Italy condemns'drone attack' on Gaza aid flotilla and deploys frigate Italy's defence minister has condemned what he said was an overnight drone attack by unidentified perpetrators on a flotilla trying to breach Israel's naval blockade of Gaza to deliver aid. Guido Crosetto also said he had ordered an Italian Navy frigate to head towards the 52 boats in the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), which are mostly off the coast of Crete, to assist Italian citizens on board. The GSF said several boats reported explosions and unidentified objects being dropped, as well as drones overhead and communications jamming. It accused Israel of a dangerous escalation. Israel's government has not commented.

This study details our approach for the CASE 2024 Shared Task on Climate Activism Stance and Hate Event Detection, focusing on Hate Speech Detection, Hate Speech Target Identification, and Stance Detection as classification challenges. We explored the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly GPT-4, in zero- or few-shot settings enhanced by retrieval augmentation and re-ranking for Tweet classification. Our goal was to determine if LLMs could match or surpass traditional methods in this context. We conducted an ablation study with LLaMA for comparison, and our results indicate that our models significantly outperformed the baselines, securing second place in the Target Detection task. The code for our submission is available at https://github.com/NaiveNeuron/bryndza-case-2024

Governments, investors and business leaders need to adopt practical solutions that can be deployed across the world at scale. The arrival of 5G along with wider adoption of AI technology into the physical world will make it possible to substantially enhance the opportunities to scale cleaner energy generation technologies, enable efficiency gains in manufacturing, our homes, retail stores, offices and transportation that will enable substantial reductions in pollution. Policies that incentivise the accelerated development and deployment of Industry 4.0 solutions will require politicians and regulators to better understand the opportunities that 5G alongside AI will enable. The OECD published a paper "What works in Innovation Policy" and observed that "Policies ignoring or resisting the industrial transition have proven to be not just futile but result in an innovative disadvantage and weak economic performance." Entering the new year will allow us to develop and deploy solutions for the 2020s that make use of the next industrial revolution with 5G and AI to enable dramatic efficiency gains across all sectors of the economy and to enhance renewable energy generation. The emergence of India, China and others as industrial economic powers is occurring at a time when we now know the damage that such pollution causes and hence there is a need to work together, collaboratively to solve a global problem. Embracing technological change and enhancing its capabilities to deliver better living standards alongside sustainable development is the best option for those who really want to make an impact on climate change at scale in the 2020s and beyond. I wish to thank Henry Derwent, former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former CEO of IETA for his efforts to promote technological innovation and scaled up financing with Green Bonds.

Dr David Levy, an expert on artificial intelligence (AI), said in an interview with the Daily Star that the way technology is developing nowadays, the world might soon face a serious challenge from AI-equipped robots of all types. Levy complained that governments are acting too slowly when it comes to introducing new laws and addressing the new challenge, recalling how the Dutch Ministry of Defence had ignored his warnings regarding the potentially malign use of drones and, less than a year later, simple drones were able to paralyse the work of Gatwick Airport in the UK during Christmas season. The AI expert argues that in order to draw more attention to the problem, a "Greta Thunberg of the robot world" is needed, adding that dangerous robots are likely to harm humanity sooner than climate change. Thunberg, a famous teenage environmental activist, rose to prominence globally in recent years by rallying students around the world to take part in her "strikes for climate", which are designed to draw attention to ecological problems. She also made an appearance at a UN committee devoted to the topic, delivering a passionate speech in which she accused global leaders of doing too little to address climate change.

Climate change activist Greta Thunberg has been named one of the ten most influential people in science in 2019 by the journal Nature. The 16 year old has been named alongside a neurologist who brought pig brains back to life and a palaeontologist who shook up humanity's family tree. The prestigious British science journal, which celebrated its 150th anniversary this year, says the Swedish campaigner'channelled the rage of a generation'. She had outshone scientists who couldn't'galvanise global attention' the way she did and many are cheering her along, according to Nature. The ten most influential list also includes a physicist building quantum computers, a biologist editing genes in adult humans and a microbiologist fighting Ebola.

"You must unite behind the science. You must do the impossible. Because giving up can never ever be an option" – Greta Thunberg Most woke Millenials have updated their vocabulary to use terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world. 'Climate change' has now turned to'climate emergency' – but there are others who haven't yet understood how the situation has worsened over the years. According to a report, seven million people have been displaced globally due to natural disasters including storms and floods between January and June 2019 and the number is estimated to grow more than triple by the end of the year.