With Donald Trump's actions in Greenland, Minneapolis, and Venezuela, a foreign enemy could not invent a better chain of events to wreck the standing of the United States. Imagine you were Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping and you woke up a year ago having magically been given command of puppet strings that control the White House. Your explicit geopolitical goal is to undermine trust in the United States on the world stage. You want to destroy the Western rules-based order that has preserved peace and security for 80 years, which allowed the US to triumph as an economic superpower and beacon of hope and innovation for the world. What exactly would you do differently with your marionette other than enact the ever more reckless agenda that Donald Trump has pursued since he became president last year?

Fifty years after her death in New York, Hannah Arendt has become the most popular philosopher of our time. For good reason: Her views are just as timely as ever. It must be so nice to play Hannah Arendt. No fewer than five actresses are on stage this evening at the Deutsches Theater Berlin to portray the philosopher. The piece is an adaptation of the graphic novel by American illustrator Ken Krimstein about the philosopher's life, called The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt," combined with scenes from the famous interview that journalist Günter Gaus conducted with Arendt in 1964 for German public broadcaster ZDF. The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 49/2025 (November 28th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL. They play Arendt and a few of her contemporaries, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the writer Walter Benjamin, her husband Heinrich Blücher. There is a great deal of speech in the play, especially from Arendt herself. The places of her life are ticked off, her ...

From sugar shortages to military contracts, World War II helped make M&Ms and Hershey's bars into symbols of American abundance. A 1940s Milky Way ad shows candy keeping pilots smiling through the war. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Every year, Hershey manufactures 373 million of its signature milk chocolate bars . While the company doesn't release exact stats on Halloween sales, you can bet a lot of those end up in plastic Jack O'Lantern-shaped pails.

Oral histories are vital records of lived experience, particularly within communities affected by systemic injustice and historical erasure. Effective and efficient analysis of their oral history archives can promote access and understanding of the oral histories. However, Large-scale analysis of these archives remains limited due to their unstructured format, emotional complexity, and high annotation costs. This paper presents a scalable framework to automate semantic and sentiment annotation for Japanese American Incarceration Oral History. Using LLMs, we construct a high-quality dataset, evaluate multiple models, and test prompt engineering strategies in historically sensitive contexts. Our multiphase approach combines expert annotation, prompt design, and LLM evaluation with ChatGPT, Llama, and Qwen. We labeled 558 sentences from 15 narrators for sentiment and semantic classification, then evaluated zero-shot, few-shot, and RAG strategies. For semantic classification, ChatGPT achieved the highest F1 score (88.71%), followed by Llama (84.99%) and Qwen (83.72%). For sentiment analysis, Llama slightly outperformed Qwen (82.66%) and ChatGPT (82.29%), with all models showing comparable results. The best prompt configurations were used to annotate 92,191 sentences from 1,002 interviews in the JAIOH collection. Our findings show that LLMs can effectively perform semantic and sentiment annotation across large oral history collections when guided by well-designed prompts. This study provides a reusable annotation pipeline and practical guidance for applying LLMs in culturally sensitive archival analysis. By bridging archival ethics with scalable NLP techniques, this work lays the groundwork for responsible use of artificial intelligence in digital humanities and preservation of collective memory. GitHub: https://github.com/kc6699c/LLM4OralHistoryAnalysis.

Waves of Ukrainian drones have hit Moscow in recent days as the Russian capital prepares for the country's most important national holiday, Victory Day, this week. Russia celebrates May 9 as Victory Day to mark the defeat of Nazi forces in World War II. The day involves a major military parade, with leaders of Russia's allies often in attendance. But this year, the run-up to the day has been clouded by a warning from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has said Kyiv cannot guarantee the safety of the foreign leaders attending the parade in Moscow. Here is more about Ukraine's attacks, Victory Day and why it is significant. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Tuesday that Russia's air defence systems shot down 19 drones flying towards Moscow from different directions.

After more than a year of Israeli bombing, tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, and a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the world was largely united in saying "enough is enough". United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution 12667 in December was clear in its demand: An immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Countries as diverse as Vietnam, Zimbabwe and Colombia echoed that call. And yet, bucking that consensus were nine "no" votes – chief among them, as is typical when it comes to resolutions calling for Israel to adhere to international law or human rights, was the United States. The US has provided unwavering support to Israel throughout its war on Gaza, even as Israel faces accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its prime minister has an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant to his name.

Fox News co-anchor John Roberts has the latest after President-elect Donald Trump nominates Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg to serve as assistant to the president and special envoy to Ukraine and Russia on'America Reports.' In the ancient world, the Pax Romana was a legendary historical period during which the western world, under the influence of the Roman Empire, enjoyed 200 years of relative peace, stability and prosperity. Commencing its founding under Caesar Augustus and ending with the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Pax Romana was marked by lower levels of violence, increasing trade and territorial expansion that saw peak Rome preside over around one-third of the global population. Since that time, there have been a number of eras so similarly named, but none as dynamic as the current one: Pax Americana. Typically dated from the conclusion of World War II in 1945, the Pax Americana is the era of peace, prosperity and progress American power has offered the world since partnering with our allies to slay fascism and confront communism.

This paper introduces KnowHalu, a novel approach for detecting hallucinations in text generated by large language models (LLMs), utilizing step-wise reasoning, multi-formulation query, multi-form knowledge for factual checking, and fusion-based detection mechanism. As LLMs are increasingly applied across various domains, ensuring that their outputs are not hallucinated is critical. Recognizing the limitations of existing approaches that either rely on the self-consistency check of LLMs or perform post-hoc fact-checking without considering the complexity of queries or the form of knowledge, KnowHalu proposes a two-phase process for hallucination detection. In the first phase, it identifies non-fabrication hallucinations--responses that, while factually correct, are irrelevant or non-specific to the query. The second phase, multi-form based factual checking, contains five key steps: reasoning and query decomposition, knowledge retrieval, knowledge optimization, judgment generation, and judgment aggregation. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that KnowHalu significantly outperforms SOTA baselines in detecting hallucinations across diverse tasks, e.g., improving by 15.65% in QA tasks and 5.50% in summarization tasks, highlighting its effectiveness and versatility in detecting hallucinations in LLM-generated content.

"Father of the Video Game" Ralph Baer escaped Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany as a teen and served in the U.S. Army in WWII. After coming of age in tough times, he felt driven to bring "more fun and whimsy" into the world. Ralph Baer's childhood was stolen by the Nazis. The German-born Jew gained a semblance of revenge overseas, imagining a new way for children of all ages to play. Ralph Baer invented video games.

Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, former Pence National Security adviser, weighs in on reports that China is working to establish a military base in Cuba. This month, 79 years ago, Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II. The greatest amphibious invasion in human history was a product of unprecedented levels of planning, heroism, sacrifice, and new technology. Scientists, service members, and industrialists came together to develop and build underwater pipelines, artificial harbors, specialized landing craft, and tide prediction equipment. Everyone had a job to do – and everyone did it as one team in the fight.