What happened
Andrew and Tristan Tate have appeared before a US federal court after being arrested in Miami on a British extradition request. The social media influencers are being held in custody while a judge considers whether they should be sent to the UK to face criminal charges.

British prosecutors allege that the brothers committed offences involving four new complainants between 2010 and 2017, including rape, assault, human trafficking and offences relating to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography. The pair also face separate UK charges involving three other alleged victims. They deny all allegations.

Who said what
The brothers’ attorney, Joe McBride, told reporters after the brief hearing that his clients had “never done nothing wrong”. He also claimed that the case was politically motivated, saying: “It’s garbage. It’s a stitch-up job.”

The new allegations are “the latest in a long-running international legal saga involving the Tates that has spanned the US, Britain and Romania”, said the Associated Press. Their social media empire “promoting male dominance, misogyny and wealth” has placed them “among the world’s most polarising internet personalities”.

Legal expert Professor Gemma Davies said the brothers could try to block the extradition under a US-UK treaty clause that allows for exemptions where the charges are politically motivated, but noted that “it’s very rare extradition between the UK and US is refused on those grounds”. 

What next?
A further hearing has been scheduled for 27 July.

What happened
Firefighters have been battling a large blaze on Arthur’s Seat, the hill near the centre of Edinburgh, since Sunday. It is the second fire in the area in the past three months, and one of several in Scotland during the recent hot, dry weather.

Who said what
The fire is surrounded, but “we’ll probably be there for a couple of days”, said Jon Henderson, assistant chief officer of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. It’s too early to speculate on cause of he blaze, but “there will be a full investigation”.

There are no reported casualties, but “large swathes of vegetation” have been burnt, said The Times. Hundreds of firefighters have also been battling a fire in Cairngorms National Park over the past week.

“I was a bit worried because I thought the fire would come this way, but thankfully there’s enough concrete here to stop it,” said Mahek Jayantilial, a student at the University of Edinburgh. Seeing the hill on fire is “a bit upsetting”, but “the grass has dried off and it was bound to happen”.

What next?
Firefighters will maintain a four-kilometre firebreak while working to extinguish the remaining hotspots.

A recent study conducted by Anthropic, the creator of Claude, analysed the AI chatbot’s responses in different languages. It found that if you want a friendlier tone, you may want to switch your language settings.

Anthropic compared data from more than 300,000 anonymised conversations in a two-week period during May this year, said The Decoder. The study used the technique “dimensionality reduction” to measure the responses across four separate axes: warmth vs rigour, depth vs brevity, candour vs execution and deference vs caution. Anthropic “explicitly states” that this study does not “imply that Claude intrinsically holds values”, but instead the term “values” refers to “values reflected by Claude’s behaviour and outputs”.

The results showed that Arabic responses had “greater warmth”, meaning they contained more “polite phrasing, humour, playfulness and affirmation”, added The Decoder. On the candour vs execution axis, Dutch responses showed a more  “honest appraisal of potential shortcomings”, said The Register.

The study also showed the response differences across Claude’s models. Sonnet 4.6 appeared to be more affirming towards users’ ideas and “offers comfort without passing judgement”, while Opus 4.7 “openly critiques” and “questions assumptions”, according to The Decoder. Sonnet 4.6 is the default free model on the Anthropic platform. Opus 4.7 is the premium paid model of Claude.

These differences remain an “open question”. Anthropic said it was “making sense of this variation” and using what it had learned to “improve Claude’s behaviour”.