UN warns of potential'ethnically driven' atrocities in Sudan's el-Fasher At least 91 people have been killed in Sudan's besieged city of el-Fasher in attacks by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) over 10 days last month, the United Nations says. The attacks took place during intensified fighting between the RSF and Sudan's army around the city, the largest urban centre in the Darfur region that remains under the control of the military and its allies, known as the Joint Forces. UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday that the city's Daraja Oula neighbourhood was repeatedly attacked and subjected to RSF artillery shelling, drone strikes and ground incursions from September 19 to 29. He called for urgent action to prevent "large-scale, ethnically driven attacks and atrocities in el-Fasher." He said "atrocities are not inevitable", adding that "they can be averted if all actors take concrete action to uphold international law, demand respect for civilian life and property, and prevent the continued commission of atrocity crimes".

Although it is, at least according to the Library of Congress, the most-watched movie of all time, The Wizard of Oz was a costly failure at the box office, and only became a perennial favorite thanks to the regular TV airings that began in the 1950s. But in the decades since it's become a metonym for the wonder of the big screen, a movie even people who prefer their content streaming will make the effort to see in a movie theater. Beginning on Labor Day weekend, audiences will get to experience the movie on perhaps the largest screen ever created. But it won't be The Wizard of Oz as we've come to know it for the better part of a century. The version of the movie that will fill Las Vegas' Sphere starting Aug. 28 has been retooled to fit the venue's curved shell, its images enhanced and expanded to fill four football fields' worth of 16K LED screens--the foundation of an immersive presentation that also includes flames, gusts of wind, and inflatable flying monkeys piloted by drone. It is, to quote the title of a CBS news report, "The Wizard of Oz as you've never seen it before."

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) can influence how historical narratives are disseminated and perceived. This study explores the implications of LLMs' responses on the representation of mass atrocity memory, examining whether generative AI systems contribute to prosthetic memory, i.e., mediated experiences of historical events, or to what we term "prosthetic denial," the AI-mediated erasure or distortion of atrocity memories. We argue that LLMs function as interfaces that can elicit prosthetic memories and, therefore, act as experiential sites for memory transmission, but also introduce risks of denialism, particularly when their outputs align with contested or revisionist narratives. To empirically assess these risks, we conducted a comparative audit of five LLMs (Claude, GPT, Llama, Mixtral, and Gemini) across four historical case studies: the Holodomor, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide, and the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. Each model was prompted with questions addressing common denialist claims in English and an alternative language relevant to each case (Ukrainian, German, Khmer, and French). Our findings reveal that while LLMs generally produce accurate responses for widely documented events like the Holocaust, significant inconsistencies and susceptibility to denialist framings are observed for more underrepresented cases like the Cambodian Genocide. The disparities highlight the influence of training data availability and the probabilistic nature of LLM responses on memory integrity. We conclude that while LLMs extend the concept of prosthetic memory, their unmoderated use risks reinforcing historical denialism, raising ethical concerns for (digital) memory preservation, and potentially challenging the advantageous role of technology associated with the original values of prosthetic memory.

Catastrophe brings a search for accountability. As fires wreak havoc in California, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., claimed in a post on X the catastrophe is "what a climate emergency looks like." He took aim at President-elect Trump, asserting the incoming president has been bought off by the oil industry. "Trump has been bought for 1 billion by Big Oil. Just a payoff to kill the IRA and the Green New Deal. We know what will happen. The LA fires are preview of coming atrocities," Markey declared in a post on X. Markey, who claims there is a "climate crisis," has also warned about the potential effects of artificial intelligence (AI).

By many counts, the trade deal President Trump signed on Jan. 15 with China lacks heft. It doesn't remove all the tariffs, it doesn't impose any major penalties on intellectual property theft, and it punts completely on issues including China's state subsidies to prop up its own companies in international markets. Yet on one matter, the agreement could dramatically alter the U.S.-China relationship and the future of global democracy. If he means it, the United States will make an enormous strategic error: treating this minor trade deal as reason for a closer relationship with Beijing and turning a blind eye to its unfolding atrocities. This new ceasefire on trade should mark the beginning -- not the end -- of assertive, values-based engagement with China. Rather than seeking renewed harmony, Trump should put aside tariff squabbles and focus on the most important item on the U.S.-China agenda: the Chinese Communist Party's subversion of democracy and human rights worldwide, using both homegrown and Western technology to do it.

Advancements in artificial intelligence may result in "atrocities" because the technology will behave in unexpected ways, a former Google software engineer has warned. Computer scientist Laura Nolan left Google in June last year after raising concerns about its work with the U.S. Department of Defense on Project Maven, a drone program that was using AI algorithms to speed up analysis of vast amounts of captured surveillance footage. Speaking to The Guardian, the software engineer said the use of autonomous or AI-enhanced weapons systems that lack a human touch may have severe, even fatal, consequences. She said: "What you are looking at are possible atrocities and unlawful killings even under laws of warfare, especially if hundreds or thousands of these machines are deployed. There could be large-scale accidents because these things will start to behave in unexpected ways.