Artificial intelligence risks increasing inequality between developed and developing countries, a United Nations report has warned. The report, titled "The Next Great Divergence" and released by the United Nations Development Programme's Asia and Pacific regional bureau on Tuesday, calls for urgent, coordinated policy action to manage the impact of the technology. "We think that AI is heralding a new era of rising inequality between countries, following years of convergence in the last 50 years," Philip Schellekens, the bureau's chief economist, told a briefing in Geneva, according to the Reuters news agency. The report argues that AI, like the Industrial Revolution before it, has the potential to unlock unprecedented opportunities or deepen existing divides, across a global landscape marked by vast gaps in wealth, skills, and digital access. Even wealthier countries would suffer if poorer states were left behind by the AI revolution, said Schellekens. "If inequality continues to rise, the spillover effects of that in terms of the security agenda, in terms of undocumented forms of migration, will also become more daunting," he worries.

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Russian tanker struck off Turkiye as Ukraine targets'shadow fleet' A Russian-flagged tanker in the Black Sea has reported being attacked off the Turkish coast, the third such vessel to have been targeted within a week. The Turkish Directorate General of Maritime Affairs said on Tuesday that the Midvolga-2 had reported coming under attack about 130km (80 miles) from land.

UK share values'most stretched' since 2008, Bank warns The Bank of England has warned of a sharp correction in the value of major tech companies with growing fears of an artificial intelligence (AI) bubble. It said share prices in the UK are close to the most stretched they have been since the 2008 global financial crisis, while equity valuations in the US are reminiscent of those before the dotcom bubble burst. The central bank's financial stability report warned valuations are particularly stretched for companies focused on AI. It said the growth of the sector in the next five years would be fuelled by trillions of dollars of debt, raising financial stability risks if the value of the companies falls. The Bank of England cited industry figures forecasting spending on AI infrastructure could top $5tn (£3.8tn).

Italian luxury fashion house Valentino is facing criticism after posting disturbing adverts made using artificial intelligence (AI) for one of its luxury handbags online. The brand announced a collaboration with digital artists as part of what it dubbed a digital creative project promoting its new DeVain handbag. But an AI-generated advert it posted on Instagram has been met with intense criticism from fans, who called the visuals - and use of AI - sloppy and sad. The BBC has approached Valentino for comment. The Instagram post promoting the handbag, which has a label to say it was made using AI, shows a surreal collage of models spliced between Valentino logos and its DeVain bag.

Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group, speaks during the Future Investment Initiative (FII) Institute Priority Asia conference in Tokyo on Monday. SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son said he wouldn't have sold off Nvidia shares if his company had unlimited money to bankroll its next investments in artificial intelligence, which include a big bet on OpenAI. Son, addressing for the first time the surprise November disclosure that SoftBank had unloaded its entire stake in the world's most valuable company, also slammed talk of an AI investment bubble. The Japanese company simply needed to raise capital to fund projects including data center construction, he told a forum in Tokyo Monday. I don't want to sell a single share. I just had more need for money to invest in OpenAI" and other projects, Son said during the FII Priority Asia forum.

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Zelenskyy says US peace plan'looks better' with new revisions Here's where things stand on Tuesday, December 2: Russian forces launched a ballistic missile on Ukraine's Dnipro, killing four people and wounding 40 others, according to Ukrainian authorities. Russia claimed the capture of the strategic eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk, the logistics hub that has been under attack for months by Moscow's forces.

The shock resignation came for a very specific reason, but the OBR saga will continue with a series of decisions the chancellor will have to make over Richard Hughes' replacement. Firstly the Chancellor will have to find a respected and credible economist to run the OBR. There are several candidates, who might fit the mould of fiercely independent bean counters. The list will be carefully watched by the markets for any departure from the normal model. The problem is that there is some political pressure to do just that.

The snakes behind the blockbuster are megafauna throwbacks. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. At roughly the length of a small school bus, anacondas are famously some of the world's largest snakes. Now fossil evidence proves that these enormous reptiles are also glimpses of an ancient world. According to a study published on December 1st in the, anacondas reached their maximum length around 12.4 million years ago--and have remained giants ever since.

Abstract--Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and K-means constitute fundamental techniques in multivariate analysis. Although they are frequently applied independently or sequentially to cluster observations, the relationship between them, especially when K-means is used to cluster variables rather than observations, has been scarcely explored. This study seeks to address this gap by proposing an innovative method that analyzes the relationship between clusters of variables obtained by applying K-means on transposed data and the principal components of PCA. Our approach involves applying PCA to the original data and K-means to the transposed data set, where the original variables are converted into observations. The contribution of each variable cluster to each principal component is then quantified using measures based on variable loadings. This process provides a tool to explore and understand the clustering of variables and how such clusters contribute to the principal dimensions of variation identified by PCA. We analyze multiple data sets with varying variability structures (USArrests, Iris, Decathlon2) to show that the correspondence between clusters of variables and principal components depends on the data's inherent structure.

Abstract--This paper presents a robust precoder design for resilient cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO) systems that minimizes the weighted sum of desired signal mean square error (MSE) and residual interference leakage power under a total transmit power constraint. The proposed robust preco der incorporates channel state information (CSI) error statis tics to enhance resilience against CSI imperfections. We employ an alternating optimization algorithm initialized with a min imum MSE-type solution, which iteratively refines the precoder w hile maintaining low computational complexity and ensuring fas t convergence. Numerical results show that the proposed meth od significantly outperforms conventional linear precoders, providing an effective balance between performance and computati onal efficiency. Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) networks have emerged as an extension of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems [1], [2] an d cornerstone of next-generation wireless systems by deploy ing a large number of distributed access points (APs) to jointly serve users without cell boundaries [3], [4], [5].