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' Russian forces launched artillery and drone attacks on Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region on Saturday, killing a 68-year-old man, wounding three others and causing fires to break out in residential buildings, according to Ukraine's emergency service. Russian shelling also killed another person in the Kramatorsk district of Ukraine's Donetsk region, the service said.

The UN Security Council is expected to vote on a draft resolution backing Donald Trump's peace plan for Gaza. The text, submitted by the US, would give a mandate for the deployment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) and to set up transitional governance there. The US says multiple unnamed countries have offered to contribute to the ISF, though it is unclear whether it would be required to ensure Hamas disarms or function as a peacekeeping force. Its formation is a central plank of Trump's 20-point plan which last month brought a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in their two-year war. The draft also raises the possibility of a Palestinian state - something Israel strongly opposes.

On Wednesday, officials and diplomats sounded the alarm on A.I.'s ability to undermine the integrity of information and fabricate fake voice and video tapes. They also warned that it posed a threat to cybersecurity and would enable the rise of autonomous weapons. Still, some argued that, if used responsibly and with guardrails, A.I. potentially could also help foster peace and stability. Secretary General António Guterres, who for the past year has championed efforts to regulate A.I., said that the Council had a responsibility to ensure the military use of artificial intelligence complies with international law and the U.N. Charter. "From design to deployment to decommissioning, A.I. systems must always comply with international law; military uses must be clearly regulated," Mr. Guterres said, before ending his speech with a warning and a call to action.

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for high-stake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making process, where the stakes are particularly high and political decisions can have far-reaching consequences. We introduce a novel dataset comprising publicly available UN Security Council (UNSC) records from 1994 to 2024, including draft resolutions, voting records, and diplomatic speeches. Using this dataset, we propose the United Nations Benchmark (UNBench), the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across four interconnected political science tasks: co-penholder judgment, representative voting simulation, draft adoption prediction, and representative statement generation. These tasks span the three stages of the UN decision-making process--drafting, voting, and discussing--and aim to assess LLMs' ability to understand and simulate political dynamics. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the potential and challenges of applying LLMs in this domain, providing insights into their strengths and limitations in political science. This work contributes to the growing intersection of AI and political science, opening new avenues for research and practical applications in global governance. The UNBench Repository can be accessed at: https://github.com/yueqingliang1/UNBench.

On Sunday, the world's governments made a series of commitments to transform global governance at the United Nations Summit of the Future in New York. The ambitiously named summit was described as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" to "forge a new global consensus on what our future should look like". Indeed, we are at a critical time when change is urgently needed. The world faces "a moment of historic danger", with increasingly imminent risks – from nuclear war to a planetary emergency, from persistent poverty and widening inequality to the unhindered advancement of artificial intelligence – threatening humanity's very existence. These are global challenges that cannot be solved purely at the national level: The people of the world need – and deserve – better coordinated global action.

International AI governance agreements and institutions may play an important role in reducing global security risks from advanced AI. To inform the design of such agreements and institutions, we conducted case studies of historical and contemporary international security agreements. We focused specifically on those arrangements around dual-use technologies, examining agreements in nuclear security, chemical weapons, biosecurity, and export controls. For each agreement, we examined four key areas: (a) purpose, (b) core powers, (c) governance structure, and (d) instances of non-compliance. From these case studies, we extracted lessons for the design of international AI agreements and governance institutions. We discuss the importance of robust verification methods, strategies for balancing power between nations, mechanisms for adapting to rapid technological change, approaches to managing trade-offs between transparency and security, incentives for participation, and effective enforcement mechanisms.

Over the past decade and a half, I have attended many meetings and conferences, and met many people in Western governments, think tanks and academia who have been concerned about the rise of autocracies across the world. Many of them believe that authoritarian tendencies are the biggest threat to the liberal world order and rules-based system. But I beg to differ. I believe the biggest threat to the liberal world order comes from liberal democracies and not their autocratic nemeses. That is because there is a widening chasm between the values Western governments proclaim to uphold and their actual conduct.

A godfather of AI is among hundreds of tech bosses and academics calling for an international treaty to avoid the technology's'catastrophic' risk to humanity. On the eve of the AI Safety Summit, Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio has signed an open letter warning the danger it poses'warrants immediate and serious attention'. It cites a survey that found over half of AI researchers estimate there is more than a 10 per cent chance advances in machine learning could lead to human extinction. Notably, among the signatories is one of China's leading AI academics, Professor Yui Zeng, a key representative of Beijing who is set to lead one of the sessions at the event in Bletchley Park. Government officials may well see his backing as a positive signal that China – whose invitation to the summit has proven highly controversial – is willing to cooperate on international regulation.

Washington, DC – Since its first session in 1946, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has served as a platform for world leaders and diplomats to spell out their countries' priorities and offer assessments of the problems and needs of humanity. UNGA meetings, particularly the general debate, have brought sworn enemies to the same building and allowed some of the United States' most hostile adversaries to visit New York, where the UN headquarters are located. As the assembly convenes for its annual session this week, here's a look at some unforgettable, and sometimes comical, UNGA moments. After more than four decades in power, the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi made it to the UN podium in 2009. And it was a debut to remember.