught fire a little.
Earth braces for impact as rare 'four-way' solar storm set to strike in just HOURS
Disney superfan, 31, vanishes from her Midwest home months after announcing pregnancy... then horrific discovery is made at Walt Disney World Pete Hegseth's jet makes emergency landing in Britain after high-stakes NATO summit on Russia-Ukraine war Doctor's husband'was watching X-rated videos in his house while daughter, two, died in roasting car outside' Bella Hadid's health battle takes dark turn: Loved ones reveal hellish new details about'missing' model... as ominous texts emerge Charlie Kirk suspect invokes Bryan Kohberger as he makes clothing demand to seem'more human' Trump says he'll go to the Supreme Court to watch tariff arguments Trump hails'beautiful black women' strutting Chicago in MAGA hats America's saddest lost soul can no longer SPEAK and spends days hitting herself'after years of unspeakable abuse by gangs of men' Virginia Giuffre calls Prince Andrew'entitled' and claims duke saw having sex with her as his'birthright' in autobiography released after her death'You will DIE if you do not remove your breasts', doctors screamed at me. I refused and tried a new experimental therapy instead... now I'm cancer-free Warning over'life-threatening' storm brewing in Atlantic that could hit US Will Trump's Gaza peace deal fail? Policy expert MARK DUBOWITZ breaks down all the forces at play... and how the president can actually pull this off Stephen A Smith eviscerates Democrat sweetheart Jasmine Crocket as he slams her use of'street' language: 'Republicans want her on TV' Astonishing interactive map lays bare where MILLIONS of homes will be submerged by water within a few years... are YOU at risk? The View's Joy Behar reveals the TRUTH behind her ageless appearance aged 83 Earth braces for impact as rare'four-way' solar storm set to strike in just HOURS A parade of four powerful bursts of solar energy is hurtling toward Earth, raising alarms about potential disruptions to technology and communications. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm watch for Thursday, warning that power grids, radio signals and GPS navigation systems could be affected .