Fungal diseases are a major threat to the global banana supply. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The popular fruit is threatened by a fungal disease called Fusarium wilt of banana (FWB), which blocks the flow of nutrients and makes it wilt. In the 1950s, the pathogen even made one species-Gros Michel bananas-functionally extinct. Fear not though, scientists are on it.

Fast, stealthy, and cheap--autonomous, semisubmersible drone boats carrying tons of cocaine could be international law enforcement's nightmare scenario. A big one just came ashore. Colombian military officials intercepted this 40-foot-long uncrewed fiberglass "narco sub" in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. On a bright morning last April, a surveillance plane operated by the Colombian military spotted a 40-foot-long shark-like silhouette idling in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. It was, unmistakably, a "narco sub," a stealthy fiberglass vessel that sails with its hull almost entirely underwater, used by drug cartels to move cocaine north. The plane's crew radioed it in, and eventually nearby coast guard boats got the order, routine but urgent: Intercept. In Cartagena, about 150 miles from the action, Captain Jaime González Zamudio, commander of the regional coast guard group, sat down at his desk to watch what happened next.

Four astronauts from the U.S., France and Russia successfully arrived at the International Space Station via SpaceX rocket on Saturday, restoring full crew capacity.

Recent memoirs by the retired bookie Art Manteris and the storied gambler Billy Walters provide a glimpse of an industry in its fledgling form--and a preview of the DraftKings era to come. Las Vegas is no longer the seat of the sportsbook gods. In most states, it's now legal, and extremely popular, to place bets using apps or websites such as FanDuel and DraftKings. From your couch, you can wager on everything from the results of snooker championships to the color of the Gatorade poured over the victorious coach after the Super Bowl. The N.F.L., along with the other major-league American sports associations, has officially partnered with sports-betting sites, and their alliance has proved so lucrative that other industries want in on the action; last month, the Golden Globes made a deal with Polymarket, a predictions-market platform, to encourage wagering (or "trading," if you prefer) on the outcomes of its awards race.

Russian drone strike killed 12 Ukrainian coal miners hours after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced postponement of U.S.-brokered peace talks with Russia until February.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG .

Dinosaur National Monument workers discovered fossils during parking lot construction in September, the first find in over a century. The fossils are believed to belong to the Diplodocus.

Trump says US hit'big facility' linked to alleged Venezuelan drug boats Donald Trump has said the US has carried out a strike on a dock area linked to alleged Venezuelan drug boats. The US president said there had been a major explosion where they load the boats up with drugs - but did not give more details. Venezuela's government is yet to respond. The explosion was caused by a drone strike carried out by the CIA, CNN and the New York Times reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. If confirmed, it would be the first known US operation inside Venezuela.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper .

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into everyday life and information ecosystems, concerns about their implicit biases continue to persist. While prior work has primarily examined socio-demographic and left--right political dimensions, little attention has been paid to how LLMs align with broader geopolitical value systems, particularly the democracy--authoritarianism spectrum. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to assess such alignment, combining (1) the F-scale, a psychometric tool for measuring authoritarian tendencies, (2) FavScore, a newly introduced metric for evaluating model favorability toward world leaders, and (3) role-model probing to assess which figures are cited as general role-models by LLMs. We find that LLMs generally favor democratic values and leaders, but exhibit increased favorability toward authoritarian figures when prompted in Mandarin. Further, models are found to often cite authoritarian figures as role models, even outside explicit political contexts. These results shed light on ways LLMs may reflect and potentially reinforce global political ideologies, highlighting the importance of evaluating bias beyond conventional socio-political axes. Our code is available at: https://github.com/irenestrauss/Democratic-Authoritarian-Bias-LLMs.