Anthropic’s alliance with pope on AI harms: all in good faith or ‘Vatican-washing?’ | AI (artificial intelligence)

Why did Anthropic’s founder sit beside the pope during a warning about AI? In the first major written teaching of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV took artificial intelligence to task. The pontiff delineated the technology’s most concerning threats to humanity: replacing workers, accelerating war and exploiting the environment. At a ceremony honoring the holy teaching … Read more

Yves Sakila’s death has echoes of George Floyd. When will we in Ireland confront our own racism? | Seán Gallen

Watching the harrowing footage of what would become Yves Sakila’s final moments of consciousness, it is hard not to be reminded of the agonising death of George Floyd. Sakila was declared dead in a Dublin hospital on 15 May, a short time after being pinned to the ground by security guards outside Arnotts, a city … Read more

When will the EU punch its weight in a perilous world? That’s the question countries eager to join should be asking | Simon Tisdall

Giant butter mountains, wine lakes and an apocryphal EU ban on bendy bananas formed the mythological backdrop to Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum debacle. Yet while many Vote Leave claims were exaggerated, inaccurate or blatantly untrue, the EU’s capacity for laying itself open to ridicule is undiminished 10 years on. Take the strange case of the … Read more

Look at how Germany defeated the Red Army Faction. The lessons about how to fight terrorism are all there | Jason Burke

In 1972, the great German novelist Heinrich Böll described the campaign of violence launched by the Red Army Faction (RAF) since its foundation two years earlier as a war of “six against 60 million”. The writer was vilified for the phrase, accused of sympathy for bombers and murderers. But Böll had highlighted the most important … Read more