Over the last four years at the United Nations, the international community has witnessed an alarming trend of closer collaboration between Russia and China that poses a significant threat to the "rules-based order" the United States helped design back in 1945. This increased and renewed level of cooperation presents an unprecedented dilemma for the United States and like-minded partners: how to maintain the existing order, warts and all, when two permanent members of the UN Security Council are now working feverishly to subvert it. To many UN observers, China and Russia have now come to the shared conclusion that the UN has become a tool Washington and its allies regularly use to destabilize their regimes and diminish their global influence. Consequently, the United Nations has become a critical battleground in the current era of "Great Power" competition. During my two-plus years as the U.S. ambassador responsible for UN Security Council matters, I have seen first-hand at the UN how these two authoritarian powers repeatedly and energetically spread falsehoods alleging: U.S. Ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament Robert Wood attends a news conference at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, April 19, 2018.

Attacks on underwater cables running through strategically significant bodies of water in both the Baltic Sea and the South China Sea by Russia and China, respectively, in recent months has top officials concerned they are not "mere coincidence." Maritime sabotage efforts in both regions of the world appear to have been on the rise over the last several years, with a notable spike in recent months after at least three separate attacks occurred in as many months, beginning in November, and the top suspects are Russia and China. "The Kremlin has been running a hybrid campaign against Europe for years, ranging from spreading disinformation and cyberattacks to weaponizing energy supplies. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, these efforts have intensified dramatically," EU High Representative Kaja Kallas told Fox News Digital. "However, Russia is not the only challenge we face."

The gut-wrenching loss of an Ukraine Air Force F-16 chasing Iranian-made drones at low altitude last week is proof positive that Ukraine's air force is becoming more aggressive and capable. The daily air battles against missiles and drones over Ukraine are only a taste of what U.S. bases and allies could experience in the event of Chinese attacks. This I can tell you. Almost certainly, the pilot, identified as Col. Alexei "Moonfish" Mes, was being very aggressive in defense of his homeland. Russia had launched an attack on Ukraine with 127 missiles and 109 one-way attack drones on Aug. 26.

Rebekah Koffler discusses if the U.S. is prepared to simultaneously provide aid to Ukraine and Taiwan. An open letter recently signed by Elon Musk, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, and more than a thousand other prominent people set off alarm bells on advances in artificial intelligence (AI). The letter urged the world's leading labs to hit the brakes on this powerful technology for six months because of the "profound risks to society and humanity." A pause to consider the ramifications of this unpredictable new technology may have benefits. But our enemies will not wait while the U.S. engages in teleological discourse.

Russia has said that a division of its Bastion coastal defence missile systems has been deployed to Paramushir, one of the Kuril Islands in the north Pacific, some of which Japan claims as its territory. The move is part of a wider strengthening of Russia's defences in its vast far eastern regions, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday, partly in response to what he called United States efforts to "contain" Russia and China. Moscow's move also comes after high-level visits by Asian leaders to both sides of the Ukraine war. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, a close US ally and a key Chinese rival in East Asia, made a surprise trip to Ukraine this week, which some observers said was an attempt to upstage Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Russia. "To contain Russia and China, the United States is significantly increasing its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, strengthening its political and military links with its allies, continuing to create a new American security architecture in this region," Shoigu said in a video of his address to Russia's top brass, published by the defence ministry.

DEEPFAKE AI-generated people will be among us by 2024 and will be nearly impossible to detect, a former White House official has warned. Pictures created by artificial intelligence, increasingly smart chatbots and sophisticated deepfake videos are already becoming hard to discern from reality. The technology is only going to become more advanced - with rapid developments already smoothing out the edges and finessing the programmes. Red flags are already being raised - as some imagery created by AI can already be almost indistinguishable from the real thing apart from a few telltale inconsistencies. The pictures at the top of this article are near perfect recreations of people's faces, created using the AI driven system Generated.Photos.

China has confirmed it's joining forces with Russia to build a research station on the moon by 2035, which will rival NASA's Lunar Gateway. Confirmation of plans to build the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) came on Friday from officials at China National Space Administration (CNSA), the country's national space agency. Russia and China aim to complete basic infrastructure construction for ILRS by 2035, Wu Yanhua, CNSA deputy director, told a briefing in Beijing. ILRS will rival NASA's Lunar Gateway, which is set to play a'vital' role in the US space agency's upcoming Artemis program. However, NASA's Lunar Gateway will only orbit the moon, while ILRS will have both an orbiter and a base on the lunar surface, as well as multiple exploration rovers.

The relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and defence is a longstanding one. The first "AI winter" of the 1970s, when interest in the subject evaporated and research work all but ceased, was due to Anglosphere government and defence bodies pulling the plug on funding. It's still widely believed that telephone conversations intercepted by Five Eyes intelligance agencies under the secret Echelon initiative are scanned in bulk for keywords of interest, allowing conversations of significance to be picked out from among millions of innocuous ones: but in fact, the problem of speech recognition, one of the main applications foreseen for AI, has yet to be completely solved even today. Back in the '70s a lack of tangible results led to an exhaustion of goodwill towards AI. It's common knowledge that military and intelligence interest can propel new technologies forward, and for a long while AI was without that safety net. But the story couldn't be more different today.

Russia and China have committed to work together on a moon base and lunar space station, but it will not be ready to house astronauts until at least 2036, the two countries said. Known as the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), it will consist of a surface moon base and station in lunar orbit, with construction expected to start in 2026. The two nations have asked other international agencies to join them in the project, which will also include rovers and'hopping robots' to aid eventual inhabitants. NASA is working with the European Space Agency (ESA), as well as Canada and Japan on the Lunar Gateway, a modular crewed space station designed to operate in orbit around the moon and help astronauts reach the lunar surface from 2024. While Russia and China are working together on the moon, the two will compete in low Earth orbit, with both planning their own space station to rival the International Space Station (ISS).

Russia is developing an array of autonomous weapons platforms utilizing artificial intelligence as part of an ambitious push supported by high-tech cooperation with neighboring China. The extent to which Russia has prioritized AI in modernizing its military was featured in a report entitled "Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy in Russia," which was published Monday by the CNA nonprofit research and analysis group located in Arlington, Virginia. The report's authors worked closely with the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to produce what the organization called "the first major piece of US research that articulates contemporary Russia's main initiatives, achievements, and accomplishments in AI and autonomy efforts and places those initiatives within the broader technological landscape in Russia." "Russian military strategists have placed a premium on establishing what they refer to as'information dominance on the battlefield,'" the report stated, "and AI-enhanced technologies promise to take advantage of the data available on the modern battlefield to protect Russia's own forces and deny that advantage to the adversary." While there are significant challenges and some reservations toward ceding critical decision-making capabilities to artificial intelligence and away from human minds, trends clearly signal that Russian efforts to introduce these advanced capabilities are well underway.