A Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Type-88 surface-to-ship missile is fired during the Balikatan exercises at Culili Point Sand Dunes in Paoay, Ilocos Norte province, Philippines, on May 6. | REUTERS Singapore - Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi and his Philippine counterpart, Gilberto Teodoro, affirmed Sunday that talks will be launched on the export of surface-to-ship missiles from Japan to the Southeast Asian nation. Koizumi revealed this in talks with reporters after holding a meeting with the Philippine defense chief in Singapore earlier in the day. Type-88 surface-to-ship guided missiles of Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force are expected to be up for consideration. The Philippine side is believed to have shown an interest in procuring the missiles as the Self-Defense Forces used them in the Balikatan multilateral exercises conducted in Manila between April and May. The SDF, which had taken part in the annual exercises organized by the United States and the Philippines as an observer since 2012, joined the drills on a full scale for the first time this year following the entry into force of the Japan-Philippine reciprocal access agreement in September 2025. The possible procurement of Type-88 missiles is expected to help reinforce the deterrent and response capabilities of the Philippines, which is in a territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea.

Samsung Electronics is the world's biggest supplier of the memory chips that go into everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to servers at artificial intelligence data centers. Samsung Electronics union members have voted in favor of a compensation deal that will hand chip workers an average bonus of about $340,000, staving off a strike that threatened to disrupt global chip supply. The company's largest union said the deal was signed after about 74% of its members voted in favor of the agreement. Workers accepted a wage proposal that was tentatively agreed by labor leaders last week, just 90 minutes before a planned strike at the world's largest memory chipmaker. Samsung's shares rose as much as 8% in Seoul on Wednesday.

A Philippine Navy band plays music to welcome the Royal New Zealand Navy frigate HMNZS Te Kaha upon arrival at the South Harbor, for a four-day goodwill visit in metro Manila in April 2017. New Zealand intends to spend about 1.6 billion New Zealand dollars ($936 million) on drones, ship maintenance and naval upgrades to bolster the island nation's maritime security at a time of increasing concern about supply routes. Defense Minister Chris Penk said Saturday that the government will invest in two types of drones: one for the southwest Pacific to provide long-duration intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; the other is a polar-capable vehicle that can operate from naval vessels in the Southern Ocean. "New Zealand's prosperity and security depend on the sea," Penk said in a statement. "Recent events have served as a reminder of how quickly disruptions to international shipping routes can affect economies and supply chains across the globe. The oceans are not a barrier to danger, but a vital national interest that must be actively secured."

We provide the supplements of "Contextual Gaussian Process Bandits with Neural Networks" here. Specifically, we discuss alternative acquisition functions that can be incorporated with the neural network-accompanied Gaussian process (NN-AGP) model in Section 6. In Section 7, we discuss the bandit algorithm with NN-AGP, where the neural network approximation error is considered. In Section 8, we provide the detailed proof of theorems. We provide the experimental details and include additional numerical experiments in Section 9. Last we discuss the limitations of NN-AGP and propose the potential approaches to addressing the limitations for future work, including sparse NN-AGP for alleviating computational burdens and transfer learning with NN-AGP to address cold-start issue; see Section 10. In the main text, we employ the upper confidence bound function as the acquisition function in the contextual Bayesian optimization approach. Here, we provide two alternative choices: Thompson sampling (TS) and knowledge gradient (KG). We describe the two procedures of the contextual GP bandit problems with NN-AGP, where the acquisition function is replaced by TS or KG. It chooses the action that maximizes the expected reward with respect to a random belief that is drawn for a posterior distribution. Besides the multi-armed bandit problems, TS has also achieved both theoretical and practical success in BO and Gaussian process regression. For more detailed discussions on TS, we refer to [87, 88]. Specifically, we propose a neural network-accompanied Gaussian process Thompson sampling (NNAGP-TS) approach to address contextual GP bandits. The approach works as follows. In each iteration, NN-AGP-TS first fits an NN-AGP model with the historic data. Then, given the current contextual variable, a realization of the Gaussian process with respect to x X is sampled from the posterior distribution conditional on the historic data1.

What does the data tell us about immigration in Wales? Like many countries, Wales sees a steady flow of people arriving and leaving for other countries each year. The difference between those arriving and those leaving is known as net migration. Focusing on people moving from abroad, latest estimates say Wales' population - which was 3.2 million in June 2024 - had increased by about 23,000 over the previous year as a result of net international migration. A recent YouGov poll found a quarter of people surveyed in Wales believed that immigration, alongside the economy, should be among the issues prioritised by the Welsh government, even though immigration is controlled by the UK government.

Andon Market in San Francisco represents a vision, however flawed, of a future when more sophisticated AI agents take over work traditionally done by humans. In San Francisco's upscale Cow Hollow district, the introduction of a boutique selling coffee table games, tote bags and other household items would be pretty unremarkable. However, Andon Market has one key differentiator: It's run by AI. At this store, an artificial intelligence agent named Luna effectively acts as the chief executive officer of the operation. It decides what products to offer and how much to charge for them.

Environment Animals Wildlife Bats People keep trespassing near cave filled with bats infected by Ebola's cousin The Marburg virus disease can reach a nearly 90 percent mortality rate. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Epidemiologists believe the Marburg virus disease is primarily transmitted to humans through Egyptian fruit bats. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. You do not want to contract Marburg virus disease (MVD).

Outside of Japan, Google's chatbot is accessible on both desktop and iOS. Google has added a new sidebar to Chrome that allows users to access Gemini from any of their tabs. After debuting in the US, Gemini in Chrome is making its way to more markets. Starting today, Google is rolling out Chrome's built-in chatbot to users in Asia and the Pacific, including Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam. The expansion comes after Google earlier this year made Gemini in Chrome available to people in Canada, India and New Zealand .

The USS Cassin Young is one of the last of the war's Fletcher-class destroyers. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. The USS Cassin Young is one of four remaining Fletcher-class destroyers still afloat. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Although its name may not sound immediately familiar, the over 360-foot-long ship's recognizable silhouette remains a hallmark example of World War II imagery.

More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Installing wheels on a tortoise might seem like a cruel joke--but a veterinary practice in the Philippines recently did so to help out an Aldabra giant tortoise () with troubled hind legs. As the name suggests, Aldabra giant tortoises are among the largest land tortoises. Also referred to as the Aldabra tortoise or giant tortoise, this reptile can weigh up to 550 pounds and can live over 150 years.