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Pope Leo XIV warned Friday that a “paradise of machines” risked undermining humanity as he opened a four-day trip to France — raising existential questions about artificial intelligence, scientific progress, and human rights, the Associated Press and BBC reported.

Speaking to President Emmanuel Macron and diplomats at the Élysée Palace after an hour of talks, the pontiff cautioned against “losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines.” He also reaffirmed Vatican opposition to nuclear weapons and called the nuclear-deterrence doctrine “mistaken,” saying it was fueling a new arms race amid wars in Europe and the Middle East.

Church bells tolled when Leo’s flight landed at Paris Orly; upward of a million people are expected during the visit, which includes Lourdes and Metz. Saturday’s giant Mass on the Place de la Concorde is set for more than half a million attendees. Macron will skip papal Masses to respect France’s church-state separation; First Lady Brigitte Macron and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu are expected instead.

It is the first papal visit to France in 18 years — and Leo’s AI warning lands in the same week tech CEOs begged the U.N. for global rules while city halls race to write their own.

Sources: AP; BBC

New York City Council is taking aim at artificial intelligence — introducing a slate of bills Friday that would mandate “kill switches,” require third-party safety validation, and pay cash rewards to whistleblowers, the New York Post reported.

Council Speaker Julie Menin said the city is “fast becoming the technology and AI capital of the world” and therefore has “an even greater responsibility” to protect New Yorkers. The package heads to a rare council-wide hearing Oct. 5; Menin sent letters inviting the heads of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, SpaceX, and Meta.

Proposals would bar marketing, selling, or deploying AI systems in the five boroughs without outside expert validation of safety claims, and require a “human override that can shut down the system” for AI tools used in the city — with a $25,000 fine per offense. A separate bill would create what the council called a first-in-the-nation approach: whistleblowers rewarded from fines collected from violators they help catch.

The push follows Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan for AI firms to register in a state portal starting in November and report critical safety incidents within 72 hours. A council spokesperson said the bills target companies with offices in New York and are enforceable by the city.

Sources: New York Post (Hannah Fierick)

The United States has proposed that the United Arab Emirates host a trilateral meeting with Ukraine and Russia to discuss ending their four-and-a-half-year war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Friday, Reuters reported.

“The American side has proposed… meeting at a technical level in a three-way format,” Zelenskiy told reporters in a briefing via WhatsApp. “We are awaiting a proposal from the United States regarding the date, and the United States has suggested the Emirates as a possible location.”

Zelenskiy held talks this week with President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. After those talks, he said, Ukrainian negotiators met U.S. counterparts on specifics: “We will inform and discuss these details with the European side, the Americans will talk to the Russians, and we will return in 10 days with either a new perspective or a result.” The Kremlin said Friday a trilateral meeting with Ukraine and the U.S. could happen soon.

Zelenskiy also said he asked Trump to raise the Ukraine war in talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is on a state visit to the U.S., and that he was still awaiting feedback on winter de-escalation efforts. He warned European partners Russia would continue hybrid attacks — claims the Kremlin denies.

Sources: Reuters (Olena Harmash, Pavel Polityuk, Daniel Flynn); AP

U.S. long-dated Treasury yields jumped to their highest in more than 20 years on Thursday as a global bond selloff deepened, Reuters reported. The 30-year Treasury yield climbed to just over 5.46% — about 5.458%, the highest since 2004 — while the benchmark 10-year hit 5.14% after touching a 19-year high. U.S. 30-year mortgage rates reached 7%, around their highest in two years. Oil returned to about $105 a barrel, NBC News reported, amid the Middle East war.

Drivers include high energy costs, resilient growth, and heavy government spending. The selloff accelerated after strong U.S. business-activity data pointed to rising inflation pressures and stoked Federal Reserve rate-hike bets. New York Fed President John Williams, speaking in London, said the economy was showing “remarkable resilience,” and that markets viewing another rate hike by year-end as likely “seems… a reasonable way of thinking,” while stressing the decision remains data-dependent.

Stocks have been under pressure as yields climbed. Rising long-term rates raise borrowing costs for governments, companies, and households just as energy prices stay elevated.

Sources: Reuters (Amanda Cooper et al.); NBC News; Reuters (Williams)

Iranian airlines were barred from neighbouring countries including the UAE and Oman on Thursday after new U.S. secondary sanctions took effect — the first big hit from Washington’s push to target third-country firms that do business with Iran, Reuters reported.

The UAE’s General Civil Aviation Authority said it was suspending all flights by Iranian airlines until further notice after the U.S. deadline of September 23 for companies worldwide to stop business with Iranian airlines, aiming to ground Iran’s civil fleet. Iran’s Tasnim news agency said flights were also shut to Oman, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Baghdad, with authorities working to route to Najaf. President Trump has called the broader secondary-sanctions strategy “economic D-Day.” On Wednesday a senior Iranian official threatened to make airports “unusable” in any regional country that abides by the U.S. ban.

Separately, Saudi Arabia said it intercepted six Houthi ballistic missiles Thursday; the Houthis said they fired dozens of missiles and drones, and Saudi authorities issued alerts for Mecca, Jeddah, and Yanbu. With the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran largely stalemated for months on the battlefield, secondary sanctions mark a shift toward economic pressure beyond the combat zone.

Sources: Reuters

Alphabet’s Google said Thursday it will launch a prototype satellite next week in its first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher — a research push to see whether space could host large-scale AI computing, Reuters reported.

The mission is slated for SpaceX’s upcoming Transporter-18 rideshare with Planet Labs and will assess how Google’s AI hardware withstands launch forces, radiation, and extreme temperatures in low Earth orbit. After launch, a prototype satellite carrying Google Tensor Processing Units will test whether the chips can operate reliably in space — where radiation can cause data errors known as bit flips. Google said it ground-tested TPUs running AI workloads at the University of California, Davis, but orbital testing is needed for the real environment.

Cooling is a separate challenge: with no airflow in vacuum, the design combines heat pipes with radiators. Experts say commercial orbital data centers remain years away given launch costs, engineering limits, and satellite production bottlenecks. The first Suncatcher flight is meant to gather data and spot failure points, not prove an operational orbital data center. Google aims to launch two satellites in 2027 to test high-bandwidth laser links for future computing clusters. SpaceX and Starcloud are also pursuing LEO data centers to tap near-continuous sunlight and sidestep terrestrial power constraints.

Sources: Reuters (Akash Sriram)

A fire at a Starlink satellite station in central Poland was a deliberate “act of sabotage,” the government said Thursday, the BBC reported.

Polish Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said the blaze in Wola Krobowska in the Masovian Voivodeship was “deliberately designed to disable the station… disrupting internet access for various institutions, including the Ukrainian army.” He told public broadcaster TVP Info an investigation was ongoing but “many indications suggest” the attack fits a “new Russian doctrine of attack.” The Kremlin has not commented. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he disliked labeling sabotage without “100% certainty, but it looks bad.” The state-owned station — which routes internet traffic through Poland to countries including Ukraine using SpaceX Starlink systems — remains operational. On Wednesday Poland also said a Russian military helicopter briefly violated its airspace, forcing fighter jets to scramble.

Denmark’s intelligence service issued a new threat assessment expecting Russia to escalate hybrid warfare in coming months, calling a conventional attack “highly unlikely” but warning of “a low but growing risk” of a limited military strike on NATO countries. Overnight into Thursday, Russian strikes killed at least eight civilians in Ukraine, with the worst hits on Kharkiv and Kyiv; Moldova and Romania reported drone airspace violations.

Sources: BBC (Alys Davies); ABC News / AP

The heads of several major AI firms told the United Nations Security Council their industry urgently needs global oversight to avoid dangers that could threaten the whole world, Al Jazeera reported, citing AP and Reuters coverage of the Wednesday session convened by France during U.N. General Assembly week.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told the council. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman echoed that humanity could “lose control of the future of AI,” arguing the biggest decisions “cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone” and must be shaped through democratic processes. French and U.K. foreign ministers backed common international frameworks. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said his company had been attacked by AI agents and “defended ourselves with AI,” including relying on a Chinese model with fewer restrictions than comparable U.S. tools.

The Trump administration pushed back hard. White House science adviser Michael Kratsios told members: “We totally reject all efforts by international bodies to assert centralised control and global governance of AI.” Chinese President Xi Jinping is in Washington this week for talks that may touch AI regulation, even as the U.S.–China tech race makes deep new limits unlikely soon. AI safety expert Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the U.N.’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, warned the council of an “unprecedented threat” none of its members can contain alone.

Sources: Al Jazeera / AP / Reuters

Mark Zuckerberg took repeated digs at Apple during Meta’s annual Connect event Wednesday — then borrowed a page from Steve Jobs’ playbook for a surprise reveal: a pocket-watch-sized device that carries Meta’s viral Muse AI agent into the real world, Reuters reported.

The Muse Charm has a roughly 2-inch (5-cm) screen navigable with a thumb, a customizable Muse character at its center, and a built-in 5G modem so users can tap into Muse without Wi-Fi — though it cannot make calls. Users access Muse directly on the gadget, bypassing AI apps on smartphones. Zuckerberg said the company has shifted focus from the metaverse to “personal superintelligence,” adding Muse will also soon be available across Meta’s smart glasses lineup.

Muse has drawn millions of downloads in what some analysts called the biggest U.S. app launch since ChatGPT. Meta shares were down about 2% in premarket Thursday after gaining nearly 12% this week. Analysts say Charm could appeal to Gen Z nostalgia for companion gadgets, but warn mass adoption is hard — pointing to the 2024 Rabbit R1 handheld that flopped after overpromising. “Unless Muse Charm can offer unique functions that smartphones, watches, earbuds or smart glasses cannot easily replace, it is more likely to remain a nice-to-have for early adopters,” said Linda Sui of Smart Analytics Global.

Sources: Reuters (Aditya Soni); CNN Business (Lisa Eadicicco)

Astronomers report the first convincing direct detection of radio signals from an exoplanet — and no, it is not aliens, Live Science reported Wednesday, covering a new arXiv preprint.

A team led by Kevin Ortiz Ceballos at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian used South Africa’s MeerKAT array to observe Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant about 64 light-years away with roughly 10 times Jupiter’s mass. They detected rapid, recurring, highly circularly polarized radio bursts. By comparing radio images with background quasars as fixed reference points, the team localized the emission to the planet rather than its host star — something no prior radio detection had unambiguously done.

The signal matches electron-cyclotron maser emission from auroras. Emission up to about 3.5 GHz implies a magnetic field of at least roughly 1,250 gauss at the source — the first direct exoplanet magnetic-field strength measurement. For comparison, Jupiter’s field is about 4.3 gauss and Earth’s about 0.5 gauss. Oxford astrophysicist Suzanne Aigrain, who was not involved, called it the first truly convincing direct detection and stressed the signals are natural, not technosignatures. The preprint has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Sources: Live Science (Pandora Dewan); arXiv preprint 2609.16720