A drone attack on a busy market in western Sudan has killed 11 people and wounded dozens more, including children, as the United Nations warns that the country's rapidly escalating air wars have claimed more than 200 civilian lives in little over a week. The attack on Adikong market, near Sudan's border with Chad, ignited fuel reserves and sent flames tearing through the area on Thursday. MSF described it as the second deadly drone attack on the same area in less than a month. Drones have become a key weapon used by both sides in the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that began in April 2023. UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said on Thursday he was appalled by the scale of intensifying aerial assaults on civilians in the war, warning that more than 200 people had been killed by drones across the Kordofan region and White Nile state since March 4 alone.

Trump says Putin may be helping Iran'a bit' US President Donald Trump has said he believes that Vladimir Putin and Russia are helping Iran a bit amid the conflict with the US and Israel. In an interview with Fox News, Trump acknowledged that the US also helps Ukrainian forces as they battle with Russian forces. According to some US media reports, Russia has been sharing the location of US military forces with Iran that could help guide missile and drone attacks across the Middle East. On Thursday, US Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff said that Russia's government had assured the Trump administration that it was not providing intelligence to the Iranian government in Tehran. Asked by Fox about the potential of Russian intelligence being shared with Iran, Trump said that I think he [Putin] may be helping them a bit, yeah.

How the US left Ukraine exposed to Russia's winter war Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? The United States, which stopped providing military and financial assistance to Ukraine under President Donald Trump, has asked for Kyiv's assistance in protecting its bases from Iranian retaliatory strikes in the Gulf. Ukraine's head of the Center for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, made the request public on March 6. On March 9, Zelenskyy also dispatched chief negotiator Rustem Umerov to sell Ukrainian interceptor drones to Gulf states.

US's new scramble for Africa is biomedical imperialism Late in February, Zimbabwe pulled out of a proposed $367m United States health funding agreement after objecting to provisions requiring broad American access to sensitive health data. The five-year programme was presented as support for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and epidemic preparedness efforts. However, the terms demanded extensive sharing of national health intelligence, including epidemiological surveillance data and pathogen samples, while offering no binding guarantees that Zimbabwe would receive equitable access to medical technologies developed from them. Harare called the proposal an "unequal exchange", warning that Zimbabwe risked supplying the "raw materials for scientific discovery" while the resulting benefits could remain concentrated in the United States and global pharmaceutical firms. Critics increasingly describe this pattern as biomedical extractivism: a toxic combination of exploitative research practices and colonial thinking that reinforces Western dominance.

Games which feature loot boxes will soon be given an age rating of 16 across Europe, including in the UK, under a host of changes by the European video game ratings organisation. The Pan-European Game Information body (PEGI)'s age ratings are displayed on games sold in the UK and other countries in Europe to indicate their suitability for children of different ages. Loot boxes are an in-game feature allowing players to buy random mystery items with real or virtual currency, but recent research has found they blur the line between gaming and gambling. The new ratings, taking effect from June, could see games containing loot box systems, such as EA Sports FC, receive a much higher age rating. The PEGI system is used in 38 countries to help consumers and particularly parents make informed decisions about the games they purchase.

Plastic pollution is one of those problems everyone can see, yet few know how to tackle it effectively. I grew up walking the beaches around Tramore in County Waterford, Ireland, where plastic debris has always been part of the coastline, including bottles, fragments of fishing gear and food packaging. According to the UN, every year 19-23 million tonnes of plastic lands up in lakes, rivers and seas, and it has a huge impact on ecosystems, creating pollution and damaging animal habitats. Community groups do tremendous work cleaning these beaches, but they're essentially walking blind, guessing where plastic accumulates, missing hot spots, repeating the same stretches while problem areas may go untouched. Years later, working in marine robotics at the University of Limerick, I began developing tools to support marine clean-up and help communities find plastic pollution along our coastline.

Though the US military's big data initiative Maven has sped up the planning of strikes for years, the comments suggest that generative AI is now adding a new interpretative layer to such deliberations. The US military might use generative AI systems to rank lists of targets and make recommendations--which would be vetted by humans--about which to strike first, according to a Defense Department official with knowledge of the matter. The disclosure about how the military may use AI chatbots comes as the Pentagon faces scrutiny over a strike on an Iranian school, which it is still investigating. A list of possible targets might be fed into a generative AI system that the Pentagon is fielding for classified settings. Then, said the official, who requested to speak on background with to discuss sensitive topics, humans might ask the system to analyze the information and prioritize the targets while accounting for factors like where aircraft are currently located. Humans would then be responsible for checking and evaluating the results and recommendations.

Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? The Stream Can AI in military operations really be ethical? We examine concerns about AI's role in military operations and the broader ethical challenges facing tech companies. Amid growing backlash against ChatGPT and OpenAI, including social media campaigns calling for a boycott, we examine whether so-called "ethical alternatives" truly live up to their claims. We also explore emerging initiatives seeking to challenge Big Tech's dominance and develop more accountable AI systems.

British forces based in Iraq shot down two Iranian drones overnight, Defence Secretary John Healey has said. But some drones in the attack hit the coalition base in the Iraqi city of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region, and injured a number of US troops. There were no British casualties. Brigadier Guy Foden said the base and another in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad were struck a number of times on Wednesday night and British personnel are currently in Erbil helping to defend that base. Since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, US bases in Iraq have been targeted in retaliation.

Writing tool Grammarly has disabled an AI feature which mimicked personas of prominent writers, including Stephen King and scientist Carl Sagan, following a backlash from people impersonated. The Expert Review function, which offered writing feedback inspired by the styles of famous authors and academics, was taken down this week by Superhuman, the tech firm which runs Grammarly. The feature was met with resistance, including a multi-million dollar lawsuit, from writers who found their names and reputations used as AI personas without their consent. Shishir Mehrotra, the firm's chief executive, apologised on LinkedIn, acknowledging the tool had misrepresented the voices of experts. Investigative journalist Julia Angwin, a New York Times contributing opinion writer, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Superhuman and Grammarly in the Southern District of New York.