Democracies rely on opposition and dissent to function, but in emerging democracies, freedom of speech is often restricted. This effect intensifies during regional conflicts. This study examines how the India-Pakistan conflict of May 2025 influenced Pakistani media coverage. Analyzing approximately 2,600 news articles from three major newspapers using a large language model (LLM), the study found that war-related reporting significantly overshadowed coverage of political opposition and dissent. These findings highlight how conflict can marginalize democratic discourse, reinforcing the need to safeguard press freedom in volatile regions.

Sense and Sensibility: What makes a social robot convincing to high-school students? Abstract --This study with 40 high-school students demonstrates the high influence of a social educational robot on students' decision-making for a set of eight true-false questions on electric circuits, for which the theory had been covered in the students' courses. The robot argued for the correct answer on six questions and the wrong on two, and 75% of the students were persuaded by the robot to perform beyond their expected capacity, positively when the robot was correct and negatively when it was wrong. Students with more experience of using large language models were even more likely to be influenced by the robot's stance - in particular for the two easiest questions on which the robot was wrong - suggesting that familiarity with AI can increase susceptibility to misinformation by AI. We further examined how three different levels of portrayed robot certainty, displayed using semantics, prosody and facial signals, affected how the students aligned with the robot's answer on specific questions and how convincing they perceived the robot to be on these questions. The students aligned with the robot's answers in 94.4% of the cases when the robot was portrayed as Certain, 82.6% when it was Neutral and 71.4% when it was Uncertain. The alignment was thus high for all conditions, highlighting students' general susceptibility to accept the robot's stance, but alignment in the Uncertain condition was significantly lower than in the Certain. Post-test questionnaire answers further show that students found the robot most convincing when it was portrayed as Certain. These findings highlight the need for educational robots to adjust their display of certainty based on the reliability of the information they convey, to promote students' critical thinking and reduce undue influence. Educational robots are becoming more common and they have significant potential in, e.g., STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education [46, 69, 17], offering students realistic and natural interactions, not the least by employing Large Language Models (LLMs), as demonstrated in several recent studies [41, 68, 67]. However, it is also well-known that while the LLMs' linguistic proficiency is often astonishing, their factual "knowledge" in STEM subjects is flawed, and incorrect statements occur frequently [34, 60]. Since robots can exert high informational social influence [38, 24, 25, 55, 56] and students will align with the robot's views to large extents [27], the positive as well as negative effects of learning with a social robot need to be considered: Students need to use critical thinking to decide if they should accept the robot's propositions [63]. Educators need to understand which students are more at risk of being misled by a robot presenting incorrect STEM facts, to provide in-time support.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential in clinical question answering, with recent multi-agent frameworks further improving diagnostic accuracy via collaborative reasoning. However, we identify a recurring issue of Silent Agreement, where agents prematurely converge on diagnoses without sufficient critical analysis, particularly in complex or ambiguous cases. We present a new concept called Catfish Agent, a role-specialized LLM designed to inject structured dissent and counter silent agreement. Inspired by the ``catfish effect'' in organizational psychology, the Catfish Agent is designed to challenge emerging consensus to stimulate deeper reasoning. We formulate two mechanisms to encourage effective and context-aware interventions: (i) a complexity-aware intervention that modulates agent engagement based on case difficulty, and (ii) a tone-calibrated intervention articulated to balance critique and collaboration. Evaluations on nine medical Q&A and three medical VQA benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms both single- and multi-agent LLMs frameworks, including leading commercial models such as GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1.

Markets and policymakers around the world hang on the consequential monetary policy decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Publicly available textual documentation of their meetings provides insight into members' attitudes about the economy. We use GPT-4 to quantify dissent among members on the topic of inflation. We find that transcripts and minutes reflect the diversity of member views about the macroeconomic outlook in a way that is lost or omitted from the public statements. In fact, diverging opinions that shed light upon the committee's "true" attitudes are almost entirely omitted from the final statements. Hence, we argue that forecasting FOMC sentiment based solely on statements will not sufficiently reflect dissent among the hawks and doves.

Ukraine will keep targeting Russian oil-refining facilities despite U.S. discontent with its campaign, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who warned that Kyiv's forces may be forced to retreat "step by step" without more military aid from allies. The drone attacks are in retaliation against Kremlin strikes on Ukraine's energy grid and part of an effort to compel Moscow to stop them, The Washington Post's David Ignatius wrote in a column, citing an interview with Zelenskyy done Thursday in Kyiv. Ukrainian forces have attacked more than a dozen refineries inside Russia with explosive-laden drones over the past month, slashing fuel production. But the strikes irked Kyiv's allies in U.S. who are concerned about rising domestic fuel prices in an election year, the Financial Times reported last week, citing people familiar with the issue.

BOTTLED UP - Bud Light shuts down dissent as controversy over trans activist partnership rages. Continue reading … 'AN ATTACK' - This prairie chicken is Biden's latest weapon in his war on fossil fuels, writes Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. 'HORRIFIC' - Interstate crash involving 72 vehicles leaves several people dead, many more injured. GRISLY DISCOVERY - Seven bodies found in search for missing teen girls seen traveling with convicted rapist. HOLLYWOOD ON HOLD - Movie, TV writers to strike for the first time in 15 years after failed negotiations.

With the 2020 US Census results having been delivered to the states, now the process begins for using the population results to draw new Congressional districts. Gerrymandering, a practice intended to establish a political advantage by manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts, is expected to be practiced on a wide scale with Democrats having a slight margin of seats in the House of Representatives and Republicans seeking to close the gap in states where they hold a majority in the legislature. Today, more powerful redistricting software incorporating AI and machine learning is available, and it represents a double-edged sword. The pessimistic view is that the gerrymandering software will enable legislators to gerrymander with more precision than ever before, to ensure maximum advantages. This was called "political laser surgery" by David Thornburgh, president of the Committee of Seventy, an anti-corruption organization that considers the 2010 redistricting as one of the worst in the country's history, according to an account in the Columbia Political Review.

The year is 2029, and you wake up one morning living in a community called Hope, a dystopian dictatorship. "Everyone here wears the same outfit, lives the same repetitive routine, and is happy … For many, Hope is their entire universe. They are uninterested in the outside world. However, you are different--you have the ability to choose." This is how you are introduced to the game Name of the Will on Kickstarter.

Last week, the Supreme Court issued a surprising 6–3 decision barring hiring discrimination against LGBTQ people under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch making the textualist case for this landmark protection. The unexpected outcome in Bostock v. Clayton County should provoke introspection among progressives in the legal community who have long been skeptical of textualism, offering a chance for them to fix chronic blind spots and strategic gaffes that have damaged the progressive judicial project. While it's clear that this ruling was a major victory for progressives, less apparent is how, going forward, progressive advocates, judges, and politicians should think and talk about statutory interpretation. Although brow-furrowing, that question is hugely important. As the late high priest of conservative textualism, Justice Antonin Scalia, pointed out: "By far the greatest part of what I and all federal judges do is interpret the meaning of federal statutes."

Davos, Switzerland – "Has China Won?" Kishore Mahbubeni, the Singaporean author and intellectual, greets me warmly in a conference lounge here and hands me a card promoting the March release of his new book, bearing that provocative question as its title. The cover blurb announces that he will explain "how, while America became arrogant and distracted, a three-thousand-year-old civilization is well on the way to becoming the number one power in the world." The year ahead is likely to provide the most profound trial yet for that thesis and for the durability of China's rise. Several new shocks and challenges, ranging from a potential pandemic to slowing growth, will test the resilience of China's authoritarian leadership and the state-run capitalist system that has provided the country four decades of record growth. It thus also could mark a significant year for the emerging, generational clash, not of civilizations as Samuel Huntington had argued, but rather of economic and political systems, between democratic and authoritarian capitalism.