Who is Rob Jetten, tipped to become youngest Dutch prime minister? Rob Jetten's achievement in dragging his socially liberal D66 party from fifth place to the top of Dutch politics in less than two years has been extraordinary. But politically, all the stars were perfectly aligned for the 38-year-old to do so. The result of Wednesday's election is too close to call, with Jetten vying with anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders for the most seats in parliament. No other political leader commanded as much screen time during the campaign as Jetten and his smile and cheerful message resonated with voters, while his rivals sometimes struggled.

As the Netherlands gears up for a snap parliamentary election on October 29, less than halfway through parliament's usual four-year term following the collapse of the ruling coalition, the likelihood of another win for the country's far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) is mounting. An outright win is next to impossible. The Netherlands has always had a coalition government formed by a minimum of two parties due to its proportional representation electoral system, under which seats in parliament are awarded to parties in proportion to the number of votes they win. It then partnered with three other far-right parties - the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), New Social Contract (NSC), and the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) - to form a coalition government. But in June, PVV made a dramatic exit from the coalition government over a disagreement on immigration policy.

The Netherlands's data protection watchdog has cautioned citizens against consulting with artificial intelligence on how to vote, warning that popular chatbots provide a "highly distorted and polarised view" of politics. The Dutch Data Protection Authority said on Tuesday that an increasing number of voters were using AI to help decide who to vote for, despite the models offering "unreliable and clearly biased" advice. The research found that the chatbots more often recommended parties on the fringes of the political spectrum when asked to identify the three choices that best matched the policy preferences of 1,500 fictitious voter profiles. In more than half of cases, the AI models identified the hard-right Party for Freedom (PVV) or left-wing Green Left-Labour Party as the top choice, the watchdog said. Parties closer to the political middle ground - such as the right-leaning People's Party for Freedom and Democracy and the centre-left Democrats 66 - were recommended much less often, according to the watchdog.

MMS look for explosive reconnection events as it flies through the magnetopause -- the boundary region where Earth's magnetic butts up against the solar wind that flows throughout the solar system. An alert pops up in your email: The latest spacecraft observations are ready. You now have 24 hours to scour 84 hours-worth of data, selecting the most promising split-second moments you can find. The data points you choose, depending on how you rank them, will download from the spacecraft in the highest possible resolution; researchers may spend months analyzing them. Everything else will be overwritten like it was never collected at all.

Automated story plot generation is the task of generating a coherent sequence of plot events. Causal relations between plot events are believed to increase the perception of story and plot coherence. In this work, we introduce the concept of soft causal relations as causal relations inferred from commonsense reasoning. We demonstrate C2PO, an approach to narrative generation that operationalizes this concept through Causal, Commonsense Plot Ordering. Using human-participant protocols, we evaluate our system against baseline systems with different commonsense reasoning reasoning and inductive biases to determine the role of soft causal relations in perceived story quality. Through these studies we also probe the interplay of how changes in commonsense norms across storytelling genres affect perceptions of story quality.

HONG KONG/BEIJING – On the same day Donald Trump and Xi Jinping struck a trade war truce in Argentina, some 7,000 miles away Canadian authorities made an arrest that now threatens to make the U.S.-China conflict much worse. The U.S. is seeking the extradition of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Co., after convincing Canada to arrest her on Dec. 1 in connection with violating sanctions against Iran. China reacted with outrage on Wednesday, demanding that both countries move to free Meng immediately. It's hard to overstate the significance of her arrest in Beijing: Meng is the daughter of the founder of Huawei, a national champion at the forefront of Xi's efforts for China to be self-sufficient in strategic technologies. While the U.S. routinely asks allies to extradite drug lords, arms dealers and other criminals, arresting a major Chinese executive like this is rare -- if not unprecedented.

Do you have that friend you go out with to indulge on all the scrumptious (and unhealthy) delicacies L.A. has to offer? Or how about that other friend who eats organic and always makes you feel like an unhealthy chicken nugget? Chances are you have both--and you're also probably one of them. Peers can wield a lot of influence when it comes to our lifestyle choices: According to the American Psychological Association, people who enrolled in weight loss programs with friends did a better job at keeping their weight off than those who did it alone. Bryan Wilder, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and Kayla de la Haye, assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, believe there's an opportunity to optimize our peer influences to live a healthier life using artificial intelligence.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In the Netherlands, voters head to the polls tomorrow, in Europe's first big and closely watched election of the year. An ardent nationalist, running on an anti-immigrant agenda, is bidding for the prime minister's office, hoping to lead the way for similar candidates in France and Germany. The election also comes amid an escalating war of words between the Dutch government and Turkey over a referendum next month that could give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vast new powers. Just today, Erdogan accused Dutch troops of complicity in the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. That's a charge which a Dutch court had previously cleared.

Datorama, a cross-channel marketing analytics firm that's scored $50 million in funding, has introduced a voice-activated component of its platform, allowing clients to summon their previous campaign measurement data by asking their Alexa-enabled device. The new querying capability is intended to supplement the traditional dashboard reporting that marketers are accustomed to, giving them an additional way to pull quick data points in the midst of a business conversation -- during a board meeting, for example. "At the speed of conversation, there are instances where maybe you need information," said Jay Wilder, director of product marketing at Datorama. "Wouldn't it be great if you could just ask the question and get the response back immediately without friction?" The Datorama platform is integrated with Alexa.

For anyone who's heard the "Oompa Loompa" song or Frankenstein pronounced as "Fronkensteen," news of actor Gene Wilder's death on Monday cuts deeply. Wilder died from complications of Alzheimer's disease at age 83, according to his nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman. Wilder passed away in his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, late Sunday, reported the Associated Press. He had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer that originates in the lymphatic system, in 1989. Wilder was born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee and began studying acting at age 12.