How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? 'Ukraine is only first': Zelenskyy warns against Putin's expansionist goals Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the world is in "the most destructive arms race in history" as he calls on the international community to act against Russia now, asserting in his address to the United Nations General Assembly that President Vladimir Putin wants to expand his war in Europe . "Ukraine is only the first, and now Russian drones are already flying across Europe, and Russian operations are already spreading across countries, and Putin wants to continue this war by expanding it," Zelenskyy said on Wednesday at UN headquarters in New York. Moscow has denied the claims of incursions into NATO members' airspace, accusing European powers of levying baseless accusations.

A secret Russian-funded network is attempting to disrupt upcoming democratic elections in an eastern European state, the BBC has found. Using an undercover reporter, we discovered the network promised to pay participants if they posted pro-Russian propaganda and fake news undermining Moldova's pro-EU ruling party ahead of the country's 28 September parliamentary ballot. Participants were paid to find supporters of Moldova's pro-Russia opposition to secretly record - and also to carry out a so-called poll. This was done in the name of a non-existent organisation, making it illegal. The results of this selective sampling, an organiser from the network suggested, could lay the groundwork to question the outcome of the election.

Hausa texts are often characterized by writing anomalies such as incorrect character substitutions and spacing errors, which sometimes hinder natural language processing (NLP) applications. This paper presents an approach to automatically correct the anomalies by finetuning transformer-based models. Using a corpus gathered from several public sources, we created a large-scale parallel dataset of over 450,000 noisy-clean Hausa sentence pairs by introducing synthetically generated noise, fine-tuned to mimic realistic writing errors. Moreover, we adapted several multilingual and African language-focused models, including M2M100, AfriTEVA, mBART, and Opus-MT variants for this correction task using SentencePiece tokenization. Our experimental results demonstrate significant increases in F1, BLEU and METEOR scores, as well as reductions in Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research provides a robust methodology, a publicly available dataset, and effective models to improve Hausa text quality, thereby advancing NLP capabilities for the language and offering transferable insights for other low-resource languages.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. State security services in Moldova's Russia-backed breakaway region of Transnistria said Friday that a drone attacked a military unit close to the border with Ukraine, causing minor damage to a radar station but no casualties. The incident occurred in the region of Rabnita, about 4 miles from the Ukraine border, the region's state security ministry said, adding that a criminal investigation has been opened. They did not say who they thought was behind the alleged attack.

Large transformer-based pre-trained language models have achieved impressive performance on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks and can capture factual knowledge in their parameters. We argue that storing large amounts of knowledge in the model parameters is sub-optimal given the ever-growing amounts of knowledge and resource requirements. We posit that a more efficient alternative is to provide explicit access to contextually relevant structured knowledge to the model and train it to use that knowledge. We present LM-CORE -- a general framework to achieve this -- that allows \textit{decoupling} of the language model training from the external knowledge source and allows the latter to be updated without affecting the already trained model. Experimental results show that LM-CORE, having access to external knowledge, achieves significant and robust outperformance over state-of-the-art knowledge-enhanced language models on knowledge probing tasks; can effectively handle knowledge updates; and performs well on two downstream tasks. We also present a thorough error analysis highlighting the successes and failures of LM-CORE.

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany – The United States marshaled 40 allies on Tuesday to furnish Ukraine with long-term military aid in what could become a protracted battle against the Russian invasion, and Germany said it would send dozens of armored anti-aircraft vehicles. It was a major policy shift for a country that had wavered over fear of provoking Russia. The announcement by Germany, Europe's biggest economy and one of Russia's most important Western trading partners, was among many signals on Tuesday pointing to further escalation in the war and disappointment for diplomacy. Germany's shift on weapons also was seen as a strong affirmation of a toughened message by the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, which has said it wants to see Russia not only defeated in Ukraine but seriously weakened from the conflict that Russian President Vladimir Putin began two months ago. The increasing flow of Western weapons into Ukraine -- including howitzers, armed drones, tanks and ammunition -- also amounted to another sign that a war Putin had expected would divide his Western adversaries had instead drawn them much closer together.

Last Saturday we took a look at some of the most-read Singularity Hub articles from 2019. As opposed to short pieces about what's happening, these are long reads about why it matters and what's coming next. Some of them make the news while others frame the news, go deep on big ideas, go behind the scenes, or explore the human side of technological progress. We hope you find them as fascinating, inspiring, and illuminating as we did. DeepMind and Google: The Battle to Control Artificial Intelligence Hal Hodson 1843 "[DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis] Hassabis thought DeepMind would be a hybrid: it would have the drive of a startup, the brains of the greatest universities, and the deep pockets of one of the world's most valuable companies. Every element was in place to hasten the arrival of [artificial general intelligence] and solve the causes of human misery."

This week FIFA's senior representative, Tokyo Sexwale, will throw his hat into the ring as he attempts to resolve disagreements between Israeli and Palestinian football associations. The disputes are over Israeli restrictions placed on the movement of Palestinian players and the participation of at least five Israeli football clubs in Israeli leagues - two issues which Palestinians claim contravene FIFA's own rules. While progress has been achieved on movement for Palestinian players, the issue of settlement teams remains intractable. Their inclusion within Israeli leagues is the manifestation of a political process that seeks to normalise Israel's claim to the Palestinian territory it occupied in 1967. In this context, football has become a tool to legitimise the expanding settlements as an integral part of Israel.