following some resignations and forced departures.

With the Nato summit due to be held in the Hague at the end of the month, it is likely that Schoof's ministers will remain in power in a caretaker capacity until a date is set for the Netherlands to return to the polls.Police in Mexico have detained a man known by the alias of M-47, whom they suspect of ordering the murder of members of the band Grupo Fugitivo.

The bodies of four musicians from the band and their manager were discovered on Thursday in Tamaulipas state, four days after the men had been reported missing.Their relatives had reported receiving ransom demands in the days after the men's disappearance.While kidnappings for ransom are not uncommon in violence-wracked Tamaulipas, the way band members were apparently lured to an abandoned lot by their kidnappers with the promise of a gig at a private party and then killed has shocked locals, who held rallies demanding their release.

Police said they arrested M-47 during raids on three properties, in which they also seized drugs, weapons, cash and suspicious vehicles and detained two other suspects.Federal officials said they suspect M-47 of being one of the bosses of a gang known as "Metros", which forms part of the Gulf Cartel.

The Gulf Cartel has its stronghold in Tamaulipas state and engages in the smuggling of drugs and migrants across the US-Mexico border, as well as kidnapping for ransom.

It is not clear why the members of Grupo Fugitivo were targeted.The idea of machines with their own minds has long been explored in science fiction. Worries about AI stretch back nearly a hundred years to the film Metropolis, in which a robot impersonates a real woman.

A fear of machines becoming conscious and posing a threat to humans is explored in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the HAL 9000 computer attacks astronauts onboard its spaceship. And in the final Mission Impossible film, which has just been released, the world is threatened by a powerful rogue AI, described by one character as a "self-aware, self-learning, truth-eating digital parasite".But quite recently, in the real world there has been a rapid tipping point in thinking on machine consciousness, where credible voices have become concerned that this is no longer the stuff of science fiction.

The sudden shift has been prompted by the success of so-called large language models (LLMs), which can be accessed through apps on our phones such as Gemini and Chat GPT. The ability of the latest generation of LLMs to have plausible, free-flowing conversations has surprised even their designers and some of the leading experts in the field.There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious.