The next Call of Duty game has been revealed, with much of the reaction focused on its campaign set around a fictional renewed conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Modern Warfare 4, due out 23 October, partly follows South Korean soldiers battling a full-scale North Korean invasion. Dr Sarah Son, Senior Lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield, said the move could be controversial as it turns still-unresolved war into entertainment. Some Koreans reacted more positively, with one calling Korea's inclusion in one of gaming's biggest franchises a symbolic moment . Developer Infinity Ward said the game will be grounded in the military authenticity Modern Warfare is known for.

Belgium and France have summoned Russia's ambassadors to express anger after Moscow urged foreigners to leave Kyiv in advance of planned "systematic strikes". Brussels and Paris said on Wednesday that Russia's announcement earlier in the week was "unacceptable" and a violation of international law. The spat is unlikely to help smooth the way for the EU to mediate talks to bring the conflict to an end, an arrangement that Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday he is ready to accept. Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the European Union summoned Russian envoys on Tuesday following Moscow's warning that foreigners and diplomats should leave the Ukrainian capital before the onset of renewed air strikes . "Threatening embassies is not diplomacy, it is intimidation. And it is a flagrant violation of international law and the Vienna Convention," Belgium Foreign Minister Maxim Prevot said on Wednesday.

What Pope Leo XIV's First Encyclical Says About the Power of AI In, the Pope decries the concentration of technological power in a few global players. Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah shakes hands with Pope Leo XIV ahead of the presentation of the first encyclical. An algorithm decides what we see, another filters what we read, and still others enter into the processes that govern work, information, and collective choices. But the text is not conceived as an exclusively technological reflection. Pope Leo XIV places the issue of AI within the tradition of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and directly invokes--while updating it--the of Pope Leo XIII (published on May 15, 1891) in the year of its 135th anniversary.

Pope Leo says AI must be'disarmed' in first major teaching Pope Leo has presented the first major teaching document of his papacy, warning that artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, the Pope said. Encyclicals are technically letters to Catholic bishops, but over recent decades the missives have become messages to the world from a Pope. While this letter was largely focused on AI, Pope Leo also included one of the strongest, most comprehensive apologies from the Vatican for the Catholic Church's role in slavery. It was impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many, the Pope wrote, adding that he sincerely asked for pardon in the name of the Church.

How Saudi Arabia's spending spree reached the end of the line Autocratic monarchs once left an echo of their glory in the ruins of the megaprojects they commanded at the peak of their unchallenged power. Those monumental physical traces are to be found in the fertile plains, mountainsides and deserts of the Middle East. But one of their most prominent modern counterparts may only have a digital footprint to leave behind for some of his most ambitious concepts. A decade ago, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman - or MBS as he is widely known - decreed a revisioning of his country that leapt from the realm of science fiction. It was called Vision 2030. Extraordinary monolithic structures were to help bring forth new technological marvels not just for the Kingdom but for the world.

'Hear them before I see them': How drones strike fear in Colombia Increasingly, armed groups in Colombia are turning to cheap, widely available drones to fight from a distance. What is the toll on civilians? Military surveillance drones fly in formation past an air traffic control tower in Colombia [Courtesy of Colombia's Batallon de Aeronaves No Tripuladas] Military surveillance drones fly in formation past an air traffic control tower in Colombia [Courtesy of Colombia's Batallon de Aeronaves No Tripuladas] She instinctively reaches for her young son. The noise always emerges from a small mountain behind her home, part of a tree-quilted landscape stitched with winding rivers along Colombia's border with Venezuela. I always hear them before I see them, if I see them at all, she says.

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 19 people in southern Lebanon, the country's health ministry has said. Ten of them, including three children and three women, were killed in a single attack that hit a house in the town of Deir Qanoun, the ministry said. Lebanon was drawn into the war on 2 March, when the Iran-backed armed Shia Islamist group Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes that killed Iran's supreme leader. The latest deaths less than a week after the US said that Lebanon and Israel had agreed to extend a ceasefire by 45 days, with the two sides set to resume talks at the beginning of June. Despite the extension, both Israel and Hezbollah have continued to exchange fire, especially in southern Lebanon.

Machine learning systems increasingly make life-changing decisions about individuals, such as loan approvals, hiring, and cheating detection, raising a pressing question: how can individuals respond to negative decisions made by these opaque systems? While explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has largely focused on algorithmic recourse -- helping individuals change their features to obtain a desired outcome -- the parallel problem of algorithmic contestability -- helping individuals review and correct erroneous algorithmic decisions -- has received far less attention, despite its central ethical and legal importance. We trace this neglect to the absence of clear formal definitions and a systematic operationalization of contestability as an algorithmic problem. To address it, we propose an operational definition of contestability as a natural complement to recourse: contestability starts from the presumption that a decision may be incorrect and focuses on identifying evidence to challenge and potentially overturn it, whereas recourse assumes the decision is valid and instead provides pathways for changing it. We show that standard XAI explanations, such as counterfactuals, LIME, or Anchors, even when combined with human intuitions about decision continuity or monotonicity, reveal only errors in the neighborhood of the individual, but provide insufficient grounds for overturning the decision at hand. Going thus beyond traditional XAI, we identify three types of evidence warranting reversal according to the decision maker's own ethical standards: predictive multiplicity, incorrect feature values, and neglected overruling evidence. We argue that these render decisions normatively indefensible and thus successfully contestable. Finally, we analyze how existing EU legislation connects to our framework and argue that individuals already hold some legal rights to these forms of evidence.

British fighter jets in the Middle East will be equipped with new missile systems to make it cheaper to intercept Iranian drones. Royal Air Force Typhoon jets will be fitted with an Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) to destroy targets more precisely and at a fraction of the price of missiles currently in use, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced. Gulf countries and allies in the region have been grappling with how to counter Iran's Shahed drones, which are relatively cheap to make and have been causing considerable damage. During the 2024 conflict between Israel and Iran, the UK was reported to have shot down some drones with missiles worth around £200,000 each. Defence experts have estimated APKWS rockets used by other countries cost around $30,000 (£22,377) each.

Hezbollah has increased its use of small first-person view (FPV) drones to attack Israel, including systems controlled by fibre-optic cables to evade sophisticated defences. BBC Verify has geolocated 35 videos shared by the Lebanese armed group since 26 March which show strikes on Israeli soldiers, armoured vehicles and air defence systems in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. Experts told BBC Verify the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has so far been unable to develop any effective countermeasures, as the small drones can easily bypass detection systems. The drones can also be made from commercially available and 3D-printed components - and are cheap compared to the high-value targets they can destroy, experts also said. The use of cheap FPV drones became widespread during the Russia-Ukraine war and has changed modern warfare.