Survivors of sex abuse by members of the Catholic clergy have expressed hope after meeting Pope Leo at the Vatican for the first time. Gemma Hickey, board president of Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA Global), told the BBC it spoke volumes he had met them so soon in his papacy. The group is pushing for a global zero-tolerance policy, already adopted in the US, of permanently removing a priest who admits or is proven to have sexually abused a child. The Pope acknowledged there was resistance in some parts of the world to this, Hickey said. The new Pope, who assumed the role in May, has inherited the issue, which has haunted the Catholic Church for decades and the Vatican has struggled to root out.

Cybersecurity experts warn the AI companion app data leak could fuel blackmail and identity theft after millions of private chats were exposed.

When OpenAI released its AI video-generation app, Sora, in September, it promised that "you are in control of your likeness end-to-end." The app allows users to include themselves and their friends in videos through a feature called "cameos"--the app scans a user's face and performs a liveness check, providing data to generate a video of the user and to authenticate their consent for friends to use their likeness on the app. But Reality Defender, a company specializing in identifying deepfakes, says it was able to bypass Sora's anti-impersonation safeguards within 24 hours. Platforms such as Sora give a "plausible sense of security," says Reality Defender CEO Ben Colman, despite the fact that "anybody can use completely off-the-shelf tools" to pass authentication as someone else. Reality Defender's researchers used publicly available footage of notable individuals, including CEOs and entertainers, from earnings calls and media interviews.

'Every kind of creative discipline is in danger': Lincoln Lawyer author on the dangers of AI Michael Connelly says tech is moving so fast that he feared his new novel would seem'archaic' before it was published H e is one of the most prolific writers in publishing, averaging more than a novel a year. But even Michael Connelly, the author of the bestselling Lincoln Lawyer series, feared he might fall behind when writing about AI. Connelly's eighth novel in the series, to be released on Tuesday, centres on a lawsuit against an AI company whose chatbot told a 16-year-old boy that it was OK for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for being unfaithful. But as he was writing, he witnessed the technology altering the way the world worked so rapidly that he feared his plot might become out of date. "You don't have to lick your finger and hold it up to the wind to know that AI is a massive change that's coming to science, culture, medicine, everything," he said.

For years, Paul Kingsnorth was one of the most visible members of the green movement. Then he walked away from it. Now he wants us to walk away from everything else. For Kingsnorth, the Industrial Revolution marked the point of no return, the moment when we decided to play gods and turn our backs on the Earth. In 2014, Paul Kingsnorth was sunk in doubt. He was forty-one and had been on the green movement's front lines since the nineteen-nineties--working for Greenpeace and EarthAction, chaining himself to a bridge, getting tear-gassed outside a G-8 summit.

The FTC Is Disappearing Blog Posts About AI Published During Lina Khan's Tenure The Federal Trade Commission removed several blog posts in recent months about open source and potential risks to consumers from the rapid spread of commercial AI tools. Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, arrives to testify before Congress in 2024. In late July 2024, Lina Khan, then the chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, gave a speech at an event hosted by the San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator in which she positioned herself as an advocate for open source artificial intelligence. The event took place as California lawmakers were considering a landmark bill called SB 1047 that would have imposed new testing and safety requirements on AI companies. Critics of the legislation, which was later vetoed by California governor Gavin Newsom, argued it would hamper the development and release of open source AI models.

The charity said it wanted to safeguard'the privacy and dignity of real girls'. The charity said it wanted to safeguard'the privacy and dignity of real girls'. AI-generated'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies AI-generated images of extreme poverty, children and sexual violence survivors are flooding stock photo sites and increasingly being used by leading health NGOs, according to global health professionals who have voiced concern over a new era of "poverty porn". "All over the place, people are using it," said Noah Arnold, who works at Fairpicture, a Swiss-based organisation focused on promoting ethical imagery in global development. "Some are actively using AI imagery, and others, we know that they're experimenting at least."

AI has the potential to significantly improve how NGOs utilize their limited resources for societal benefits, but evidence about how NGOs adopt AI remains scattered. In this study, we systematically investigate the types of AI adoption use cases in NGOs and identify common challenges and solutions, contextualized by organizational size and geographic context. We review the existing primary literature, including studies that investigate AI adoption in NGOs related to social impact between 2020 and 2025 in English. Following the PRISMA protocol, two independent reviewers conduct study selection, with regular cross-checking to ensure methodological rigour, resulting in a final literature body of 65 studies. Leveraging a thematic and narrative approach, we identify six AI use case categories in NGOs - Engagement, Creativity, Decision-Making, Prediction, Management, and Optimization - and extract common challenges and solutions within the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. By integrating our findings, this review provides a novel understanding of AI adoption in NGOs, linking specific use cases and challenges to organizational and environmental factors. Our results demonstrate that while AI is promising, adoption among NGOs remains uneven and biased towards larger organizations. Nevertheless, following a roadmap grounded in literature can help NGOs overcome initial barriers to AI adoption, ultimately improving effectiveness, engagement, and social impact.

Scenario to be rewritten: { scenario } To rigorously evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) could still recognize the original source behind these rewritten scenarios, we designed three complementary prompt strategies, each probing different aspects of the models' recognition and reasoning capabilities. Zero-shot Direct Identification focuses on testing the model's raw ability to recall source material under minimal guidance (Brown et al., 2020; Mu et al., 2024). Paraphrased Queries introduce linguistic variation to reduce prompt-specific biases and measure the robustness of recognition (Liu et al., 2024a; Ngweta et al., 2025). Instruction-tuned T ask-framed Prompts leverage explicit role framing and step-by-step task descriptions to maximize retrieval pressure and analytical reasoning (Ouyang et al., 2022; Sivarajkumar et al., 2024). By combining these strategies, we construct a comprehensive recognition test that balances sensitivity and robustness, ensuring that a scenario is only deemed valid if no prompt family leads to a confident and correct identification of the original work. This integrated approach provides a stronger safeguard against hidden memorization and enables more reliable downstream behavioral analysis of the tested LLMs. V alidation Prompt We designed three prompt families for scenario source identification. Each family targets a different aspect of model behavior: Given the following scenario: 19 { scenario } 1. Zero-shot Identification Please determine whether this scenario originates from a known literary or cinematic work.

With the rapid proliferation of large language models and vision-language models, AI agents have evolved from isolated, task-specific systems into autonomous, interactive entities capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting without human intervention. As these agents proliferate across virtual and physical environments, from virtual assistants to embodied robots, the need for a unified, agent-centric infrastructure becomes paramount. In this survey, we introduce the Internet of Agents (IoA) as a foundational framework that enables seamless interconnection, dynamic discovery, and collaborative orchestration among heterogeneous agents at scale. We begin by presenting a general IoA architecture, highlighting its hierarchical organization, distinguishing features relative to the traditional Internet, and emerging applications. Next, we analyze the key operational enablers of IoA, including capability notification and discovery, adaptive communication protocols, dynamic task matching, consensus and conflict-resolution mechanisms, and incentive models. Finally, we identify open research directions toward building resilient and trustworthy IoA ecosystems.