A ninth-grade student opened fire at a high school in Zamboanga, Philippines, killing a fellow student and himself and wounding two others after apparently livestreaming the attack. Chinese company unveils new'Superman' humanoid robot Can Trump limit birthright citizenship?

Drone video shows cattle in parched landscape across drought-hit farmland as Britain endures one of its driest summers on record. More than two-thirds of England is now in drought, according to officials. Chinese company unveils new'Superman' humanoid robot Can Trump limit birthright citizenship?

AI to help planes avoid climate-warming'sky graffiti' We've all looked up and seen the white lines trailing behind aircraft in the sky. Known as contrails, these icy clouds contribute to climate change, and scientists have been trying to work out how to stop them. Now, a £5m UK trial will test whether AI can help, by predicting where warming contrails are likely to form and getting planes to avoid those areas. The 30-month Operation Blue Skies project brings together Google, the UK government, the Met Office, air traffic control provider National Air Traffic Services (NATS) and academic researchers. It will focus on the Shanwick Oceanic airspace in the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor which accounts for approximately 5% of global contrail warming.

There are many tech irritants that are a scourge of modern life, yet we have lacked the vocabulary to describe them ... until now T he "dickover" is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as "a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user". Essentially, it is the thing (or more often, things) you have to click away in order to read the thing you wanted to read. It is the "accept cookies" box, the "allow notifications?" box, the "sign in with Google" box, the pop-up video box, etc. We shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that dickovers are the only terrible thing about technology in 2026.

Z.ai's latest AI model release could help companies secure their systems--or find its way into the hands of hackers. Last Friday, the Chinese AI company Z.ai announced a powerful open-weight model that it says is capable of automating cutting-edge coding and cybersecurity tasks almost as well as the best publicly available models from Anthropic and OpenAI . The new model, GLM 5.3, could be a gift for companies looking to secure their systems against attacks, providing a cheaper way to scan for hidden bugs and other weaknesses. Open-weight--or free-to-download--models can be run on one's own hardware and are often significantly less costly than closed models like Claude and GPT. Alongside the new model, Z.ai released OpenVuln, a service for scanning code repositories for vulnerabilities using GLM 5.3.

"You're a fake reporter," Donald Trump told a CNN reporter who asked whether North Korea's president had requested the US president scale back military drills with South Korea. Chinese company unveils new'Superman' humanoid robot Can Trump limit birthright citizenship?

Chinese company unveils new'Superman' humanoid robot Chinese company unveils new'Superman' humanoid robot Chinese start-up Unitree has unveiled its new humanoid robot called'Superman', which it says can jump up to 2 metres and run 100m faster than any human has. Can Trump limit birthright citizenship? Trump says talking to North Korea's Kim makes the south safer

'This is an apartheid regime' Does Trump have real leverage over Netanyahu? Video released by the Palestinian Red Crescent shows Israeli settler children attacking and blocking an ambulance transporting a patient in Hebron's Tel Rumeida neighbourhood in the occupied West Bank. Chinese company unveils new'Superman' humanoid robot Can Trump limit birthright citizenship? Trump says talking to North Korea's Kim makes the south safer

The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) is currently taking place in Bremen, Germany. The first couple of days saw the attendees enjoy some of the many tutorials and workshops on offer. The official opening ceremony took place yesterday morning (Monday 17 August). Find out what the participants have been getting up to so far. Toby Walsh, UNSW, IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Ethics Co-Chair, will deliver his AI Lecture, on Mon, Aug 17. Open to the general public, it offers a preview of themes explored in his forthcoming book, God AI: Boom or Doom?

Is the war entering a new phase? Russian officials have reported more than 620 overnight drones targeting Moscow, in what appears to be one of Ukraine's largest attacks on the Russian capital in years. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Russian defences shot down 180 drones over the capital region between Monday evening and 5am (02:00 GMT) on Tuesday. He said 17 more drones were shot down en route to the capital later. The drone attack wounded three people, including a 10-year-old girl, Moscow region's Governor Andrey Vorobyov said on Telegram.