Although you'd never guess it from mainstream media, the most significant antitrust case in more than 20 years is under way in Washington. In it, the US justice department, alongside the attorneys general of eight states, is suing Google for abusively monopolising digital advertising technologies, thereby subverting competition through "serial acquisitions" and anti-competitive auction manipulation. Or, to put it more prosaically, arguing that Google – which has between 90% and 95% of the search market – has maintained its monopoly not by making a better product, but by locking down almost every avenue through which consumers might find a different search engine and making sure they only see Google wherever they look. Basically, because the US government has been asleep at the wheel for almost a quarter of a century and has finally woken up to its democratic responsibilities. The last time it stirred itself to take on an aggressive monopolist was in 2001, when it sued Microsoft for illegally tying its Internet Explorer browser to Windows as part of a (successful) campaign to destroy Netscape, maker of the first distinctive commercial web browser, which Bill Gates and co perceived as a potentially lethal competitive threat.

As human access to space expands, the influx of new actors promises to forever alter the dynamics of space. The head-to-head U.S.–Soviet rivalry that once dominated the Space Race will evolve into something more inclusive--but also messier. Aspiring space nations, such as Luxembourg, India, and China, together with new categories of nonstate actors, including large industrial players, startups, and universities, raise questions about how we should regulate space. Explosive commercialization is particularly challenging for existing space law, whose foundations were set in the 1960s and designed with national governments in mind. This rapidly changing environment is dramatized in "Little Assistance," a new Future Tense Fiction story from Stephen Harrison.

This story is part of Future Tense Fiction, a monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives. The other homesteaders, mostly engineers and technicians, seemed to enjoy outings in the lunar rover. But for Eugene, this was a grinding chore that frayed his nerves. Suddenly, Mel's soothing feminine voice reverberated in his cochlear implant. "Would you like some affirmations?" You are a well-respected judge … You have worked hard to get here, to this special time and place …" As Mel went on, it seemed the suit hugged his chest a little less tightly. He relaxed his grip on the wheel. Why, he wondered, had he not remembered this technique without her prompting? Strange how the basic principles of cognitive psych were always slipping from his mind. Fortunately, she was there to remind him. "You are someone who wants what is best for the American lunar community and ...

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan has said the agency is watching closely for signs of anticompetitive behavior. In March, the FTC opened an inquiry into cloud computing providers, asking whether AI products are dependent on the cloud provider they're built on. Regulators elsewhere are watching, too. The offices of Nvidia, which makes the computer chips and software necessary to train large language models, were raided Wednesday by French competition authorities, according to the Wall Street Journal.

There's a bill in US Congress right now to stop AI from gaining control of nuclear weapons, and roughly a dozen militaries around the world are investigating the possibilities of autonomous weaponry. That's why watching The Creator, a movie set roughly 40 years from now, feels surreal, jarring, and oddly welcome. From Metropolis to Terminator, sci-fi has taught us to fear the AI revolt. This one opts to wonder what would happen if AI got so empathetic to humanity it wanted to save people from themselves. In writer-director Gareth Edwards' latest, war has laid waste to both humans and robots.

Training a single fighter pilot could cost the Air Force over $10 million. So this company is using augmented reality headsets with AI to give U.S. airmen an edge. Visors that allow pilots to simulate dogfights while they're actually flying will give the U.S. military a "transformational" advantage, a former Air Force aviator told Fox News. "When you combine the power of AI with the power of augmented reality, now you are capable of creating synthetic worlds that are living, breathing, digital worlds that will think and fly and act for themselves," Dan Robinson, CEO of the military tech company Red 6, told Fox News. "Now you can put a really representative training together at scale outdoors in dynamic environments, which is a transformational value proposition for the Air Force and how we think about training."

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on a visit to Kyiv that Ukrainian forces are "gradually gaining ground" in their counteroffensive against Russian forces. "Every metre that Ukrainian forces regain is a metre that Russia loses," he said at a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Russia said it destroyed 11 Ukrainian drones overnight in an attack that saw one combat drone drop explosives on a power substation, cutting a local power supply in Russia's Kursk region. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree setting out his country's routine autumn conscription campaign, which will see 130,000 people called up for statutory military service. Adult men in Russia are required to do a yearlong military service between the ages of 18 and 27 or equivalent training while pursuing higher education.

In today's digital age, images have emerged as powerful tools for politicians to engage with their voters on social media platforms. Visual content possesses a unique emotional appeal that often leads to increased user engagement. However, research on visual communication remains relatively limited, particularly in the Global South. This study aims to bridge this gap by employing a combination of computational methods and qualitative approach to investigate the visual communication strategies employed in a dataset of 11,263 Instagram posts by 19 Brazilian presidential candidates in 2018 and 2022 national elections. Through two studies, we observed consistent patterns across these candidates on their use of visual political communication. Notably, we identify a prevalence of celebratory and positively toned images. They also exhibit a strong sense of personalization, portraying candidates connected with their voters on a more emotional level. We note a substantial presence of screenshots from news websites and other social media platforms. Furthermore, text-edited images with portrayals emerge as a prominent feature. In light of these results, we engage in a discussion regarding the implications for the broader field of visual political communication. This article serves as a testament to the pivotal role that Instagram has played in shaping the narrative of two fiercely polarized Brazilian elections, casting a revealing light on the ever-evolving dynamics of visual political communication in the digital age. Finally, we propose avenues for future research in the realm of visual political communication. Introduction In the ever-evolving arena of election campaigns, candidates rely heavily on the media as their megaphone to amplify their messages to the masses. Over the years, the landscape of political communication has undergone a profound transformation. This transformation has been driven by the rise of online social media platforms, which have emerged as indispensable tools for candidates in their quest to gauge public sentiment and rally support from the electorate (Boulianne & Olof Larsson, 2023; Farkas & Bene, 2021). The significance of this transformation has been further accentuated by the global ascent of populist leaders, spanning diverse nations, who have wholeheartedly embraced social media as their primary mode of communication (Bernardi & Costa, 2020; Novoselova, 2020).

For a broad class of choice and ranking models based on Luce's choice axiom, including the Bradley--Terry--Luce and Plackett--Luce models, we show that the associated maximum likelihood estimation problems are equivalent to a classic matrix balancing problem with target row and column sums. This perspective opens doors between two seemingly unrelated research areas, and allows us to unify existing algorithms in the choice modeling literature as special instances or analogs of Sinkhorn's celebrated algorithm for matrix balancing. We draw inspirations from these connections and resolve important open problems on the study of Sinkhorn's algorithm. We first prove the global linear convergence of Sinkhorn's algorithm for non-negative matrices whenever finite solutions to the matrix balancing problem exist. We characterize this global rate of convergence in terms of the algebraic connectivity of the bipartite graph constructed from data. Next, we also derive the sharp asymptotic rate of linear convergence, which generalizes a classic result of Knight (2008), but with a more explicit analysis that exploits an intrinsic orthogonality structure. To our knowledge, these are the first quantitative linear convergence results for Sinkhorn's algorithm for general non-negative matrices and positive marginals. The connections we establish in this paper between matrix balancing and choice modeling could help motivate further transmission of ideas and interesting results in both directions.

While large pre-trained language models (LLMs) have shown their impressive capabilities in various NLP tasks, they are still under-explored in the misinformation domain. In this paper, we examine LLMs with in-context learning (ICL) for news claim verification, and find that only with 4-shot demonstration examples, the performance of several prompting methods can be comparable with previous supervised models. To further boost performance, we introduce a Hierarchical Step-by-Step (HiSS) prompting method which directs LLMs to separate a claim into several subclaims and then verify each of them via multiple questions-answering steps progressively. Experiment results on two public misinformation datasets show that HiSS prompting outperforms state-of-the-art fully-supervised approach and strong few-shot ICL-enabled baselines.