The Royal Family hosted the first German state visit to the UK in 27 years - with a state banquet and ceremonial events in Windsor. The Prince and Princess of Wales met Frank-Walter Steinmeier on the tarmac at Heathrow, before King Charles hosted him in a glittering, Christmassy state banquet at Windsor Castle. In a speech delivered in both English and German, the King welcomed the President and his wife, as well as the 150 other guests which included Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. In response, President Steinmeier said the King's first visit abroad as monarch to Germany in 2023 was a special symbol of the German-English friendship. The BBC's Russia Editor shares his analysis after five hours of peace talks between the Russians and the US.

The state banquet is the spectacular showstopper of a state visit, a glittering feast with speeches, royal toasts, trumpet fanfares and fancy food and wine. It's diplomacy served up with fine dining. A cut-glass shock-and-awe approach to hospitality designed to make a visiting leader like President Trump feel special. The setting in St George's Hall inside Windsor Castle is a remarkable sight, a mix of medieval banquet and Harry Potter film. Elaborately uniformed staff around the hall are as drilled as the soldiers who have been on parade during the day.

Since the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, there have been hundreds of films, TV series and comic books featuring some iteration of the famous character. The latest adaptation sees Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Isaac take on the role of Victor Frankenstein, with Saltburn and Euphoria actor Jacob Elordi unrecognisable as the monster-like creature he gives life to. Isaac recalls: "Guillermo said, 'I'm creating this banquet for you, you just have to show up and eat'. And that was the truth, there was a fusion, I just hooked myself into Guillermo, and we flung ourselves down the well. "I can't believe I'm here right now," he adds, "that we got to this place from two years ago.

Music source separation is an audio-to-audio retrieval task of extracting one or more constituent components, or composites thereof, from a musical audio mixture. Each of these constituent components is often referred to as a "stem" in literature. Historically, music source separation has been dominated by a stem-based paradigm, leading to most state-of-the-art systems being either a collection of single-stem extraction models, or a tightly coupled system with a fixed, difficult-to-modify, set of supported stems. Combined with the limited data availability, advances in music source separation have thus been mostly limited to the "VDBO" set of stems: \textit{vocals}, \textit{drum}, \textit{bass}, and the catch-all \textit{others}. Recent work in music source separation has begun to challenge the fixed-stem paradigm, moving towards models able to extract any musical sound as long as this target type of sound could be specified to the model as an additional query input. We generalize this idea to a \textit{query-by-region} source separation system, specifying the target based on the query regardless of how many sound sources or which sound classes are contained within it. To do so, we propose the use of hyperellipsoidal regions as queries to allow for an intuitive yet easily parametrizable approach to specifying both the target (location) as well as its spread. Evaluation of the proposed system on the MoisesDB dataset demonstrated state-of-the-art performance of the proposed system both in terms of signal-to-noise ratios and retrieval metrics.

A video game development studio is about to launch an eagerly anticipated expansion to its popular role-playing game. This is hardly a typical premise you'd expect out of a TV show, yet it's precisely what you'll find in "Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet," a new streaming comedy series on Apple TV Plus. All nine half-hour episodes of the first season debuted Friday. Co-created by Rob McElhenney, Megan Ganz and Charlie Day (of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" fame), "Mythic Quest" might best be described as "The Office" meets gamer culture – both in the way it's shot (often with documentary-style camera pushes) and in the hilarious contrast between disparate personalities under pressure to deliver another hit. The formula works, mostly because of the cast's obvious chemistry, but also the smart writing, clever direction and faithful peek behind the scenes at a game studio today.

The Turing award, in existence since 1966, comes with a $250,000 prize funded by Google and Intel. Last year's award went to Leslie Valiant, a Harvard University computer scientist. One past winner, Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, says Pearl's accomplishments have "redefined the term'thinking machine'" over the past 30 years. Pearl's efforts have had "a pervasive influence not only on machine learning but on natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science and statistics," Cerf said in a statement. The UCLA computer science professor is widely credited with coining the term "Bayesian Network," which refers to a statistical model ACM describes as mimicking "the neural activities of the human brain, constantly exchanging messages without benefit of a supervisor."