Epstein's shadow: Why Bill Gates pulled out of Modi's AI summit Microsoft founder Bill Gates has cancelled his keynote speech at India's flagship AI summit just hours before he was due to take the stage on Thursday. Gates, who has faced renewed scrutiny over his past ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, withdrew to "ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit's key priorities", the Gates Foundation said in a statement. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi had billed the summit as an opportunity for India to shape the future of AI, drawing high-profile attendees, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Instead, it has been dogged by controversy, from Gates's abrupt exit to an incident in which an Indian university tried to pass off a Chinese-made robotic dog as its own innovation. So, what exactly went wrong at India's flagship AI gathering and why has it drawn such intense scrutiny?

Emmanuel Macron told delegates at the AI summit: 'Europe is not blindly focused on regulation.' Emmanuel Macron told delegates at the AI summit: 'Europe is not blindly focused on regulation.' Macron defends EU AI rules and vows crackdown on child'digital abuse' Emmanuel Macron has hit back at US criticism of Europe's efforts to regulate AI, vowing to protect children from "digital abuse" during France's presidency of the G7. Speaking at the AI Impact summit in Delhi, the French president called for tougher safeguards after global outrage over Elon Musk's Grok chatbot being used to generate tens of thousands of sexualised images of children, and amid mounting concern about the concentration of AI power in a handful of companies. His remarks were echoed by António Guterres, the UN secretary general, who told delegates - including several US tech billionaires - that "no child should be a test subject for unregulated AI". "The future of AI cannot be decided by a few countries or left to the whims of a few billionaires," Guterres said. "AI must belong to everyone".

Trump says he will meet Putin in Hungary for Ukraine talks after'very productive' call US President Donald Trump says great progress was made during a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, with the pair agreeing to face-to-face talks in Hungary. He said the call, the first with Putin since mid-August, was very productive, adding that teams from Washington and Moscow will meet next week. Trump did not confirm a date for his meeting with Putin in Budapest. The Kremlin said work on the summit would begin immediately after the extremely frank and trustful call. The talks came a day before Ukraine's President Zelensky was to visit the White House, and with Trump weighing whether to arm Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles capable of striking deep into Russia.

India casts doubt on Trump's claim Modi will stop buying Russian oil India's foreign ministry has said it is not aware of a phone call in which US President Donald Trump claimed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to stop purchasing Russian oil. On Wednesday, Trump said his Indian counterpart had assured me today that it would end Russian oil imports, a move the US has pushed for in a bid to increase economic pressure on the Kremlin to end the war in Ukraine. But asked about the call on Thursday, an Indian government spokesman cast doubt on Trump's account, saying he was not aware of any conversation between the two leaders taking place the previous day. The Indian government had earlier said discussions were still ongoing with the US over its Russian oil purchases. India has become a key energy customer for Russia since the outbreak of the war, partly allowing the Kremlin to withstand the impact of Ukrainian allies slashing oil and gas imports, the country's biggest export market.

When Elon Musk met Narendra Modi in Washington DC in February, the SpaceX and Tesla chief presented India's prime minister with a gift and introduced him to his family. Modi described the meeting as "very good". Modi was in the United States to see President Donald Trump. In Modi's meeting with Musk, the two talked about collaborating in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), space exploration, innovation and sustainable development, according to India's Ministry of External Affairs. But almost a month later, Musk's social media platform X has filed a lawsuit against the Indian government, alleging that New Delhi is unlawfully censoring content online. The lawsuit comes as Musk edges closer to launching both Starlink and Tesla in India.

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) scales poorly to high dimensional problems when it is used to estimate a multivariate Gaussian approximation with a full covariance matrix. In this paper, we extend the batch-and-match (BaM) framework for score-based BBVI to problems where it is prohibitively expensive to store such covariance matrices, let alone to estimate them. Unlike classical algorithms for BBVI, which use gradient descent to minimize the reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence, BaM uses more specialized updates to match the scores of the target density and its Gaussian approximation. We extend the updates for BaM by integrating them with a more compact parameterization of full covariance matrices. In particular, borrowing ideas from factor analysis, we add an extra step to each iteration of BaM -- a patch -- that projects each newly updated covariance matrix into a more efficiently parameterized family of diagonal plus low rank matrices. We evaluate this approach on a variety of synthetic target distributions and real-world problems in high-dimensional inference.

Ukraine continues to reel from Russia's missile strike on Monday, which ranks as the largest attack since the start of the war, as Moscow is beginning to suggest that Ukraine could make desperate moves. "Russia's large-scale strikes on Ukraine's critical infrastructure on Monday are almost certainly in response to Ukraine's incursion into Kursk Oblast, breaching Russia's border," Rebekah Koffler, told Fox News Digital. "Zelenskyy likely anticipated Russia's retaliation and accepted the risk anyway," Koffler explained. "Zelenskyy wants to stay in the fight - there's no other path for him personally or professionally." "To stay in the fight, he needs more weapons and financing from the West," she added.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other ruling party leaders have been rattled by India's newly emboldened opposition, which now plans to use its expanded presence in parliament to challenge the Bharatiya Janata Party on multiple fronts, a senior opposition leader said. Shashi Tharoor, a senior member of the Indian National Congress and 15-year veteran of the lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, said BJP leaders appeared "shaken" by a fiery parliamentary speech this week by opposition leader Rahul Gandhi. He said the speech signals the presence of a more forceful opposition in India for the first time since Modi took power a decade ago. "They're not used to it. They have to get used to it," Tharoor said of the BJP during an interview in New Delhi on Wednesday.

In the early morning hours of May 15, the cargo vessel Borkum stopped off the Spanish coast, lingering in the waters a short distance from Cartagena. At the port, protesters waved Palestinian flags and called on authorities to inspect the ship based on suspicions that it carried weapons bound for Israel. Leftist members of the European Parliament sent a letter to Spanish President Pedro Sánchez requesting that the ship be prevented from docking. "Allowing a ship loaded with weapons destined for Israel is to allow the transit of arms to a country currently under investigation for genocide against the Palestinian people," the group of nine MEPs warned. Before the Spanish government could take a stand, the Borkum cancelled its planned stopover and continued to the Slovenian port of Koper.

If India's most recent elections proved anything, it's that the "world's largest democracy" may yet still be worthy of that name. The results of the six-week cycle, which saw more than 640 million voters turn out across the subcontinent, dealt a steep blow to the demagogic Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which lost its single-party hold over the majority of seats in India's lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha. The Hindu nationalist BJP still snapped up most of the electorate's votes, and Modi is bound to continue as head of state, but he and his cronies will no longer enjoy the untrammeled federal power they have held for the past half-decade (forget the 400 seats they'd aimed to nab in this election). The INDIA Alliance, a multiparty coalition of opposition candidates, has flipped dozens of seats, and the BJP will have to rely on parliamentary allies--who already desire some significant changes to Modi's Hindu supremacist governing style--for a majority. In light of the clean sweep Modi and Co. achieved in 2019, the increasingly authoritarian grip they brought to India's institutions, the economic depression that has afflicted Indians in the Modi years, the protest movements that resultantly flared up, and the formerly BJP-supporting constituencies the party lost this round, it's hard to view this outcome as anything but a popular rebuke of Modi's antidemocratic excesses.