Month: December 2024
Blinken trip to Iraq
Blinken’s meeting with the Iraqi prime minister comes days after the top US military commander for the Middle East visited “for an assessment of the D-ISIS mission inside Iraq and Syria.” Two top State Department officials were also in Baghdad ahead of Blinken’s visit.Blinken met with Sudani for more than an hour in Baghdad the
Israel to stay on peak of Mount Hermon during winter
Israel’s defence minister has instructed troops to prepare to stay for winter on peak of Mount Hermon, which sits on the border between Syria, Lebanon border and a UN demilitarised buffer zone in the Golan Heights. The announcement comes after Israel seized control of the zone on 8 December after the fall of Syrian President
Black-box forgetting
The capabilities of large-scale pre-trained AI models have recently skyrocketed, as demonstrated by large-scale vision-language models like CLIP or ChatGPT. These typical generalist models can perform reasonably well in tasks covering a large variety of fields, which has paved the way for their widespread adoption by the public. Pretrained large-scale AI models need to ‘forget’
Chinese hackers Inside America Telecommunication Networks
Officials say a Chinese hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon compromised at least eight of America’s telecoms networks. The intruders stole the call-record metadata of a “large number” of Americans. They gained access to the wiretap requests of security agencies meaning they could work out if any Chinese spies or agents were under American surveillance. And
NATO to increase Military spending
NATO countries are committed to spending at least 2% of GDP on defense but several, including Italy and Spain, have fallen short. This year, Poland has led the alliance on defense, spending 4.12% of GDP followed by Estonia at 3.43%, and the US at 3.38%. NATO members may increase their defense spending to 3% of
Russia-Ukraine prison swap in December
Hungary has retained warm economic and diplomatic ties with Moscow even after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, criticizing EU sanctions against Russia and obstructing military aid for Kyiv.Ukraine and Russia held numerous prisoner exchanges throughout the full-scale war with the mediation of a third-party country. The most recent swap occurred in mid-October, with each side
Kurdish forces lose ground to Turkey backed rebels
Turkey’s long-standing opposition to Kurdish autonomy remains a pivotal challenge. It views the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the primary Kurdish militia, as an extension of Kurdish insurgents within its own borders. Ankara has financed and trained Syrian factions, known as the Syrian National Army, to reclaim Kurdish-held territories, intensifying regional hostilities. The Kurdish forces allied
The success of Google Willow chip
The new chip, which even wow’d Tesla CEO Elon Musk, can complete a complex computation in five minutes that would take the most powerful supercomputer 10 septillion years more than the estimated age of the universe, wrote Hartmut Neven.Google captivated the tech world Monday with Willow, a new quantum chip that outperformed even the world’s
Russia rescue Bashir al-Assad
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, personally approved the rescue of Assad on Sunday and has guaranteed his safety in exile, although he has no intention of meeting him. Russia organised for Bashir al-Assad to flee to Moscow via its air base on the Syrian coast as rebels broke into Damascus on Sunday. Assad followed the
confidence vote for Germany Government
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz sent a request to parliament on Wednesday to hold a vote of confidence on Dec. 16, setting a path to an early federal election next year after the collapse of his coalition.If, as expected, Scholz loses the confidence vote, he must then ask the president to dissolve parliament, which would trigger