📌 Peace Preparations, Congo Turmoil, More

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives in Saudi Arabia today ahead of talks with Russian officials to end the war in Ukraine.

The talks come after President Donald Trump last week spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone and ordered top officials to begin negotiations on the war, which he repeatedly vowed to end during his presidential campaign.

Riyadh, which is also involved in talks with Washington over the future of the Gaza Strip, has played a role in early contacts between the Trump administration, which took office on January 20, and Moscow, helping to secure a prisoner swap last week.

Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that the talks would take place on Tuesday in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, citing unnamed sources.

Zelenskiy, who arrived in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, said he also intended to visit Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but no dates were set. He said he had no plans to meet Russian or US officials and Ukraine is not believed to be invited to the Saudi-hosted talks.

Rwandan-backed M23 rebels have entered Bukavu, the second-largest city in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Some people lined the streets to clap and cheer the fighters as they marched and drove into the city centre without resistance. It is the second city after Goma to fall to the rebels in the mineral-rich region in the past few weeks.

The UN and European countries have warned that the latest offensive, which has seen hundreds of thousands of people forced from their homes, could spark a wider regional war.

The provincial governor, Jean-Jacques Purusi Sadiki, confirmed the fighters were in Bukavu city centre by Sunday morning, adding that Congolese troops had withdrawn to avoid urban fighting.

The Congolese government accuses Rwanda of sowing chaos in the region — as well as having troops on the ground — so it can benefit from its natural resources. The African Union, which has been holding a heads of state summit in Ethiopia on the weekend, again urged the M23 to disarm.

The Trump administration has reversed the layoffs of hundreds in the energy department working on building nuclear warheads.

350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were “abruptly laid off” on February 13. The next day, Teresa Robbins, acting director of the NNSA (pictured), issued a memo reversing the firing of 322 “fired” workers.

Rob Plonski, a senior NNSA staffer, wrote on LinkedIn: “Cutting the federal workforce responsible for these functions may be seen as reckless at best and adversarily opportunistic at worst.” Experts, meanwhile, have cautioned that DOGE's “blind cost-cutting” could put communities at risk as the majority of these 350 jobs involved high-level security clearances and sensitive tasks. The 350 NNSA workers cut were among the 2,000 Energy Department employees culled by DOGE that week. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, blasted the DOGE team for making decisions with little knowledge of what the department is responsible for. “They don’t seem to realise that it’s actually the department of nuclear weapons more than it is the Department of Energy.”

Talk of war and politics mixed with sport at the closing ceremony of the 2025 Invictus Games in Vancouver.

Competing for their country were 550 wounded, injured or sick service personnel and veterans from 23 countries in 11 sports. Prince Harry, who founded the Invictus Games in 2014, attended many of the events over the past week and with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Sunday.

“I know my American friends, you've been reminded this past week that your Canadian friends and every other competitor in this place is just as proud to fight for their flags as you are to fight for yours,“ Trudeau said, addressing the US team.

In speaking to close out the ceremony, Prince Harry said: “Being a role model is not just about resilience, skill or power. It's about integrity, compassion and courage. You guys give us hope through your healing, through your honesty and through your humanity.“

One spectator said he wouldn’t forget the skiing event at nearby Whistler Mountain. “The announcer came over the intercom system and explained to the crowd that they rely on their guide to navigate the course. And so they asked everybody to be quiet. And so, hundreds of people all just were suddenly silent.

“There was no music over the loudspeakers. It was dead silent as they made their way down the course. As soon as they crossed the finish line, everybody erupted into cheers. It was just a really cool moment to see.“ The 2027 Invictus Games will be held in Birmingham, UK.

An AI algorithm called torque clustering significantly improves how AI systems learn and uncover patterns in data independently.

“What sets torque clustering apart is its foundation in the physical concept of torque, enabling it to identify clusters autonomously and adapt seamlessly to diverse data types, with varying shapes, densities, and noise degrees,“ said first author Dr Jie Yang.

The researchers said it has been tested on 1,000 diverse datasets, achieving an average adjusted mutual information score — a measure of clustering results — of 97.7%. In comparison, other state-of-the-art methods only achieve scores in the 80% range.

“Last year’s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for foundational discoveries that enable supervised machine learning with artificial neural networks. Unsupervised machine learning — inspired by the principle of torque — has the potential to make a similar impact,“ said Dr Yang.

The researchers said torque clustering could support the development of general artificial intelligence, particularly in robotics and autonomous systems, by helping to optimise movement, control and decision-making. The open-source code has been made available to researchers.

A New Zealand tourism campaign has been ridiculed for sounding like a clearance sale slogan while emigration soars.

The government launched its “Everyone must go!” campaign on Sunday, in a bid to encourage Australian holiday-makers to visit New Zealand. But the tagline quickly became the subject of derision inside New Zealand, with opposition politicians and social media users likening it to a clearance sale advertisement.

Australia is New Zealand’s largest tourism market, making up roughly 44% of international visitors a year. Visitor numbers are sitting at roughly 88% of pre-pandemic rates.

Some critics said the tagline was tactless for sounding like a directive to New Zealanders to leave the country amid record-high departure rates. “If I was in a [government] seeing record emigration I simply would not pick ‘everyone must go’ as a slogan,” said one social media user.

Others took the opportunity to turn the campaign back on the government. “The upside of the gormless ‘everyone must go’ slogan is that by rights it should be easy to invert for election posters and protest signs …. Done. Dusted. And their own fault,” wrote a BlueSky user.

A young man from an isolated indigenous tribe in the Amazon visited a community before returning less than 24 hours later.

The encounter occurred in Bela Rosa, a community along the Purus River in the southwestern Amazon. Footage shows him barefoot and wearing a small loincloth, seemingly calm and in good health as he carried two logs.

Locals believe the man was asking for fire. Smartphone video of the encounter showed one resident trying unsuccessfully to show the man how to use a lighter. Officials from Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, Funai, arrived soon after and took him to a nearby facility.

Funai said a team of health professionals was sent to assess if the young man had been exposed to any disease to which isolated indigenous tribes have no immunity. It said surveillance has been established to prevent people from reaching the isolated tribe’s location.

As a policy, Brazil does not actively seek contact with these groups but instead establishes protected and monitored areas, such as Mamoriá Grande, near where the encounter occurred.