Lithuania Asks NATO for Air Defense After Russian Drone Scare
The Baltic nation's foreign and defense ministers sent a letter to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Tuesday urging the alliance to quickly implement a rotational model which requires members to take turns sending air defense systems.
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New York Times
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- New York Times
Trump Tells European Leaders He Intends to Meet With Putin and Zelensky
President Trump intends to meet in person with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as soon as next week, and he plans to follow up shortly afterward with a meeting between himself, Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the plan. Mr. Trump disclosed his plans in a call with European leaders on Wednesday, the people said. The meetings would include only those three men, and would not include any European counterparts. The European leaders, who have tried to play a coordinating role on meetings to end the violence between Russia and Ukraine while supporting their European neighbor, appeared to accept what Mr. Trump said, one of the people familiar with the call said. It was not immediately clear if Mr. Putin or Mr. Zelensky have agreed to the plan Mr. Trump described. But Mr. Zelensky was on Mr. Trump's call with European leaders, saying in a statement afterward that he had a 'conversation with President Trump' and that his and European leaders' position was that 'the war must end,' but 'an honest end.' The call also included the leader of the United Kingdom, the German chancellor and the NATO secretary general, along with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Mr. Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff. Mr. Trump gave some details of the call in a post on his social media site, saying Mr. Witkoff had met for several hours in Russia with Mr. Putin. He did not mention his plans for his own summits. 'Afterwards, I updated some of our European Allies,' Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social. 'Everyone agrees this War must come to a close, and we will work towards that in the days and weeks to come. Thank you for your attention to this matter!' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Spain rules out buying F-35, choosing between Eurofighter or FCAS
MADRID (Reuters) -Spain is no longer considering the option of buying U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets and is choosing between European-made Eurofighter and the so-called Future Combat Air System (FCAS), a defence ministry spokesperson said on Wednesday. The spokesperson was confirming an earlier report by El Pais newspaper that the government had shelved plans to buy the F-35, which is manufactured by U.S. aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. Asked to comment on the matter, Lockheed Martin said in a statement: "Foreign military sales are government-to-government transactions, and this matter is best addressed by the U.S. or Spanish government." The government had earmarked 6.25 billion euros ($7.24 billion) in its 2023 budget to buy new fighter jets, El Pais said. But the Spanish government's plan to spend most of the additional 10.5 billion euros for defence this year in Europe made it impossible to acquire the U.S.-made fighter jets, the newspaper reported. Spain's Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced plans earlier this year to increase spending on defence to meet the current NATO target of 2% of gross domestic product in 2025. However he has refused to raise spending to 5% in the longer run despite U.S. pressure on all NATO allies to do so. Sanchez's position was heavily criticized by U.S. President Donald Trump, who threatened to impose additional tariffs on the country's goods. The U.S. embassy in Madrid did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the F-35 issue. Eurofighter is manufactured by Airbus, BAE systems and Leonardo, while FCAS is being developed by Dassault Aviation, Airbus and Indra Sistemas. ($1 = 0.8634 euros) Sign in to access your portfolio
Geek Wire
2 hours ago
- Geek Wire
AI chatbots sway political opinions – but education could offer protection, UW study finds
University of Washington graduate student Jillian Fisher presenting at the Association for Computational Linguistics in Vienna, Austria, on July 28. (UW Photo) If you've faced the frustrating challenge of trying to pull a friend or family member with opposing political views into your camp, maybe let a chatbot make your case. New research from the University of Washington found that politically biased chatbots could nudge Democrats and Republicans toward opposing viewpoints. But the study reveals a more concerning implication: bias embedded in the large language models that power these chatbots can unknowingly influence people's opinions, potentially affecting voting and policy decisions. '[It] is kind of like two sides of a coin. On one hand, we're saying that these models affect your decision making downstream. But on the other hand … this may be an interesting tool to bridge political divide,' said author Jillian Fisher, a UW doctoral student in statistics and in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Jillian Fisher, University of Washington doctoral student in statistics and in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. (UW Photo) Fisher and her colleagues presented their findings on July 28 at the Association for Computational Linguistics in Vienna, Austria. The underlying question that the researchers set out to answer was whether bias in LLMs can shape public opinions — just as political bias in news outlets can. The issue is of growing importance as people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for information gathering and decision-making. While engineers don't necessarily set out to build biased models, the technology is trained on information of varying quality and the many decisions made by model designers can skew the LLMs, Fisher said. The researchers recruited 299 participants (150 Republicans, 149 Democrats) for two experiments designed to measure the influence of biased AI. The study used ChatGPT given its widespread usage. In one test, they asked participants about their opinions on four obscure political issues: covenant marriage, unilateralism, multifamily zoning and the Lacey Act of 1900, which restricts the import of environmentally dangerous plants and animals. Participants were then allowed to engage with ChatGPT to better inform their stance and then asked again for their opinion of the issue. In the other test, participants played the role of a city mayor, allocating a $100 budget for education, welfare, public safety and veteran services. Then they shared their budget decisions with the chatbot, discussed the allocations, and redistributed the funds. The variable in the study was that ChatGPT was either operating from a neutral perspective, or was instructed by the researchers to respond as a 'radical left U.S. Democrat' or a 'radical right U.S. Republican.' Diagram illustrating an AI bias study conducted by researchers at the University of Washington. (UW Image) The biased chatbots successfully influenced participants regardless of their political affiliation, pulling them toward the LLM's assigned perspective. For example, Democrats allocated more funds for public safety after consulting with conservative-leaning bots, while Republicans budgeted more for education after interacting with liberal versions. Republicans did not move further right to a statistically significant degree, likely due to what researchers called a 'ceiling effect' — meaning they had little room to become more conservative. The study dug deeper to characterize how the model responded and what strategies were most effective. ChatGPT used a combination of persuasion — such as appealing to fear, prejudice and authority or using loaded language and slogans — and framing, which includes making arguments based on health and safety, fairness and equality, and security and defense. Interestingly, the framing arguments proved more impactful than persuasion. The results confirmed the suspicion that the biased bots could influence opinions, Fisher said. 'What was surprising for us is that it also illuminated ways to mitigate this bias.' The study found that people who had some prior understanding of artificial intelligence were less impacted by the opinionated bots. That suggests more widespread, intentional AI education can help users guard against that influence by making them aware of potential biases in the technology, Fisher said. 'AI education could be a robust way to mitigate these effects,' Fisher said. 'Regardless of what we do on the technical side, regardless of how biased the model is or isn't, you're protecting yourself. This is where we're going in the next study that we're doing.' Additional authors of the research are the UW's Katharina Reinecke, Yulia Tsvetkov, Shangbin Feng, Thomas Richardson and Daniel W. Fisher; Stanford University's Yejin Choi and Jennifer Pan; and Robert Aron of ThatGameCompany. The study was peer-reviewed for the conference, but has not been published in an academic journal.
