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Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli cautioned that human existence could be at risk if the population growth does not take place equally alongside development and prosperity.

He said so at a program organized by the Ministry of Health and Population today to mark the World Population Day-2025 and to introduce the National Population Policy-2082 BS.

Emphasizing the need for development to align with population growth/demographic dividend, Oli stated that everyone should view childbearing as a responsibility towards the Earth.

"Every country has a meaning because of humans. As humans, we give meaning to the earth as well. If there were no population, there would not be a country either," the PM asserted, calling for suitable policies and timely action to protect the prosperous existence of the human race. 

He argued that the human race is the most valuable source for creation and thus urged people to stop killing people for personal gain. 

Hitting out at irony, he said, "Holding seminars on population while continuing to kill people by making weapons of mass destruction will endanger the existence of humankind."

Canadian singer Justin Bieber has surprised fans by releasing a new album titled Swag, BBC reported.

The record features 20 songs with track names including Dadz Love, Devotion and Therapy Session and follows online concern for the singer's mental health after a confrontation with paparazzi.

Promotional pictures shared by the singer feature his wife, Hailey Bieber, and their son - at points being held over his head.

Fellow artists and fans have reacted with glee to the new music, which comes four years after Bieber's last album, Purpose, according to BBC.

Top South Korean, U.S. and Japanese military officers urged North Korea to cease all unlawful activities that threaten regional security, as the three nations flew advanced warplanes for a joint exercise in a show of force against the North, Associated Press reported.

The development came Friday as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was to travel to North Korea amid booming military and other cooperation between the two countries that have raised concerns among their neighbors. 

During their regular meeting in Seoul on Friday, the chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff from South Korea, the U.S. and Japan discussed North Korea’s deployment of troops to Russia to support its war against Ukraine and Russia’s potential transfer of military technology to North Korea in return, according to Associated Press.

“They urged the DPRK to immediately cease all unlawful activities to destabilize the Korean Peninsula, the Indo-Pacific, and beyond, and pledged to continue working together to respond to the DPRK’s threats,” the three top military officers said in a joint statement.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is wrapping his up his second and final day at a Southeast Asian security conference with a high-stakes meeting with his Chinese counterpart as tensions grow between Washington and Beijing over issues from trade to security and China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, Associated Press reported.

After discussions with regional countries at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations forum in Malaysia, Rubio on Friday was close out his first official trip to Asia in his first face-to-face talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the State Department said.

The meeting comes less than 24 hours after Rubio met in Kuala Lumpur with another rival, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, during which they discussed potential new avenues to jumpstart Ukraine peace talks. 

The meetings come against a backdrop of global and regional unease over U.S. policies, notably on trade and large tariffs that U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to impose on friend and foe alike, according to Associated Press.

 Israel believes deeply buried stocks of enriched uranium at one Iranian nuclear facility hit by the U.S. military are potentially retrievable, a senior Israeli official said, Associated Press reported.

And the agency that built the U.S. “bunker buster” bombs dropped on two other nuclear sites said Thursday that it is still waiting for data to be able to determine if those munitions reached their targets.

Both developments widen the views on the damage from last month’s strikes, when the United States inserted itself in Israel’s war in a bid to eliminate the threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapon. Iran says its program is peaceful. 

President Donald Trump is adamant that the U.S. strikes “obliterated” the three Iranian nuclear facilities it targeted. International assessments and an initial U.S. intelligence assessment have been more measured, with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency saying in a preliminary report that the strikes did significant damage to the Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan sites, but did not destroy them, according to Associated Press.

Russian authorities have confiscated assets worth some $50 billion over the past three years, underscoring the scale of the transformation into a "fortress Russia" economic model during the war in Ukraine, research showed on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

The conflict has been accompanied by a significant transfer of assets as many Western companies fled the Russian market, others' assets were expropriated and the assets of some major Russian businesses were seized by the state.

In response to what Russia called illegal actions by the West, President Vladimir Putin signed decrees over the past three years allowing the seizure of Western assets, entangling firms ranging from Germany's Uniper to Danish brewer Carlsberg.

Besides the Western assets, major domestic companies have changed hands on the basis of different legal mechanisms including the need for strategic resources, corruption claims, alleged privatisation violations, or poor management, according to Reuters.

Contrary to popular belief, using cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools slowed down experienced software developers when they were working in codebases familiar to them, rather than supercharging their work, a new study found, Reuters reported.

AI research nonprofit METR conducted the in-depth study, opens new tab on a group of seasoned developers earlier this year while they used Cursor, a popular AI coding assistant, to help them complete tasks in open-source projects they were familiar with.

Before the study, the open-source developers believed using AI would speed them up, estimating it would decrease task completion time by 24%. Even after completing the tasks with AI, the developers believed that they had decreased task times by 20%. But the study found that using AI did the opposite: it increased task completion time by 19%, according to Reuters.

The study’s lead authors, Joel Becker and Nate Rush, said they were shocked by the results: prior to the study, Rush had written down that he expected “a 2x speed up, somewhat obviously.”

A federal judge on Thursday again barred President Donald Trump's administration from denying citizenship to some babies born in the U.S., making use of an exception to overcome the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling that restricted the ability of judges to block that and other policies nationwide, BBC reported.

U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante ruled at a hearing in Concord, New Hampshire, after immigrant rights advocates implored him to grant class action status to a lawsuit they filed seeking to represent any children whose citizenship status would be threatened by the implementation of Trump's executive order curtailing automatic birthright citizenship.

The ruling is far from the last word in the legal battle over Trump's order, which he signed in January on his first day back in office. The judge paused his ruling for seven days to give the Trump administration time to appeal, which a Justice Department lawyer at the hearing indicated would certainly happen, according to BBC.

Laplante, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, agreed, opens new tab the plaintiffs could provisionally proceed as a class, allowing him to issue a fresh judicial order blocking implementation of the Republican president's policy nationally.