Russia has accused Ukraine of carrying out a drone attack on a nuclear plant that has caused a fire and damage to an auxiliary transformer as Ukraine celebrates its Independence Day for the 34th time. Sunday's attack forced a 50 percent reduction in the operating capacity at reactor number three at the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), close to the border with Ukraine, according to Russian officials, who added that several power and energy facilities were targeted in the overnight strikes. The fire at the nuclear facility was quickly extinguished with no injuries reported, the plant's news service said on Telegram. Two other reactors are operating without power generation, and one is undergoing scheduled repairs, it said, adding that radiation levels were normal. Alexander Khinshtein, the Kursk region's acting governor, said Ukrainian attacks on the plant, 60km (38 miles) from the Russia-Ukraine border, "are a threat to nuclear safety and a violation of all international conventions".

In this paper, we identify a cultural dominance issue within large language models (LLMs) due to the predominant use of English data in model training (e.g. ChatGPT). LLMs often provide inappropriate English-culture-related answers that are not relevant to the expected culture when users ask in non-English languages. To systematically evaluate the cultural dominance issue, we build a benchmark that consists of both concrete (e.g. holidays and songs) and abstract (e.g. values and opinions) cultural objects. Empirical results show that the representative GPT models suffer from the culture dominance problem, where GPT-4 is the most affected while text-davinci-003 suffers the least from this problem. Our study emphasizes the need for critical examination of cultural dominance and ethical consideration in their development and deployment. We show two straightforward methods in model development (i.e. pretraining on more diverse data) and deployment (e.g. culture-aware prompting) can significantly mitigate the cultural dominance issue in LLMs.

On August 15, India's Independence Day, it's customary to sing Jana Gana Mana: the Indian national anthem, originally composed by the poet Rabindranath Tagore and adopted as the anthem after India gained full independence. This year, together with Prasar Bharati and Virtual Bharat, we offered Indians a new take on the familiar with Sounds of India, an AI-powered web app. Using the app, you sing Jana Gana Mana into your phone, karaoke-style, and it transforms your voice into one of three traditional Indian instruments. The day culminated in a rendition of the national anthem, combining many of the voices that Indians submitted through the app. The Sounds of India experiment was made possible by machine learning models built with Google's TensorFlow platform to convert sounds into musical instruments (in this case, the Bansuri, the Shehnai, and the Sarangi).

The Fourth of July is a special US holiday for a few important reasons. First, it is a celebration of the birth of our nation filled with symbolism, patriotism, picnics, guilt-free potato salad binging, and lots of noisy fireworks. Secondly, it signifies the unofficial start of summer, when schools are closed, families take leisurely vacations, and flip flops overtake work shoes as the footwear of choice. Last and most importantly, the July 4th holiday symbolizes a spirit of independence that is deeply embedded in the DNA of our country. It's a day when many of us, consciously or unconsciously, reflect upon the importance that freedom and self-reliance play in our lives.

Retiring well & aging independently requires more than health and wealth, it requires a supportive community. On an extraordinarily hot Independence Day weekend, I visited my elderly mother-in-law in her quiet suburban community on the edge of Boston, Massachusetts. She lives alone and mostly independently. Part of my wife's and my weekend ritual is visiting and running errands with her. As we walked down her driveway, we saw a black car drive slowly down the quiet, empty street. A man stuck his head out the window and asked whether I had seen an older Asian man dressed in dark clothing walking through the neighborhood.

Participants run ahead of Puerto de San Lorenzo's fighting bulls during the third bull run of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, northern Spain. Each day at 8:00 am hundreds of people race with six bulls, charging along a winding, 848.6-metre (more than half a mile) course through narrow streets to the city's bull ring, where the animals are killed in a bullfight or corrida, during this festival, immortalised in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel "The Sun Also Rises" and dating back to medieval times and also featuring religious processions, folk dancing, concerts and round-the-clock drinking. Iraqi women, who fled the fighting between government forces and Islamic State (IS) group jihadists in the Old City of Mosul, cry as they stand in the city's western industrial district awaiting to be relocated

Will Smith is science fiction's leading man. He kicked extraterrestrial ass in Independence Day and Men in Black, dodged satellite surveillance in Enemy of the State, and crushed a giant mecha-tarantula in Wild Wild West. In July, the high tech bad boy goes back to the future in I, Robot as a police detective investigating a murder allegedly committed by a bot. Driving through Manhattan's West Village in his black SUV, the former Fresh Prince admits he's all about getting geeky with it. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links.

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. Will it have a happy ending? Do blockbuster movies really bust people's blocks anymore? Is there an insatiable craving for more noise and killing, one that is synonymous with the American summer? Hollywood is becoming concerned that people might be tiring of all these episode twos, threes and lost-count-of-how-manys.

Speculating what will cause our ultimate demise has been the stuff of science fiction for years--if it's not aliens wiping out the human race, it's probably robots. This is a proven trope that keeps moviegoers flocking to the likes of Independence Day, Ender's Game, The Terminator, or The Matrix. To deviate from the norm takes a little extra work, but one way directors can suggest a different route is with a short format proof-of-concept sales pitch. Created with nearly 40,000 in Kickstarter funding, "Rise" is a short film aspiring to feature length. Its central theme is to Terminator what District 9 was to Independence Day.

Speculating what will cause our ultimate demise has been the stuff of science fiction for years--if it's not aliens wiping out the human race, it's probably robots. This is a proven trope that keeps moviegoers flocking to the likes of Independence Day, Ender's Game, The Terminator, or The Matrix. To deviate from the norm takes a little extra work, but one way directors can suggest a different route is with a short format proof-of-concept sales pitch. Created with nearly 40,000 in Kickstarter funding, "Rise" is a short film aspiring to feature length. Its central theme is to Terminator what District 9 was to Independence Day.