USA - “Significant fractions” of Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on the dangers of artificial intelligence were actually written by artificial intelligence, analyst Linch Zhang claims. In the 42,000-word ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ (Magnificent Humanity), the pontiff warned of the growing, state-like power of Silicon Valley, the immorality of autonomous weapons, and the dangers of allowing AI to “construct a new Tower of Babel” and reduce human beings to “a resource to be used and exploited.” Despite its appeal for AI to be regulated and “disarmed,” large portions of ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ show some telltale signs of being written by AI, Zhang claimed in a blog post on Tuesday. When Zhang’s experiment was repeated by The Verge, roughly 46% of the encyclical was determined to be written by AI.

USA - Pete Hegseth has told America’s allies in Asia they cannot “freeload” on defence and must increase spending to counter China’s military build-up. The US defence secretary said the United States would no longer subsidise their allies, echoing Donald Trump’s message to NATO leaders to shoulder more of the military burden and reduce reliance on Washington. The Pentagon chief told a security conference in Singapore: “The ‌era of the United States subsidising the defence of wealthy nations is over.” “We need partners, not protectorates,” he added. “We don’t have a strong alliance unless everyone has skin in the game. No freeloading.” The remarks follow Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing this month where he met with Xi Jinping, underscoring persistent US fears over China’s territorial ambitions.

EUROPE - Yesterday was a relatively quiet night on Europe’s eastern front. According to the Ukrainian air force, Russia fired just 147 drones into Ukraine, of which air defences neutralised 138 – a tiny number compared to the massive barrage of May 13 when over 1,567 drones and 56 missiles smashed into Kyiv and other cities. But one of those drones strayed into NATO airspace, flying for four minutes before smashing into an apartment building in the Romanian border town of Galați. Two civilians were injured. Romania’s president, Nicușor Dan, called the strike “the most serious incident affecting Romanian territory” since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Europe’s leaders reacted with predictable outrage.

MIDDLE EAST - For the moment, the Gulf war continues to dominate the headlines. Scarcely a day passes without some new warning of economic apocalypse to come. With the Strait of Hormuz still closed to shipping – though Donald Trump suggests that may not be the case for much longer – the world economy is running on empty, it is widely said. Without an immediate resumption in supply, it will soon grind to a halt, we are told. But here’s the point: people have been saying this for weeks now and it hasn’t happened yet. Just you wait, say the doomsters. We are running out of oil, gas, jet fuel, fertilisers and much else besides. This reality will hit the global economy like a 10-tonne truck any day now. Sky-high prices and rationing will be just the half of it. There is, however, another equally plausible scenario and it’s the one that markets seem increasingly inclined to believe. This is that Trump desperately wants out and is even prepared to eat some humble pie in attempting to secure such a withdrawal. Of course, not in a month of Sundays would you find the US president admitting as much. In private, he perhaps accepts what JD Vance, the vice-president, has privately said all along – that the war was a strategic blunder.

USA - In the lead-up to the First World War, stock markets sailed blissfully on: not because investors were unaware of the ever-louder drum beat of impending conflict but because they collectively assumed none of the great powers would be stupid enough to stumble into the catastrophe of an all-out war. That view was perfectly encapsulated in a highly influential book by Norman Angell, a British journalist, published a few years before the outbreak of hostilities. Angell’s The Great Illusion argued that the economic costs of war and the accompanying disruptions to trade were likely to be so devastating that nobody could possibly hope to gain by starting one.

IRAN - For two hours on Friday afternoon, Donald Trump weighed up a deal for ending his war with Iran. Despite declarations from the US president about what it would contain — the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, no tolls on shipping, and no Iranian nuclear weapons — 24 hours later no agreement had actually been signed. Iran’s state-affiliated Fars news agency quoted sources saying that Trump’s latest comments were a “mixture of truth and lies”. But amid the competing claims, there are noteworthy indicators that pressure, particularly in the economic sphere, has been driving more serious engagement by Tehran in a possible peace deal.

IRAN - Not everyone has the talent to appear to be deeply entrenched and busily focused on carving a peace deal that will satisfy two diabolically opposed sides. But when it comes to the highly skilled merchants of Persia, no one does it better. Just listen to this mouthful by the Iranian Foreign Ministry: “The fact that we have reached a conclusion on a large portion of the topics under discussion is correct. However, to say that this means the signing of an agreement is imminent, no one can make such a claim. Policymaking and decision-making in the US are suffering from a kind of institutionalized vacillation. The repeated changes in positions – within a matter of hours, you are faced with different, often contradictory and conflicting viewpoints. This disrupts the process of any negotiation.”

SOMALIA - At one point in his life, Abdirahman Mohamed Ali had enough livestock to be considered rich. Three consecutive failed rainy seasons have taken everything, and all his camels, goats and sheep are now bones on the plains of central Somalia. “The climate doesn’t have mercy. I’ve been herding livestock for over seventy years and now I’ve lost everything,” he told the Telegraph from his new home in a makeshift tent by a dirt road on the edge of the capital, Mogadishu. “In the past years, even while herding livestock as they withered away, I would keep going because I knew the rains would come eventually,” the 82-year-old says. “But now it no longer rains." The country faced another terrible drought four years ago, when international aid agencies spent billions trying to stave off starvation. Yet families arriving at the same distribution points this year have often now found them closed, or empty. Food prices have risen by more than 30 per cent and fuel costs in the capital have trebled, putting necessities out of reach for millions of people.

UK - While Alan Milburn was busy insisting that Britain’s youth worklessness crisis has nothing to do with immigration, a think tank quietly published figures that told a very different story. According to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), which was set up by former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, 27 young non-EU migrants have been hired for every one young British worker since 2020. In other words, while the number of non-EU under-25s on UK payrolls has risen by 290,000 since the start of the decade, the number of young Britons employed increased by just 11,000 over the same period. Meanwhile, young people classified as Neet (not in education, employment or training) rose by almost 200,000. How can anyone seriously argue there is no correlation here? Of course, immigration is not the sole cause of youth worklessness. But to pretend mass migration has had no impact whatsoever on the youth labour market shows a wilful kind of blindness.

MIDDLE EAST - The US and Iran have reached an agreement in principle to extend their ceasefire and begin negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear programme, a US official told The Telegraph. But the framework for a memorandum of understanding must still be signed off by Donald Trump, which could take days, the official added. The agreement would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and require Iran to remove its mines from the crucial shipping lane within 30 days. It would see the US waive some sanctions to allow Iran to sell its oil, but Tehran would have to put in writing a commitment not to develop a nuclear weapon. JD Vance, the vice president, said good progress had been made towards a ceasefire extension, but Mr Trump was not yet ready to approve it. While the US was buoyant about the potential agreement, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency was more cautious. “Iran has not yet informed the Pakistani mediator of the finalisation of the text. If the text is truly finalised, Iran will announce the matter to the Pakistani mediator and to the public,” an Iranian source said.

IRAN - If Donald Trump is to be believed, Iran’s surviving leaders want nothing more than to “make a deal” to end the war. “I don’t think they have a choice,” said the US president on Wednesday. “They’re negotiating on fumes.” Yet the actions of the Islamic Republic tell a very different story about its intentions. Anyone reading recent statements from US Central Command (CentCom) encounters a litany of Iranian ceasefire violations. Iranian negotiators, meanwhile, are believed to be insisting on the immediate release of $12 billion (£9 billion) in frozen assets as a precondition for any agreement to end the war. Back in Tehran, the most hardline figures are denouncing the very idea of talking with the enemy, let alone reaching a settlement. Does this amount to the behaviour of a regime that just wants to “make a deal” and believes it has no other choice? Far more likely is that Trump is projecting his own fervent wish to end the conflict on to his Iranian enemies. He yearns to be able to declare victory and walk away from an offensive that he started without troubling to define a clear and consistent objective. The Iranian regime believes it can withstand America’s blockade for longer than the global economy can endure the closure of the Strait.

USA - A war between the US and China over Taiwan would risk nuclear escalation, a leading British think tank has warned. The research suggests the stakes of such a conflict between Washington and Beijing would be “so high as to make escalation to nuclear war likelier than not”. The report, by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said: “A direct conflict between the world’s two most powerful militaries would bring the world closer to nuclear conflagration than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.” A nuclear escalation between the world’s largest economies would have a devastating effect on the rest of the world, IISS said. Washington and Beijing would be expected to launch large-scale operations against their rivals, targeting command and communication hubs across the region. “The prospect of nuclear escalation ⁠will thus continue to loom large in a major US-China conflict.”

SWEDEN - Sweden has passed a law forcing food shops and pharmacists to accept cash payments, as the world’s pioneer of cashless banking rethinks its reliance on digital systems amid fears of Russian sabotage. The legislation, approved by the Swedish parliament on Wednesday, will require food shops and chemists to provide staffed cash tills that accept coins and banknotes. Banks will also be obliged to accept cash deposits and offer services for businesses wishing to deposit daily takings. The move underlines how far Sweden has travelled towards becoming a fully cashless society. Alongside neighbouring Norway, the Nordic nation has one of the world’s lowest levels of cash circulation, with consumers overwhelmingly favouring card and smartphone payments. Shops, cafés and restaurants routinely refuse cash, while many bank branches no longer handle physical money at all. The country’s central bank has repeatedly warned about the dangers of relying on payment systems that require a constant internet connection.

ISRAEL - Last week, we celebrated Shavuot, the festival commemorating the giving of the Torah. The Sages called it the “elixir of life.” But an honest assessment of the Israeli reality shows that it is becoming, in some hands, an elixir of violence and death, of exploiting others and shirking responsibility. Yeshiva heads and TikTok rabbis are leading large groups of believers down a path that heads in the opposite direction from the Torah path. The festival of Shavuot, and these days in particular, are an opportunity to recalibrate our moral compass and steer those who seek to receive the Torah toward better places – out of responsibility for a country whose Jewish identity and values should be a moral beacon to the world. Judaism is the moral foundation for Israel. Judaism, expressed also through the Torah, is no longer the private affair of the believer or of the community in the ghetto. It is the central moral foundation for renewed Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Therefore, we are obliged to reveal its luminous and ethical face: the face grounded in the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself” – even when the other does not share our values or belong to our people. We must not turn it into an elixir of death.

ISRAEL - Today, 62 years ago, on May 28, 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established. For many around the world, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still presented as a conflict that was born as a result of the Six Day War in 1967. According to this view, had Israel withdrawn from the territories captured in the war, the conflict could have been resolved and peace achieved. History, however, tells a different story. The PLO was established three years before the Six Day War. Three years before Israel controlled Judea and Samaria. Three years before it controlled Gaza. Three years before there was an Israeli presence in eastern Jerusalem. In other words, when the organization intended to lead the Palestinian national struggle was founded, the “occupation” of 1967 did not yet exist. So what exactly was the PLO seeking to liberate? The answer lies in the PLO’s own founding documents. The original Palestinian National Charter did not deal with an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria or Gaza, since these territories were not under Israeli control when it was written. Moreover, the charter denied the national rights of most Jews living in the State of Israel and presented Zionism as a project that must be eliminated.