Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh – The sound of children at play echoes through the verdant lanes of one of the dozens of refugee camps on the outskirts of Cox's Bazar, a densely populated coastal town in southeast Bangladesh. Just for a moment, the sounds manage to soften the harsh living conditions faced by the more than one million people who live here in the world's largest refugee camp. Described as the most persecuted people on the planet, the Rohingya Muslim refugees in Bangladesh may now be one of the most forgotten populations in the world, eight years after being ethnically cleansed from their homes in neighbouring Myanmar by a predominantely Buddhist military regime. "Cox's Bazar is ground zero for the impact of budget cuts on people in desperate need," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said during a visit to the sprawling camps in May. The UN chief's visit followed United States President Donald Trump's gutting of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which has stalled several key projects in the camps, and the United Kingdom announcing cuts to foreign aid in order to increase defence spending.

The Danish government revealed Thursday that a broad coalition of legislators are working on a bill that would make deepfakes illegal to share and put legal protections in place to prevent AI material depicting a person from being disseminated without their consent. "In the bill we agree and are sending an unequivocal message that everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice and their own facial features, which is apparently not how the current law is protecting people against generative AI," Danish culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, told The Guardian. The Danish department of culture will submit a proposed amendment for consultation this summer. The bill, if enacted, would issue "severe fines" for online platforms that do not abide by the new law. The Danish government said that parodies and satire would not be affected by the proposed amendment.

Ukraine's European allies pledged increased levels of military aid to Ukraine this year, making up for a United States aid freeze, as Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed his ambition to absorb all of Ukraine into the Russian Federation. "At this moment, the Europeans and the Canadians have pledged, for this year, 35bn in military support to Ukraine," said NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte ahead of the alliance's annual summit, which took place in The Hague on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 24-25. "Last year, it was just over 50bn for the full year. Now, before we reach half year, it is already at 35bn. And there are even others saying it's already close to 40bn," he added.

An industry-backed researcher who has forged a career sowing doubt about the dangers of pollutants is attempting to use artificial intelligence (AI) to amplify his perspective. Louis Anthony "Tony" Cox Jr, a Denver-based risk analyst and former Trump adviser who once reportedly claimed there is no proof that cleaning air saves lives, is developing an AI application to scan academic research for what he sees as the false conflation of correlation with causation. Cox has described the project as an attempt to weed "propaganda" out of epidemiological research and perform "critical thinking at scale" in emails to industry researchers, which were obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests by the Energy and Policy Institute, a non-profit advocacy group, and exclusively reviewed by the Guardian. He has long leveled accusations of flimsiness at research linking exposure to chemical compounds with health dangers, including on behalf of polluting interests such as cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris and the American Petroleum Institute – a fossil fuel lobbying group he has even allowed to "copy edit" his findings. Both the tobacco and oil industries have a history of weaponizing scientific uncertainty, experts say, with some arguing that similar tactics drive the Trump administration's current deregulatory efforts. The president's May "gold standard" science order, for instance, empowered his appointees to "correct scientific information" and "discipline" those who breach the administration's views, prompting outrage from some scientists. Cox has obtained funding to develop the new AI reviewer from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the nation's largest chemical industry advocacy group, which counts oil and chemical giants such as Exxon and DuPont as members.

US Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world's dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned. About 1bn tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry's enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian. This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a "pause" of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK. The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

In Arizona's borderlands, the desert is already deadly. But for years, another threat has stalked these routes: Armed vigilante groups who take it upon themselves to police the border – often violently, and outside the law. They have long undermined the work of humanitarian volunteers trying to save lives. Now, a new artificial intelligence platform is actively encouraging more people to join their ranks. ICERAID.us, recently launched in the United States, offers cryptocurrency rewards to users who upload photos of "suspicious activity" along the border. It positions civilians as front-line intelligence gatherers – doing the work of law enforcement, but without oversight.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt answers questions on U.S. strikes on Iran amid an intelligence leak about the operation. FIRST ON FOX: A group of House Republicans is demanding to know how the U.S. is ready to protect its own domestic assets in the event of a potential attack on the homeland. "We write to inquire with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about the current state of drone attack countermeasures for our military installations, government buildings, embassies, and consulates, both domestic and abroad," the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter. "The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have demonstrated that large-scale, highly coordinated mass-drone attacks can be highly effective if the defender lacks adequate counter-drone defenses." An Iranian demonstrator holds an anti-American sign.

Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time was (largely) a hit with the New Scientist Book Club One of the wonderful things about science fiction is the broadness of its church, and this was really brought home to me by our two most recent reads. The New Scientist Book Club moved from the hard science fiction spacefaring of Larry Niven's classic Ringworld in May to the near-future-set time travel of Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time for our June read. The former takes its science seriously, diving into the maths and physics of its set-up with gusto; the latter – not so much. Culture editor Alison Flood rounds up the New Scientist Book Club's thoughts on our latest read, the science fiction classic Ringworld by Larry Niven The story of an unnamed civil servant who is given the job of supporting an "expat" from history – Commander Graham Gore, a (real) Victorian polar explorer from 1847 – The Ministry of Time is many things in one: a thriller, a romance, a piece of climate fiction (apparently), a science fiction novel about time. I couldn't put it down and loved all of it – apart, perhaps, from the ending.

The Danish government said on Thursday it would strengthen protection against digital imitations of people's identities with what it believes to be the first law of its kind in Europe. Having secured broad cross-party agreement, the department of culture plans to submit a proposal to amend the current law for consultation before the summer recess and then submit the amendment in the autumn. It defines a deepfake as a very realistic digital representation of a person, including their appearance and voice. The Danish culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, said he hoped the bill before parliament would send an "unequivocal message" that everybody had the right to the way they looked and sounded. He told the Guardian: "In the bill we agree and are sending an unequivocal message that everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice and their own facial features, which is apparently not how the current law is protecting people against generative AI."

Given the growing influence of language model-based agents on high-stakes societal decisions, from public policy to healthcare, ensuring their beneficial impact requires understanding the far-reaching implications of their suggestions. We propose a proof-of-concept framework that projects how model-generated advice could propagate through societal systems on a macroscopic scale over time, enabling more robust alignment. To assess the long-term safety awareness of language models, we also introduce a dataset of 100 indirect harm scenarios, testing models' ability to foresee adverse, non-obvious outcomes from seemingly harmless user prompts. Our approach achieves not only over 20% improvement on the new dataset but also an average win rate exceeding 70% against strong baselines on existing safety benchmarks (AdvBench, SafeRLHF, WildGuardMix), suggesting a promising direction for safer agents.