A Navy fighter jet on Tuesday shot down an Iranian drone that aggressively approached a U.S. aircraft carrier transiting the Arabian Sea, according to a spokesman for the U.S. military's Central Command. The downing of the drone comes at a moment of heightened tension in the region, as the U.S. military builds up forces for a possible confrontation with Iran. Last month, President Trump threatened to attack the country after its government brutally crushed anti-government protests that began in late December. As the protests have ebbed, Mr. Trump has shifted his focus to demanding a deal that would end Iran's nuclear program and its support for proxy groups in the Middle East, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis operating in Yemen. Talks between Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi; Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump's Middle East envoy; and Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, are scheduled to take place in Istanbul this week.

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says AI competition with China requires making American workers 50 times more productive to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

Experts worry Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Health Department will use an internal AI tool to analyze vaccine injury claims in a way that furthers his anti-vaccine agenda. The US Department of Health and Human Services is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025. The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda. A long-standing vaccine critic, Kenedy has upended the childhood vaccination schedule in his year in office, removing several shots from a list of recommended immunizations for all children, including those for Covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A and B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.

Musk labels Spain PM'tyrant' after Madrid proposes social media curbs Tech billionaire and owner of X, Elon Musk, has dubbed socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez a "tyrant and traitor to the people" of Spain for introducing new social media curbs for children under the age of 16. Musk's comments on Tuesday came in response to an announcement by the Spanish prime minister that Madrid would introduce new changes to the country's social media laws. Sanchez also confirmed that the government would work with the public prosecutor to investigate alleged legal infringements by platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, and Musk's own AI chatbot, Grok. "Dirty Sanchez is a tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain," Musk wrote in response to the Spanish prime minister's X post, in which he detailed the upcoming measures. Grok has come under fire for allowing users to create sexually explicit fake images of women and minors, triggering an investigation by the European Commission.

Russian attacks on Ukraine energy sites'particularly depraved', UK PM Starmer says Russia's attacks on Ukraine's energy sector on Monday night - as temperatures dropped to -20C (-4F) - were barbaric and particularly depraved, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said. He made the comments after speaking to US President Donald Trump hours after Russia hit power plants and critical infrastructure in the capital, Kyiv, and elsewhere. The attacks came at the end of a week-long pause that Trump had asked Russia's President Vladimir Putin to observe as a fierce cold swept Ukraine. Trump said on Tuesday that Putin had kept his word and that he would like him to end the war. Top US envoys are meeting negotiators from Russia and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday and Thursday.

Team Mirai leader Takahiro Anno stumps in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward on Jan. 27, the first day of campaigning for the Lower House election slated for Sunday. A small, 9-month-old party that has only one seat in the Upper House may gain as many seats as decadesold peers such as the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in Sunday's Lower House election with its unconventional campaign pledges to change politics and the government through digital technology. A weekend poll conducted by the Asahi Shimbun showed Team Mirai could win up to 10 seats under the proportional representation system, more than the JCP's nine seats and Reiwa Shinsengumi's six. The party didn't have any seats in the Lower House before its dissolution. The party's founder and leader is a 35-year-old artificial intelligence engineer behind two AI startups -- Takahiro Anno. He had been working on societal reform through digital transformation when he pivoted from business to politics with the launch of Team Mirai last May.

BERLIN - German technology firm DeepL, known for its artificial intelligence-powered translation software, plans to release a Japanese-language version of its real-time interpretation software by the end of this year, a senior company official has said. The age of machine interpretation has arrived, said Leonardo Doin, head of engineering and research for real-time voice translation service DeepL Voice, in a recent interview. You can just wear an earpiece and ... you can just hear it (foreign-language speech) in your language anytime, Doin said. The interpretation software will integrate DeepL's speech recognition and machine translation technologies, and speech synthesis technology that mimics the tones of the speakers' voices. It will be able to handle multiple languages and speakers, he said, with the software's use in online meetings of multinational companies in mind. DeepL plans to roll out the software on smartphones as well.

The Corporation of London is calling on employers to re-skill female workers not currently in technical roles. The Corporation of London is calling on employers to re-skill female workers not currently in technical roles. 'Mid-career' females also being sidelined by rigid hiring processes, says City of London Corporation Women working in tech and financial services are at greater risk of losing their jobs to increased use of AI and automation than their male peers, according to a report that found experienced females were also being sidelined as a result of "rigid hiring processes". "Mid-career" women - with at least five years' experience - are being overlooked for digital roles in the tech and financial and professional services sectors, where they are traditionally underrepresented, according to the report by the City of London Corporation. The governing body that runs the capital's Square Mile found female applicants were discriminated against by rigid, and sometimes automated, screening of their CVs, which did not take into account career gaps related to caring for children or relatives, or only narrowly considered their professional experience.

We introduce a new preference-based framework for conditional treatment effect estimation and policy learning, built on the Conditional Preference-based Treatment Effect (CPTE). CPTE requires only that outcomes be ranked under a preference rule, unlocking flexible modeling of heterogeneous effects with multivariate, ordinal, or preference-driven outcomes. This unifies applications such as conditional probability of necessity and sufficiency, conditional Win Ratio, and Generalized Pairwise Comparisons. Despite the intrinsic non-identifiability of comparison-based estimands, CPTE provides interpretable targets and delivers new identifiability conditions for previous unidentifiable estimands. We present estimation strategies via matching, quantile, and distributional regression, and further design efficient influence-function estimators to correct plug-in bias and maximize policy value. Synthetic and semi-synthetic experiments demonstrate clear performance gains and practical impact.

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