Stefon Diggs guilty of NFL's dumbest move of Week 1 and it may have decided Commanders loss to Eagles John Harbaugh's Giants on full display in bruising win over Cowboys to kick off NFL season WWE star Stephanie Vaquer captures Women's World Championship at Chile live event in surprising moment Ben Shelton loses in US Open final to Zverev, but America has found its next big men's tennis star Jeremiyah Love makes immediate statement with touchdown on first career drive in Cardinals' upset win Josh Allen torches one of NFL's best defenses to make case it's time to move on from 2025 playoff loss Breanna Stewart's double-double, Caitlin Clark's emergence off bench help US to World Cup win over France Afghan woman deported in landmark'alien terrorist' court case AI policy expert dismisses Big Tech regulation calls: 'We should see through this' AI agents are'hacking out of the container' despite best efforts to prevent it, expert warns Prosecution in Lindsay Clancy trial may have'alienated' jurors, criminal defense attorney says You treat a nuclear power'significantly different' than a non-nuclear power: Gen. Keith Kellogg Accepting political violence as a form of expression is'dangerous,' Jonathan Turley warns'The Squad' faces backlash over claims'modern-day lynchings' are now common in America OutKick Caitlin Clark says she and Angel Reese have'always been friends' after winning FIBA Women's World Cup The two WNBA stars connected on key plays in the FIBA Women's World Cup final against France in Berlin Caitlin Clark is asked about her friendship with Angel Reese after winning FIBA Women's World Cup gold in Berlin, Germany. Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese sat next to each other when they were on the bench throughout the final round of the 2026 FIBA Women's World Cup. They were seen laughing together at times, and sharing emotion when their team was down. They connected on several big plays, and changed the momentum of the gold medal game against France right before halftime. The World Cup was the first time the two played together in high-stakes games, and they came out as world champions.

College football's chaos era is here: Texas rallies, Oregon falls and Lane Kiffin eyes return to Ole Miss Oklahoma State stuns Oregon, deals early season blow to Ducks' national title hopes Former ESPN host hypocritically calls network a'political lobbying firm' after Ted Cruz appearance Team USA survives Spain scare with fourth-quarter surge to reach FIBA Women's World Cup final It's only week two, but Kansas QB Isaiah Marshall might have completed the pass of the year WWE's Roxanne Perez earns No 1 contender spot for AAA Reina de Reinas Championship at Triplemania 34 Ted Cruz got booed so loudly during'College GameDay' interview you couldn't hear a thing he said Trespasser stopped by security at Kamala Harris' Malibu property Kyrsten Sinema: Trump has been'tremendous' on AI data centers Charles Payne: America voted for the'reindustrialization' of the nation Charles Payne: America voted for the'reindustrialization' of the nation Israeli ambassador to US: It's always been Israel, and always will be Israel Charles Payne praises'phenomenal' blue-collar boom under Trump Ret Col John Folsom outlines Dunham House's mission for combat-wounded veterans Ret Col John Folsom outlines Dunham House's mission for combat-wounded veterans OutKick America's women's basketball epic reaches its climax with national unity on the line in FIBA World Cup final The rivals-turned-teammates highlight the'young and turnt' crew as Americans defend a 35-game winning streak in Berlin Team USA women's basketball coach Kara Lawson spoke out on the importance of winning the FIBA Women's World Cup for the country on the weekend of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and the U.S. women's national basketball team will defend its dynasty in Berlin on Sunday in a World Cup championship against France. But this weekend, the pursuit of gold carries a distinctly heavier, and distinctly American, weight. Taking the court on the 25th anniversary weekend of the September 11 terrorist attacks, head coach Kara Lawson isn't just looking to protect a historic 35-game World Cup winning streak. And as far as unity, I think unity is not just exclusive to the women's basketball community, Lawson said.

EU and Nato vow to step up pressure on Russia after'new escalation' in Germany The heads of Nato and the European Commission have warned that Russia is growing increasingly reckless and vowed to respond to a new normal. Leipzig marks a new escalation on European Union soil directly attributed to Russia, said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a day after Germany blamed Russia for a failed drone attack last month on Leipzig airport. We have to step up and that means being ready to respond to Russia's recklessness faster and better, von der Leyen said. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte said the whole alliance, which includes the US, stood in full solidarity with Germany. Russia has rejected German accusations that a drone carrying explosives deliberately targeted a Ukrainian cargo plane on 4 August.

What to know about Germany's drone attack accusations against Russia Share What to know about Germany's drone attack accusations against Russia on social media Germany has formally accused Russia of attempting an attack last month at the Leipzig-Halle airport, a state-owned facility in the eastern part of the country. On Tuesday, German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said his country's intelligence community had determined that a drone discovered at the airport was consistent with Russian technology. The drone had been bearing explosives, according to official reports. The incident is seen as part of a growing trend in Europe, where officials fear Russia is mounting a campaign of intimidation against members of the NATO military alliance. What was found at the Leipzig airport?

The German government has accused Russia of being behind an attempted drone attack on a major regional airport last month. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said on Tuesday that the attempted attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany using a drone laden with explosives fits a known pattern of "Russian hybrid operations". "Taken together, police investigations, patterns of the offences and intelligence findings establish Russian responsibility for the attempted attack," he said, standing alongside Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul. The drone was found at the airport near a Ukrainian plane on the evening of August 4 and defused. The findings were announced as several European countries that are providing Ukraine with support as it defends itself against Russia's invasion have reported an increase in sabotage attacks and attempts that they blame on Russia.

This story appears in the August 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst believe the future doesn't have to belong to slop. The art was way too heavy. In mid-March, the artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst were preparing an installation to coincide with the Venice Biennale, the prestigious international art festival, but the execution was becoming tricky. They wanted to suspend sculptures of a trippy cityscape upside down from the ceiling of an 18th-century palazzo. But the construction material they envisioned-- 3-D-printed sand--would weigh tons, which was more than the antique building could bear. The sculptures, they realized, might fall and crush someone. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. This was a rather analog problem for a married couple widely seen as technological prophets. Herndon, 46, and Dryhurst, 41, have reached the upper echelons of the art world thanks to a media-spanning output--music, images, software, and reams of commentary--with a cybernetic bent. They are high culture's most influential exponents of artificial intelligence, an invention that many people believe spells doom for the arts but that they think could lead to a renaissance. I met them on a cold, bright Tuesday in Berlin.

A former member of the German militant group Red Army Faction (RAF) has been jailed for 13 years for carrying out a string of armed robberies between 1999 and 2016. Daniela Klette, 67, was finally caught in a flat in Berlin in 2024 after more than 30 years on the run. She went on trial last year. Her defence had called for her acquittal but the court in Verden in Lower Saxony found her guilty on Wednesday of aggravated robbery, violating weapons laws and other offences over a 17-year period. Klette's RAF group, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, was eventually disbanded after a campaign of murder, kidnapping and bombing from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.

An ethical hacker who just won major prizes at a prestigious international competition says her days of competing could be numbered due to the rise of AI tools like Claude Mythos. Valentina Palmiotti - better known as Chompie - was the most successful individual at the annual Pwn2Own hacking competition in Berlin. She told BBC News that, for now, AI tools were helping her to win bug bounties - money given to hackers who spot vulnerabilities in online systems before they can be exploited by cyber-criminals. But she said systems like Mythos were so powerful that even champion hackers like her would soon struggle to compete with them. AI has shaken the cyber-security world, with concerns focussing on Mythos in particular.

Having defined and validated the pairwise feedback simulator and evaluations in AlpacaFarm, we569 now turn our attention to studying methods that learn from pairwise feedback on AlpacaFarm.570 Unfortunately, the lack of existing benchmarks for learning from pairwise feedback for instruction571 following means that there has not been any open study of these methods in the instruction-following572 setting. In the remainder of this section, we will introduce our reference methods, which fall into two575 categories based on whether they fit a surrogate reward model as part of the learning process.576 FeedME is a method proposed by OpenAI [45] that incorporates human feedback578 with supervised fine-tuning on model generations that are rated 7/7 by human labelers. We adapt579 this approach to the pairwise feedback setting and call this baseline binary FeedME. This approach580 fine-tunes the SFT model on the chosen response in each preference pair with supervised learning.581 Motivated by controllable generation through conditioning [27, 34,582 29, 21], we propose binary reward conditioning, a baseline method that fine-tunes the SFT model583 with the feedback data Dpairwise by conditioning instances with either a positive or negative control584 token. Specifically, for each instance (x,y0,y1,z) 2D pairwise, the string concatenation of instruction585 x and response yz denoted as [x,yz] is prepended with the positive token and used in supervised586 fine-tuning (similarly [x,y1 z]is prepended with the negative token). This process creates a modified587 demonstration dataset that is double the size of Dpairwise. At test time, we draw samples from the588 fine-tuned model conditioned on the positive token.589 A.2 Methods that optimize a surrogate reward function590 We now describe methods that incorporate feedback by first building a surrogate reward model with591 pairwise feedback data. To start, we describe the step of training the surrogate reward model.592 While this can be a powerful approach,596 we will see that it can also lead to over-optimization [19] where models learn to exploit the reward597 model rather than achieve high true reward. We now describe 4 methods that leverage the surrogate598 reward model.599

The objective is to maximize cumulative reward byexploring the actions to discover optimal ones (having the best expectedreward),balancedwithexploitingthem.