The 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) concluded on Monday with artificial intelligence (AI), the Israel-Palestine conflict and the US-Israel war on Iran dominating world leaders' addresses during the general debate. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in his final address before his term ends, warned that the future of the world would be shaped by four tests: AI, climate change, wars and inequality. That is why the UN Charter - and the work of the United Nations - matter more than ever," Guterres said. Speeches ranged from calls to reform the UN to appeals for upholding international law, as the global body has been undermined by the unilateral foreign policy pushed by United States President Donald Trump. Here are the biggest takeaways from this year's summit: The situation in Palestine was a key issue among members amid Israel's ongoing genocidal war on Gaza despite the so-called "ceasefire" and escalating settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank.

'This is an apartheid regime' Does Trump have real leverage over Netanyahu? Artists in Gaza are painting murals on destroyed walls, honouring US rapper Macklemore for his support for Palestine. Despite a ceasefire agreement, Israel continues to kill Palestinians in frequent strikes across Gaza. Gaza's children return to classrooms after years of Israeli attacks

The battle over Palestine has never been fought only on the ground. For decades, Israel and its powerful political, lobbying and public-relations networks have devoted enormous resources to shaping how the conflict is understood in Washington and across the Western world. But an investigation into an Israeli-funded influence operation suggests that this campaign has entered a new and potentially more consequential arena: the artificial intelligence systems increasingly used by millions of people to determine what is true. Recent investigations exposed the Hanover Institute for Public Policy as a purported American think tank that appeared to have no real offices, identifiable scholars or meaningful institutional presence. Instead, the institute appears to have been created as a sophisticated propaganda operation aimed at shaping search engine results and influencing the answers generated by AI chatbots.

'The next stage of the Gaza genocide has begun' How important is the Rafah crossing reopening? US President Trump convenes inaugural'Board of Peace' meeting after decades of inaction on addressing core Palestinian demands to end the Israeli occupation. Al Jazeera takes a look at the international community's failures. Masked protesters arrested outside Trump's Board of Peace meeting Palestinians in Gaza say'Board of Peace' will further occupation OpenAI's Sam Altman: Global AI regulation'urgently' needed Gaza'stabilization force' commander outlines security plans Trump praises'magnificent' B-2 bombers that struck Iran in 2025 Jordan-Israel relationship'at its worst' after West Bank plans Trump's'Board of Peace' convenes for first time

Detecting political bias in news media is a complex task that requires interpreting subtle linguistic and contextual cues. Although recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have enabled automatic bias classification, the extent to which large language models (LLMs) align with human judgment still remains relatively underexplored and not yet well understood. This study aims to present a comparative framework for evaluating the detection of political bias across human annotations and multiple LLMs, including GPT, BERT, RoBERTa, and FLAN. We construct a manually annotated dataset of news articles and assess annotation consistency, bias polarity, and inter-model agreement to quantify divergence between human and model perceptions of bias. Experimental results show that among traditional transformer-based models, RoBERTa achieves the highest alignment with human labels, whereas generative models such as GPT demonstrate the strongest overall agreement with human annotations in a zero-shot setting. Among all transformer-based baselines, our fine-tuned RoBERTa model acquired the highest accuracy and the strongest alignment with human-annotated labels. Our findings highlight systematic differences in how humans and LLMs perceive political slant, underscoring the need for hybrid evaluation frameworks that combine human interpretability with model scalability in automated media bias detection.

Next week, five teens from Palestine will head to Panama to compete in one of the world's largest youth robotics competitions. To win--and then teach STEM to their peers displaced by the Israel-Hamas war. For the entirety of the past year, as the teenage roboticists of Team Palestine have been working on their latest project, their homeland has been engulfed in Israel's war with Hamas . Earlier this month, that all changed. With a fragile ceasefire in place, Israeli forces began to pull back from parts of Gaza, and the teens put the final touches on the project they hope will bring them victory: a robot that can maneuver through a series of simulated challenges based on the effects of climate change.

Can Israel survive economic isolation? Why have Spain and Italy sent ships to assist the Gaza Sumud flotilla? Italy and Spain have decided this week to dispatch naval vessels to assist the Global Sumud Flotilla on its way to break Israel's siege of Gaza. The unprecedented move to support a flotilla headed towards the Palestinian enclave comes after repeated attacks against the Sumud Flotilla, including a drone attack early on Wednesday. Israel is widely believed to be behind the attacks.

Is recognising Palestine a way to'save face' for Western leaders? This is the moment a drone launched by Yemen's Houthis exploded in the Israeli city of Eilat. Footage shows it over the southern port city before bursting into flames in a residential neighbourhood, injuring at least 22 people, after Israeli military failed to intercept it. Finland's president hails rise of global south at UNGA Estonia calls Russian jets violating its airspace a'hostile act'

Is recognising Palestine a way to'save face' for Western leaders? A Spanish naval vessel will join the Global Sumud Flotilla for Gaza to provide assistance and, if necessary, conduct rescues, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has said. Italy earlier announced it was dispatching a frigate after a night of drone attacks on the humanitarian flotilla opposed by the Israeli government. Finland's president hails rise of global south at UNGA Estonia calls Russian jets violating its airspace a'hostile act'

Is recognising Palestine a way to'save face' for Western leaders? Activists say Israeli drones carried out several attacks on the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla, dropping explosive devices near several boats but causing no injuries. Chile's president draws parallel between Gaza and Holocaust at UNGA