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Another driver in critical condition as result of collision after man failed to stop for officers in Stratford-upon-Avon

A man has died and a woman is critically injured after a police pursuit in Warwickshire.

Police said officers tried to stop a black Audi on Birmingham Road in Stratford-upon-Avon at 5.23pm on Monday but the vehicle failed to stop and drove towards the A46.

Bradley Townsend reportedly killed by a drone on 10 June in Donetsk region after joining up with separatists

A man from South Yorkshire is believed to be the first British citizen to die fighting for Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Bradley Townsend, a 33-year-old fisher from Barnsley, left Britain in April to join up with Russian separatists in eastern Donbas to aid in their invasion of Ukraine, despite having no previous combat experience or familiar ties to eastern Europe. Alongside 49-year-old Ben Stimson and 39-year-old Aiden Minnis, Townsend was granted Russian citizenship for joining the country’s military campaign.

UK PM to join delegation of leaders lobbying US president to step up supplies, as Kremlin accuses Burnham of wanting to continue war

• Burnham plans trip to New York as Ukraine pleads for US-made missiles

Vatican envoy Paul Gallagher met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow earlier today, and Reuters has some snap quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s representative following the meeting. He is quoted as saying that “The Ukrainian war must end” and that the pair discussed “avenues for pursuing lasting and just peace in Ukraine”.

In relation to the post on a US military plane landing in Moscow (at 11:23), Reuters reported that the last time a US jet flew to Russia from Europe was in ​January, when special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner travelled to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin for peace talks.

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• South Carolina chooses Darline Graham as Republican nominee for US Senate

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On Truth Social, however, the president shot down assertions that the US talks with Canada collapsed in part due a proposed trade deal that would have weakened French language protections.

“I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French!” he wrote. “In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing. This lie was made up by a weak and ineffective Prime Minister in an attempt to gain political support, which he has totally lost, from the people of Quebec.”

Republican nominee to face Democrat Annie Andrews in midterm after rushed campaigns for Lindsey Graham’s seat

Reese Boyd, the chair of the Horry county Republican party marveled on Monday afternoon at how little time Senator Darline Graham and Representative Ralph Norman have had to campaign for the Senate primary: “This is not the normal way of things.”

“This is something that usually lasts at least, you know, the better part of a year,” he said. “People normally spend the better part of 18 months getting ready for it. Who knows? This may be the right way to do it? Who knows.”

Maine Coon named Erebus Anomaly breaks previous record of 28 toes held for over two decades after overcoming illness

A Maine Coon kitten from Wisconsin overcame a perilous bout with pneumonia to break a 24-year-old world record for most toes on a cat, setting the new mark at 29.

Erebus Anomaly’s unique story received US national media attention on Monday, when ABC’s World News Now program recounted what one of his owners called a “miraculous” recovery from illness in his infancy – and the subsequent Guinness World Record that he clinched.

There has been a 76% increase in under-construction gas-fired projects amid ‘frenzy’ to build more datacenters

The US has surged ahead of China in the building of new gas-fired power generation, largely to feed a boom in artificial intelligence (AI) that is adding vast amounts of planet-heating emissions, a new analysis has found.

For decades, China’s rapid economic growth has seen it outpace the US in the addition of new gas power generation but a recent “frenzy” in datacenter construction for AI has reversed this, said Global Energy Monitor (Gem) in its new report.

The flagship environmental initiative has achieved ‘negligible’ results. Why so little progress, and what are the risks as the planet gets hotter? Plus, fusion dance pioneer Usha Jey

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India set out to expand its forested areas a decade ago. Last week, however, we learned that the forest cover programme had barely taken root when the government’s auditors released their findings of the flagship Green India Mission. The shortfall of 97.57% from India’s initial pledge in 2014 was stark enough to alarm the government’s own auditor, who described the progress as “negligible”.

Yet if you ask the government about forest cover, you’ll get a far greener picture.

A recent memo claiming executive privilege over communications with private advisers invites corruption

A recent office of legal counsel memo on executive privilege maintains that private advisers to a president can avoid responding to a subpoena by asserting the president’s executive privilege. The ability of presidents to shield communications from public view through claims of executive privilege, whether their own or those of a senior adviser, was already a powerful tool for presidents to avoid accountability. But if courts accept the OLC’s new interpretation of presidential privilege, it will be substantially harder to call witnesses to testify before Congress or in court proceedings regarding possible wrongdoing by the presidents.

Equipping presidents with extensive power to block witnesses in legal proceedings is a dangerous practice that invites corruption by presidents and their advisers. Consider the former White House counsel Don McGahn’s 2019 refusal to testify in response to a subpoena by the House judiciary committee in connection with the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump. McGahn didn’t come up with that idea on his own. It was the Trump White House that sought to bar McGahn from testifying through an assertion of a type of executive privilege known as “testimonial immunity.” Ironically, Mueller was investigating whether Trump obstructed justice, among other things, by demanding that McGahn fire Mueller himself. Trump’s insistence that McGahn not testify, backed up by a 2019 OLC opinion, effectively made the first Trump administration complicit in the very obstruction under investigation.

More than half of what Brits eat is ultra-processed. Now we’re a nation of food snobs – with no ingredient safe from judgment

Lewis Bassett is a young sociologist and chef who I first encountered through his podcast, The Full English, where he thinks about the cultural meaning of, say, Delia Smith; gazpacho; whelks. This was thinking you didn’t know you needed until you heard it. Now he’s written a book of the same name, asking: why do we eat the way we do in Britain, and why do we think the way we do, even about the stuff we wouldn’t be caught dead eating?

About 57% of all the food eaten in Britain is ultra-processed, which feels familiar from at least a decade of hand-wringing about it, but is radically defamiliarised when set against the rest of Europe. In France it’s 14%, and Italy is also in the teens. It’s amazing they don’t all live to be 150. And while this plainly has its roots in inequality, there is a hefty side order of attitude, which Bassett contemplates while working through the history of sourdough, curry and olive oil, and describing his own life cheffing in fancy kitchens and gastropubs.

Adam Hamilton, a liberal megachurch pastor, is challenging incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall in this year’s midterm election

In one of the first ads of his campaign to represent Kansas in the US Senate, the Democrat Adam Hamilton stands grilling steaks at a barbecue and attacks his opponent, Senator Roger Marshall, a Republican, for supporting “tariffs and war”.

If history is any guide, it is Hamilton who is set to get cooked. Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, and more than half a century has passed since one of their nominees even came close. But he and his supporters believe circumstances have conspired to end this streak – and potentially deliver Democrats control of the Senate.

Термопаста — это вещь, про которую многие из нас вспоминают ровно два раза: когда собирают компьютер и когда тот начинает перегреваться. А ведь между этими двумя событиями может запросто пройти года два-три, и все это время слой под кулером живет своей жизнью, о которой владелец не знает ровным счетом ничего. И зря, между прочим, не знает, потому что творится там довольно много интересного, и заканчивается это обычно не в его пользу.

Меня зовут Петрищева Евгения, я отвечаю в SM Lab за оценку и развитие сотрудников.

Последние несколько лет внесли коррективы во все сферы работы организаций и корпоративное обучение (L&D) не стало исключением. Ключевые вызовы сотрудников L&D: какие навыки понадобятся команде в ближайшие два года, как успеть развить их раньше, чем они станут дефицитом, и как ещё более точно рассчитать вложения на обучение персонала.

В этой статье хочу собрать самые интересные наблюдения, которые мне встретились. Поговорим о мировых трендах развития сотрудников, а также IT-специалистов исходя из исследования Future of Job Survey и мнений визионеров. А также обсудим российские тенденции в обучении и развитии сотрудников как в IT, так и в других отраслях. В конце расскажу, как эти тенденции отражаются в наших программах развития в SM Lab.

Every week there’s at least one new announcement about what AI will do to software development. Most of the conversation moves fast and stays shallow, focusing on productivity gains, job displacement, or which model scored highest on the latest benchmark.

We’re more interested in the questions underneath that noise, so we created the JetBrains Research Podcast. In it, we explore questions, such as: 

• What does it mean to understand a system, not just generate its code?
• What does psychology tell us about why teams succeed or fail? 
• Why does verifiability matter more than prestige in training agents?

In our podcast, we are mainly interested in research in its various forms and the people behind it. Each podcast episode goes somewhere interesting with someone who has spent serious time on things that matter. In this blog post, we highlight the ideas that came up in these conversations.

Cat Hicks: Culture is infrastructure

“Culture is infrastructure. It is not just a “nice to have”. It shapes our thinking. It shapes our problem-solving. It directly changes the quality of work that we do.”

In our latest episode, we speak with Cat Hicks, psychologist and author of Psychology of Software Teams. We ask her: What actually determines whether software teams do good work? Why study teams instead of individual developers?

Hicks has found that signals of belonging, learning, and recognition from a team can cut developers’ measured AI identity threat, i.e. the fear that their expertise is becoming obsolete, roughly in half. She emphasizes that it is important to look at the team level to better understand what is going on with individual team members. 

For example, Hicks has developed a measure she calls overproduction pressure, which refers to the feeling that arises when it seems that only short-term output matters. When that pressure is high, people generate code without understanding it, distrust colleagues, and stop being honest with managers. 

Hicks also challenges the “lone genius” myth: the idea that teams should be built around one highly-talented individual. Instead she argues that it is actually better to strive for “more bands, fewer rock stars”. Highly collaborative cultures, such as open-source problem-solving, can be especially effective at achieving technology breakthroughs.

Tomáš Petříček: Five cultures, one argument

“Programming has never really [been] just implementing a specification.”

In our fourth episode, we talk to Tomáš Petříček, a professor at Charles University in Prague who studies the history and philosophy of software. His book Cultures of Programming argues that programming has never been a single discipline. Instead, the following five distinct cultures have been competing and collaborating since the earliest days of computing:

• Mathematical, which treats programs as formal objects to be proved correct.
• Hacker, which values direct engagement with a running machine.
• Managerial, which is focused on predictability and labor organization.
• Engineering, which accepts that systems are complex and asks which practices make them reliable despite that complexity.
• Humanistic, which begins with the question of what happens in a person’s mind when they interact with software.

Each culture has a different idea of what a program is, what good work looks like, and what matters most. These cultures explain why the same event can lead to varying diagnoses. Take, for example, the Knight Capital failure in 2012, where a software deployment error cost the company $460 million in less than an hour. Depending on which culture you approach the problem from, one diagnosis might differ wildly from another. Here are some example diagnoses from each of the five cultures:

• A mathematician would ask what could have been formally guaranteed. 
• A hacker would ask what low-level knowledge would have caught th eproblem. 
• An engineer would ask about testing and rollback. 
• A manager would ask about processes and accountability. 
• A humanist would ask whether the system made its state legible to those operating it.

Petříček also talks about the current enthusiasm for AI agents, especially specification-driven development. He emphasizes the importance of looking at history. Since the 1960s, people have been trying to isolate the mechanical part of programming and automate it. But it hasn’t worked yet, because software development has always been more than just the implementation of a specification. Teams learn what they’re building through prototypes, conversations, and use.

Alexander Kulikov: What you’re building when the solution is unknown

“When you find a problem that does not get out of your head, this is probably the right problem.”

In our third episode, we chat with Alexander Kulikov, who heads the Algorithms and Complexity Theory Lab at JetBrains Research and is the Head of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence B.Sc. program at Neapolis University Pafos. His description of the current climate is more honest than most: “amazing, exciting, and frightening at the same time.”

And the concern isn’t entirely theoretical. Chess engines, for example, surpassed every human player decades ago. Kulikov doesn’t know of any law preventing AI from eventually doing the same to theorem proving. He doesn’t expect it imminently, but he also didn’t expect AI-assisted coding to progress as fast as it has. His position is what he calls attentive uncertainty: neither denial nor resignation.

In the episode, we also talk about what it actually means to teach computer science in an era when AI can solve Olympiad problems. Kulikov’s curriculum strategy is simple: teach graduate students how to learn difficult things efficiently. The specific technologies they’ll need are unknowable. The ability to dive into an unfamiliar subject, build a mental model, and make progress is more durable than any particular skill.

That’s also why he still takes mathematics seriously in a world of AI-assisted coding. A student who understands the structure of a problem can test an AI-generated answer, identify missing assumptions, and recover when the first attempt fails. A student who only knows how to request an answer may not know whether the answer is trustworthy.

Kulikov also draws a distinction between researchers who are “birds” (i.e. ranging across fields, spotting connections from above) and “frogs” (i.e. digging deep into one area). In this analogy, he would be a frog. But AI, he thinks, could act as an artificial bird for specialists: lowering the cost of looking beyond your immediate field without requiring you to become a generalist.

Ibragim Badertdinov: From dentistry to coding agents

“Vibe checks don’t scale.”

In our second episode, we talk with Ibragim Badertdinov, the Lead Research Engineer at Nebius. He took a somewhat unusual path to AI research: he first graduated from medical university with honors, completed a dental residency, and then gave himself a year to try something else. In this episode, he talks about how he made that switch, what he learned at School 21 and on Kaggle, and the work that followed. Most notably, we talk about his work on building SWE-rebench.

SWE-rebench is an automated pipeline for evaluating coding agents on real software engineering tasks. Accepted to NeurIPS 2025, it also has over 12 million Hugging Face downloads and a million leaderboard visits a month. Its key design feature is decontamination, or pulling tasks from GitHub only after a model’s release date, so agents can’t be trained on the answers. This way, SWE-rebench isolates the model’s problem-solving ability from any potential exposure to training data. After its release, it made headlines when many models performed substantially worse on SWE-rebench tasks than on SWE-bench Verified ones (see the paper for more details). 

This is especially important, because the standard up to now has been SWE-bench Verified, and the reported scores from this benchmark carried significant weight, both in research and the wider industry. As was discussed in a recent blog post, this tendency to focus on only SWE-bench Verified scores can give us a misleading picture of model performance. The post also suggests ways to evaluate models more accurately.

Badertdinov also talks about why reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven such dramatic gains in coding and math specifically. The insight is deceptively simple: in domains where you can verify whether an answer is correct, you can generate vast training signals automatically. Code runs or it doesn’t; tests pass or they don’t. That’s what makes software engineering tasks so valuable for post-training: not their prestige, but their verifiability.

Anna Kogan: The library that became infrastructure

“Right now, computer vision is not cool. LLMs are very cool.”

Our pilot episode is a conversation with Anna Kogan, founder and CEO of FitWise and former CEO of OpenCV.ai. She’s been in computer vision for 15 years and still believes in its scientific value: in computer vision, researchers gather a dataset, train a model, measure metrics, and solve specific tasks. In our conversation, we discuss challenges in the field, including monetizing open-source tools and slow adoption of AI in various industries despite the technology already existing. 

The gap between impact and resourcing for open-source tools is one thread in the conversation. An example we discuss is OpenCV, the open-source computer vision library she helped build into a global standard. It runs on billions of devices and gets 32 million Python downloads a month on PyPI alone. Because of these numbers, many people assume the library is maintained by several hundred developers, while in reality it’s been only two to eight developers at any given time.

Another conversation thread concerns a harder question: Why does computer vision adoption still move so slowly, even when tools such as OpenCV are clearly very popular? In response, Kogan brings up human movement in sports. Even though the technological advances are far enough along that people in sports could stop manually clicking through and annotating broadcast footage, organizations are resistant to adopting AI support. One reason is that it is still cheaper to hire workers in the Philippines to do this manual work, than it is to figure out an AI system to take it over. 

With FitWise AI, Kogan is interested in helping sports organizations see the value in computer vision adoption. They provide the data, 3D digital replicas of athletes’ body shapes and movements in real time; this data is collected via stadium cameras that are already streaming visual data. Sports organizations can apply their expertise to the visual data, and so far there have been interesting results. For example, one company extracted the angular velocity of a quarterback’s arm during a throw and showed that this is a strong predictor of elite performance. 

Tools like FitWise AI can change how teams understand performance and injury risk. It’s a domain where the technology is genuinely ahead of the industry’s willingness to absorb it, and Kogan is not waiting for the industry to catch up on its own.

Explore these ideas and more on our podcast

These are some of the ideas we discuss on the JetBrains Research Podcast. If you find a question you can’t stop thinking about, that’s by design.

All episodes are available on YouTube and Spotify (and any other major podcast platform). We publish new episodes about once a month. 

Danish toymaker also scores success with KPop Demon Hunters, Star Wars and botanicals products

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Lego sales have risen by more than a fifth as tie-ups with the football World Cup, Formula One and the hit film KPop Demon Hunters as well as its flower-based and Star Wars kits drive demand.

The Danish toymaker said its revenues had increased by 21% to 41.9bn Danish kroner (£4.8bn) in the first six months of 2026, driven by strong growth in the Americas, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions. Sales by its clients to consumers rose by 22%.

There has been a 76% increase in under-construction gas-fired projects amid ‘frenzy’ to build more datacenters

The US has surged ahead of China in the building of new gas-fired power generation, largely to feed a boom in artificial intelligence (AI) that is adding vast amounts of planet-heating emissions, a new analysis has found.

For decades, China’s rapid economic growth has seen it outpace the US in the addition of new gas power generation but a recent “frenzy” in datacenter construction for AI has reversed this, said Global Energy Monitor (Gem) in its new report.

Our cartoonist looks back at the big storylines and fresh looks as the English top flight swung back into action

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• And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

Авторы курсов больше не нужны — записывать и монтировать видео. Показываю на реальном примере пайплайн, который делает это за них: от презентации до готового урока, с цифрами и скриншотами.

Все мы иногда меняем работу. Я вот тоже недавно решил. Походил по собеседованиям и удивился. Спрашивать стали больше, шире, детальнее.

Кажется, что это не новость. IT всегда было местом, где обучаться чему-то новому приходилось гораздо часто. Но кажется раньше скоуп экспертизы не сдвигался так сильно за такое короткое время.

Хочу в этой статье немного порассуждать про то, что изменилось с экспертизой в LLM сфере за последние годы и что теперь нужно знать современному LLM инженеру. Опираюсь на свой личный опыт и общение с людьми из сферы из наших и зарубежных компаний.

Bradley Townsend reportedly killed by a drone on 10 June in Donetsk region after joining up with separatists

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A man from South Yorkshire is believed to be the first British citizen to die fighting for Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Bradley Townsend, a 33-year-old fisher from Barnsley, left Britain in April to join up with Russian separatists in eastern Donbas to aid in their invasion of Ukraine, despite having no previous combat experience or familiar ties to eastern Europe. Alongside 49-year-old Ben Stimson and 39-year-old Aiden Minnis, Townsend was granted Russian citizenship for joining the country’s military campaign.