Explosions have been heard near the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, a day after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) said it would agree to a humanitarian ceasefire. Residents in Khartoum, which is controlled by the army, told the AFP news agency that they were woken overnight by the sound of drones and explosions. The blasts appeared to take place near a military base and a power station in the early hours of Friday morning, the residents said. The RSF has not addressed these accounts, but Sudan's military-led government said it would be wary of agreeing to a truce as the group did not respect ceasefires. The two sides have been embroiled in a civil war that has killed at least 150,000 people and forced 12 million others from their homes since it erupted in April 2023.

How tariffs are unraveling India's textile industry Is Chicago the violent crime capital of the US? Trump's UK visit: What's on the agenda, schedule, what to expect Great Britain is set to roll out the red carpet for Donald Trump this week, honouring the president of the United States with something no other American leader has ever received: a second state visit. Trump is set to arrive in London late on Tuesday for a visit that coincides with tough trade negotiations between the US and many of its key trading partners, including the United Kingdom. During his stay, both countries plan to announce several deals on technology and civil nuclear energy, and British leaders hope to finalise an agreement on metal tariffs. The British government is confident that royal soft power will appeal to Trump's sense of flamboyance. Before setting off on Tuesday, Trump said he was looking forward to meeting with his friend, King Charles III, whom he described as an "elegant gentleman". The president said being welcomed for a second state visit was a first, and noted how it was planned for Windsor Castle, rather than Buckingham Palace.

A handful of wealthy, politically connected Silicon Valley investors are reportedly eyeing Greenland's icy shores as the site for a techno-utopian "freedom city." That's according to a report from Reuters, which details a proposed effort to establish a new, libertarian-minded municipality characterized by minimal corporate regulation and a focus on accelerating emerging technologies like AI and mini nuclear reactors. Supporters of increased economic development in Greenland argue its frigid climate could naturally cool massive, energy intensive AI data centers. Large deposits of critical and rare earth minerals buried beneath the island's ice sheets could also potentially be used to manufacture consumer electronics. The so-called "start-up city"--which bears similarities to another ongoing venture in California's Solano County--reportedly already has the backing of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, President Donald Trump's pick for Denmark ambassador.

Moldova has handed a note of protest to the Russian ambassador to Chisinau over alleged interference in its recent elections. The foreign ministry in Chisinau said in a statement on Tuesday that it turned over the "note of firm protest" in relation to the "illegal and deliberate interference" to envoy Oleg Ozerov during a meeting at its offices. Moldova has accused Russia of seeking to influence its recent presidential election and referendum on joining the European Union. Russia sought to affect results and delegitimise the democratic process, the ministry complained. Chisinau accused Russia of organising ineligible voting, bribery, and security threats in a bid to influence the votes.

The world's first beauty pageant for AI women has finally revealed its shortlist of computer-generated ladies. Out of the 1,500 entrants into the Fanvue World AI Creator Awards, the 10 artificial finalist will battle it out to become the first ever Miss AI. And, with contestants ranging from the red-headed travel influencer Olivia C to Turkish model and astronaut Asena Ilik, competition is sure to be fierce. But, just like any other pageant, it will take more than good looks to win the prize and finalists will also be judged on their technology and social media clout. Fanvue co-founder Will Monange says: 'The awards have shown how engaged creators in the AI space are, and the standard of the shortlist is nothing short of incredible.'

NORAD confirmed it detected four Russian military aircraft in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone on Thursday, but the aircraft didn't enter U.S. airspace. Russia said Monday it plans to hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons amid rising tensions following comments by senior Western officials about the possibility of deeper involvement in the war in Ukraine. The announcement came on the eve of Russian President Vladimir Putin's inauguration to a fifth term in office and in a week when Moscow on Thursday will celebrate Victory Day, its most important secular holiday, marking its defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. The drills are a response to "provocative statements and threats of certain Western officials regarding the Russian Federation," the Defense Ministry said in a statement. PUTIN WARNS THE WEST THAT RUSSIA IS'READY' FOR NUCLEAR WAR: 'WEAPONS EXIST IN ORDER TO USE THEM' It was the first time Russia has publicly announced drills involving tactical nuclear weapons, although its strategic nuclear forces regularly hold exercises.

The United Nations' cultural and scientific agency UNESCO has announced that the United States plans to rejoin – and pay more than $600m in back dues – after a decade-long dispute sparked by the organisation's move to include Palestine as a member. UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay informed ambassadors of the member states of the US decision in a special meeting on Monday. US officials say the decision to return was motivated by concerns that China is filling the gap left by the US in UNESCO policymaking, notably in setting standards for artificial intelligence and technology education around the world. US Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Richard Verma submitted a letter last week to Azoulay formalising the plan. The proposed plan to rejoin in 2023 would be submitted to the General Conference of UNESCO Member States for final approval.

In 2018, Smith called for policies that would require the government to obtain a warrant to use facial recognition, as competitors such as Amazon aggressively pursued government facial recognition contracts. In 2019, he criticized Facebook for the impact of foreign influence on its platform during the 2016 elections -- an issue Microsoft's business-oriented social network, LinkedIn, largely didn't confront. He has said that Section 230, a key law that social media companies use as a shield from lawsuits, had outlived its utility.

Washington's claim that a Russian fighter jet collided with a US surveillance drone near Crimea causing it to crash is both a rare military incident between the two superpowers and a serious escalation in already tense relations since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine last year. US and Russian officials have given conflicting accounts of what occurred on Tuesday over the Black Sea between the MQ-9 Reaper drone, valued at more than $30m and packed with sensitive US spying technology, and two Russian Su-27 fighter jets that were deployed to intercept the US aircraft. The Pentagon said two Russian Su-27 aircraft intercepted the drone and proceeded to dump fuel on the MQ-9 Reaper model as it conducted routine surveillance over the Black Sea in international airspace. US officials said the Russian jets flew around and in front of the drone several times for 30 to 40 minutes, and then one of the Su-27 fighters "struck the propeller" of the drone, "causing US forces to have to bring the MQ-9 down in international waters". A Pentagon spokesman said the collision likely damaged the Russian fighter jet, though the Su-27 did land.

Data-to-text (D2T) and text-to-data (T2D) are dual tasks that convert structured data, such as graphs or tables into fluent text, and vice versa. These tasks are usually handled separately and use corpora extracted from a single source. Current systems leverage pre-trained language models fine-tuned on D2T or T2D tasks. This approach has two main limitations: first, a separate system has to be tuned for each task and source; second, learning is limited by the scarcity of available corpora. This paper considers a more general scenario where data are available from multiple heterogeneous sources. Each source, with its specific data format and semantic domain, provides a non-parallel corpus of text and structured data. We introduce a variational auto-encoder model with disentangled style and content variables that allows us to represent the diversity that stems from multiple sources of text and data. Our model is designed to handle the tasks of D2T and T2D jointly. We evaluate our model on several datasets, and show that by learning from multiple sources, our model closes the performance gap with its supervised single-source counterpart and outperforms it in some cases.