The UN Security Council is expected to vote on a draft resolution backing Donald Trump's peace plan for Gaza. The text, submitted by the US, would give a mandate for the deployment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) and to set up transitional governance there. The US says multiple unnamed countries have offered to contribute to the ISF, though it is unclear whether it would be required to ensure Hamas disarms or function as a peacekeeping force. Its formation is a central plank of Trump's 20-point plan which last month brought a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in their two-year war. The draft also raises the possibility of a Palestinian state - something Israel strongly opposes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for high-stake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making process, where the stakes are particularly high and political decisions can have far-reaching consequences. We introduce a novel dataset comprising publicly available UN Security Council (UNSC) records from 1994 to 2024, including draft resolutions, voting records, and diplomatic speeches. Using this dataset, we propose the United Nations Benchmark (UNBench), the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across four interconnected political science tasks: co-penholder judgment, representative voting simulation, draft adoption prediction, and representative statement generation. These tasks span the three stages of the UN decision-making process--drafting, voting, and discussing--and aim to assess LLMs' ability to understand and simulate political dynamics. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the potential and challenges of applying LLMs in this domain, providing insights into their strengths and limitations in political science. This work contributes to the growing intersection of AI and political science, opening new avenues for research and practical applications in global governance. The UNBench Repository can be accessed at: https://github.com/yueqingliang1/UNBench.

Consumers must be safeguarded from artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) which is "advancing at a remarkable pace", says a European parliamentary committee. A draft resolution, approved by the European Parliament's Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) on 23 January, proposes that humans should always be ultimately responsible for, and able to overrule, decisions, especially in medical, legal and accounting contexts. It also sets out how to make use of the technology more transparent and accountable. IMCO chair Petra De Sutter said the committee welcomed the potential of rapid advances in AI technology, but at the same time wanted to highlight important issues that needed to be addressed. The resolution makes clear that while free-flowing data will be essential for the creation of innovative services, the importance of protecting personal data under GDPR, and of using only high-quality and unbiased data sets is equally important.

UNITED NATIONS – U.N. member states on Tuesday condemned widespread human rights violations in North Korea and expressed concerns that funds needed to ease the dire humanitarian crisis are spent on Pyongyang's missile and nuclear arms programs. A resolution drafted by Japan and the European Union was adopted by a consensus vote in the General Assembly's committee on humanitarian affairs. Following the vote, diplomats from China, Pyongyang's ally, Russia, Syria, Iran and Cuba took the floor to state they were disassociating themselves from the outcome. The full General Assembly is expected to vote on the measure next month. North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests this year and test-fired a series of missiles, even as 18 million North Koreans out of a total population of 25 million are facing food shortages, Japan's ambassador said. "The authorities of the DPRK (North Korea), without regard to the plight of their own citizens, divert their limited resources to develop weapons of mass destruction," said Ambassador Koro Bessho.