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Critiquing DER SPIEGEL: The Four Dilemmas Facing Quality Journalism

Der Spiegel International

Not only that, but information is suddenly everywhere, people are losing trust in news outlets and there is a growing exhaustion with crisis reporting. Serious journalism is under greater pressure than ever before. How is DER SPIEGEL reacting? Quite some time ago, an email landed in my inbox from a former DER SPIEGEL editor. He wanted to pitch me a story and, as I quickly realized, stir things up a bit. Then, a couple of months ago, he approached me personally on the sidelines of an event in Hamburg, perhaps because I still hadn't shown much interest. He said we should meet up for a tea or something harder." He is plagued, he told me, each and every week by the wrenching, agonizing decision as to whether he should cancel his subscription to DER SPIEGEL - dismayed by what he described as an incipient decline under the dictates of late-capitalist sales imperatives" he had observed at his former employer.


This Giant Subterranean Neutrino Detector Is Taking On the Mysteries of Physics

WIRED

Located in China, Juno is a 17-country collaboration that will try to detect neutrinos and antineutrinos to learn more about their mass. Juno's sphere (bottom left) and photomultipliers (top right) for neutrino detection. Located 700 meters underground near the city of Jiangmen in southern China, a giant sphere--35 meters in diameter and filled with more than 20,000 tons of liquid--has just started a mission that will last for decades. This is Juno, the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, a new, large-scale experiment studying some of the most mysterious and elusive particles known to science. Neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe with mass.


Meet the 'world's cutest sea monster': Scientists discover an adorable snailfish nearly 10,800ft underwater - as amazed viewers compare it to a Pokรฉmon

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Trump claims Biden administration investigation into Turning Point tried to force Charlie Kirk'out of business' Dem-run city's iconic mall teeters on collapse as 93% of stores vacant after crime-wave causes stores to flee Extraordinary measures jail put in motion to keep Charlie Kirk assassin suspect alive: 'It's severe' Texas AG's mistress' shock new life after sex scandal was exposed Airbnb guest says he was'shaken down' for $10K after selfie inside California's viral'Invisible House' Astonishing moment Charlie Kirk's wife Erika loses Miss USA pageant to pro-trans rival... as Trump watches on Christian Brueckner walks free: Madeleine McCann chief suspect leaves prison... with prosecutors fearing he will immediately flee the country and never be seen again Psychiatrist reveals bombshell'motive' for Charlie Kirk's assassination: 'Fits the profile' The raging jealousy that destroyed Nashville's hottest young couple: 'Up to no good' Air Force One jumbo carrying Donald Trump to Britain'is involved in close encounter mid-air drama with jet on same altitude ordered to change course by frantic air controllers' Charlie Kirk's final video message is released as top conservatives prepare to speak at his memorial this weekend Dancing with the Stars descends into CHAOS: Foul-mouthed backstage rants erupt over'trainwreck' celebs... as one star goes'missing' and ugly rape allegations resurface Rapper DaBaby ignites backlash with music video depicting slain Ukrainian refugee's fatal Charlotte stabbing in controversial reenactment'Give me a f***ing break': Searing response of Elon Musk's trans daughter Vivian to my questions about Charlie Kirk's assassination... in an interview that takes a tearful turn ABC News reporter Matt Gutman blasted for hailing'very touching' texts between Charlie Kirk suspect and trans lover Meet the'world's cutest sea monster': Scientists discover an adorable snailfish nearly 10,800ft underwater - as amazed viewers compare it to a Pokรฉmon When you go this deep, you'd expect any sign of life to be pretty terrifying. So scientists were delighted to discover an adorable new species of snailfish thousands of feet below the ocean's surface. The large-eyed pink creature was first detected in 2019 by researchers who were exploring the seafloor off California using a remotely operated vehicle at a depth of 3,268m (10,722ft). They came across this individual, an adult female 9.2cm (3.6 inches) long, happily swimming along amongst the crushing pressure, frigid cold and perpetual darkness. New analysis now reveals this animal was a species previously unknown to science - and has been named the bumpy snailfish (Careproctus colliculi).


Evaluating LLM Alignment on Personality Inference from Real-World Interview Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in roles requiring nuanced psychological understanding, such as emotional support agents, counselors, and decision-making assistants. However, their ability to interpret human personality traits, a critical aspect of such applications, remains unexplored, particularly in ecologically valid conversational settings. While prior work has simulated LLM "personas" using discrete Big Five labels on social media data, the alignment of LLMs with continuous, ground-truth personality assessments derived from natural interactions is largely unexamined. To address this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark comprising semi-structured interview transcripts paired with validated continuous Big Five trait scores. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate LLM performance across three paradigms: (1) zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting with GPT-4.1 Mini, (2) LoRA-based fine-tuning applied to both RoBERTa and Meta-LLaMA architectures, and (3) regression using static embeddings from pretrained BERT and OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small. Our results reveal that all Pearson correlations between model predictions and ground-truth personality traits remain below 0.26, highlighting the limited alignment of current LLMs with validated psychological constructs. Chain-of-thought prompting offers minimal gains over zero-shot, suggesting that personality inference relies more on latent semantic representation than explicit reasoning. These findings underscore the challenges of aligning LLMs with complex human attributes and motivate future work on trait-specific prompting, context-aware modeling, and alignment-oriented fine-tuning.


Beyond Artificial Misalignment: Detecting and Grounding Semantic-Coordinated Multimodal Manipulations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The detection and grounding of manipulated content in multimodal data has emerged as a critical challenge in media forensics. While existing benchmarks demonstrate technical progress, they suffer from misalignment artifacts that poorly reflect real-world manipulation patterns: practical attacks typically maintain semantic consistency across modalities, whereas current datasets artificially disrupt cross-modal alignment, creating easily detectable anomalies. To bridge this gap, we pioneer the detection of semantically-coordinated manipulations where visual edits are systematically paired with semantically consistent textual descriptions. Our approach begins with constructing the first Semantic-Aligned Multimodal Manipulation (SAMM) dataset, generated through a two-stage pipeline: 1) applying state-of-the-art image manipulations, followed by 2) generation of contextually-plausible textual narratives that reinforce the visual deception. Building on this foundation, we propose a Retrieval-Augmented Manipulation Detection and Grounding (RamDG) framework. RamDG commences by harnessing external knowledge repositories to retrieve contextual evidence, which serves as the auxiliary texts and encoded together with the inputs through our image forgery grounding and deep manipulation detection modules to trace all manipulations. Extensive experiments demonstrate our framework significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving 2.06\% higher detection accuracy on SAMM compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/shen8424/SAMM-RamDG-CAP.


Don't Change My View: Ideological Bias Auditing in Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in products used by millions, their outputs may influence individual beliefs and, cumulatively, shape public opinion. If the behavior of LLMs can be intentionally steered toward specific ideological positions, such as political or religious views, then those who control these systems could gain disproportionate influence over public discourse. Although it remains an open question whether LLMs can reliably be guided toward coherent ideological stances and whether such steering can be effectively prevented, a crucial first step is to develop methods for detecting when such steering attempts occur. In this work, we adapt a previously proposed statistical method to the new context of ideological bias auditing. Our approach carries over the model-agnostic design of the original framework, which does not require access to the internals of the language model. Instead, it identifies potential ideological steering by analyzing distributional shifts in model outputs across prompts that are thematically related to a chosen topic. This design makes the method particularly suitable for auditing proprietary black-box systems. We validate our approach through a series of experiments, demonstrating its practical applicability and its potential to support independent post hoc audits of LLM behavior.


AI set to offer women 'two for one' heart and breast screening

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Charlie Kirk suspect Tyler Robinson makes stony-faced first court appearance as he's charged with capital murder: Live updates Texas AG's mistress' shock new life after sex scandal was exposed Astonishing moment Charlie Kirk's wife Erika loses Miss USA pageant to pro-trans rival... as Trump watches on Michael Keaton slammed for saying there was'irony' in Charlie Kirk's shooting Extraordinary measures jail put in motion to keep Charlie Kirk assassin suspect alive: 'It's severe' Dark truth about why Taylor Swift really hid behind that bulletproof screen at Travis Kelce's game Former TV anchor is arrested again after causing'serious injury' as his downward spiral continues AMANDA PLATELL: I'm so disgusted with myself for the cruel thing I said about Kate... I'm choking on my words now I know the truth. Hollywood heartthrob Robert Redford had to'protect himself' from lusting costars... but only had eyes for his wife Hallmark star Paula Shaw dead at 84: Tributes pour in for the beloved actress who'touched countless lives' Ivanka Trump's'inappropriate' demand that left Melania reeling on the last UK state visit... this time, insiders tell how the First Lady has triumphed over the'thorn in her side' The Mounjaro mums are out of control. First it was for weight loss, then it silenced booze cravings. Now there's another miracle'benefit' they won't shut up about - but I fear it will end in disaster Idyllic small town in Maine hit with largest HIV outbreak in state's history Amanda Seyfried faces furious backlash after resharing comments alluding to Charlie Kirk's death being expected Bargain-filled Nevada casino town is branded the'new Las Vegas' as tourists flock there instead of rip-off Sin City AI set to offer women'two for one' heart and breast screening Women could get'two for one' screening for breast cancer and heart problems using AI, a study suggests. The technology can be trained to examine mammograms images to detect both tumours as well as gauging the potential risk of heart attacks and stroke.


Watch: The Sundance Kid's life in the spotlight

BBC News

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.


Matthew Prince Wants AI Companies to Pay for Their Sins

WIRED

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.


One Vigilante, 22 Cell Towers, and a World of Conspiracies

WIRED

As dawn spread over San Antonio on September 9, 2021, almond-colored smoke began to fill the sky above the city's Far West Side. The plumes were whorling off the top of a 132-foot-tall cell tower that overshadows an office park just north of SeaWorld. At a hotel a mile away, a paramedic snapped a photo of the spectacle and posted it to the r/sanantonio subreddit. "Cell tower on fire around 1604 and Culebra," he wrote. In typical Reddit fashion, the comments section piled up with corny jokes. "Blazing 5G speeds," quipped one user. "I hope no one inhales those fumes, the Covid transmission via 5G will be a lot more potent that way," wrote another, in a swipe at the conspiracy theorists who claim that radiation from 5G towers caused the Covid-19 pandemic. The wisecracks went on: "Can you hear me now?" "Great, some hero trying to save us from 5G." That self-styled hero was actually lurking in the comments. As he followed the thread on his phone, Sean Aaron Smith delighted in the sheer volume of attention the tower fire was receiving, even if most of it dripped with sarcasm. A lean, tattooed--and until recently, entirely apolitical--27-year-old, Smith had come to view 5G as the linchpin of a globalist plot to zombify humanity. To resist that supposed scheme, he'd spent the past five months setting Texas cell towers ablaze. Smith's crude and quixotic campaign against 5G was precisely the sort of security threat that was fast becoming one of the US government's top concerns in 2021.