A new feature on X revealed that many influential MAGA accounts are not actually based in the US. President Donald Trump has continued sharing their posts anyway. A new feature on X has revealed that a number of major MAGA accounts on the platform are operated by people based overseas. And in the days since these accounts were exposed, President Donald Trump has continued boosting several of them. Many of the accounts, which have large followings and claim to be conservative people based in Texas or "America First" accounts "promoting good resisting evil," are actually operated everywhere from Chile and Nigeria to Russia and across eastern Europe .

Although large language models (LLMs) are increasingly implicated in interpersonal and societal decision-making, their ability to navigate explicit conflicts between legitimately different cultural value systems remains largely unexamined. Existing benchmarks predominantly target cultural knowledge (CulturalBench), value prediction (WorldValuesBench), or single-axis bias diagnostics (CDEval); none evaluate how LLMs adjudicate when multiple culturally grounded values directly clash. We address this gap with CCD-Bench, a benchmark that assesses LLM decision-making under cross-cultural value conflict. CCD-Bench comprises 2,182 open-ended dilemmas spanning seven domains, each paired with ten anonymized response options corresponding to the ten GLOBE cultural clusters. These dilemmas are presented using a stratified Latin square to mitigate ordering effects. We evaluate 17 non-reasoning LLMs. Models disproportionately prefer Nordic Europe (mean 20.2 percent) and Germanic Europe (12.4 percent), while options for Eastern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa are underrepresented (5.6 to 5.8 percent). Although 87.9 percent of rationales reference multiple GLOBE dimensions, this pluralism is superficial: models recombine Future Orientation and Performance Orientation, and rarely ground choices in Assertiveness or Gender Egalitarianism (both under 3 percent). Ordering effects are negligible (Cramer's V less than 0.10), and symmetrized KL divergence shows clustering by developer lineage rather than geography. These patterns suggest that current alignment pipelines promote a consensus-oriented worldview that underserves scenarios demanding power negotiation, rights-based reasoning, or gender-aware analysis. CCD-Bench shifts evaluation beyond isolated bias detection toward pluralistic decision making and highlights the need for alignment strategies that substantively engage diverse worldviews.

The news: Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now. Why it matters: The team hopes their work could usher in an era of robots that are far more useful and require less detailed training for each task. Incorporating LLMs into robotics is part of a growing trend, and this may be the most impressive example yet.

The United Nations has identified improving food security and reducing hunger as essential components of its sustainable development goals. As of 2021, approximately 828 million people worldwide are experiencing hunger and malnutrition, with numerous fatalities reported. Climate change significantly impacts agricultural land suitability, potentially leading to severe food shortages and subsequent social and political conflicts. To address this pressing issue, we have developed a machine learning-based approach to predict the risk of substantial land suitability degradation and changes in irrigation patterns. Our study focuses on Central Eurasia, a region burdened with economic and social challenges. This study represents a pioneering effort in utilizing machine learning methods to assess the impact of climate change on agricultural land suitability under various carbon emissions scenarios. Through comprehensive feature importance analysis, we unveil specific climate and terrain characteristics that exert influence on land suitability. Our approach achieves remarkable accuracy, offering policymakers invaluable insights to facilitate informed decisions aimed at averting a humanitarian crisis, including strategies such as the provision of additional water and fertilizers. This research underscores the tremendous potential of machine learning in addressing global challenges, with a particular emphasis on mitigating hunger and malnutrition.

Alex Svinov is the CEO and Co-founder of Insquad, the platform to build remote development teams. He believes that the future of work is in remote teams – and this notion will radically change the world as it will bring opportunity and talent closer to each other. Alex launched Insquad after facing challenges in hiring senior tech talent for his previous startup. He tried staffing services, but they were expensive and did not give a lot of value to him as a startup. So he decided to solve this problem and help the startup community as well as offer great opportunities to the talent in underprivileged countries. Alex is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor -- 10 investments in IT companies all over the world -- Forbes council member and Alchemist mentor. In the past 10 years, he has created several successful startups in industry areas that he had no experience in before -- FinTech, outsourcing, HRTech, and food service. He is passionate about making new tech products and services and helping distributed teams achieve their goals. Alex met with Bill Clinton and Queen Elizabeth in Moscow's high school. Outside of work, he's a father of 3, plays tennis and regularly participates in amateur tournaments. Today I have with me, Alex Svinov. Now, Alex is the CEO and Co-founder of Insquad, which is a platform to build remote development teams and as the world basically circulates around technology these days, it's very very important to get a great development team and remote now as we know with the pandemic has produced change the way we work. He believes that the future work is in remote teams and this notion will radically change the world as well bring opportunity and talent closer to each other. Alex launched Insquad one year ago because he faced challenges hiring senior tech talents for his previous startup. He tried staffing services but they were expensive and did not give a lot of value to him as a startup.

We use state-of-the-art AI plus intuitive UI to eliminate useless paperwork and make the whole world go faster. Help us build amazing machine learning models that scale to terabyte-sized datasets, tens of thousands of simultaneous users, and reliably serve the biggest enterprises and software vendors in the world. We are already processing up to hundreds of documents per minute. But this volume grows exponentially and the scope of our product is only slightly slower. Our final goal is so far ahead that we won't hesitate to re-design everything a couple of times more.

"The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets." We are experiencing one of the biggest refugee crises since World War II. Within weeks of the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than 4 million people fled the country, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). Although international media attention is focused on Eastern Europe, this is on top of an already-desperate situation in the Global South: It is estimated that countries in that region of the world have absorbed two-thirds of an estimated 82.4 million global refugees.

"The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets." We are experiencing one of the biggest refugee crises since World War II. Within weeks of the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than 4 million people fled the country, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). Although international media attention is focused on Eastern Europe, this is on top of an already-desperate situation in the Global South: It is estimated that countries in that region of the world have absorbed two-thirds of an estimated 82.4 million global refugees.

Taipei, Taiwan – China and Europe may not be in a cold war, but bilateral relations are increasingly chilly. China's failure to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, considered an existential threat to European security, is the latest and gravest in a series of challenges by Beijing to the rules-based order on which the European Union professes to operate. Reflecting a bilateral relationship centred on economics, Europe has often taken disagreements with its top trading partner China in stride. However, China's support for Russia – rooted in Chinese leader Xi Jinping's close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin – has altered European calculations. "The sense of urgency to protect Europe from authoritarian threats wasn't as strong before as it is now. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a game-changer," Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy, an assistant professor at Taiwan's National Dong Hwa University and a former political adviser in the European Parliament, told Al Jazeera.

As the coronavirus pandemic enveloped the world last year, businesses increasingly turned to automation in order to address rapidly changing conditions. Floor-cleaning and microbe-zapping disinfecting robots were introduced in hospitals, supermarkets and other environments. Some enterprises found that, given the new emphasis on hygiene and social distancing, robotic operations offered a marketing advantage. The American fast food chain White Castle began using hamburger-cooking robots in an effort to create "an avenue for reduced human contact with food during the cooking process". With the worst days of the pandemic hopefully now behind us, the jobs story has turned out to be unexpectedly complicated. While overall unemployment rates remain elevated, both the US and the UK are experiencing widespread worker shortages, focused especially in those occupations that tend to offer gruelling work conditions and relatively low pay.