That's the unofficial moniker of almost 100 women aged 19 to 64 who are volunteers in part-time military service in air defence units in the suburban community northwest of Kyiv. Each "Bucha witch" trains to handle assault rifles and machineguns to shoot down Russian drones that swarm above their homes several times a month. The weapons fly towards Kyiv to blow up buildings, prompting Ukrainian air defence forces to launch pricey Western-supplied missiles at them. The buzzing swarms repeat the route of Russian ground forces in early 2022 when they occupied most of the Bucha district for 33 days and committed atrocities, now well documented, that captured the world's attention. According to Ukrainian officials and international war crimes monitors, Russian fighters killed hundreds of civilians and robbed, raped and tortured thousands more.

The Chinese military recently unveiled a new kind of battle buddy for its soldiers: a "robot dog" with a machine gun strapped to its back. In video distributed by the state-run news agency CCTV, People's Liberation Army personnel are shown operating on a testing range alongside a four-legged robot with what appears to be a variant of the standard-issue 5.8 x 42-mm QBZ-95 assault rifle mounted on it as part of China's recent Golden Dragon 24 joint military exercises with Cambodia in the Gulf of Thailand. In one scenario, Chinese soldiers stand on either side of a doorway while the robot dog enters the building ahead of them; in another, the robot fires off a burst of bullets as it advances on a target. "It can serve as a new member in our urban combat operations, replacing our members to conduct reconnaissance and identify enemy [sic] and strike the target during our training," one Chinese soldier shown operating the robot told CCTV. This isn't the first time the Chinese military-industrial complex has shown off an armed robot dog. In October 2022, Chinese defense company Kestrel Defense published a video showing an unmanned aerial vehicle air-dropping a quadrupedal ground vehicle affixed with a 5.8 x 42-mm QBB-97 light machine gun on a roof during an urban warfare experiment.

The man often touted as the godfather of artificial intelligence will be responding to requests for help from Bernie Sanders, Elon Musk and the White House, he says, just days after quitting Google to warn the world about the risk of digital intelligence. Dr Geoffrey Hinton, 75, won computer science's highest honour, the Turing award, in 2018 for his work on "deep learning", along with Meta's Yann Lecun and the University of Montreal's Yoshua Bengio. The technology, which now underpins the AI revolution, came about as a result of Hinton's efforts to understand the human brain – efforts which convinced him that digital brains might be about to supersede biological ones. But the London-born psychologist and computer scientist might not offer the advice the powerful want to hear. "The US government inevitably has a lot of concerns around national security. And I tend to disagree with them," he told the Guardian.

Joe Levy is working hard to help avoid another mass school shooting tragedy. He says his technology, designed to spot a gun using existing CCTV cameras, could make a critical difference in future life-or-death situations. Seventeen people died in 2018 when a 19-year-old student opened fire at Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, USA. Fifteen died in the Columbine High School massacre, near Denver, Colorado, in 1999 when a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old shot fellow students. And 22 people died in May of this year when an 18-year-old rampaged through the Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas – one of the worst school shootings in US history.

Kevin Larson crouched behind a boulder and watched the forest through his breath, waiting for the police he knew would come. It was Jan. 19, 2020. He was clinging to an assault rifle with 30 rounds and a conviction that, after all he had been through, there was no way he was going to prison. Larson was a drone pilot -- one of the best. He flew the heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper, and in 650 combat missions between 2013 and 2018, he had launched at least 188 airstrikes, earned 20 medals for achievement and killed a top man on the U.S.' most-wanted terrorist list. The 32-year-old pilot kept a handwritten thank-you note on his refrigerator from the director of the CIA.

Military security firm Ghost Robotics has built a mechanical dog capable of carrying a remote-controlled rifle on its back. The Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR) is comprised of a 6.5mm Creedmore rifle from weapons company SWORD International combined with the quadruped unmanned ground vehicle from the robotics firm. First seen at the US Army's annual convention in Washington DC, as reported by The Drive, this is apparently one of the first systems like these with an actual weapon attached. It is unclear how much ammunition the gun contains, and how difficult it might be to reload. Ghost Robotics says that the robot dog can be commanded to chamber the first round from an unloaded state, clear the chamber, and'safeing' the gun (when the weapon is not cocked and no ammunition is present). It can fire bullets up to a 1200-metre distance.

It was not a surprise to see Donald Trump and a cabal of other Republican politicians seeking to implicate video games in the US's latest mass shootings. The idea that young men can be driven to kill by Doom, Call of Duty or Fortnite is a seductive one: it's simple, it ties in with fears that older voters harbour about digital culture and screen time, and it conveniently draws attention away from more complex societal concerns such as poverty, neglect, easy access to deadly firearms and a violently confrontational political culture. There's just one problem: despite years of research and hundreds of studies, there is no compelling evidence that video game violence causes real-life bloodshed. Every time these claims are made, the industry seems unwilling to analyse or engage with the reasons why games are so often implicated in violent acts. The standard response is blanket outrage and denial – games don't cause real-world violence, they're "apolitical" fun, so we don't have to think about the issue, we don't have to consider how the shooters portray or utilise military violence.

In e-commerce, product content, especially product images have a significant influence on a customer's journey from product discovery to evaluation and finally, purchase decision. Since many e-commerce retailers sell items from other third-party marketplace sellers besides their own, the content published by both internal and external content creators needs to be monitored and enriched, wherever possible. Despite guidelines and warnings, product listings that contain offensive and non-compliant images continue to enter catalogs. Offensive and non-compliant content can include a wide range of objects, logos, and banners conveying violent, sexually explicit, racist, or promotional messages. Such images can severely damage the customer experience, lead to legal issues, and erode the company brand. In this paper, we present a machine learning driven offensive and non-compliant image detection system for extremely large e-commerce catalogs. This system proactively detects and removes such content before they are published to the customer-facing website. This paper delves into the unique challenges of applying machine learning to real-world data from retail domain with hundreds of millions of product images. We demonstrate how we resolve the issue of non-compliant content that appears across tens of thousands of product categories. We also describe how we deal with the sheer variety in which each single non-compliant scenario appears. This paper showcases a number of practical yet unique approaches such as representative training data creation that are critical to solve an extremely rarely occurring problem. In summary, our system combines state-of-the-art image classification and object detection techniques, and fine tunes them with internal data to develop a solution customized for a massive, diverse, and constantly evolving product catalog.

Russia's most famous weapons manufacturer has unveiled a 13ft tall walking killer robot operated by pilots who sit inside it. Kalashnikov Concern presented the state-of-the-art bulletproof robot along with utility vehicles and new assault rifles at the Army 2018 fair at the Patriot Park just outside Moscow. The gold robot, called Igorek, is still in development and its creators do not wish to reveal all of its features until they have finished. So far, all that is known about the'controlled bipedal walker' is that it weighs 4.5 tonnes and can reportedly hold and move objects - including weapons - with its claws. Russia's most famous weapons manufacturer has unveiled a 13ft tall walking robot operated by pilots who sit inside it A cabin behind the robot's glass panels allows people to sit and operate the robot from inside.

PUBG's weapons have received a complete overhaul in a new update aimed at making the game more fair. In what they describe as a "big patch", the makers of the game have changed just about everything about the game, in some way – with much of the focus on how guns work. Developers worried that some guns – particularly assault rifles – were objectively better than any others in the game, and had noticed that players seemed to be preferring them over all others. To counteract that, all of the game's guns have recieved an overhaul in the way they work. Assault rifles have become less powerful, and just about every other kind of weapon has become more useful.