Two human rights groups have said an Israeli attack in southern Lebanon that killed al-Akhbar newspaper reporter Amal Khalil and seriously wounded freelance camera operator Zeinab Faraj was an apparent war crime. Separate reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International concluded that the journalists were targeted while reporting in the town of al-Tiri on 22 April. They called for an independent investigation and for Lebanon to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. The Israeli military denied targeting the journalists, telling the BBC that the three strikes carried out by its forces were aimed at two operatives of the armed group Hezbollah. The Israeli military says it does not target journalists, but the facts and evidence show that it has repeatedly done so.

Why $370bn tech group Palantir pays 1.4 percent tax rate: Report Palantir Technologies, the United States data analytics and artificial intelligence company which has contracts with the country's military and intelligence apparatus, has "engineered its corporate structure" to pay no US federal corporate income tax, according to a new report. The study by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) comes as Palantir reports soaring revenues, driven partly by government contracts, while it faces continued criticism for providing technology to the Israeli military amid the genocide in Gaza. What does the report show? Earlier this week, Palantir reported second-quarter revenue of $1.94bn, up 93 percent from a year earlier. But despite its rapid growth, CICTAR said its global effective tax rate was just 1.4 percent in 2025.

What came into force with the EU's AI Act this week - and what didn't On August 2, the next phase of Europe's Artificial Intelligence Act came into force as the European Union frames this legislation as the world's first comprehensive law on AI. Like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) before it, this new EU legislation is intended not to replace the economic bloc's existing digital rulebook but to complement it. GDPR has gone on to shape privacy practices well beyond Europe, becoming the benchmark against which many multinational organisations design their compliance programmes. The question now is whether the AI Act will prove just as influential for AI governance. What came into force this week?

Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 AI model accessed the internet from its supposed-to-be isolated testing environment and hacked into a third-party service. Andy Stone, Meta's spokesperson, has confirmed the incident to Bloomberg after The Information reported about the breach. Stone said the model was able to access the internet due to a misconfiguration in the testing environment by the company's evaluation partner Irregular. After gaining access to the internet, it then exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, "in a matter similar to previously reported instances with other companies." It was also due to a misconfiguration by Irregular that Anthropic's models were able to leave their testing environment and hack into three organizations.

US curbs on foreign-made robots intensify its wider rivalry with China over AI, chips and industry. Humanoid robots are no longer a laboratory experiment; they are a growing market. Morgan Stanley estimates it could hit $5 trillion by 2050, with more than a billion humanoids in use worldwide. However, much of the global robot supply chain runs through China. It produces robot components at a scale and a price its competitors struggle to match.

UAE fund weighs $6.3 billion AI data center investment in Japan Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment is considering an investment that would see the construction of one of the largest data centers in Japan. The United Arab Emirates is considering investing as much as ¥1 trillion ($6.3 billion) to build an artificial intelligence data center in Japan, according to a person familiar with the matter. Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment would lead the funding of a 500-megawatt project in Akita Prefecture, which may include other foreign and domestic investors, the person said, asking not to be identified because the information isn't public. Once completed, it could become the largest data center in Japan. The talks with the Persian Gulf state underscore growing global interest in securing critical AI assets in countries viewed as relatively insulated from geopolitical tensions. A spokesperson for Mubadala declined to comment.

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens.

AI's volatile power demand is damaging its own data centers Artificial intelligence at times sees power usage spike as much as 50% above its design capacity. Artificial intelligence's tremendous hunger for electricity is already well known. What's less familiar is how the rapid fluctuations in data centers' appetites can break essential equipment at the facilities. Batteries, generators, cooling units and other critical systems are put under such strain at AI computing facilities that they are malfunctioning or prematurely reaching the end of their lives. As the AI boom accelerates, these technical problems suggest added costs and unforeseen reliability problems, with even a few minutes of lost uptime hitting data-center developers' revenue.

For the three months to June, SoftBank booked gains from its bets on Intel, whose shares more than tripled during the quarter. SoftBank Group has reported a smaller-than-expected decline in quarterly net income, helped by a rally in its chip-stock holdings while it awaits further gains from its bets on OpenAI. The Tokyo-based technology investor's net income fell 18% to ¥347.3 billion ($2.2 billion) in its fiscal first quarter after unrealized gains on its bets on chipmakers countered startup valuation declines. That compares with a market estimate of about ¥166 billion, based on the average of four analysts polled. OpenAI's Japanese backer is in the spotlight alongside concerns about the climbing debt levels artificial intelligence service providers are taking on so they can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers and other infrastructure.