Pope Leo XIV speaks during a meeting with bishops, members of the clergy and families whose members have been victims of environmental pollution at the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, in Acerra, Italy, on 23 May 2026. Pope Leo XIV speaks during a meeting with bishops, members of the clergy and families whose members have been victims of environmental pollution at the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, in Acerra, Italy, on 23 May 2026. Americans echo Pope Leo's concerns about AI: 'It threatens workers, privacy and human life' Guardian readers in the US spoke of fears about unregulated AI in response to the pope's encyclical warning about the risks of the technology I n his first major papal text since assuming leadership of the Catholic church last year, Pope Leo issued a stark warning about the rise of artificial intelligence this week, denouncing the "culture of power" driving the AI age. Calling for the "most rigorous" ethical constraints on AI - which he described as one of the greatest threats facing humanity today - the first US-born pope also warned of "new forms of slavery" emerging through the digital economy. Speaking to the Guardian, readers in the US echoed the pope's concerns, describing AI as an "unregulated" industry increasingly being used to the "detriment of too many people", while also raising fears about surveillance, labor displacement, war and environmental harm .

Papa Johns launches drone delivery testing with Wing in Indian Trail, North Carolina, starting with sandwiches while custom pizza packaging is developed for future flights.

A new collaboration with Alphabet's Wing will only deliver sandwiches. It demonstrates the tricky parts of taking to the sky. Starting today, eager customers of the US pizza restaurant chain Papa Johns living in one corner of southern North Carolina will have the opportunity to receive their food from the sky, thanks to a new collaboration with Alphabet's drone company, Wing . But Papa Johns' signature pizzas won't be on offer. Instead, drone-loving North Carolinians will have to choose between three kinds of sandwiches, a newer product for the fast-food chain: Philly cheesesteak, chicken bacon ranch, or steak and mushroom varieties.

A nonparametric model using a sequence of Bernstein polynomials is constructed to approximate arbitrary isotropic covariance functions valid in $\mathbb{R}^\infty$ and related approximation properties are investigated using the popular $L_{\infty}$ norm and $L_2$ norms. A computationally efficient sieve maximum likelihood (sML) estimation is then developed to nonparametrically estimate the unknown isotropic covaraince function valid in $\mathbb{R}^\infty$. Consistency of the proposed sieve ML estimator is established under increasing domain regime. The proposed methodology is compared numerically with couple of existing nonparametric as well as with commonly used parametric methods. Numerical results based on simulated data show that our approach outperforms the parametric methods in reducing bias due to model misspecification and also the nonparametric methods in terms of having significantly lower values of expected $L_{\infty}$ and $L_2$ norms. Application to precipitation data is illustrated to showcase a real case study. Additional technical details and numerical illustrations are also made available.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is important for closing the gap between offline training and evaluation of reinforcement learning (RL), by estimating performance and/or rank of target (evaluation) policies using offline trajectories only. It can improve the safety and efficiency of data collection and policy testing procedures in situations where online deployments are expensive, such as healthcare. However, existing OPE methods fall short in estimating human feedback (HF) signals, as HF may be conditioned over multiple underlying factors and is only sparsely available; as opposed to the agent-defined environmental rewards (used in policy optimization), which are usually determined over parametric functions or distributions. Consequently, the nature of HF signals makes extrapolating accurate OPE estimations to be challenging. To resolve this, we introduce an OPE for HF (OPEHF) framework that revives existing OPE methods in order to accurately evaluate the HF signals. Specifically, we develop an immediate human reward (IHR) reconstruction approach, regularized by environmental knowledge distilled in a latent space that captures the underlying dynamics of state transitions as well as issuing HF signals. Our approach has been tested over two real-world experiments, adaptive in-vivo neurostimulation and intelligent tutoring, as well as in a simulation environment (visual Q&A). Results show that our approach significantly improves the performance toward estimating HF signals accurately, compared to directly applying (variants of) existing OPE methods.

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A piece of the UFC White House event's setup is sitting in Pennsylvania Amish country Edward Cabrera's strikeout prop is the play as struggling Phillies face surging Cubs today Nuggets vs Timberwolves Game 3 pick hinges on Jaden McDaniels calling out Denver's entire defense Charles Barkley was disgusted by Magic's highly questionable pregame handshake ChatGPT predicted the first round of the NFL Draft and here's what it said Curt Cignetti was so focused this offseason, he turned down all external requests: 'I'm 95% football' Former MLB owner claims'despicable' San Francisco Giants are the reason the A's left Oakland Trump weighs in on Iran's internal power struggle and Strait of Hormuz control Hasan Piker justifies'social murder' of CEO Fox News celebrates'Bring Your Kids to Work Day' Trump says there's'no time frame' to secure Iran deal Iranian activist praises Trump's intervention after female protesters saved from execution OutKick Viral Ottawa Senators fan blamed for team's 0-2 playoff start banished to Taiwan US men's hockey team faces media backlash after White House visit, SOTU appearance Fox News contributors Marc Thiessen and Ari Fleischer discuss the U.S. men's hockey team's White House visit and State of the Union appearance, breaking down media reactions to the events on'Fox & Friends.' When it comes to sports superstitions, they don't make them much more militant than teams and players in the Stanley Cup Playoffs . Everyone on the team has to grow playoff beards, and if the team ate at a certain restaurant then had a great game, guess where you're eating for the next two months during home games? Hell, even Sidney Crosby has been wearing the same jockstrap for 20 years because of how superstitious he was (okay, that was TMI, I apologize). Suffice it to say, teams can get a little paranoid when it comes to luck and bad omens in the playoffs, which is why the Ottawa Senators had to act accordingly after their team fell down 0-2 against the Carolina Hurricanes.

What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools? The tech world assumes that A.I.-aided education is necessary and inevitable. A growing number of parents, educators, and cognitive scientists say the opposite. I don't like A.I., and I am raising my children not to like it. I've been telling them for years now that chatbots are manipulative and dangerous, that A.I.-image generators are loosening our collective grip on reality, that large language models are built atop industrial-scale intellectual-property theft. At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult. Yes, I, too, have suspected that the creepy neighbor walks on cloven hooves inside his Yeezy Boosts, but he probably isn't going anywhere--in fact, he keeps buying up properties around town--so just try your best not to engage. Somehow, I was not prepared for the creepy neighbor to start hanging around my kids' schools; somehow, I thought we had until high school.