McDonald's boss on abuse claims: 'I don't want to talk about the past' The boss of McDonald's UK and Ireland has said she doesn't want to talk about the past when asked about allegations of abuse at the fast-food chain. Lauren Schultz told the BBC what had happened in recent years was unacceptable but said we have drawn a line under it. A BBC investigation in 2023 heard from more than 100 McDonald's workers in the UK claiming they faced a toxic culture of sexual assault, harassment, racism, and bullying. Last year, staff said they still faced sexual abuse and harassment. The UK equality watchdog agreed tougher measures with the company to protect staff in November, including new sexual harassment training.

Anthropic is investigating a claim that a small group of people gained access to its Claude Mythos model - the cyber-security tool which the AI firm says is too powerful to release to the public. We're investigating a report claiming unauthorized access to Claude Mythos Preview through one of our third-party vendor environments, the company said in a statement. It was in response to a Bloomberg report that users in a private forum managed to access the model without the normal permissions. There is deep unease about Mythos' capabilities - though the UK's top cyber official has said advanced AI tools could be a net positive if the technology was secured from misuse. There is currently no suggestion that malicious actors have managed to get hold of the model, and Anthropic says it does not have evidence its systems are affected.

What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' Russia strikes Ukraine's Odesa port, kills railway worker in Zaporizhia Russian drones have attacked Ukraine's main Black Sea port in the southern city of Odesa and a railway in the region of Zaporizhia, killing a train driver, according to Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba. The overnight attacks damaged the infrastructure of the Odesa port, including berths, warehouses, railway infrastructure and port operators' facilities, Kuleba said in a statement on X on Wednesday. Kuleba said this is "another proof of terrorism, Russia is at war against peaceful people, against those who were simply doing their job and keeping the country moving". Russia also launched several drones and missiles on a flight path near the disused Chornobyl nuclear plant, elevating the risk of a significant accident, according to Ukraine's top state prosecutor. This comes as Ukraine prepares to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster on Sunday.

Taiwan President Lai Ching-te has cancelled a presidential trip to the African nation of Eswatini, accusing Beijing of putting pressure on its neighbours to bar his aircraft from flying over their territories. Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar revoked Lai's overflight permits after intense pressure and economic coercion from China, said a Taiwan official. China denied coercion, while praising the three African countries saying it had high appreciation for them. This is the first publicly known instance where a Taiwanese leader has had to cancel a foreign trip due to revoked flight permits. Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is Taiwan's only diplomatic ally in Africa.

The U.S. military is launching a new autonomous warfare command under SOUTHCOM to deploy unmanned systems across Latin America, SOUTHCOM Gen. Francis Donovan said.

Abstract--Recovering latent structure from count data has received considerable attention in network inference, particularly when one seeks both cross-group interactions and within-group similarity patterns in bipartite networks, which is widely used in ecology research. Such networks are often sparse and inherently imperfect in their detection. Existing models mainly focus on interaction recovery, while the induced similarity graphs are much less studied. Moreover, sparsity is often not controlled, and scale is unbalanced, leading to oversparse or poorly rescaled estimates with degrading structural recovery. We impose nonconvex ℓ1/2 regularization on the latent similarity and connectivity structures to promote sparsity within-group similarity and cross-group connectivity with better relative scale. To solve it, we develop an ADMM-based algorithm with adaptive penalization and scale-aware initialization and establish its asymptotic feasibility and KKT stationarity of cluster points under mild regularity conditions. Experiments on synthetic and real-world ecological datasets demonstrate improved recovery of latent factors and similarity/connectivity structure relative to existing baselines. Index Terms--augmented Lagrangian, nonconvex nonsmooth optimization, nonnegative matrix factorization, link prediction, ecological network inference, structured sparse recovery I. INTRODUCTION This setting is inherent in sensing and monitoring applications [3], [4], where observations, such as counts, are obtained via an imperfect sampling process. In this paper, we are interested in ecological interaction networks describing how species associate with locations and how environments shape biodiversity patterns [5], [6].

Peter Molyneux OBE is reflecting upon the future of the UK games industry in his office - and how he could soon be leaving it. The 66-year-old, who over the years has helped create iconic series such as Fable, Black & White and Theme Park, tells me Masters of Albion - his latest project as creative director of 22cans - will also be his final one. He sees it as a return to his roots - a reinvention of the god game - a genre he introduced with Populous in 1989, one where players play as a deity on high, controlling a population's inhabitants as they please. In this new iteration, players are able to build and manage settlements by day, before defending them from attacks at night, with the ability to take control of individual characters at any point. For Molyneux, once voted one of the top game creators of all time, the key idea is freedom - creating systems that respond to player curiosity rather than directing them down a fixed path.

Meta to track workers' clicks and keystrokes to train AI Meta will start tracking the way employees work, including their keystrokes and mouse clicks, to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. The company, which owns Instagram and Facebook, told workers on Tuesday that a new tool will run on Meta's computers and internal apps, logging their activity to be used as training data for AI technology. A Meta spokesman told the BBC: If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them. The data is not used for any other purpose, he said, adding that the tool has safeguards in place to protect sensitive content. But one Meta employee, who asked not to be identified, said having their smallest actions on a computer being used to train AI model as workers expect a slew of additional job cuts feels very dystopian.

Why did Trump fire Pam Bondi? Trump's US Fed nominee Warsh vows independence, says he's no'sock puppet' Kevin Warsh, United States President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Federal Reserve, has addressed concerns about his independence pending his appointment to the bank amid fears that Trump could sway his decisions on monetary policy. On Tuesday, Warsh -- who served on the central bank's Board of Governors from 2006 to 2011 -- faced waves of criticism during a confirmation hearing of the Senate Banking Committee where Democrats voiced concerns about the Fed's independence should he be appointed to lead the organisation. "I do not believe the operational independence of monetary policy is particularly threatened when elected officials -- presidents, senators, or members of the House -- state their views on interest rates," Warsh said. "Monetary policy independence is essential. Monetary policymakers must act in the nation's interest . . . Warsh, 56, also called for "regime change" at the US central bank, including a new approach for controlling inflation and a communications overhaul that may discourage his colleagues from saying too much about the direction of monetary policy. Warsh blamed the central bank for an inflation surge after it slashed interest rates to nearly zero in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a move that continues to hurt US households. Concerned by the implications of artificial intelligence for jobs - expected to increase productivity - and prices, he said he would move quickly to see if new data tools could provide better insight on inflation, and would also discourage policymakers from saying too much about where interest rates might be heading. "What the Fed needs are reforms to its frameworks and reforms to its communications," the former Fed governor said. "Too many Fed officials opine about where interest rates should be That is quite unhelpful." Warsh has also long been an advocate for shrinking the Fed's $6.7 trillion balance sheet. In the Tuesday hearing, he said any such plans would take time and must be publicly discussed well in advance. Jai Kedia, a research fellow at the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Al Jazeera that there were many "encouraging" signs in Warsh's candidacy. "Warsh is presenting himself as a regime change candidate at a time when the Fed needs serious reform," Kedia noted. "Particularly encouraging was his understanding of the negative effects of QE and his focus on reducing the balance sheet.

OpenAI is facing a criminal investigation in the US over whether its ChatGPT technology played a part in the murder of two people during a mass shooting at Florida State University last year. Florida's Attorney General James Uthmeier said on Tuesday his office had been looking into the use of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot by a man who allegedly shot several people at the campus in Tallahassee. Our review has revealed that a criminal investigation is necessary, Uthmeier said. ChatGPT offered significant advice to this shooter before he committed such heinous crimes. An OpenAI spokesperson said: ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime.