The Director of a Raunchy 3-Hour Dracula Movie Says AI Is Gross and Slimy. That's Why He Used It Radu Jude is the internet's favorite filmmaker. In 2021, the Romanian writer-director bagged the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for, a black comedy about a school teacher whose career is threatened when a hardcore porno she makes with her husband goes viral. Shot largely on the streets of Bucharest during Covid-19 lockdowns, the film documents the eerie, empty aesthetic of urban centers in the era and captures real citizens snarling and cursing at the camera and at the film's lead actress. His follow-up, 2023's, nailed a different strain of post-Covid alienation. Its heroine, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), toils away 9 to 5 making shady workplace safety videos for a faceless multinational while moonlighting on TikTok, pretending to be a misogynist influencer (modeled after Romania's own model of toxic masculinity, Andrew Tate).

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Russian forces killed four people, including a 12-year-old girl, and injured 13 in an attack on Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, on Sunday night, Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv's military administration, wrote in a post on Telegram. Those killed also included staff and patients at a cardiology centre, Tkachenko added.

As urbanization and climate change progress, urban heat island effects are becoming more frequent and severe. To formulate effective mitigation plans, cities require detailed air temperature data. However, predictive analytics methods based on conventional machine learning models and limited data infrastructure often provide inaccurate predictions, especially in underserved areas. In this context, geospatial foundation models trained on unstructured global data demonstrate strong generalization and require minimal fine-tuning, offering an alternative for predictions where traditional approaches are limited. This study fine-tunes a geospatial foundation model to predict urban land surface temperatures under future climate scenarios and explores its response to land cover changes using simulated vegetation strategies. The fine-tuned model achieved pixel-wise downscaling errors below 1.74 °C and aligned with ground truth patterns, demonstrating an extrapolation capacity up to 3.62 °C.

Fighter jets from the UK will join Nato allies in defending Polish airspace after last week's incursion of Russian drones, the defence secretary has confirmed. RAF Typhoon jets will fly air defence missions over Poland as part of the military alliance's mission to bolster the eastern flank. Other allies including Denmark, Germany and France are already taking part - a jet from the latter was scrambled earlier on Monday in response to another potential incursion by Russian drones. Nato said that alert was quickly over. Tensions have risen across Europe since Poland accused Russia of the incident, which saw 19 drones enter its territory.

Russian military exercises near NATO borders follow the recent incursion of Russian drones into the airspace of Poland and Romania, further stoking tensions with the West. On Sunday, Russia released images of its launch of a 3M22 Zircon hypersonic missile from a frigate in the Barents Sea, in the Arctic Ocean, near NATO borders. The launch comes against a backdrop of rising tensions with the West, just days after several Russian drones violated the airspace of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries Poland and Romania. The Zircon test is part of the Zapad 2025 joint maneuvers with Belarus, a week of military exercises aimed at assessing defensive and coordination capabilities between the two allied countries. It also serves to show that Russia's military force has not lost its strength, despite heavy losses more than three years after the start of the invasion of Ukraine .

Romania says a Russian drone has breached its airspace - the second Nato country to report such an incursion. Romanian fighter jets were in the air monitoring a Russian attack in Ukraine on Saturday and were able to track the drone near Ukraine's southern border, the defence ministry said in a statement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the incursion could not be a mistake - it was an obvious expansion of the war by Russia. Moscow has not commented on the Romanian claims. On Wednesday, Poland said it had shot down at least three Russian drones which had entered its airspace.

Russia hit pipelines in Ukraine, sparking bright flames and plumes of smoke seen from Romania. Russia narrowly avoided an armed skirmish with Romania, a member of the NATO alliance, after striking just a half mile from its border. Romanian defense officials believe the new law passed by parliament explicitly allowing its armed forces to shoot down Russian drones that fly over its territory prevented the Kremlin from incurring on its territory. Russia struck a gas distribution center in the Ismail Area of Ukraine with Shahed kamikaze drones on Tuesday and Wednesday, so close to Romania's border that Bucharest deployed F-16 aircraft to monitor. No unauthorized intrusions were reported.

Russia hit pipelines in Ukraine, sparking bright flames and plumes of smoke seen from Romania. Romania was forced to scramble F-16 jets after Russia carried out a strike just half a mile from the NATO nation's territory. The country's Ministry of National Defense (MApN) confirmed in a post on X that Russia carried out a drone attack near its border. "On the night of August 5-6, the Russian forces launched a massive drone attack on the civilian infrastructure in the Ismail area, Ukraine, in the vicinity of the border with Romania," Romania's defense ministry wrote in a post on X. "The radar systems of the MApN detected air targets in Ukrainian space, close to Tulcea County. At 1:10a.m., the population in the north of the county was warned via RO-Alert," the ministry added.

Analysing and understanding the transmission and evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic is mandatory to be able to design the best social and medical policies, foresee their outcomes and deal with all the subsequent socio-economic effects. We address this important problem from a computational and machine learning perspective. More specifically, we want to statistically estimate all the relevant parameters for the new coronavirus COVID-19, such as the reproduction number, fatality rate or length of infectiousness period, based on Romanian patients, as well as be able to predict future outcomes. This endeavor is important, since it is well known that these factors vary across the globe, and might be dependent on many causes, including social, medical, age and genetic factors. We use a recently published improved version of SEIR, which is the classic, established model for infectious diseases. We want to infer all the parameters of the model, which govern the evolution of the pandemic in Romania, based on the only reliable, true measurement, which is the number of deaths. Once the model parameters are estimated, we are able to predict all the other relevant measures, such as the number of exposed and infectious people. To this end, we propose a self-supervised approach to train a deep convolutional network to guess the correct set of Modified-SEIR model parameters, given the observed number of daily fatalities. Then, we refine the solution with a stochastic coordinate descent approach. We compare our deep learning optimization scheme with the classic grid search approach and show great improvement in both computational time and prediction accuracy. We find an optimistic result in the case fatality rate for Romania which may be around 0.3% and we also demonstrate that our model is able to correctly predict the number of daily fatalities for up to three weeks in the future.

The Tate brothers left the Sunshine State Thursday ahead of an expected court appearance in Romania, but influencer and former MMA fighter Andrew Tate says he'll be back. Andrew Tate is back in America, forcing us to confront his perverse messaging to a subset of America's young men. But what we really need to come to grips with are the social conditions in our culture that created an opening for this men's rights Frankenstein. Tate, 38, is a former professional kickboxer facing sex trafficking charges in Romania, serious enough that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis insists the podcast star is not welcome in the Sunshine State, where he landed earlier this week; the Florida attorney general is now investigating Tate and his brother Tristan. ANDREW TATE SAYS HE PLANS TO LIVE IN FLORIDA DESPITE'HEE HAW' OVER RETURN TO US SOIL Tate made a fortune off of a "webcam model" (read: porn) business, then began selling online courses ostensibly teaching alienated boys and young men how to become alpha males.