Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrive for a reception marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Sept. 3, 2025. Moscow and Beijing are driving closer collaboration between authoritarian states and such networks help advance repression globally, according to researchers who used artificial intelligence to drill into the activities. The U.S.-based nonprofit Action for Democracy said in a report Wednesday that its researchers built an index to track seven types of cooperation, including on funding, diplomatic activities, propaganda and tech sharing. It found that China and Russia sit at the center of global authoritarian collaboration" and were jointly involved in around half of all recorded activity. The report's authors said that such cooperation generated compound returns because, for example, surveillance infrastructure exported to one regime becomes a template for the next." In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Over 200 Ukrainian military experts in Gulf region to counter Iran's drones More than 200 Ukrainian military experts are in the Gulf region and wider Middle East helping governments in their defence against Iran's drone attacks, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said. In an address to dozens of members of the United Kingdom Parliament in London on Tuesday, the Ukrainian leader said 201 Ukrainian anti-drone experts are in the region and another 34 "are ready to deploy". "Our teams are already in the Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and on the way to Kuwait," the Ukrainian leader said. "We are working with several other countries - agreements are already in place. We do not want this terror of the Iranian regime against its neighbours to succeed," he said.

Higgs Boson breakthrough was UK triumph, but British physics faces'catastrophic' cuts When the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in Stockholm in October 2013, the world was watching. Among the names read out was Prof Peter Higgs, the British theorist who, nearly half a century earlier, had predicted the existence of a particle believed to hold the cosmos together - the Higgs boson. The announcement, broadcast live from Sweden, was what many scientists had hoped for since a year earlier, when experiments at CERN had finally confirmed Higgs's theory by discovering the Higgs boson - hailed as one of the biggest discoveries in a generation. At the time Higgs, who has since passed away, said in a statement: I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research. Blue-sky research asks questions to understand the universe, rather than design new products.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. L.A. teachers union widely expected to announce strike date at massive Wednesday rally Members of the largest unions representing teachers and nonteachers participate in joint rally at Grand Park in March 2023. The scene will be repeated on Wednesday, with union members once again on the verge of a strike. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .

Justice Department Says Anthropic Can't Be Trusted With Warfighting Systems In response to Anthropic's lawsuit, the government said it lawfully penalized the company for trying to limit how its Claude AI models could be used by the military. The Trump administration argued in a court filing on Tuesday that it did not violate Anthropic's First Amendment rights by designating the AI developer a supply-chain risk and predicted that the company's lawsuit against the government will fail. "The First Amendment is not a license to unilaterally impose contract terms on the government, and Anthropic cites nothing to support such a radical conclusion," US Department of Justice attorneys wrote. The response was filed in a federal court in San Francisco, one of two venues where Anthropic is challenging the Pentagon's decision to sanction the company with a label that can bar companies from defense contracts over concerns about potential security vulnerabilities. Anthropic argues the Trump administration overstepped its authority in applying the label and preventing the company's technologies from being used inside the department.

Ugly new Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban divorce fight ERUPTS: Her friends share humiliating details of'midlife crisis'... and reveal brutal REAL reason daughter Sunday Rose'snubbed' him Supreme Court's top judge issues chilling warning as Trump targets his own appointees SARAH VINE: How telling that Meghan's joined the ranks of those peddling wellness and fake lifestyles to the gullible I moved my family OFF-GRID after a horrific series of events... now our tiny home saves us thousands each MONTH. We are richer and happier than ever. Here's how you can do it too Furious US troops erupt at CNN's $20m steak and lobster claims as grim photos expose reality Mother of cheating nurse shares horrific way daughter was killed after SUV sex... and shares heartbreaking details of her marriage to doctor Hollywood's top insider makes VERY catty observation about Kaitlan Collins CIA accused of'poisoning the sky' with toxins as files expose secret weather control agenda Mysterious'three-sided pyramid' similar to those in Egypt spotted on Mars in NASA footage Trump says he's'not afraid' of Vietnam-style ground combat in Iran I've always been embarrassed by my spotty skin. I'd tried every lotion and potion, until I found a science-backed plan that restored my skin's health and my confidence Alix Earle stuns in white bikini in first glimpse at 2026 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition... after turning heads with Tom Brady and Joe Burrow'We no longer need NATO': Trump sends shockwaves through Europe with ferocious attack on allies Everything JFK Jr told friends about his love affair with'sexual dynamo' Madonna... her unprintable pillow talk... and his perverse incest request that she couldn't go through with What your WALK says about you: Study reveals how your swagger can reveal how you're really feeling READ MORE: 'Tough guy' walk in western movies makes you look powerful A new study has revealed exactly what your walk says about you - whether it's a slow swagger or a peppy stride. Scientists from the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Japan carried out several experiments as part of their study.

Ad for AI editing app which said it could'remove anything' banned An advert for a video and image editing tool that implied viewers could digitally remove a woman's clothing has been banned by the UK advertising regulator. The YouTube ad for PixVideo - AI Video Maker, seen in January, showed a before and after image of a young women, with red scribble overlaid on her midriff in the former, and parts of her bare skin exposed in the latter. Text across the bottom of the picture stated: Erase anything followed by a heart-eyes emoji. Eight people complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that the ad sexualised and objectified women, and was irresponsible, offensive and harmful. It is not clear whether the image in the ad is of a real person or is itself AI-generated, with the ASA telling the BBC making such an assessment had not been part of its investigation.

Beyond conditional average treatment effects, treatments may impact the entire outcome distribution in covariate-dependent ways, for example, by altering the variance or tail risks for specific subpopulations. We propose a novel estimand to capture such conditional distributional treatment effects, and develop a doubly robust estimator that is minimax optimal in the local asymptotic sense. Using this, we develop a test for the global homogeneity of conditional potential outcome distributions that accommodates discrepancies beyond the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), has provably valid type 1 error, and is consistent against fixed alternatives -- the first test, to our knowledge, with such guarantees in this setting. Furthermore, we derive exact closed-form expressions for two natural discrepancies (including the MMD), and provide a computationally efficient, permutation-free algorithm for our test.

Objective. We establish a principled method for inferring mental health related psychometric variables from neural and behavioral data using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as the data generation engine, aiming to overcome the limited predictive performance (typically under 0.7 AUC) of the gold-standard D-score method, which relies solely on reaction times. Approach. We propose a sparse hierarchical Bayesian model that leverages multi-modal data to predict experiences related to mental illness symptoms in new participants. The model is a multivariate generalization of the D-score with trainable parameters, engineered for parameter efficiency in the small-cohort regime typical of IAT studies. Data from two IAT variants were analyzed: a suicidality-related E-IAT ($n=39$) and a psychosis-related PSY-IAT ($n=34$). Main Results. Our approach overcomes a high inter-individual variability and low within-session effect size in the dataset, reaching AUCs of 0.73 (E-IAT) and 0.76 (PSY-IAT) in the best modality configurations, though corrected 95% confidence intervals are wide ($\pm 0.18$) and results are marginally significant after FDR correction ($q=0.10$). Restricting the E-IAT to MDD participants improves AUC to 0.79 $[0.62, 0.97]$ (significant at $q=0.05$). Performance is on par with the best reference methods (shrinkage LDA and EEGNet) for each task, even when the latter were adapted to the task, while the proposed method was not. Accuracy was substantially above near-chance D-scores (0.50-0.53 AUC) in both tasks, with more consistent cross-task performance than any single reference method. Significance. Our framework shows promise for enhancing IAT-based assessment of experiences related to entrapment and psychosis, and potentially other mental health conditions, though further validation on larger and independent cohorts will be needed to establish clinical utility.

Benchmarking the performance of complex systems such as rail networks, renewable generation assets and national economies is central to transport planning, regulation and macroeconomic analysis. Classical frontier methods, notably Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA), estimate an efficient frontier in the observed input-output space and define efficiency as distance to this frontier, but rely on restrictive assumptions on the production set and only indirectly address heterogeneity and scale effects. We propose Geometric Manifold Analysis (GeMA), a latent manifold frontier framework implemented via a productivity-manifold variational autoencoder (ProMan-VAE). Instead of specifying a frontier function in the observed space, GeMA represents the production set as the boundary of a low-dimensional manifold embedded in the joint input-output space. A split-head encoder learns latent variables that capture technological structure and operational inefficiency. Efficiency is evaluated with respect to the learned manifold, endogenous peer groups arise as clusters in latent technology space, a quotient construction supports scale-invariant benchmarking, and a local certification radius, derived from the decoder Jacobian and a Lipschitz bound, quantifies the geometric robustness of efficiency scores. We validate GeMA on synthetic data with non-convex frontiers, heterogeneous technologies and scale bias, and on four real-world case studies: global urban rail systems (COMET), British rail operators (ORR), national economies (Penn World Table) and a high-frequency wind-farm dataset. Across these domains GeMA behaves comparably to established methods when classical assumptions hold, and provides additional insight in settings with pronounced heterogeneity, non-convexity or size-related bias.