Thailand's top court has ruled that former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra must serve a year in jail, in yet another blow to the influential political dynasty. The decision relates to a previous case where he was sentenced to years in prison for corruption, but ended up spending less than a day in a jail cell as he was moved to a hospital. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that this transfer was unlawful - and that the 76-year-old would have to serve his sentence in jail. Thaksin and his family have dominated Thai politics since he was first elected PM in 2001. His daughter Paetongtarn previously served as leader but was removed from office last month over a leaked phone call.

Geedge Networks, a company with ties to the founder of China's mass censorship infrastructure, is selling its censorship and surveillance systems to at least four other countries in Asia and Africa. A leak of more than 100,000 documents shows that a little-known Chinese company has been quietly selling censorship systems seemingly modeled on the Great Firewall to governments around the world. Geedge Networks, a company founded in 2018 that counts the "father" of China's massive censorship infrastructure as one of its investors, styles itself as a network-monitoring provider, offering business-grade cybersecurity tools to "gain comprehensive visibility and minimize security risks" for its customers, the documents show. In fact, researchers found that it has been operating a sophisticated system that allows users to monitor online information, block certain websites and VPN tools, and spy on specific individuals. Researchers who reviewed the leaked material found that the company is able to package advanced surveillance capabilities into what amounts to a commercialized version of the Great Firewall--a wholesale solution with both hardware that can be installed in any telecom data center and software operated by local government officers.

AI audits play a critical role in AI accountability and safety. One branch of the law for which AI audits are particularly salient is anti-discrimination law. Several areas of anti-discrimination law implicate the "less discriminatory alternative" (LDA) requirement, in which a protocol (e.g., model) is defensible if no less discriminatory protocol that achieves comparable performance can be found with a reasonable amount of effort. Notably, the burden of proving an LDA exists typically falls on the claimant (the party alleging discrimination). This creates a significant hurdle in AI cases, as the claimant would seemingly need to train a less discriminatory yet high-performing model, a task requiring resources and expertise beyond most litigants. Moreover, developers often shield information about and access to their model and training data as trade secrets, making it difficult to reproduce a similar model from scratch. In this work, we present a procedure enabling claimants to determine if an LDA exists, even when they have limited compute, data, information, and model access. We focus on the setting in which fairness is given by demographic parity and performance by binary cross-entropy loss. As our main result, we provide a novel closed-form upper bound for the loss-fairness Pareto frontier (PF). We show how the claimant can use it to fit a PF in the "low-resource regime," then extrapolate the PF that applies to the (large) model being contested, all without training a single large model. The expression thus serves as a scaling law for loss-fairness PFs. To use this scaling law, the claimant would require a small subsample of the train/test data. Then, the claimant can fit the context-specific PF by training as few as 7 (small) models. We stress test our main result in simulations, finding that our scaling law holds even when the exact conditions of our theory do not.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented significant challenges in Nigeria's public health systems since the first case reported on February 27, 2020. This study investigates key factors that contribute to state vulnerability, quantifying them through a composite risk score integrating population density (weight 0.2), poverty (0.4), access to healthcare (0.3), and age risk (0.1), adjusted by normalized case rates per 100,000. States were categorized into low-, medium-, and high-density areas to analyze trends and identify hotspots using geographic information system (GIS) mapping. The findings reveal that high-density urban areas, such as Lagos, accounting for 35.4% of national cases, had the highest risk scores (Lagos: 673.47 vs. national average: 28.16). These results align with global and local studies on the spatial variability of COVID-19 in Nigeria, including international frameworks such as the CDC Social Vulnerability Index. Google Trends data highlight variations in public health awareness, serving as a supplementary analysis to contextualize vulnerability. The risk score provides a prioritization tool for policymakers to allocate testing, vaccines, and healthcare resources to high-risk areas, though data gaps and rural underreporting call for further research. This framework can extend to other infectious diseases, offering lessons for future pandemics in resource-limited settings.

Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) offers a novel approach to encoding and understanding the complexity of natural languages through the power of quantum computation. This paper presents a pretrained quantum context-sensitive embedding model, called QCSE, that captures context-sensitive word embeddings, leveraging the unique properties of quantum systems to learn contextual relationships in languages. The model introduces quantum-native context learning, enabling the utilization of quantum computers for linguistic tasks. Central to the proposed approach are innovative context matrix computation methods, designed to create unique, representations of words based on their surrounding linguistic context. Five distinct methods are proposed and tested for computing the context matrices, incorporating techniques such as exponential decay, sinusoidal modulation, phase shifts, and hash-based transformations. These methods ensure that the quantum embeddings retain context sensitivity, thereby making them suitable for downstream language tasks where the expressibility and properties of quantum systems are valuable resources. To evaluate the effectiveness of the model and the associated context matrix methods, evaluations are conducted on both a Fulani corpus, a low-resource African language, dataset of small size and an English corpus of slightly larger size. The results demonstrate that QCSE not only captures context sensitivity but also leverages the expressibility of quantum systems for representing rich, context-aware language information. The use of Fulani further highlights the potential of QNLP to mitigate the problem of lack of data for this category of languages. This work underscores the power of quantum computation in natural language processing (NLP) and opens new avenues for applying QNLP to real-world linguistic challenges across various tasks and domains.

Trump's Epstein crisis explodes as lewd birthday letter showing president's signature is revealed Judge's'promise' let career criminal walk free to butcher Ukrainian refugee after his MOM said he should be locked up'She was so f***ed up': Carolyn Bessette's friends tell MAUREEN CALLAHAN of her secret Daddy issue, JFK Jr's murder brag that drove her mad... and why everything we know about her is a lie The chaos behind when Meghan Markle was told not to be at Queen Elizabeth II's deathbed They were locked in a dungeon inside a house of horrors. But incredible footage shows five kids' daring acts while their parents were out... and it left neighbors speechless Turn back the clock with the K-beauty retinol cream Amazon shoppers say leaves their skin'silky smooth' - and it's now $10 Scientists crack the ultimate answer to the meaning of life... and it's hidden among 38M obituaries CBS News hires a CONSERVATIVE to police interviews after Trump and Noem'deceptive' editing fury Scientist claims life on Earth was not random... but engineered Supreme Court LIFTS restrictions on Trump's immigration raids despite claims agents targeted people by race I was 52 with a collapsed'turkey neck'. Here's how I turned back the clock 10 years Plastic surgeons weigh in on Jessica Simpson's dramatic new look at VMAs as fans declare her'unrecognizable' Billionaire turns his back on Trump as he blasts President's'risky' financial move that could cost Americans their savings Trump loses appeal and must pay $83 million to E. Jean Carroll AMANDA PLATELL: Harry is'desperate' to come back to Britain and reclaim his royal role - but this fresh snub from William makes it clear why it will never happen... and why he'll never forgive his brother Scientists crack the ultimate answer to the meaning of life... and it's hidden among 38million obituaries Scientists on a mission to uncover what constitutes a life well lived found the answer after analyzing 38 million obituaries from the US spanning 30 years. Using automated text analysis tools, the team found that the most commonly celebrated values were tradition and benevolence. Nearly 80 percent of obituaries highlighted respect for customs or religion, while 76 percent emphasized caring, reliability and trustworthiness.

Turkish police stormed the Istanbul offices of the main opposition Republican People's Party's (CHP), using shields and pepper spray to enforce a court ruling ousting provincial head Ozgur Celik. Party members barricaded themselves inside with furniture to block police. Nepal'Gen Z' protest death toll climbs, parliament stormed Israel wants to'destroy Gaza City, not occupy it'

Nepal'Gen Z' protest death toll climbs, parliament stormed NewsFeed Nepal'Gen Z' protest death toll climbs, parliament stormed At least 19 people have been killed in clashes between security forces and protesters in Nepal. Mostly young'Gen Z' demonstrators took to the streets and stormed parliament amid anger over a social media ban and corruption. Israel wants to'destroy Gaza City, not occupy it'

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder joined aid workers on a boat as they delivered food and important medical supplies to people who have lost everything as Pakistan's flood-ravaged Punjab province braces for even more heavy rain over the next two days. Nepal'Gen Z' protest death toll climbs, parliament stormed Israel wants to'destroy Gaza City, not occupy it'

Six people were killed in a shooting attack by suspected Palestinian gunmen at a bus stop in occupied East Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the site, as Palestinian groups praised the attack without claiming responsibility. Israel wants to'destroy Gaza City, not occupy it'