United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks during an interview at the United Nations headquarters, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024 [Pamela Smith/AP] United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks during an interview at the United Nations headquarters, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024 [Pamela Smith/AP] Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio Guterres called President Bill Clinton from Lisbon on August 30 and September 8, 1999, to discuss the growing crisis in East Timor. The small Southeast Asian territory, which had endured a brutal Indonesian occupation since 1975, was again engulfed in violence after voters overwhelmingly chose independence in a referendum. Pro-Indonesian militias responded to the vote for independence by unleashing a so-called scorched-earth campaign, destroying infrastructure, displacing up to half a million people and killing thousands. The crisis resonated in Portugal, where linguistic, Catholic, and historical ties to its former colony helped fuel a solidarity movement. An estimated 10,000 demonstrators, dressed in white, formed human chains through Lisbon's city streets. Guterres had raised the issue before. At a 1996 summit in Bangkok, he met Indonesia's President Suharto and broached the politically sensitive topic of East Timor, offering to restore diplomatic relations (severed since the 1975 invasion) in exchange for the release of Timorese resistance leader Xanana Gusmao. The proposal was met with an awkward silence. This time, Guterres was asking the United States to support a UN mission in East Timor, but Washington was reluctant to confront Indonesia. Guterres recalled in his 2022 biography, "Honest Broker", that he warned Clinton during the second call that Portugal could reconsider its Balkan deployments if the international community failed to intervene. Portugal's contribution to NATO was small but politically well-placed, with its troops serving in the alliance's prominent post-Cold War missions in Bosnia and Kosovo. Guterres offered Clinton a choice: risk a public falling-out with a founding NATO ally, or use Washington's influence to make Indonesia accept an international force in East Timor. The next day, amid growing international pressure, the White House stated that Indonesia "must" allow international assistance.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted the domain of multi-hop question answering (MHQA), where systems are required to aggregate information and infer answers from disparate pieces of text. However, the autoregressive nature of LLMs inherently poses a challenge as errors may accumulate if mistakes are made in the intermediate reasoning steps. This paper introduces Monte-Carlo tree search for Zero-shot multi-hop Question Answering (MZQA), a framework based on Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) to identify optimal reasoning paths in MHQA tasks, mitigating the error propagation from sequential reasoning processes. Unlike previous works, we propose a zero-shot prompting method, which relies solely on instructions without the support of hand-crafted few-shot examples that typically require domain expertise. We also introduce a behavioral cloning approach (MZQA-BC) trained on self-generated MCTS inference trajectories, achieving an over 10-fold increase in reasoning speed with bare compromise in performance. The efficacy of our method is validated on standard benchmarks such as HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, and MuSiQue, demonstrating that it outperforms existing frameworks.

Pope Francis, on a visit to Singapore, has warned of the negative effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on society and called for "fair" wages for migrant workers. The comments by the head of the Catholic Church came on Thursday as the high-tech city-state became his final stop on a 12-day Asia Pacific tour. Technology developments risk isolating individuals and putting them into a false reality, Francis said, adding that AI should be used to bring people closer together and to promote understanding and solidarity within society. He also cautioned that AI should not make people forget about what is important: human relationships. This is not the first time the 87-year-old pontiff has weighed in on AI.