South America
HistoryBankQA: Multilingual Temporal Question Answering on Historical Events
Mandal, Biswadip, Khandelwal, Anant, Gupta, Manish
Temporal reasoning about historical events is a critical skill for NLP tasks like event extraction, historical entity linking, temporal question answering, timeline summarization, temporal event clustering and temporal natural language inference. Yet efforts on benchmarking temporal reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are rather limited. Existing temporal reasoning datasets are limited in scale, lack multilingual coverage and focus more on contemporary events. To address these limitations, we present HistoryBank, a multilingual database of 10M+ historical events extracted from Wikipedia timeline pages and article infoboxes. Our database provides unprecedented coverage in both historical depth and linguistic breadth with 10 languages. Additionally, we construct a comprehensive question answering benchmark for temporal reasoning across all languages. This benchmark covers a diverse set of 6 temporal QA reasoning tasks, and we evaluate a suite of popular language models (LLaMA-3-8B, Mistral-7B, Gemma-2-9b, Qwen3-8B, GPT4o) to assess their performance on these tasks. As expected GPT4o performs best across all answer types and languages; Gemma-2 outperforms the other small language models. Our work aims to provide a comprehensive resource for advancing multilingual and temporally-aware natural language understanding of historical events. To facilitate further research, we will make our code and datasets publicly available upon acceptance of this paper.
President Trump in UK for historic second state visit
President Donald Trump has arrived in the UK for his historic second state visit, which will see a crowded mix of royal pageantry, trade talks and international politics. Before making the trip from the US on Air Force One, Trump sent positive signals, describing the visit as an honour and saying: My relationship is very good with the UK. They want to see if they can refine the trade deal a little bit I'm into helping them, said Trump, with a multi-billion US technology investment deal being announced as the president's visit got underway. But Trump said the main purpose of the visit was to see my friend King Charles: He represents the country so well, such an elegant gentleman. Landing at Stansted airport, President Trump received an official welcome from a line-up on the runway including Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper. The president is spending the night in the US ambassador's residence, Winfield House, before a day of royal ceremony and lavish spectacle in Windsor Castle on Wednesday - with the president describing Windsor as the ultimate in settings.
AI could boost UK economy by 10% in five years, says Microsoft boss
Microsoft says its new $30bn (ยฃ22bn) investment in the UK's AI sector - its largest outside of the US - should significantly boost Britain's economy in the next few years. Its package forms a major part of a ยฃ31billion agreement made between the UK government and various other US tech giants, including Nvidia and Google, to invest in British-based infrastructure to support AI technology, largely in the form of data centres. Microsoft will also now be involved in the creation of a powerful new supercomputer in Loughton, Essex. Speaking exclusively to the BBC Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the BBC of the tech's potential impact on economic growth. It may happen faster, so our hope is not ten years but maybe five.
US Tech Giants Race to Spend Billions in UK AI Push
Microsoft and Nvidia unveiled plans to invest up to $45 billion in the UK during US President Donald Trump's state visit. Microsoft and Nvidia have unveiled plans to invest up to $45 billion dollars into the UK economy, in a move that will bolster the building of more data centers as well as research and development into artificial intelligence . The investment comes as US president Donald Trump travels to Britain, where he is expected to announce a US-UK tech deal alongside UK prime minister Keir Starmer. As part of the agreement, Microsoft has committed to invest $30 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years. The company claims this is the largest financial commitment it has ever made in the UK and will make up more than two thirds of the total investment announced into the UK this week, timed to Trump's visit.
OpenAI Rolls Out Teen Safety Features Amid Growing Scrutiny
CEO Sam Altman announced an age-prediction system and new parental controls in a blog post on Tuesday. OpenAI announced new teen safety features for ChatGPT on Tuesday as part of an ongoing effort to respond to concerns about how minors engage with chatbots . The company is building an age-prediction system that identifies if a user is under 18 years old and routes them to an " age-appropriate " system that blocks graphic sexual content. If the system detects that the user is considering suicide or self-harm, it will contact the user's parents. In cases of imminent danger, if a user's parents are unreachable, the system may contact the authorities.
Russian drone strike targets busy Kharkiv street, injuring four
How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Footage shows the moment a Russian Shahed drone struck an administrative building in central Kharkiv in Ukraine, injuring four. Local officials said the drone targeted a busy street to maximize civilian casualties, underscoring relentless strikes as peace efforts stall.
Watch: The Sundance Kid's life in the spotlight
Hollywood icon Robert Redford has died at the age of 89, his publicist has said. The actor was known for his roles in blockbuster movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and went on to win an Oscar for Ordinary People when he turned his hand to directing. David Sillito looks back at his life. 'No doubt' Russia will cross Nato border if Ukraine falls, former US VP says Former US Vice-President Mike Pence calls for security guarantees in Ukraine to help deliver "just and lasting peace". The US House Oversight Committee has released new surveillance footage recorded hours before the convicted paedophile's death.
Trump's UK visit: What's on the agenda, schedule, what to expect
How tariffs are unraveling India's textile industry Is Chicago the violent crime capital of the US? Trump's UK visit: What's on the agenda, schedule, what to expect Great Britain is set to roll out the red carpet for Donald Trump this week, honouring the president of the United States with something no other American leader has ever received: a second state visit. Trump is set to arrive in London late on Tuesday for a visit that coincides with tough trade negotiations between the US and many of its key trading partners, including the United Kingdom. During his stay, both countries plan to announce several deals on technology and civil nuclear energy, and British leaders hope to finalise an agreement on metal tariffs. The British government is confident that royal soft power will appeal to Trump's sense of flamboyance. Before setting off on Tuesday, Trump said he was looking forward to meeting with his friend, King Charles III, whom he described as an "elegant gentleman". The president said being welcomed for a second state visit was a first, and noted how it was planned for Windsor Castle, rather than Buckingham Palace.
Human Design Is Blowing Up. Following It Might Make You Leave Your Spouse
Human Design Is Blowing Up. The astrology-like system uses birthdates to break people into personality types and even find love and riches. From sleeping arrangements to diets, some are taking it very seriously. Travis Day regrets being so strict with his ex-partner about never sleeping in the same bed. According to human design, the New Age "synthesis" of astrology, the I Ching book of Chinese wisdom, Kabbalah, and the chakra system, "everyone should sleep in their own bed at night" to preserve their auras, says the blond 38-year-old Los Angeles county-based surfer, who's been following the practice rigidly for the last five years.
Matthew Prince Wants AI Companies to Pay for Their Sins
The Cloudflare CEO joined to talk about standing up to content scraping, the internet's potential futures, and his company's relationship to Trump. Matthew Prince may not be a household name, but the world most certainly knows his work. Prince is the cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare . Launched in 2010, the internet infrastructure company has found itself increasingly in the position of serving as the web's bodyguard. It filters out bad traffic, keeps sites safe, and stops them from crashing when too many people visit. Its tools defend against DDoS attacks. In 2017, Cloudflare made headlines when it dropped white supremacist site The Daily Stormer . Cloudflare's severing of ties with The Daily Stormer marked a momentous shift, one that came after years of claiming a neutral stance. Prince continues to evolve the way Cloudflare works. In July, the company rolled out a new tool tasked with blocking unauthorized AI scraping. It effectively creates a pay-per-crawl model requiring AI platforms to shell out money if they want access to a site's content. On this episode of, I talked to Prince about publishing, the old internet, and how his ideal version of the future web means that OpenAI just might become the Netflix of content. KATIE DRUMMOND: Good to have you here, Matthew. You should have been warned ahead of time, but you probably weren't.