Government
Ben & Jerry's brand could be destroyed, says co-founder
Ben & Jerry's brand could be destroyed, says co-founder Ben & Jerry's will be destroyed as a brand if it remains with parent company Magnum, the company's co-founder Ben Cohen has told the BBC. His remarks are the latest in a long-running spat between the ice cream brand and its parent company over its ability to express its social activism and the continued independence of its board. The comments came on the day that the Magnum Ice Cream Company (TMICC) started trading on the European stock market - spinning off from owner Unilever. A spokesperson for Magnum said the firm wanted to build and strengthen Ben & Jerry's powerful, non-partisan values-based position in the world. Ben & Jerry's was sold to Unilever in 2000 in a deal which allowed it to retain an independent board and the right to make decisions about its social mission.
Trump clears way for Nvidia to sell powerful AI chips to China
Before Monday's announcement, the US had prohibited sales of Nvidia's most advanced chips to China over national security concerns. Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday: "I have informed President Xi, of China, that the United States will allow NVIDIA to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China, and other Countries, under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security. Trump said the Department of Commerce was finalising the details and that he was planning to make the same offer to other chip companies, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel. Nvidia's H200 chips are the company's second most powerful, and far more advanced than the H20, which was originally designed as a lower-powered model for the Chinese market that would not breach restrictions, but which the US banned anyway in April. The president said the US would receive 25% of the proceeds, more than the 15% previously agreed to with Nvidia in an earlier deal to lift restrictions, and following similar unorthodox plans for the federal government to take a financial cut from private business dealings.
Supermassive black hole belches 30,000-miles-per-second winds
Two X-ray space telescopes captured the never-before-seen blast 130 million light-years away. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A never-before-seen blast from a supermassive black hole was spotted by two sophisticated X-ray space telescopes . This giant black hole about 130 million light-years away from Earth whipped up powerful winds, flinging material out into space at 37,282 miles per second. This particular supermassive black hole is lurking within the spiral galaxy NGC 3783.
Ukraine prepares new peace plan as Zelensky rules out giving up land
Ukraine is preparing to present a revised peace plan to the White House, as it seeks to avoid making territorial concessions to Russia. Kyiv is set propose alternatives to the US after President Volodymyr Zelensky again ruled out surrendering land, saying he had no right to do so under Ukrainian or international law. He made the comments as he met European and Nato leaders on Monday, part of a collective push to deter the US from backing a peace deal which includes major concessions for Ukraine, and which allies fear would leave it vulnerable to a future invasion. Meanwhile, the city of Sumy in north-western Ukraine was left without power overnight after a Russian drone attack. The region's governor said more than a dozen drones had hit power infrastructure, the latest in Russia's nightly attacks.
Trump clears way for sale of powerful Nvidia H200 chips to China
What are the implications of Trump's Somali'garbage' comments? What happens if the US attacks Venezuela? Does'America First' make the US weaker? What we know about the DC pipe bomb suspect Brian Cole Jr. US President Donald Trump has cleared the way for tech giant Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chip to China, in a significant easing of Washington's export controls targeting Chinese tech. Trump said on Monday that he had informed Chinese President Xi Jinping of the decision to allow the export of the chip under an arrangement that will see 25 percent of sales paid to the US government.
Trump gives Nvidia green light to sell advanced AI chips to China
US President Donald Trump has announced that he will allow AI chip giant Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips to approved customers in China. We will protect National Security, create American Jobs, and keep America's lead in AI, Trump said on social media on Monday. The decision will apply to other US chip companies like AMD and comes after extensive lobbying by Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, who visited Washington last week to drum up support. Nvidia - both the world's leading chip firm and most valuable company - has found itself at the centre of a geopolitical tug-of-war between the US and China in recent months, and had been banned from selling its most advanced chips to Beijing. Trump reversed the chip-selling ban in July, but demanded that Nvidia pay 15% of its Chinese revenues to the US government. Beijing then reportedly ordered its tech companies to stop buying Nvidia chips manufactured for use in the Chinese market.
Sudan air force bombing of towns, markets and schools has killed hundreds, report says
Sudan's air force has carried out bombings in which at least 1,700 civilians have died in attacks on residential neighbourhoods, markets, schools and camps for displaced people, according to an investigation into air raids in the country's civil war. The Sudan Witness Project says it has compiled the largest known dataset of military airstrikes in the conflict, which began in April 2023. Its analysis indicates that the air force has used unguided bombs in populated areas. The data focuses on attacks by warplanes, which only the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) is capable of operating. Its rival, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) does not have aircraft.
Prediction with Expert Advice under Local Differential Privacy
We study the classic problem of prediction with expert advice under the constraint of local differential privacy (LDP). In this context, we first show that a classical algorithm naturally satisfies LDP and then design two new algorithms that improve it: RW-AdaBatch and RW-Meta. For RW-AdaBatch, we exploit the limited-switching behavior induced by LDP to provide a novel form of privacy amplification that grows stronger on easier data, analogous to the shuffle model in offline learning. Drawing on the theory of random walks, we prove that this improvement carries essentially no utility cost. For RW-Meta, we develop a general method for privately selecting between experts that are themselves non-trivial learning algorithms, and we show that in the context of LDP this carries no extra privacy cost. In contrast, prior work has only considered data-independent experts. We also derive formal regret bounds that scale inversely with the degree of independence between experts. Our analysis is supplemented by evaluation on real-world data reported by hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic; RW-Meta outperforms both the classical baseline and a state-of-the-art \textit{central} DP algorithm by 1.5-3$\times$ on the task of predicting which hospital will report the highest density of COVID patients each week.
Modeling Spatio-temporal Extremes via Conditional Variational Autoencoders
Ma, Xiaoyu, Zhang, Likun, Wikle, Christopher K.
Extreme weather events are widely studied in fields such as agriculture, ecology, and meteorology. The spatio-temporal co-occurrence of extreme events can strengthen or weaken under changing climate conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to model spatio-temporal extremes by integrating climate indices via a conditional variational autoencoder (cXVAE). A convolutional neural network (CNN) is embedded in the decoder to convolve climatological indices with the spatial dependence within the latent space, thereby allowing the decoder to be dependent on the climate variables. There are three main contributions here. First, we demonstrate through extensive simulations that the proposed conditional XVAE accurately emulates spatial fields and recovers spatially and temporally varying extremal dependence with very low computational cost post training. Second, we provide a simple, scalable approach to detecting condition-driven shifts and whether the dependence structure is invariant to the conditioning variable. Third, when dependence is found to be condition-sensitive, the conditional XVAE supports counterfactual experiments allowing intervention on the climate covariate and propagating the associated change through the learned decoder to quantify differences in joint tail risk, co-occurrence ranges, and return metrics. To demonstrate the practical utility and performance of the model in real-world scenarios, we apply our method to analyze the monthly maximum Fire Weather Index (FWI) over eastern Australia from 2014 to 2024 conditioned on the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index.
An Adaptive Multi-Layered Honeynet Architecture for Threat Behavior Analysis via Deep Learning
The escalating sophistication and variety of cyber threats have rendered static honeypots inadequate, necessitating adaptive, intelligence-driven deception. In this work, ADLAH is introduced: an Adaptive Deep Learning Anomaly Detection Honeynet designed to maximize high-fidelity threat intelligence while minimizing cost through autonomous orchestration of infrastructure. The principal contribution is offered as an end-to-end architectural blueprint and vision for an AI-driven deception platform. Feasibility is evidenced by a functional prototype of the central decision mechanism, in which a reinforcement learning (RL) agent determines, in real time, when sessions should be escalated from low-interaction sensor nodes to dynamically provisioned, high-interaction honeypots. Because sufficient live data were unavailable, field-scale validation is not claimed; instead, design trade-offs and limitations are detailed, and a rigorous roadmap toward empirical evaluation at scale is provided. Beyond selective escalation and anomaly detection, the architecture pursues automated extraction, clustering, and versioning of bot attack chains, a core capability motivated by the empirical observation that exposed services are dominated by automated traffic. Together, these elements delineate a practical path toward cost-efficient capture of high-value adversary behavior, systematic bot versioning, and the production of actionable threat intelligence.