Two years ago, every argument about AI was about quality. The machines hallucinated court cases, absorbed biases from their training data, misspelled words in their own images, drew hands with six fingers, and couldn’t count the letters in strawberry. The confident claims that biases and hallucination errors were inherent to machines already sound quaint. Those […]

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A growing share of the world’s electric-vehicle batteries contains nickel from Obi, an Indonesian island where the mining company Harita Group has long paid for goodwill, according to alleged leaked documents published on October 22 by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). When accusations of such payments reach an Indonesian courtroom, accountability usually […]

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On October 20, 2026, a week before Israel’s elections, dozens of men were detained on suspicion of evading the draft – arrests that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “unacceptable.” The young men attend ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, religious schools, whose students were long exempt from the military service mandatory for most Israelis. A 2024 court ruling […]

The post Why ultra‑Orthodox parties will decide Netanyahu’s electoral fate appeared first on Asia Times.

Recent midlife upgrades to China’s older surface combatants highlight an ongoing debate over whether preserving naval fleet mass provides an operational edge over purely qualitative technological modernization in naval warfare. This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has carried out an extensive midlife refit of its […]

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