Day: April 28, 2026

Defending champions Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) host Bayern Munich for the first leg of their blockbuster Champions League semifinal, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.

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The football match at Parc des Princes in Paris, France kicks off at 9pm (19:00 GMT).

PSG dumped Liverpool out in the quarterfinals with relative ease, but must overcome a four-game losing streak in the competition against Bayern to reach the final in May, where either Atletico Madrid or Arsenal will await.

German champions Bayern dispatched Real Madrid in a thrilling Champions League quarterfinal.

The post PSG vs Bayern Munich – 2-2 in the Champions League semifinal first leg​ appeared first on azeritimes.com.

The government has faced questions since it emerged that the prime minister’s former chief of staff’s phone was stolen, leading to the loss of many of his messages with sacked US ambassador Lord Peter Mandelson.

The government-issued device was reported stolen after Mandelson’s firing, but before parliament forced the government to publish all papers and communications relating to his appointment and time in office.

However, the theft of a device containing so much sensitive information, as well as the loss of messages of which parliament has mandated the release, has raised a number of questions, particularly after the police admitted they took down the wrong address of the theft.
So what do we know about what has happened?

Mr McSweeney’s government-issued iPhone was stolen shortly before 22.30pm on 20 October, the Metropolitan Police has confirmed.

This was a month after Lord Mandelson was sacked as ambassador to the US following the release of a cache of emails showing he had a much closer relationship with deceased paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein than previously known.

The police took the unusual step in March of releasing a transcript of Mr McSweeney’s emergency call to police reporting the theft, which reveals confusion over where it actually occurred.

Although Mr McSweeney said it was on “Belgrave Street in Westminster”, it was misrecorded by the police call handler as Belgrave Street in Tower Hamlets.

The explanation for this is that the street in Westminster is actually called Belgrave Road, and when the call handler typed “Belgrave Street” into their system, it entered the address as East London, which went unnoticed. The force has now reopened the investigation.

In addition, although Mr McSweeney said it was a “government phone”, he did not say he was the prime minister’s chief of staff, and the Met Police has said that it means the detail “could not reasonably have shaped our decision-making”.

It is worth noting that over 2,000 government devices across all departments were lost or stolen in 2024, according to figures published by The Guardian.

Mr McSweeney told parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) on 28 Paril that he reported the theft to No 10 as soon as it happened, and he “thought at the time that they would be able to track” the phone.

“I then called 999. If No 10 had told me you need to tell the police or you need to tell the call handler what your job is, I would have done so. But otherwise, I didn’t do that as a matter of course. I didn’t in any part of my job go around saying ‘I’m a very serious and senior person’. If No 10 had asked me to do it, I would have done that.”

He later made “further calls to No 10”, and said he was “quite surprised by how limited the security is around the chief of staff’s telephone”.

Why is the theft of McSweeney’s phone an issue?

Firstly, he was the prime minister’s chief of staff, so the PM’s most senior political advisor. His phone contained the contact details for and messages with Sir Keir Starmer, the cabinet, and the most senior British officials.

This is information that the foreign intelligence services of adversaries like Russia, China and Iran would be very interested in obtaining.

But there is controversy because it also contained messages exchanged with Lord Mandelson, who had been fired as US ambassador just over a month before it was stolen.

The humble address passed by the Commons specifically mandates the release of “electronic communications between the prime minister’s chief of staff and Lord Mandelson” because Mr McSweeney is said to have been the main advocate for his initial hiring – which led to his resignation from Downing Street last month.
Although it is understood that the Cabinet Office does hold some messages between the pair, Mr McSweeney said he was not aware if the phone was backed up at all, and regardless, he believes he had the ‘disappearing messages’ function switched on for his conversations with Lord Mandelson.

Sir Keir Starmer has rejected accusations that the government wanted to hide the messages, telling broadcasters: “The phone was stolen. It was reported to the police. There’s a transcript of the call in which Morgan McSweeney gives his name, his date of birth, the details of the phone, and the police confirm that it was reported.

“Unfortunately, there are thefts like this. It was stolen. It was reported at the time and the police have acknowledged and confirmed that that is what happened.

“And the idea that somehow everybody could have seen that sometime in the future there would be a request for the phone is, to my mind, a little bit far-fetched.”

For full coverage, see the original article on SkyNews.

The post Morgan McSweeney’s stolen phone sparks controversy—what happened?​ appeared first on azeritimes.com.

A jury had previously convicted him of 13 charges, mostly related to sexual assault of three women, News.Az reports, citing The Associated Press.

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Accusers and their families told Judge Jessica Peterson they continue to suffer from the trauma caused by Chasing Horse, 49, and struggle with their faith after he exploited his position as a spiritual leader.

“There is no way to get back the youth, the childhood loss, my first time, my first kiss, the graduation I never got to have,” said Corena Leone-LaCroix, who was 14 when Chasing Horse assaulted her. “The life that little girl could have lived has been taken from me forever.”

The Associated Press typically does not use the name of alleged sexual assault victims unless they come forward publicly, as Leone-LaCroix has.

Chasing Horse, wearing his navy blue Clark County Detention Center uniform, stared straight ahead as victims read their statements and remained quiet as he was escorted out of the courtroom. He’ll be eligible for parole after serving for 37 years, and has continued to deny the charges against him.
“This is a miscarriage of justice,” he told the judge on Monday.

Peterson said she was struck by his continued denial of the charges despite the evidence shown in trial.

“You preyed on these women’s trusts and their spirituality, and you manipulated them for your own personal gratification,” she said before she announced his sentence. When the hearing adjourned, more than a dozen people in the courtroom clapped.

Other charges in Canada are still pending

The sentencing wraps a yearslong effort to prosecute the former actor after he was first arrested and indicted in 2023. That initial arrest reverberated around Indian Country, with law enforcement in other states and Canada following up with more criminal charges. Those charges are still pending.

The British Columbia Prosecution Service said Chasing Horse was charged with sexual assault in February 2023, though the date of the alleged offense took place in September 2018 near Keremeos, a village about four hours east of Vancouver. In November 2023, the case paused due to Chasing Horse’s charges in the United States, but resumed the following year.

After all of Chasing Horse’s appeals have been exhausted, British Columbia prosecutors will assess next steps, Damienne Darby, communications counsel for the British Columbia Prosecution Service, said in an email.

A warrant against Chasing Horse remains outstanding in Alberta, the Tsuut’ina Nation Police Service in Alberta said in a statement following Chasing Horse’s conviction in January. The Tsuut’ina Nation Police Service said that it is in contact with the Alberta Crown Prosecutors Office regarding the warrant.

January trial focused on his role as spiritual leader

Chasing Horse was born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, which is home to the Sicangu Sioux, one of the seven tribes of the Lakota nation. Following his appearance as the young Sioux tribe member Smiles a Lot in Kevin Costner’s Oscar-winning film “Dances With Wolves,” Chasing Horse traveled across Indian Country to attend powwows and perform healing ceremonies.

During his trial, Nevada prosecutors said Chasing Horse used his reputation as a Lakota medicine man to prey on Indigenous women and girls.

Deputy District Attorney Bianca Pucci told the jury that for almost 20 years, Chasing Horse “spun a web of abuse” that ensnared many women.

Jurors heard from three women who said Chasing Horse sexually assaulted them. The jury returned guilty verdicts on some charges. He was acquitted on others.

Needing medical help

Multiple victims described how they participated in his ceremonies or went to Chasing Horse for medical help.

Chasing Horse allegedly told Leone-LaCroix when she was 14 that the spirits wanted her to give up her virginity to save her mother, who was diagnosed with cancer. He then sexually assaulted her and told her that if she told anyone, her mother would die, according to Pucci. The sexual assaults continued for years, Pucci said.

Chasing Horse denied the allegations and his attorney questioned the main accuser’s credibility, calling her a “scorned woman.” His attorney had filed a motion for a new trial, arguing that a witness was not qualified to talk about grooming and that the statute of limitations had expired. That motion was denied.

Victims and their family members testified that they struggle with their faith as a result of Chasing Horse’s actions. The mothers of the victims said Chasing Horse betrayed their trust and abused sacred traditions.

“Even to this day I struggle to regain my faith and spirituality,” said Lynnette Adams, the mother of Siera Begaye, one of the other victims.

The AP typically does not use the name of alleged sexual assault victims unless they come forward publicly or approved the use of their names, as Begaye has.

Begaye said she still faces complications after suffering an ectopic pregnancy as a result of the assault and being forced to undergo surgery.

“I am choosing to see this moment as a fresh start,” Begaye said. “I will rebuild my life, reclaim my voice and continue fighting for the future I deserve.”

The post Dances With Wolves actor sentenced to life for sexual assault​ appeared first on azeritimes.com.

This best-in-class model gives enterprises and developers a production path for more efficient and accurate multimodal AI agents with full deployment flexibility and control, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
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Nemotron 3 Nano Omni sets a new efficiency frontier for open multimodal models with leading accuracy and low cost, topping six leaderboards for complex document intelligence, and video and audio understanding.
AI and software companies already adopting Nemotron 3 Nano Omni include Aible, Applied Scientific Intelligence (ASI), Eka Care, Foxconn, H Company, Palantir and Pyler, with Dell Technologies, DocuSign, Infosys, K-Dense, Lila, Oracle and Zefr evaluating the model. 
“To build useful agents, you can’t wait seconds for a model to interpret a screen,” said Gautier Cloix, CEO of H Company. “By building on Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, our agents can rapidly interpret full HD screen recordings — something that wasn’t practical before. This isn’t just a speed boost: It’s a fundamental shift in how our agents perceive and interact with digital environments in real time.”
Nemotron 3 Nano Omni Enables Faster, Leaner Multimodal AgentsConsider an AI agent for customer support processing a screen recording while analyzing uploaded call audio and checking data logs — or an agent for finance tasked with parsing PDFs, spreadsheets, charts and voice notes. Today, most agentic systems accomplish these tasks with separate models for vision, speech and language. 
This approach increases latency through repeated inference passes, fragments context across modalities, and adds cost and inaccuracies over time.
By combining vision and audio encoders within its 30B-A3B hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture, Nemotron 3 Nano Omni eliminates the need for separate perception models, improving efficiency at scale. As the first open model to deliver both this level of efficiency and strong multimodal perception accuracy, it enables AI systems to achieve up to 9x higher throughput than other open omni models with similar interactivity. The result is lower cost and better scalability — without sacrificing responsiveness or quality.
By combining vision and audio encoders within its 30B-A3B, hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture, Nemotron 3 Nano Omni eliminates the need for separate perception models, driving inference efficiency at scale. It pairs this efficiency with strong multimodal perception accuracy, enabling AI systems to achieve 9x higher throughput than other open omni models with the same interactivity. The result is lower costs and better scalability without sacrificing responsiveness or quality.
In agentic systems, Nemotron 3 Nano Omni can work alongside proprietary cloud models or other NVIDIA Nemotron open models — such as Nemotron 3 Super for high-frequency execution or Nemotron 3 Ultra for complex planning — as well as proprietary models from other providers, to power sub-agents for agentic workflows such as computer use, document intelligence and audio-video reasoning.

The post NVIDIA unveils Nemotron 3 Nano Omni model, enhancing AI agents’ efficiency by 9x appeared first on azeritimes.com.

The Kars-Gyumri railway is back at the center of South Caucasus geopolitics.

Turkey and Armenia are testing whether regional connectivity can become a tool for normalization, with growing US backing for the process.

🔗 https://t.co/UT8vWOUPaf#Turkey #Armenia #SouthCaucasus…

— Spiros Sideris – IBNA (@Sp_Sideris) April 28, 2026

According to The Information, the contract stipulates that these technologies cannot be used for mass surveillance or for the creation of autonomous weapons operating without human oversight.
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At the same time, Google will not have the authority to influence or veto government operational decisions.
The company stated that it cooperates with government institutions on both classified and non classified projects.

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