People visit an Alibaba booth during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 26, 2025. China is restricting overseas travel for top AI professionals in private firms such as Alibaba Group and DeepSeek, suggesting an escalation in measures intended to safeguard its technology and catch up to the U.S. in a pivotal sphere. Government agencies have begun imposing restrictions on individuals involved in advanced AI work and considered strategically important to the country, people familiar with the matter said. That means they need approval from relevant authorities before embarking on overseas travel, the people said, asking for anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. Beijing has for years imposed travel restrictions on key personnel from prominent college researchers to nuclear scientists and executives at state firms.

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This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG .

Causal discovery in time series is increasingly performed using nonlinear machine-learning models, yet the resulting causal relationships are almost always summarized by scalar edge scores. We argue that this practice obscures the true object learned by nonlinear autoregressive models: a state-dependent function whose effect varies across regimes, magnitudes, and contexts. We formalize function-valued causal influence for additive, contribution-decomposable architectures and show that scalar causal scores constitute a severe information bottleneck, conflating between-state variation with within-state residual noise. Using Neural Additive Vector Autoregression as a representative architecture, we introduce a practical framework based on Individual Conditional Expectation for estimating causal response functions directly from trained models. Through controlled synthetic experiments, we demonstrate that edges with indistinguishable scalar scores can exhibit qualitatively different functional behaviors, including monotonic, thresholded, saturating, and sign-changing effects. An applied case study on democratic development further shows that function-valued analysis reveals regime-specific and asymmetric causal structure systematically missed by score-centric approaches.

Discrete diffusion models have achieved strong empirical performance in text and other symbolic domains, but, especially for uniform-rate models, they often require many steps to generate a single sample. Existing acceleration methods either rely on training additional quantities or suffer from slow mixing. In this work, we propose a novel Gibbs-based corrector for discrete diffusion models, termed Gibbs-Accelerated Discrete Diffusion (GADD). GADD leverages the structure of the concrete score function to construct Gibbs posterior likelihoods directly, without requiring any additional training beyond standard score estimation. We show that GADD achieves an overall sampling complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\mathrm{polylog} (\varepsilon^{-1}))$, yielding the first such rate for diffusion-based samplers for uniform-rate discrete diffusion models. We also conduct numerical experiments demonstrating the practical advantages of GADD across synthetic data, zero-shot text sampling, and zero-shot conditional music generation. These results corroborate the theory and show that GADD consistently improves sample quality and wall-clock efficiency over standard baselines, including vanilla Euler methods and CTMC correctors. Beyond this, our theoretical analysis introduces a novel framework for analyzing predictor-corrector methods in discrete diffusion models, which may be of independent interest. Unlike existing approaches that rely on the Girsanov change-of-measure technique, our method is based on an induction argument that tracks error propagation across predictor iterations while accounting for inaccuracies in the corrector updates.

Russia'relentlessly targeting' critical infrastructure and democracy, GCHQ says The UK is at a moment of consequence as Russia is relentlessly targeting critical infrastructure, the UK's largest spy agency will warn. GCHQ Director Anne Keast-Butler will set out threats facing the UK and the measures she believes need to be taken to confront them when she makes her inaugural public speech on Wednesday. Russia has been blamed for a string of espionage plots on British soil and, more recently, waging an undeclared'hybrid war' against the UK and other Nato countries. The Kremlin has denied the allegations. Keast-Butler says GCHQ is working tirelessly to fend off cyber attacks and counter what she calls reckless sabotage and assassination attempts.

The Holy Father referenced in his encyclical about AI--an expert (if unintentional) troll of tech billionaires who keep misinterpreting the series. Nobody was surprised that Pope Leo XIV cited well-known saints and previous pontiffs in his first encyclical, or papal letter of spiritual guidance,, released Monday. But the name that immediately jumped out to many readers is one synonymous with high fantasy literature: J.R.R. Tolkien, the Catholic author of . Leo's letter is concerned with "safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence," a major theme of his first year as leader of the Catholic Church. Drawing from his predecessor, Pope Francis, he warns of "the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm," one capable of "reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency."

Preparations are underway at the White House South Lawn for an upcoming Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event. The cage fight is scheduled to take place 14 June as part of the America 250 celebrations. US President Donald Trump said UFC president Dana White, a longtime ally, will build "a 5,000-seat arena right outside the front door of the White House", along with eight large screens in a nearby park for fans to watch from a distance. Fans rally behind US men's national soccer team as World Cup roster revealed BBC's Carl Nasman was at the event, where he asked enthusiasts about World Cup ticket prices and what the sport means to the US. The plans include permanent human habitation on the Earth's only natural satellite by 2032.

India's communists once ruled millions. For the first time since 1957, India no longer has a single communist-led state government. The defeat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala this month, after a decade in power, marked the end - at least for now - of one of the world's most enduring experiments in democratic communism. At their peak, India's communist parties ruled states stretching from West Bengal to Kerala and Tripura. They impacted the lives of more than 100 million people through trade unions, peasant organisations, student wings and disciplined cadre networks.

Sharrell Shaw's request for strangers to visit her husband's Arlington grave on Memorial Day drew over 6 million views and visits from Trump administration officials.