How the US left Ukraine exposed to Russia's winter war Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? Russian forces launched multiple attacks on Ukraine's Zaporizhia region, killing one person and injuring seven others over the past day, the region's military administration said on the Telegram messaging platform. The attacks involved 448 drones as well as 163 artillery strikes, causing damage to 136 homes, cars and other structures, the military administration said. Russian forces also continued shelling Ukraine's Donetsk region, forcing 173 people, including 135 children, to evacuate front-line areas over the past day, regional governor Vadym Filashkin said on Telegram.

How the US left Ukraine exposed to Russia's winter war Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? Russia-Ukraine talks resume in Geneva as US claims'meaningful' progress Day two of the third round of trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine and the United States is under way in Geneva, Switzerland, as the four-year anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of its neighbour looms next week, with vague references to "progress" but nothing tangible yet shared. Little has been made public about the talks' contents since negotiations kicked off on Tuesday behind closed doors and continued on Wednesday morning. The thorniest of issues, territory and the yielding of it, remains the key sticking point.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Ukrainian officials have left for Geneva, Switzerland, where another round of negotiations aimed at ending the war with Russia is set to take place. The next round of negotiations is ahead.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' A deadly exchange of drone strikes has killed one person in Ukraine and one in Russia and cast doubts on the prospects of a ceasefire before another round of negotiations to end the war next week. News of the deaths comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio signalled hurdles to reaching an agreement in Geneva as the conflict is about to enter its fifth year.

Iran says'ready for war' Which are Iran's main opposition groups? The United States military says it shot down an Iranian drone that approached a US aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, amid continued efforts by regional powers to ease tensions between Washington and Tehran. In a statement on Tuesday, US Central Command (CENTCOM) spokesperson Tim Hawkins said a US fighter jet from the USS Abraham Lincoln "shot down the Iranian drone in self-defense and to protect the aircraft carrier and personnel on board". CENTCOM said the drone "aggressively approached" the aircraft carrier with "unclear intent" and it "continued to fly toward the ship despite de-escalatory measures taken by US forces operating in international waters". There was no immediate comment from the Iranian authorities on the incident.

Diplomacy is one of the most sophisticated activities in human society, involving complex interactions among multiple parties that require skills in social reasoning, negotiation, and long-term strategic planning. Previous AI agents have demonstrated their ability to handle multi-step games and large action spaces in multi-agent tasks. However, diplomacy involves a staggering magnitude of decision spaces, especially considering the negotiation stage required. While recent agents based on large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in various applications, they still struggle with extended planning periods in complex multi-agent settings. Leveraging recent technologies for LLM-based agents, we aim to explore AI's potential to create a human-like agent capable of executing comprehensive multi-agent missions by integrating three fundamental capabilities: 1) strategic planning with memory and reflection; 2) goal-oriented negotiation with social reasoning; and 3) augmenting memory through self-play games for self-evolution without human in the loop.

Former chancellor George Osborne is joining artificial intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI. He will lead its OpenAI for Countries programme, which is aimed at helping governments increase their AI capacity. Announcing his new London-based role, Osborne said it was a privilege to be joining the company. I recently asked myself the question: what's the most exciting and promising company in the world right now? The answer I believe is OpenAI, he said on X.

Negotiations over a technology deal between the UK and US have stalled due to stumbling blocks in wider trade negotiations between the two sides. The Technology Prosperity Deal - which was billed as historic when it was unveiled during US President Donald Trump's state visit in September - saw both countries pledge to co-operate in areas such as AI. However, talks on the agreement are now being held up because of US concerns about what it considers to be wider UK trade barriers. A government spokesperson said our special relationship with the US remains strong and the UK is firmly committed to ensuring the Tech Prosperity Deal delivers opportunity for hardworking people in both countries. The New York Times - which first reported the story - said there were broader disagreements between the two sides, including over digital regulations and food safety rules.

Automated negotiation has emerged as a critical area of research in multiagent systems, with applications spanning e-commerce, resource allocation, and autonomous decision-making. This paper presents ChargingBoul, a negotiating agent that competed in the 2022 Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) and placed second in individual utility by an exceptionally narrow margin. ChargingBoul employs a lightweight yet effective strategy that balances concession and opponent modeling to achieve high negotiation outcomes. The agent classifies opponents based on bid patterns, dynamically adjusts its bidding strategy, and applies a concession policy in later negotiation stages to maximize utility while fostering agreements. We evaluate ChargingBoul's performance using competition results and subsequent studies that have utilized the agent in negotiation research. Our analysis highlights ChargingBoul's effectiveness across diverse opponent strategies and its contributions to advancing automated negotiation techniques. We also discuss potential enhancements, including more sophisticated opponent modeling and adaptive bidding heuristics, to improve its performance further.

As AI-generated video platforms rapidly advance, ethical challenges such as copyright infringement emerge. This study examines how users make sense of AI-generated videos on OpenAI's Sora by conducting a qualitative content analysis of user comments. Through a thematic analysis, we identified four dynamics that characterize how users negotiate authenticity, authorship, and platform governance on Sora. First, users acted as critical evaluators of realism, assessing micro-details such as lighting, shadows, fluid motion, and physics to judge whether AI-generated scenes could plausibly exist. Second, users increasingly shifted from passive viewers to active creators, expressing curiosity about prompts, techniques, and creative processes. Text prompts were perceived as intellectual property, generating concerns about plagiarism and remixing norms. Third, users reported blurred boundaries between real and synthetic media, worried about misinformation, and even questioned the authenticity of other commenters, suspecting bot-generated engagement. Fourth, users contested platform governance: some perceived moderation as inconsistent or opaque, while others shared tactics for evading prompt censorship through misspellings, alternative phrasing, emojis, or other languages. Despite this, many users also enforced ethical norms by discouraging the misuse of real people's images or disrespectful content. Together, these patterns highlighted how AI-mediated platforms complicate notions of reality, creativity, and rule-making in emerging digital ecosystems. Based on the findings, we discuss governance challenges in Sora and how user negotiations inform future platform governance.