Ketvirtadienio vakarą 14 abiem JAV partijoms atstovaujančių senatorių grupė paragino prezidentą Donaldą Trumpą atšaukti Rusijos prezidentui Vladimirui Putinui skirtą kvietimą dalyvauti šių metų gruodį Majamyje vyksiančiame Didžiojo dvidešimtuko (G20) viršūnių susitikime, praneša „The Washington Post“.

Šeštadienį ciklonas pamažu jau atsitraukinės, būsime pietrytiniame jo pakraštyje. Vis tik debesuotumas dar išliks didelis, pragiedrulių padaugės popietę vakarinėje šalies dalyje. Protarpiais palis daugelyje šalies vietų.

Such strikes aim to disrupt "people's ability to stay connected, study, work", says Ukraine's president.

The pontiff delivered the warning on the first day of his trip to France on Friday.

His stake in DRJB Holdings has entitled him to almost half of its £85.5m in dividend payments.

Manchester City have been found guilty of breaking the majority of the 115 financial rules they were accused of breaching.

LONDON — Andy Burnham flew to New York this week with a dream: the U.K. would set itself up on the world stage as a leading light in AI safety. He didn’t bank on Donald Trump immediately tearing that idea to shreds. The new U.K. prime minister said the country would use its upcoming G20 presidency to set international principles on AI, and use its world-renowned AI Security Institute to test the latest AI models and cement its role as a global AI power player. Within the space of a week, however, Trump trashed any hopes that America will participate in global agreements on AI and POLITICO revealed that AISI’s usually privileged access to new AI models is now being delayed by the White House – which told leading AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic not to share their models with the U.K. until U.S. testers have finished ascertaining that they don’t pose a threat to American systems. So if Burnham wants to stick to his plan of making U.K. the center for brokering international AI harmony he has to figure out how to bring the U.S. onside, or else press on without the U.K.’s closest ally. When approached by POLITICO, a U.K. government spokesperson said: “The U.K. is a world leader in AI security, and the AI Security Institute continues to work closely with the U.S. government, international partners and leading AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic.” Special relationship problems The U.K. already has a track record for convening global meetings on AI safety, but it has also tended to stick by the U.S. when deciding whether to sit out specific international agreements. In 2023 the U.K. hosted the Bletchley Park Summit on AI safety, which produced an agreement on the opportunities and risks of AI signed by 28 countries, crucially including the U.S. and China. However, at the Paris iteration of the summit in 2025 the U.K. declined to sign a new declaration on the ethical development of AI alongside the U.S. This week at the U.N. General Assembly, Finland and Norway brought a declaration on frontier AI safety to ensure human oversight and suggested a global supervisory regime. It was adopted by 22 countries on the sidelines of the UNGA, but not the U.S. or U.K. Bringing the U.S. to the table on any international agreement will now prove a delicate dance. According to a person familiar with U.K. government thinking, granted anonymity to disclose private discussions, the Burnham administration does want to drive international cooperation but is worried that signing up to formal pacts at this point could alienate the White House. The risks of sticking by Trump Mounting political frustration with the U.K. on AI means there are also concerns that the likes of France, Canada and EU “will cut us out [of brokering] if they can,” said Wendy Hall, computer scientist and a U.K. representative in U.N. efforts on AI. One of the countries that did sign the 22-country pact earlier this week was Australia, whose prime minister Anthony Albanese used an address at the U.N. to reveal his country’s Medicare site had been hacked by OpenAI agents and health records stolen. “That’s not a ‘rogue agent,’” said Gina Neff, executive director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, “It’s literally a cybercrime against a state. Now, if the U.S. won’t rein in these companies, other countries will be faced with no choice: they have to defend the realm.” Testing times Both Burnham and his foreign secretary Ed Miliband stressed at UNGA that the U.K.’s AISI gives the country an edge on AI safety, but the reports that AISI’s access to models is being delayed by America cast doubt over that claim. AI companies hand their models over to AISI voluntarily, on the basis that it has a deep bench of expertise. But AISI continuing on a voluntary basis is “going to be difficult to sell to domestic audiences if frontier AI companies are no longer playing ball,” said Neff. Hall said that she “can’t see a U.K.-led effort being very strong at the moment but we need to be part of the conversation. Our strong card is AISI. If that is weakened, then our efforts to lead on AI assurance and safety are weakened.” The U.K. government spokesperson said: “We will continue to work closely with the U.S. and other partners on the testing of advanced AI, while building our own rigorous scientific understanding of these systems and ensuring our approach is grounded in the evidence.” The China question China has shown a lot more appetite for global agreements around AI than America, and when President Xi Jinping met with Trump on Thursday the technology was high on the agenda. “Burnham’s call for collaboration on AI standards provides Xi with an opportunity to demonstrate the gulf between the present U.S. administration,” said Aled Lloyd Owen, chief of staff at Responsible Ai, a non-profit for international responsible AI research.  “China is seizing the initiative by advocating for relatively uncontroversial measures and a cooperative approach that will be increasingly challenging for other advocates of cooperation to ignore,” he added. That means if the U.S. refuses to be brought to the table on AI, the U.K. could turn increasingly to China as the next largest global power. The U.K and China already have ties on AI, said Isabella Wilkinson, Senior Research Fellow for the Digital Society Initiative at Chatham House. “The U.K. and China have had very close exchanges on issues of technology, policy, and cybersecurity in the past,” Wilkinson told a briefing ahead of Xi and Trump’s meeting. Bridging the divide between China and the U.S. could be a way for the U.K. to bring America into the fold, Neff said. “Burnham has some great diplomatic tools in the toolkit to be able to offer the Americans a way of third-party evaluation for safety, while coordinating with allied countries to ensure that their own systems are safe and secure,” she said. For Burnham to achieve his goal of the U.K. being treated as the world’s “honest broker” on AI, he’ll have to decide how much pressure he wants to exert on its largest, and at present most unpredictable, ally. “As the prime minister said, we are going to put AI at the heart of our G20 presidency and will work towards agreeing a single set of global principles and standards to ensure the transparency and access we need to increase our preparedness – and to ensure that AI development is safe,” the U.K. government spokesperson said. Emilio Casalicchio contributed reporting.

The largest opposition party in the Netherlands has chosen to join the European Socialists rather than the Greens in an internal vote, the results of which were announced Friday. Some 65% of votes cast by members of Progressive Netherlands (PRO), which was formed earlier this year when the Dutch GreenLeft (GroenLinks) and Labour (PvdA) parties merged, backed joining the Party of European Socialists instead of the European Green Party. Before voting began, an advisory committee to the party recommended joining the PES, arguing that membership would give the party greater influence at the European level. “There are only three European political families represented at all three levels [of theEU],” the advisory committee wrote in a report, adding that the PES has “prime ministers, the President of the European Council, European Commissioners, and leaders of national parties.” “The Greens … have fewer ministers, no members of the European Commission, and noheads of government; consequently, their preliminary consultations carry less weight,” the report went on. PRO leader Jesse Klaver joined a PES meeting ahead of the European Council summit in June, alongside Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. What about the MEPs? European political parties and political groups in the European Parliament are closelylinked, but they are not the same thing. A PRO spokesperson told POLITICO that the party’s eight MEPs are likely to remain intheir current parliamentary groups: four in the Socialists and Democrats and fourin the Greens/European Free Alliance. The spokesperson said PRO would likely review the arrangement ahead of the nextEuropean Parliament election in 2029. The choice of European party will, however, have implications for the allocation of EUfunding. Most EU cash for European political parties is distributed according to their share of MEPs. Under the rules, the PES could count all eight PRO MEPs toward its funding share, even if four remain in the Greens. The Dutch party told POLITICO one option would be for the four MEPs from the former GroenLinks side to technically leave PRO, allowing them to be counted separately under the funding rules.

Iran's FM says the "choice rests with the US" to approve the proposed seven-day proposal to reopen Hormuz.

US appeals courts have varied on regulation of prediction markets, opening the door to US Supreme Court debate.

Russian strikes in Kyiv, Netanyahu in New York, floods in Japan and the Asian Games – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists Continue reading...

Thélyson Orélien had been in the running to win a top literary prize before the AI claim emerged on social mediaThe organisers of France’s most prestigious literary prize said they had removed a critically acclaimed novel by a Canadian-Haitian writer from the longlist after an anonymous online account claimed the book was “almost entirely” written by AI.The Académie Goncourt, a Paris-based literary organisation, said on Friday its decision to withdraw Thélyson Orélien’s novel C’était ça ou mourir (It Was That or Die) was “driven by the desire to preserve the integrity of the Goncourt prize and the academy itself, whose central role is to promote and honour literature written by women and men”. Continue reading...

New survey puts South African city ahead of 24 other short- and long-haul destinations

Pledge comes as container shipping through key Bab al-Mandeb Strait reaches highest level in almost three years

"For the pope, for God, make some noise!": Blending gospel and contemporary Christian music, 80,000 young Catholics filled the Stade de France on Friday evening to proclaim their faith. They gave Pope Leo XIV a rock-star welcome as he arrived at the stadium in his 'popemobile'.

Yemen’s Riyadh-based President Rashid al-Alimi on Friday called on ‌his people to mobilise and join the armed ‌forces while offering a general amnesty to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels who have seized swaths of Yemen's Red Sea coast and imposed a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia.

The French leader called on international oversight to ensure the most advanced systems mankind has ever created, are not controlled by a small number of powerful actors, or get used as instruments to oppress people.

The United Nations says it has received just one-fifth of the funding needed to prepare for food crises linked to the El Niño weather phenomenon.