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'It's 2C in our flat': Inside Kyiv apartment as Russia targets power and heating

BBC News

Russia has been exploiting Ukraine's harshest winter in years to pummel energy infrastructure across the country. Repeated strikes have crippled the power supply to major Ukrainian cities, leaving millions without heating or light as temperatures hover around -15C (5F) for the third week in a row. Electrical companies carry out round-the-clock repairs - only for their work to be undone at night, when Russian drone and missiles again damage power stations. In Kyiv, people were initially able to keep the cold at bay by using electric heaters or wrapping up warm. But the freezing temperatures have lasted weeks now, with no end in sight.


'The end of the world as we know it': Is the rules-based order finished?

Al Jazeera

How much is US support for Israel costing Trump? What is a Palestinian without olives? Why are Gaza's homes collapsing in winter? 'The end of the world as we know it': Is the rules-based order finished? Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the quiet part out loud at the World Economic Forum: what many call the global rules-based order was either collapsing or had collapsed already.


Day of mourning for bar fire victims in Switzerland

BBC News

A day of national mourning is being held in Switzerland on Friday, following a fire which killed 40 young people, mostly teenagers, in a bar in the Crans-Montana ski resort on New Year's Eve. Church bells rang across the country for five minutes, and people stood for a minute's silence in their memory. Firefighters in the resort were applauded as they joined an audience watching the tribute ceremony, which was live-streamed to Crans-Montana from the Swiss city of Martigny. The ceremony saw the leaders of neighbouring countries, including France's Emmanuel Macron, join an audience while speakers, including the Valais canton's president, paid tribute to those who died. The annual food fight festival ''Els Enfarinats'' has left the Spanish town of Ibi covered in flour and egg shells.


Skiers create heart-shaped tribute for Switzerland fire victims

BBC News

Dozens of skiers created a heart shape on the slopes of Crans-Montana to mourn the victims of the deadly bar fire on New Year's Eve. Forty people were killed at the bar where the fire began, while 119 others were injured. Swiss prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into the managers of Le Constellation bar. The annual food fight festival ''Els Enfarinats'' has left the Spanish town of Ibi covered in flour and egg shells. The French model and actress has died at the age of 91.


Watch: Spaniards hurl flour, eggs and fireworks in mock battle

BBC News

The annual food fight festival ''Els Enfarinats'' has left the Spanish town of Ibi covered in flour and egg shells. Every year participants wear military-style costumes and stage a fake coup using eggs, flour and firecrackers. The eggers go around asking for taxes - donations to charity - from local people and if you don't pay you could end up getting splatted. The festival, held in the province of Alicante, is more than 200 years old and takes place on the 28 December each year to coincide with the Day of the Innocents - Spain's equivalent of April Fools' Day. The French model and actress has died at the age of 91.


Snow-capped Mount Etna erupts as skiers use its slopes

BBC News

Huge plumes of ash and smoke were filmed erupting from Mount Etna, Sicily on 27 December as skiers used the slopes below. Scientists at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia said volcanic activity at the site, which frequently erupts, had intensified, with craters continuously emitting ash. In response, scientists issued a red Volcano Observatory Notice for Aviation, its highest level, though authorities said flights would continue to operate normally at a nearby airport unless ashfall increased. The annual food fight festival ''Els Enfarinats'' has left the Spanish town of Ibi covered in flour and egg shells. The French model and actress has died at the age of 91.


Interpreter in tears as Ukrainian boy recalls losing mother in Russian strike

BBC News

An interpreter broke down in tears at the European Parliament in Brussels while translating for an 11-year-old Ukrainian boy who was injured in a Russian missile strike on a hospital in central Ukraine in 2022. Roman Oleksiv's mother was killed in the attack and he has undergone multiple surgeries since. The aspiring ballroom dancer, who was also the subject of an award-winning film, has also received an award from the Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky. A waterspout is a whirling column of air and mist that can form over oceans, seas or large lakes. 'I don't want to be part of this war machine': Young Germans protest against military service plans Germany is introducing voluntary military service to boost national defences after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.


OnCoCo 1.0: A Public Dataset for Fine-Grained Message Classification in Online Counseling Conversations

Albrecht, Jens, Lehmann, Robert, Poltermann, Aleksandra, Rudolph, Eric, Steigerwald, Philipp, Stieler, Mara

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents OnCoCo 1.0, a new public dataset for fine-grained message classification in online counseling. It is based on a new, integrative system of categories, designed to improve the automated analysis of psychosocial online counseling conversations. Existing category systems, predominantly based on Motivational Interviewing (MI), are limited by their narrow focus and dependence on datasets derived mainly from face-to-face counseling. This limits the detailed examination of textual counseling conversations. In response, we developed a comprehensive new coding scheme that differentiates between 38 types of counselor and 28 types of client utterances, and created a labeled dataset consisting of about 2.800 messages from counseling conversations. We fine-tuned several models on our dataset to demonstrate its applicability. The data and models are publicly available to researchers and practitioners. Thus, our work contributes a new type of fine-grained conversational resource to the language resources community, extending existing datasets for social and mental-health dialogue analysis.


Motion2Meaning: A Clinician-Centered Framework for Contestable LLM in Parkinson's Disease Gait Interpretation

Nguyen, Loc Phuc Truong, Do, Hung Thanh, Nguyen, Hung Truong Thanh, Cao, Hung

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI-assisted gait analysis holds promise for improving Parkinson's Disease (PD) care, but current clinical dashboards lack transparency and offer no meaningful way for clinicians to interrogate or contest AI decisions. To address this issue, we present Motion2Meaning, a clinician-centered framework that advances Contestable AI through a tightly integrated interface designed for interpretability, oversight, and procedural recourse. Our approach leverages vertical Ground Reaction Force (vGRF) time-series data from wearable sensors as an objective biomarker of PD motor states. The system comprises three key components: a Gait Data Visualization Interface (GDVI), a one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN) that predicts Hoehn & Yahr severity stages, and a Contestable Interpretation Interface (CII) that combines our novel Cross-Modal Explanation Discrepancy (XMED) safeguard with a contestable Large Language Model (LLM). Our 1D-CNN achieves 89.0% F1-score on the public PhysioNet gait dataset. XMED successfully identifies model unreliability by detecting a five-fold increase in explanation discrepancies in incorrect predictions (7.45%) compared to correct ones (1.56%), while our LLM-powered interface enables clinicians to validate correct predictions and successfully contest a portion of the model's errors. A human-centered evaluation of this contestable interface reveals a crucial trade-off between the LLM's factual grounding and its readability and responsiveness to clinical feedback. This work demonstrates the feasibility of combining wearable sensor analysis with Explainable AI (XAI) and contestable LLMs to create a transparent, auditable system for PD gait interpretation that maintains clinical oversight while leveraging advanced AI capabilities. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/hungdothanh/motion2meaning.