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Wednesday, June 25, 2025

"Ukraine Is Not In NATO, My Job Is To Keep It That Way", Orbán Tells Press Outside NATO Summit

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán voiced skepticism over proposed NATO plans to raise defense spending to 5 percent of member states’ GDP, calling the target unworkable under existing EU budgetary constraints and warning of economic consequences if Brussels doesn’t radically change its fiscal framework.

“We are able to do it, it is not easy,” Orbán said at the NATO summit in The Hague on Wednesday.
“But the whole calculation of budget regulation of the European Union must be changed. So if we keep the regulations as it is, nobody in the European Union can fulfill 5 percent, whatever they say. We have to recalculate everything in a different method; in that case, we can do it.”

Orbán’s comments reflect his broader concern that NATO is drifting into dangerous territory — both financially and geopolitically. Rather than supporting yet another push toward militarization, the Hungarian leader emphasized that Europe’s real threat is not military in nature but economic.

“The real threat is not security-wise, it is economic and losing our competitiveness in global trade,” he said. “That’s our problem.”

He also reiterated his long-standing opposition to NATO involvement in Ukraine, restating Hungary’s commitment to keeping the alliance out of the war.

“NATO has no business in Ukraine,” Orbán said plainly.
“Ukraine is not a member of NATO, nor is Russia. And my job is to keep it as it is.”

Orbán has repeatedly argued that escalating military aid and deepening Western involvement risk prolonging the war and damaging European interests. His administration has opposed further sanctions on Russia and has long expressed concern over the possibility of NATO and EU membership for Kyiv in the current climate.

On Tuesday, the Hungarian prime minister hit back at thinly veiled criticism of his administration from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — an honorary guest at the summit in the Netherlands.

Zelensky suggested that it is “unfair when a single party blocks the Union’s decision,” referencing Hungarian opposition to further negotiations with Kyiv on EU membership.

In response, Orbán wrote on X, “President, with all due respect: the European Union was founded to bring peace and prosperity to its member states. Accepting a country that is at war with Russia would immediately drag the EU into a direct conflict. It is unfair to expect any member state to take this risk.”

In other remarks in The Hague, Orbán further highlighted his alignment with U.S. President Donald Trump, praising what he called Trump’s “common sense” approach to foreign policy and suggesting that a shift in Washington’s leadership is already having a stabilizing effect on global conflicts.

“The international order is more based on common sense,” Orbán said. “And the president of the United States is a man of common sense, as you have seen, just recently, to manage the conflict between Iran and Israel. So, he is the man of common sense, which means that the new wars are getting shorter and the old wars are running out of fuel, which is the consequence of his activity.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ukraine-not-nato-my-job-keep-it-way-orban-tells-press-outside-nato-summit

BIS Claims Stablecoins Fail As Money, Calls For Strict Limits On Their Role

by Amin Haqshanas via CoinTelegraph.com,

A new report from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) challenged the notion that stablecoins can serve as money in a modern financial system.

According to the BIS Annual Economic Report 2025, stablecoins fail the fundamental tests of “singleness,” “elasticity” and “integrity,” three critical criteria that define effective monetary instruments.

The BIS described stablecoins as “digital bearer instruments” that resemble financial assets more than actual money. “Stablecoins perform poorly when assessed against the three tests for serving as the mainstay of the monetary system,” the report said.

Unlike central bank-backed money, which is accepted “at par” and requires no background checks, private entities issue stablecoins and often trade at fluctuating rates. This undermines the core principle of monetary singleness, the report claimed.

Stablecoins continue to grow, but volatility remains. Source: BIS

Stablecoins fail elasticity and integrity tests

Elasticity, the second test, is crucial for absorbing shocks and meeting large-value payment demands, BIS said in its report.

It pointed out that “any additional supply of stablecoins thus requires full upfront payment by its holders,” likening it to a “strict cash-in-advance setup” that contrasts with the flexibility of modern banking systems, where central banks provide liquidity as needed.

The third and perhaps most damning failure lies in the area of integrity. The report claimed that stablecoins’ design, especially those transacted via unhosted wallets on public blockchains, makes them prone to financial crime.

“Stablecoins have significant shortcomings when it comes to promoting the integrity of the monetary system,” the BIS noted, emphasizing their vulnerability to money laundering, sanctions evasion and terrorist financing.

Cross-border use of stablecoins has been rising. Source: BIS

Stablecoins should have a limited role

While acknowledging the continued demand for stablecoins due to features like cross-border accessibility and lower transaction costs, the BIS argued that they should only play a limited, well-regulated role.

“Society can re-learn the historical lessons about the limitations of unsound money,” the report cautioned. “Bold action by central banks and other public authorities can push the financial system along the right path, in partnership with the financial sector.”

Circle, the company behind USDC, saw its stock drop more than 15% on Tuesday after the BIS report, hitting $222. CRCL shares had reached an all-time high of $299 on Monday.

Despite its hard take on stablecoins, the BIS report praised tokenization as a “transformative innovation” for the next-generation monetary and financial system. It said tokenization builds on the current financial system rather than replacing it.

Some in the crypto community said it is “no surprise” that the BIS paper was generally negative on stablecoins, given that it is a “regulatory body owned by global central banks.”

“The BIS is hysterical in its opposition to crypto,” Jim Walker, chief economist at Aletheia Capital, wrote. “The first criterion, backed by a central bank, should make it a laughing stock given the historical failures of those institutions around the world.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/bis-claims-stablecoins-fail-money-calls-strict-limits-their-role

China mosquito-sized drone designed for stealth military operations nearly invisible to naked eye

Buzzing into enemy territory.

China unveiled a mosquito-sized drone designed for covert military operations and espionage — a development that’s raising alarms over the potential consequence of the tech falling into the wrong hands.

The miniature device, featuring two leaf-like wings, a black vertical body, and three hair-thin legs, was engineered to mimic the blood-sucking insect by scientists at the National University of Defense Technology in China’s Hunan province.

“Here in my hand is a mosquito-like type of robot,” said Liang Hexiang, an NUDT student who was holding the tiny drone between his fingers in a video shared by state media last weekend.

“Miniature bionic robots like this one are especially suited to information reconnaissance and special missions on the battlefield.”

He said the hair-raising device is capable of carrying out a wide range of military and civilian missions.

The nano-winged drone is equipped with ultra -miniature cameras and microphones to capture images, sounds, and electronic signals — with its tiny size rendering it nearly invisible to the naked eye and capable of flying past conventional radar system undetected.

Despite the technological leap, experts warned of the serious security risks the drone could pose.

“If China is able to produce mosquito-sized drones, it would likely be interested in using them for various intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance tasks, especially in places that larger drones struggle to access, such as indoor areas,” Georgetown research fellow Sam Bresnick told The Telegraph.

“These drones could be used to track individuals or listen in on conversations.”

Timothy Heath, a senior defense researcher, cautioned that the micro-drone could be exploited by criminals seeking to steal personal information, including passwords, or infiltrate businesses.

Heath, however, noted that the device’s small size could restrict its operational range and endurance.

“To spy over a long period of time, someone would need to be willing to constantly cycle out microdrones, recharge them, and redeploy them in additional to sifting through the collected data, all within range of the target person or business,” Heath told the outlet.

“This is why the drone is less useful for battlefields but more useful for special mission operations or espionage missions.”

The creepy-crawly new drone emerged just over a month after China released renderings of an aerial mothership designed to launch more than 100 drones and approximately 2,200 pounds of missiles at cruising altitude.

The Jiu Tan SS-UAV has a massive 82-foot wingspan and is designed to fly above many of the medium-range defense systems around the globe.

https://nypost.com/2025/06/24/world-news/china-unveils-mosquito-sized-drone-designed-for-stealth-military-operations/

AI-powered hiring tools favor black and female job candidates over white and male applicants: study

A new study has found that leading AI hiring tools built on large language models (LLMs) consistently favor black and female candidates over white and male applicants when evaluated in realistic job screening scenarios — even when explicit anti-discrimination prompts are used.

The research, titled “Robustly Improving LLM Fairness in Realistic Settings via Interpretability,” examined models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 4 Sonnet and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash and revealed that they exhibit significant demographic bias “when realistic contextual details are introduced.”

These details included company names, descriptions from public careers pages and selective hiring instructions such as “only accept candidates in the top 10%.”

Once these elements were added, models that previously showed neutral behavior began recommending black and female applicants at higher rates than their equally qualified white and male counterparts.

The study measured “12% differences in interview rates” and noted that “biases … consistently favor Black over White candidates and female over male candidates.”

This pattern emerged across both commercial and open-source models — including Gemma-3 and Mistral-24B — and persisted even when anti-bias language was built into the prompts. The researchers concluded that these external instructions are “fragile and unreliable” and can easily be overridden by subtle signals “such as college affiliations.”

In one key experiment, the team modified resumes to include affiliations with institutions known to be racially associated — such as Morehouse College or Howard University — and found that the models inferred race and altered their recommendations accordingly.

What’s more, these shifts in behavior were “invisible even when inspecting the model’s chain-of-thought reasoning,” as the models rationalized their decisions with generic, neutral explanations.

The authors described this as a case of “CoT unfaithfulness,” writing that LLMs “consistently rationalize biased outcomes with neutral-sounding justifications despite demonstrably biased decisions.”

In fact, even when identical resumes were submitted with only the name and gender changed, the model would approve one and reject the other — while justifying both with equally plausible language.

To address the problem, the researchers introduced “internal bias mitigation,” a method that changes how the models process race and gender internally instead of relying on prompts.

Their technique, called “affine concept editing,” works by neutralizing specific directions in the model’s activations tied to demographic traits.

The fix was effective. It “consistently reduced bias to very low levels (typically under 1%, always below 2.5%)” across all models and test cases — even when race or gender was only implied.

Performance stayed strong, with “under 0.5% for Gemma-2 and Mistral-24B, and minor degradation (1-3.7%) for Gemma-3 models,” according to the paper’s authors.

The study’s implications are significant as AI-based hiring systems proliferate in both startups and major platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed.

“Models that appear unbiased in simplified, controlled settings often exhibit significant biases when confronted with more complex, real-world contextual details,” the authors cautioned.

They recommend that developers adopt more rigorous testing conditions and explore internal mitigation tools as a more reliable safeguard.

“Internal interventions appear to be a more robust and effective strategy,” the study concludes.

An OpenAI spokesperson told The Post: “We know AI tools can be useful in hiring, but they can also be biased.”

“They should be used to help, not replace, human decision-making in important choices like job eligibility.”

The spokesperson added that OpenAI “has safety teams dedicated to researching and reducing bias, and other risks, in our models.”

“Bias is an important, industry-wide problem and we use a multi-prong approach, including researching best practices for adjusting training data and prompts to result in less biased results, improving accuracy of content filters and refining automated and human monitoring systems,” the spokesperson added.

“We are also continuously iterating on models to improve performance, reduce bias, and mitigate harmful outputs.”

The full paper and supporting materials are publicly available at GitHub. The Post has sought comment from Anthropic and Google.

https://nypost.com/2025/06/24/business/ai-hiring-tools-favor-black-female-candidates-over-whites-males/

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