Author: The Nexus Report

[ad_1] Israel has made an intervention into the Labor party’s internal processes, publicly criticising a draft policy platform that it claims risks blaming Israel for the Gaza conflict while giving “insufficient attention” to the role of Hamas.The Israeli embassy in Canberra issued a four-page statement on Monday challenging the proposed positions on Palestine, Hamas and settler violence in the West Bank, due to be debated at this week’s Labor national conference.“The Embassy of Israel notes these policy motions are still in draft form, and will continue to engage constructively with the Australian Labor Party through the usual diplomatic channels,” the…

[ad_1] Jules Von Hep has wanted a baby ever since he can remember. For many people that dream is straightforward to realise – but, as a gay man, he has always known it would take years of saving and searching.The only way he can have a biological child is to use a surrogate, which costs tens of thousands of pounds, and it often takes years of searching to find the right match. For Von Hep, it has been an “incredibly painful, incredibly expensive” process.“I’ve always known that surrogacy is the option I wanted to go down. That, really, has led…

[ad_1] The models were even more likely to stereotype people by demographic group than the human participants in the original study. On the study’s segregation scale, where 2 means every group has been completely confined to its own job niche, human participants scored 0.84. The models scored roughly 65% higher, with OpenAI’s reasoning model o3 scoring 1.83, close to the maximum possible. That’s because LLMs “really are eager to create generalizations from limited data,” says Ryan Liu, a PhD student at Princeton University and a coauthor of the study, which was published in a paper at ICML in Seoul in…

[ad_1] Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, and the UK government have invested in a £2bn British artificial intelligence startup that is aiming to become the “search engine for rare materials” that accelerates the next wave of technological breakthroughs.The Cambridge-based CuspAI has raised $450m (£330m) in funding from investors including Bezos and the government’s sovereign AI fund, valuing the two-year old business at $2.6bn.The company has launched the AI Materials Foundry, a coalition of more than 48 tech companies, industrial firms and research facilities, with the aim of building software underpinned by artificial intelligence to discover and develop new materials for chipmakers…

[ad_1] The journalist Edward Stourton has died aged 68, it has been announced.The BBC Radio 4 presenter was best known for fronting current affairs programmes including Today, World at One and its religious and ethical current affairs series Sunday.He died on Saturday surrounded by his family after being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014, the BBC said in a statement.Former colleagues paid tribute to the man they called an outstanding broadcaster.“It’s far too soon to lose Ed,” said Jonathan Munro, who runs BBC News and Current Affairs. “I worked as his producer when he was ITN’s diplomatic editor – unflappable…

[ad_1] Andy Burnham to become new prime minister and lay out ‘10-year plan’ for the UK in No 10 speechGood morning. Today we are getting a new PM. It is the sixth time this has happened in just over a decade (Theresa May replaced David Cameron on 13 July 2016), and so in some respects there is nothing very new or surprising about this. Yet the process has been unusual. In the past, when parties in power have replaced a PM, generally they have opted for someone popular with their own MPs, but less popular than their predecessor with the…

[ad_1] A British YouTuber and musician bit and slapped a young female fan while he was raping her after a gig in Western Australia, a court has been told.Yung Filly, 30, has pleaded not guilty to six counts of sexually penetrating a 20-year-old woman without consent in a Perth hotel room in September 2024.The rapper, whose real name is Andres Felipe Valencia Barrientos, also denies impeding the woman’s breathing by applying pressure to her neck and three counts of assault occasioning bodily harm.Barrientos and the woman initially engaged in consensual sex in the performer’s room at the Intercontinental Hotel, prosecutor…

[ad_1] The former attorney general Mark Dreyfus has called on governments to consider banning protests outside synagogues and Jewish schools, invoking a high court decision allowing restrictions outside abortion clinics.The federal Labor backbencher told the antisemitism royal commission the laws should be considered in light of a 2019 high court decision upholding safe access zone laws in Victoria and Tasmania, which prohibit protests within 150 metres of abortion clinics.“The high court said that kind of law directed at reducing distress and anxiety to Australians who need to attend an abortion clinic is within the constraints of the implied freedom of…

[ad_1] Retired civil servants have been failed by the decision to outsource their pension scheme, the government has admitted, and the maladministration meant some were left waiting up to a year for payments.Multiple members of the civil service pension scheme, run by the private company Capita since December, have come forward to say they are unable to afford rent and have been forced to use food banks after being left without an income.An estimated 17,000 relatives of deceased claimants are also facing financial hardship as chaos at the scheme leads to delays in payments to them.The Cabinet Office has confirmed…

[ad_1] The jerry-built bordello at the foot of Vila Cururu, an illegal gold-mining settlement at the heart of Brazil’s most desecrated Indigenous territory, was a hive of depravity until just a few weeks ago.Inebriated prospectors huddled around wooden tables, swigging beer and Scotch whisky, and ogling pole-dancing sex workers before going with them to shacks behind the brothel.The wreckage of the destroyed bordello in Vila Cururu. Photograph: João Laet/The GuardianThe encircling encampment also teemed with intruders as hordes of miners used pickaxes and explosives to burrow deep into the hillsides and savanna in search of treasure.“They wiped out everything. They…