Can Israel survive economic isolation? Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has said his country's navy will join Italy in sending warships to protect the Global Sumud Flotilla, which has come under drone attack in international waters en route to deliver aid to Gaza. Speaking to reporters in New York on Wednesday, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Sanchez said international law must be respected and the citizens of 45 nations participating in the aid mission had every right to sail in the Mediterranean unharmed. "Tomorrow we will dispatch a naval vessel from Cartagena with all necessary resources in case it is necessary to assist the flotilla and carry out a rescue operation." On Wednesday night, activists described a wave of attacks by Israeli drones and other aircraft which targeted vessels in the small fleet in what flotilla organisers described as "an alarmingly dangerous escalation".

An Australian film that was digitally altered to change a same-sex couple to a heterosexual one has drawn backlash from moviegoers in China. Together, a horror film starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, was shown in selected Chinese cinemas in advance screenings on 12 September. Cinemagoers later realised some scenes had been modified after screenshots showing the original scenes went viral online. The film was due to be publicly released on 19 September - but as of Thursday has yet to be aired in cinemas. The film's global distributor, Neon, later condemned the edit, saying they did not approve of [this] unauthorised edit... and demand they ceased distribution, according to reports.

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? How is Russia replenishing its military? At least two people were killed by a daytime Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian city of Novorossiysk on Wednesday, according to The Moscow Times. Among those injured were employees of a Russian-Kazakh oil project. Russia's Ministry of Defence on Wednesday said 1,495 Ukrainian troops were killed in the past 24 hours of fighting, according to Russia's state news agency TASS.

Yang Song, who previously led the strategic explorations team at OpenAI, is the new'research principal' of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Mark Zuckerberg has poached a high-ranking OpenAI researcher to be the research principal of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Yang Song, who previously led the strategic explorations team at OpenAI, is now reporting to Shengjia Zhao, another OpenAI alum who has overseen the buzzy AI effort since July, according to multiple sources. He started earlier this month. The move comes after Zuckerberg went on a hiring blitz earlier this summer, bringing in at least 11 top researchers from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

U.N. calls for probe after alleged drone attack on Gaza-bound aid flotilla Activists wave Palestinian flags as they gather to support a flotilla carrying humanitarian aid in Ajaccio, on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica, on Sept 12. | AFP-JIJI Rome - The United Nations called Wednesday for an investigation into alleged drone attacks against a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that prompted Italy and Spain to send naval ships to help. The Global Sumud Flotilla, carrying activists including Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg, blamed Israel for more than a dozen explosions heard around its vessels off Greece late on Tuesday. U.N. Human Rights Office spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said anyone responsible for the violations should be held accountable, and called for an independent, impartial and thorough investigation. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.

Denmark's Aalborg airport in the country's north has been closed after unauthorised drones were seen in its airspace, according to local authorities. Three other smaller airports in the country's southern region - Esbjerg, Sønderborg and Skrydstrup - also reported drone activity, but were not closed. The incident comes after the country's Copenhagen airport was forced to close earlier this week due to a drone incursion, which the prime minister described as the most severe attack on Danish infrastructure so far. Police said the devices could be seen from the ground, adding they couldn't rule out the activity being a prank. They were investigating who was controlling them and their motive.

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) offer a structured and interpretable framework for multivariate function approximation by composing univariate transformations through additive or multiplicative aggregation. This paper establishes theoretical convergence guarantees for KANs when the univariate components are represented by B-splines. We prove that both additive and hybrid additive-multiplicative KANs attain the minimax-optimal convergence rate $O(n^{-2r/(2r+1)})$ for functions in Sobolev spaces of smoothness $r$. We further derive guidelines for selecting the optimal number of knots in the B-splines. The theory is supported by simulation studies that confirm the predicted convergence rates. These results provide a theoretical foundation for using KANs in nonparametric regression and highlight their potential as a structured alternative to existing methods.

Spike-and-wave discharges (SWDs) are the electroencephalographic hallmark of absence epilepsy, yet their manual identification in multi-day recordings remains labour-intensive and error-prone. We present a lightweight hybrid pipeline that couples analytical features with a shallow artificial neural network (ANN) for accurate, patient-specific SWD detection in long-term, monopolar EEG. A two-sided moving-average (MA) filter first suppresses the high-frequency components of normal background activity. The residual signal is then summarised by the mean and the standard deviation of its normally distributed samples, yielding a compact, two-dimensional feature vector for every 20s window. These features are fed to a single-hidden-layer ANN trained via back-propagation to classify each window as SWD or non-SWD. The method was evaluated on 780 channels sampled at 256 Hz from 12 patients, comprising 392 annotated SWD events. It correctly detected 384 events (sensitivity: 98%) while achieving a specificity of 96.2 % and an overall accuracy of 97.2%. Because feature extraction is analytic, and the classifier is small, the pipeline runs in real-time and requires no manual threshold tuning. These results indicate that normal-distribution descriptors combined with a modest ANN provide an effective and computationally inexpensive solution for automated SWD screening in extended EEG recordings.

Semantic parsing methods for converting text to SQL queries enable question answering over structured data and can greatly benefit analysts who routinely perform complex analytics on vast data stored in specialized relational databases. Although several benchmarks measure the abilities of text to SQL, the complexity of their questions is inherently limited by the level of expressiveness in query languages and none focus explicitly on questions involving complex analytical reasoning which require operations such as calculations over aggregate analytics, time series analysis or scenario understanding. In this paper, we introduce STARQA, the first public human-created dataset of complex analytical reasoning questions and answers on three specialized-domain databases. In addition to generating SQL directly using LLMs, we evaluate a novel approach (Text2SQLCode) that decomposes the task into a combination of SQL and Python: SQL is responsible for data fetching, and Python more naturally performs reasoning. Our results demonstrate that identifying and combining the abilities of SQL and Python is beneficial compared to using SQL alone, yet the dataset still remains quite challenging for the existing state-of-the-art LLMs.