Furious Trump issues chilling threat to Iran demanding Strait of Hormuz is'FULLY OPENED' in hours or America will'obliterate their power plants'... and there's already a key target in sight Chappell Roan accused of'leaving Jude Law's 11-year-old daughter in tears and using security guard to threaten her' I was the only one JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette trusted when they burdened me with an extraordinarily intimate secret. How Iran's ruthless enforcers use rape to crush dissent: Brutal sex attacks on victims as young as 12 used to strike fear into protesters, rights groups reveal amid fury over sickening nurse gang rape Shia LaBeouf suffers public meltdown in Rome as he's caught screaming'f*** off' at woman... after battery arrests'He just didn't protect him': Insiders reveal REAL reason Justin Bieber and Usher's secret feud hit'boiling point' at Oscars Mom-to-be finds out cop who got her pregnant has HIV after baby mama's text... as he is charged with felony I thought I was losing my mind... then doctors told me I had'exploding head syndrome'. America is about to be torn apart by a financial tsunami - and it's not just an oil crisis to fear. Denise Richards's plastic surgeon reveals stunning before-and-after photos of her facelift'Get the f*** out of my life,' JFK Jr screamed at Carolyn Bessette... what she cruelly told friends about his manhood... the cuckolding, cocaine - and moment that sent her truly psychotic: MAUREEN CALLAHAN has the untold REAL story Florida's Olivier Rioux, tallest player in college basketball history, dwarfs 6ft8 March Madness rival as defending champs roll to win YouTuber who exposed Somali'fraudsters' in bombshell investigation reveals terrifying threats from left-wing activists... as he begs for cash to help pay for security Charlie's Angels bombshell Jaclyn Smith looks nowhere near her 80 years in Beverly Hills... see her now Fury over plan for 110 homes near Yosemite Park that will tower up to 24ft and'cause road chaos' Gisele Pelicot tells how she thought she was dying from a brain tumor... then she discovered the horrific truth of her husband's abuse Iran ballistic missile hits Israeli city in terrifying strike near top-secret facility that is key to country's atomic weapons program Couple murdered outside Walgreens near golf's Players Championship were killed by jealous ex, says sheriff As the threat of a nuclear war intensifies, the terrifying reality of what could happen after the bombs explode may cause more fear than the initial cataclysm. For decades, worst-case scenarios have projected that tens of millions could perish within minutes as nuclear warheads struck major metropolitan areas such as New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles .

Iranian forces deploy explosive drone boats disguised as fishing vessels in Strait of Hormuz, defense expert Cameron Chell warns, marking new phase of hybrid warfare.

Kentucky mother and daughter turn down $26.5MILLION to sell their farms to secretive tech giant that wants to build data center there Horrifying next twist in the Alexander brothers case: MAUREEN CALLAHAN exposes an unthinkable perversion that's been hiding in plain sight Hollywood icon who starred in Psycho after Hitchcock dubbed her'my new Grace Kelly' looks incredible at 95 Kylie Jenner's total humiliation in Hollywood: Derogatory rumor leaves her boyfriend's peers'laughing at her' behind her back Tucker Carlson erupts at Trump adviser as she hurls'SLANDER' claim linking him to synagogue shooting Ben Affleck'scores $600m deal' with Netflix to sell his AI film start-up Long hair over 45 is ageing and try-hard. I've finally cut mine off. Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL rape video: Classmates speak out on sickening footage... as creepy unseen photos are exposed Heartbreaking video shows very elderly DoorDash driver shuffle down customer's driveway with coffee order because he is too poor to retire Amber Valletta, 52, was a '90s Vogue model who made movies with Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson, see her now Model Cindy Crawford, 60, mocked for her'out of touch' morning routine: 'Nothing about this is normal' Shocking declassified files have revealed how the US government intentionally injected Americans with radioactive substances without their knowledge or consent. This happened to 18 hospital patients between 1945 and 1947, where doctors secretly administered plutonium to study how it moved through and affected the human body as part of early US nuclear experiments during World War II and the Cold War. The chilling details originally came to light in 1995, when the Clinton White House had the Department of Energy disclose the secret experiments aimed at understanding radiation risks to workers building atomic bombs.

Plus: A CDC panel voted to recommend delaying the hepatitis B vaccine for babies. If you're a longtime reader, you probably know that our newsroom selects 10 breakthroughs every year that we think will define the future . This group exercise is mostly fun and always engrossing, with plenty of lively discussion along the way, but at times it can also be quite difficult. The 2026 list will come out on January 12--so stay tuned. In the meantime, we wanted to share some of the technologies from this year's reject pile, as a window into our decision-making process. These four technologies won't be on our 2026 list of breakthroughs, but all were closely considered, and we think they're worth knowing about.

A new congressional report warns China's military buildup has reached a war footing with 350 new missile silos and 20% nuclear expansion, threatening U.S. deterrence.

Shroud of Turin mystery deepens as surgeon spots hidden detail that points to Jesus' resurrection I was so happy after trying a trendy new cosmetic procedure. But 10 years later I suffered a devastating side effect... the doctor had lied I'm no longer sleeping with my husband - and never will again, says MOLLY RYDDELL. I love him, but counted down the moments until he climaxed. Then I couldn't bear it any more and the truth spilled out... so many women feel the same The'middle-class kinks' saving marriages: Wives reveal the eight buzzy sex trends that revived their lagging libidos - including the fantasy husbands are secretly obsessed with I'm a woman with autism... here are the signs you might be masking, even from yourself Lori Loughlin's husband Mossimo Giannulli seen with mystery brunette in tiny skirt day after shock split Body count from Houston's bayous rises as serial killer whispers grip city and residents are told: 'Be vigilant' Cake-faced 90s sitcom star looks unrecognizable as she ditches the heavy eyeshadow for an LA errand run can you guess who? Trump dollar coin design released by Treasury... and it's inspired by the most iconic political photo of the century I've loved Taylor Swift for years. Mystery deepens over Hulk Hogan's death as his widow faces fresh anguish Prison chief reveals exactly where Diddy could end up... and the one horrifying jail he MUST avoid Is THIS Amelia Earhart's missing plane?

Islands are diversity hotspots and vulnerable to environmental degradation, climate variations, land use changes and societal crises. These factors can exhibit interactive impacts on ecosystem services. The study reviewed a large number of papers on the climate change-islands-ecosystem services topic worldwide. Potential inclusion of land use changes and other drivers of impacts on ecosystem services were sequentially also recorded. The study sought to investigate the impacts of climate change, land use change, and other non-climatic driver changes on island ecosystem services. Explanatory variables examined were divided into two categories: environmental variables and methodological ones. Environmental variables include sea zone geographic location, ecosystem, ecosystem services, climate, land use, other driver variables, Methodological variables include consideration of policy interventions, uncertainty assessment, cumulative effects of climate change, synergistic effects of climate change with land use change and other anthropogenic and environmental drivers, and the diversity of variables used in the analysis. Machine learning and statistical methods were used to analyze their effects on island ecosystem services. Negative climate change impacts on ecosystem services are better quantified by land use change or other non-climatic driver variables than by climate variables. The synergy of land use together with climate changes is modulating the impact outcome and critical for a better impact assessment. Analyzed together, there is little evidence of more pronounced for a specific sea zone, ecosystem, or ecosystem service. Climate change impacts may be underestimated due to the use of a single climate variable deployed in most studies. Policy interventions exhibit low classification accuracy in quantifying impacts indicating insufficient efficacy or integration in the studies.

Text-embedding models often exhibit biases arising from the data on which they are trained. In this paper, we examine a hitherto unexplored bias in text-embeddings: bias arising from the presence of $\textit{names}$ such as persons, locations, organizations etc. in the text. Our study shows how the presence of $\textit{name-bias}$ in text-embedding models can potentially lead to erroneous conclusions in assessment of thematic similarity.Text-embeddings can mistakenly indicate similarity between texts based on names in the text, even when their actual semantic content has no similarity or indicate dissimilarity simply because of the names in the text even when the texts match semantically. We first demonstrate the presence of name bias in different text-embedding models and then propose $\textit{text-anonymization}$ during inference which involves removing references to names, while preserving the core theme of the text. The efficacy of the anonymization approach is demonstrated on two downstream NLP tasks, achieving significant performance gains. Our simple and training-optimization-free approach offers a practical and easily implementable solution to mitigate name bias.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced human-AI interaction but struggle with cultural understanding, often misinterpreting symbols, gestures, and artifacts due to biases in predominantly Western-centric training data. In this paper, we construct CultureVerse, a large-scale multimodal benchmark covering 19, 682 cultural concepts, 188 countries/regions, 15 cultural concepts, and 3 question types, with the aim of characterizing and improving VLMs' multicultural understanding capabilities. Then, we propose CultureVLM, a series of VLMs fine-tuned on our dataset to achieve significant performance improvement in cultural understanding. Our evaluation of 16 models reveals significant disparities, with a stronger performance in Western concepts and weaker results in African and Asian contexts. Fine-tuning on our CultureVerse enhances cultural perception, demonstrating cross-cultural, cross-continent, and cross-dataset generalization without sacrificing performance on models' general VLM benchmarks. We further present insights on cultural generalization and forgetting. We hope that this work could lay the foundation for more equitable and culturally aware multimodal AI systems.

The rapid advancement of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced the development of Embodied Question Answering (EQA), enhancing agents' abilities in language understanding and reasoning within complex and realistic scenarios. However, EQA in real-world scenarios remains challenging, as human-posed questions often contain noise that can interfere with an agent's exploration and response, bringing challenges especially for language beginners and non-expert users. To address this, we introduce a NoisyEQA benchmark designed to evaluate an agent's ability to recognize and correct noisy questions. This benchmark introduces four common types of noise found in real-world applications: Latent Hallucination Noise, Memory Noise, Perception Noise, and Semantic Noise generated through an automated dataset creation framework. Additionally, we also propose a 'Self-Correction' prompting mechanism and a new evaluation metric to enhance and measure both noise detection capability and answer quality. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that current EQA agents often struggle to detect noise in questions, leading to responses that frequently contain erroneous information. Through our Self-Correct Prompting mechanism, we can effectively improve the accuracy of agent answers.