I won't accept exclusion, says Polanski after criticism of Zionist motion Zack Polanski has said he will not accept anyone being excluded from the Green Party because of the religious or communal body they are part of, after members adopted a motion declaring Zionism a form of racism. The Green leader said no-one will be made unwelcome because of their background, their faith, or where they worship. The motion defines Zionism as an ideology supporting an ethnonationalist Jewish state and backs a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine. It comes after more than a dozen Labour MPs reported the Greens to the equality watchdog on Monday, saying it raised serious questions. Tensions exposed among Greens by'Zionism is racism' conference vote Nine Labour MPs have also referred the Green Party to Sussex Police, asking the force to investigate whether alleged possible antisemitic offences at the conference merit a criminal investigation. Sussex Police and the Green Party have been contacted for comment.

Horse lover's final wish fulfilled with pony visit A lifelong horse lover was able to spend time with two ponies in the final days of her life after a community appeal helped arrange a surprise hospice visit. Denise Lee, from Ashington, West Sussex, had loved horses since childhood and volunteered with the Riding for the Disabled Association but her cancer diagnosis meant she could no longer ride. While receiving care at St Barnabas House in Worthing last month, she told the hospice's staff she would love to touch a horse and experience the horsey smell again. A healthcare assistant suggested trying to make the wish happen and Joanne, Denise's daughter, appealed for help through local Facebook community groups. She was a horse lover from I think the age of like five or six, Joanne said.

Drop-off fees at the UK's major airports have risen by a third on average since last summer, new analysis has found. The RAC looked at the cost of pulling up at the closest point to terminals at the 20 busiest airports - 16 had put up their fees since last year. Two London airports, Gatwick and Stansted, topped the price table at £10. Trade body Airports UK said free drop-offs were available and fees were part of airports' business models and climate change objectives . London Gatwick's is the highest farewell fee, charging £10 for 10 minutes on the forecourt outside either of its terminals. At Stansted, £10 buys a more generous 15 minutes, at Express Set Down outside departures.

A large-scale wildfire in north Wales as been declared a major incident by emergency services, as firefighters tackle fires across England and Wales during the record-breaking heatwave. Residents near Conwy Mountain and the Sychnant Pass have been evacuated, while members of the public were warned to avoid the area. In Greater Manchester, fire crews are working to contain a moorland fire near a reservoir, while in Camberley, Hampshire, crews are extinguishing a large heathland fire. Wildfires burned in County Durham, Derbyshire, East Sussex, West Sussex, Devon and Somerset over the weekend, during a warning that parts of the country were facing an exceptional risk for fires. North Wales Fire and Rescue Service said in an update on Sunday afternoon that it was working in challenging conditions in order to contain the Conwy Mountain fire, with operations expected to continue for some time.

Since the conflict in the Middle East began on Feb. 28, Emirates has cancelled more than 2,000 flights -- 54% of scheduled services, according to data from Cirium. As Emirates flight EK10 from London cruised over Saudi Arabia on Monday, news broke of a drone strike at its destination, Dubai. The aircraft turned back to Gatwick, flight data shows, completing a 9,100 km round trip -- one of dozens of flights to nowhere triggered by the Middle East war. Roughly 30 Emirates flights heading to Dubai International Airport were also ordered back or rerouted after Iranian drone attacks temporarily shut what is normally the world's busiest airport for international passengers. Passengers expecting a dawn landing in the glitzy United Arab Emirates port city were stunned. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

We propose nonparametric identification and semiparametric estimation of joint potential outcome distributions in the presence of confounding. First, in settings with observed confounding, we derive tighter, covariate-informed bounds on the joint distribution by leveraging conditional copulas. To overcome the non-differentiability of bounding min/max operators, we establish the asymptotic properties for both a direct estimator with polynomial margin condition and a smooth approximation with log-sum-exp operator, facilitating valid inference for individual-level effects under the canonical rank-preserving assumption. Second, we tackle the challenge of unmeasured confounding by introducing a causal representation learning framework. By utilizing instrumental variables, we prove the nonparametric identifiability of the latent confounding subspace under injectivity and completeness conditions. We develop a ``triple machine learning" estimator that employs cross-fitting scheme to sequentially handle the learned representation, nuisance parameters, and target functional. We characterize the asymptotic distribution with variance inflation induced by representation learning error, and provide conditions for semiparametric efficiency. We also propose a practical VAE-based algorithm for confounding representation learning. Simulations and real-world analysis validate the effectiveness of proposed methods. By bridging classical semiparametric theory with modern representation learning, this work provides a robust statistical foundation for distributional and counterfactual inference in complex causal systems.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Statistical learning theory is the foundation of machine learning, providing theoretical bounds for the risk of models learned from a (single) training set, assumed to issue from an unknown probability distribution.

A.I. re-creations of the "Magnificent Ambersons" stars Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Dolores Costello, and Tim Holt. Edward Saatchi first saw "The Magnificent Ambersons," Orson Welles's mangled masterpiece from 1942, when he was twelve years old, in the private screening room of his family's crenellated mansion, in West Sussex. Saatchi's parents had already shown him and his brother "Citizen Kane." But "Ambersons," Welles's follow-up film, about a wealthy Midwestern clan brought low, came with a bewitching backstory: R.K.O. had ripped the movie from the director's hands, slashed forty-three minutes, tacked on a happy ending, and destroyed the excised footage in order to free up vault space, leaving decades' worth of cinephiles to obsess over what might have been. Part of this outcome was the result of studio treachery, but Welles, owing to some combination of hubris and distraction, had let his film slip from his grasp. Saatchi recalled, "Around the family dinner table, that was always such a big topic: How much was Welles responsible for this? Mum was always quite tough on him." Saatchi's father, Maurice, a baron also known as Lord Saatchi, is one of two Iraqi British brothers who founded the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, in 1970, which led their family to become one of the richest in the U.K. Edward's mother, Josephine Hart, who died in 2011, was an Irish writer best known for her erotic thriller "Damage," which was adapted into a film by Louis Malle. Edward, born in 1985, grew up in London and at the sprawling country estate, surrounded by palatial gardens and classical statuary. He described his parents as "movie mad." The actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow, a Saatchi family friend, recalled, "They had a cinema of their own inside the house, and it was a ritual of theirs every week to watch a film together." Aside from old movies, Edward was obsessed with "Star Trek"--especially the Holodeck, a device that conjured simulated 3-D worlds populated by characters who could interact with the members of the Starship Enterprise. That kind of wizardry didn't exist in the real world, at least not yet. But the young prince of the Saatchi castle had faith that someday it would, and that it could bring the original "Ambersons" back from oblivion. "To me, this is the lost holy grail of cinema," Saatchi told me recently, like Charles Foster Kane murmuring about Rosebud. "It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened."

Distributionally robust optimisation (DRO) minimises the worst-case expected loss over an ambiguity set that can capture distributional shifts in out-of-sample environments. While Huber (linear-vacuous) contamination is a classical minimal-assumption model for an $\varepsilon$-fraction of arbitrary perturbations, including it in an ambiguity set can make the worst-case risk infinite and the DRO objective vacuous unless one imposes strong boundedness or support assumptions. We address these challenges by introducing bulk-calibrated credal ambiguity sets: we learn a high-mass bulk set from data while considering contamination inside the bulk and bounding the remaining tail contribution separately. This leads to a closed-form, finite $\mathrm{mean}+\sup$ robust objective and tractable linear or second-order cone programs for common losses and bulk geometries. Through this framework, we highlight and exploit the equivalence between the imprecise probability (IP) notion of upper expectation and the worst-case risk, demonstrating how IP credal sets translate into DRO objectives with interpretable tolerance levels. Experiments on heavy-tailed inventory control, geographically shifted house-price regression, and demographically shifted text classification show competitive robustness-accuracy trade-offs and efficient optimisation times, using Bayesian, frequentist, or empirical reference distributions.