Aston Villa boss Unai Emery had an unhappy 18-month spell in charge of Arsenal that ended in 2019, but can he get the better of his old club on Tuesday? After the abuse he took from Arsenal fans, I'd love nothing more than Emery to go back to the Emirates and win, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. He absolutely didn't deserve that. Some of those fans should take a long, hard look at themselves for the way they mocked him. I hope Villa go there and spank them, just because of that. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week 19 - which includes the final games of 2025 on Tuesday, 30 December and the first matches of 2026 on New Year's Day - he takes on singer-songwriter Tom A Smith, who is a Sunderland fan.

We introduce the first open-source model for translation between the vulnerable Chechen language and Russian, and the dataset collected to train and evaluate it. We explore fine-tuning capabilities for including a new language into a large language model system for multilingual translation NLLB-200. The BLEU / ChrF++ scores for our model are 8.34 / 34.69 and 20.89 / 44.55 for translation from Russian to Chechen and reverse direction, respectively. The release of the translation models is accompanied by the distribution of parallel words, phrases and sentences corpora and multilingual sentence encoder adapted to the Chechen language.

Russian air defenses downed an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people, four sources with knowledge of the preliminary findings of Azerbaijan's investigation into the disaster said on Thursday. Flight J2-8243 crashed on Wednesday in a ball of fire near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from an area of southern Russia, where Moscow has repeatedly used air defense systems against Ukrainian drone strikes. The Embraer passenger jet had flown from Azerbaijan's capital Baku to Grozny, in Russia's southern Chechnya region, before veering off hundreds of miles across the Caspian Sea. It crashed on the opposite shore of the Caspian after what Russia's aviation watchdog said was an emergency that may have been caused by a bird strike. Officials did not explain why it had crossed the sea.

We release the first neural machine translation system for translation between Russian, Azerbaijani and the endangered Lezgian languages, as well as monolingual and parallel datasets collected and aligned for training and evaluating the system. Multiple experiments are conducted to identify how different sets of training language pairs and data domains can influence the resulting translation quality. We achieve BLEU scores of 26.14 for Lezgian-Azerbaijani, 22.89 for Azerbaijani-Lezgian, 29.48 for Lezgian-Russian and 24.25 for Russian-Lezgian pairs. The quality of zero-shot translation is assessed on a Large Language Model, showing its high level of fluency in Lezgian. However, the model often refuses to translate, justifying itself with its incompetence. We contribute our translation model along with the collected parallel and monolingual corpora and sentence encoder for the Lezgian language.

Singers, supermodels and sports stars descended on Paris as Vogue World took over a city square and turned it into a runway. The fashion magazine turned the historic Place Vendôme into a catwalk to celebrate 100 years of French fashion. A different sport was used as a backdrop for each decade of fashion from the 1920s to the present day - a month before the capital city hosts the Olympic Games. They're the biggest-selling act in the world, and they're about to play the Pyramid Stage.22 hrs agoCulture1 day ago Many have hit out at the brand online, suggesting they would return fewer items if sizing was consistent.1 day agoBusiness2 days ago As a new exhibition opens in London exploring the career of Naomi Campbell, Britain's first black supermodel, a look at the women who forged a path in fashion.2 The acclaimed fashion designer says it taught her a lesson - that fear was not an option.2

A joint statement from the U.S. Representative to the United Nations on behalf of a coalition of European countries has urged the U.N. to investigate Russia's use of Iranian drones in Ukraine. "Earlier this month, the United States released further information documenting how Iran has provided Russia with hundreds of one-way attack UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), as well as UAV production-related equipment. Ukraine and the U.K. also submitted evidence to the U.N. of Iranian UAVs recovered by the Ukrainian armed forces," Linda Thomas-Greenfield, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters. "Russia has not only procured hundreds of Mohajer and Shahed series UAVs from Iran in clear violation of Resolution 2231, but it is also now working with Iran to produce these weapons inside Russia," she continued, reading a statement on behalf of the U.S., the U.K., France, Ukraine and Albania. "Russia has been using these UAVs in recent weeks to strike Kyiv, destroy Ukrainian infrastructure, and kill and terrorize Ukrainian civilians. Media reports indicate just this week Russia targeted Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with dozens of Iranian-made drones," she said, adding, "The United Nations must respond to growing calls from the international community to investigate these violations."

The United States has accused the Iranian government of helping Russia to build a drone manufacturing plant near Moscow, in an escalation of their defence cooperation. In a statement on Friday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby cited US intelligence findings that indicated Iran had provided material support for the plant, which could be operational by early next year. US officials also double-downed on claims that Iran has sent hundreds of drones -- or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) -- to Russia for use in Ukraine, where a full-scale invasion was launched in 2022. "Russia has been using Iranian UAVs in recent weeks to strike Kyiv and terrorize the Ukrainian population, and the Russia-Iran military partnership appears to be deepening," Kirby said in Friday's statement. "We are also concerned that Russia is working with Iran to produce Iranian UAVs from inside Russia."

Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin has the latest on Iran's claims of developing an advanced hypersonic missile on'Special Report.' United States officials believe Iran is sending Russia materials to build a drone manufacturing plant east of Moscow to produce more Iranian drones to use in Ukraine. The intelligence was made public by the National Security Council's Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby on Friday. "As of May, Russia received hundreds of one-way attack [unmanned aerial vehicles], as well as UAV production-related equipment, from Iran," Kirby said. Russian President Vladimir Putin takes part in the ceremony of signing an agreement on the construction of the Rasht-Astara railway via a video link together with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, at the Kremlin in Moscow.

In a nondescript office building on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian soldiers have been honing what they believed will be a decisive weapon in their effort to repel the Russian invasion. Inside, the weapon glows from a dozen computer screens – a constantly updated portrayal of the evolving battlefield to the south. With one click on a menu, the map is populated with hordes of orange diamonds, showing Russian deployments. They reveal where tanks and artillery have been hidden, and intimate details of the units and the soldiers in them, gleaned from social media. Zooming in shows satellite imagery of the terrain in sharp detail.

Since its original appearance in 1991, the Perso-Arabic script representation in Unicode has grown from 169 to over 440 atomic isolated characters spread over several code pages representing standard letters, various diacritics and punctuation for the original Arabic and numerous other regional orthographic traditions. This paper documents the challenges that Perso-Arabic presents beyond the best-documented languages, such as Arabic and Persian, building on earlier work by the expert community. We particularly focus on the situation in natural language processing (NLP), which is affected by multiple, often neglected, issues such as the use of visually ambiguous yet canonically nonequivalent letters and the mixing of letters from different orthographies. Among the contributing conflating factors are the lack of input methods, the instability of modern orthographies, insufficient literacy, and loss or lack of orthographic tradition. We evaluate the effects of script normalization on eight languages from diverse language families in the Perso-Arabic script diaspora on machine translation and statistical language modeling tasks. Our results indicate statistically significant improvements in performance in most conditions for all the languages considered when normalization is applied. We argue that better understanding and representation of Perso-Arabic script variation within regional orthographic traditions, where those are present, is crucial for further progress of modern computational NLP techniques especially for languages with a paucity of resources.