During his long career as a polemicist and a strategist of terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri often taunted the United States. He hewed to the familiar theme that America was an apostate power at war with Islam. But he also described it as a spent force. In a video released this spring, he said that "U.S. weakness" was responsible for the war triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and he mocked the country's standing "after its defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the economic disasters caused by the 9/11 invasions, after the coronavirus pandemic, and after it left its ally Ukraine as prey for the Russians." The U.S. drone strike in Kabul last Saturday that killed Zawahiri, who was seventy-one, added a punctuation mark to the long search for justice for the victims of 9/11 and of other deadly attacks that Zawahiri directly approved, such as the bombing of two U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998, which killed twelve Americans and more than two hundred Africans.

At first glance, the July 31 killing of al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri by a US drone attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, appears to be the most significant setback the group has experienced since the death of its founder, Osama bin Laden, in 2011. However, throughout the decade he administered al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri worked to ensure the organisation has all the necessary tools in place to survive his death. As such, while the operation that eliminated one of the organisers of the 9/11 attacks is undoubtedly a major win for the current US administration, it is unlikely to debilitate the group. Indeed, the fallout from this targeted assassination will be minimal for al-Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri, seen by many as nothing other than a "grey bureaucrat", can easily be replaced by someone with a similar managerial mindset.

The future looks bright, perhaps thanks to the three Suns? These past few days, we've been tinkering with two AI engines. DALL·E 2 is an artificial intelligence system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. It is part of a larger OpenAI set of models. Midjourney is a similar AI program that creates images from textual descriptions.

In his short address, delivered on a White House balcony with the monuments behind him, the president vowed not to permit another sanctuary for terrorism. "We will never again, never again allow Afghanistan to become a terrorist safe haven, because he is gone and we're going to make sure nothing else happens," he said. "It can't be a launching pad against the United States. We're going to see to it that won't happen." While celebrating al-Zawahri's killing, Republicans wasted little time on Monday night asserting that the president's withdrawal had endangered the country.

A United States drone strike killed Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri at a hideout in the Afghan capital, President Joe Biden said Monday, adding "justice had been delivered" to the families of the September 11, 2001 attacks. In a somber televised address, Biden said he gave the final go-ahead for the high-precision strike that successfully targeted Zawahiri in the Afghan capital over the weekend. "Justice has been delivered and this terrorist leader is no more," Biden said, adding that he hoped Zawahiri's death would bring "closure" to families of the 3,000 people killed in the United States on 9/11. A senior administration official said Zawahiri was on the balcony of a house in Kabul when he was targeted with two Hellfire missiles, an hour after sunrise on July 31, and that there had been no US boots on the ground in Afghanistan. "We are not aware of him ever leaving the safe house. We identified Zawahiri on multiple occasions for sustained periods of time on the balcony of where he was ultimately struck," the official said.

Coccidiosis, Salmonella, and Newcastle are the common poultry diseases that curtail poultry production if they are not detected early. In Tanzania, these diseases are not detected early due to limited access to agricultural support services by poultry farmers. Deep learning techniques have the potential for early diagnosis of these poultry diseases. In this study, a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model was developed to diagnose poultry diseases by classifying healthy and unhealthy fecal images. Unhealthy fecal images may be symptomatic of Coccidiosis, Salmonella, and Newcastle diseases. We collected 1,255 laboratory-labeled fecal images and fecal samples used in Polymerase Chain Reaction diagnostics to annotate the laboratory-labeled fecal images. We took 6,812 poultry fecal photos using an Open Data Kit. Agricultural support experts annotated the farm-labeled fecal images. Then we used a baseline CNN model, VGG16, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, and Xception models. We trained models using farm and laboratory-labeled fecal images and then fine-tuned them. The test set used farm-labeled images. The test accuracies results without fine-tuning were 83.06% for the baseline CNN, 85.85% for VGG16, 94.79% for InceptionV3, 87.46% for MobileNetV2, and 88.27% for Xception. Finetuning while freezing the batch normalization layer improved model accuracies, resulting in 95.01% for VGG16, 95.45% for InceptionV3, 98.02% for MobileNetV2, and 98.24% for Xception, with F1 scores for all...

A U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan this weekend killed Ayman al-Zawahri, who helped Osama bin Laden plot the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and ensured al-Qaida survived and spread in the years after. President Joe Biden on Monday announced the killing of al-Zawahri, delivering a significant counterterrorism win just 11 months after American troops left the country. A look at the al-Qaida leader, who evaded U.S. capture for 21 years after the suicide airliner attacks that in many ways changed America and its relations with the rest of the world. Americans who lived through the 9/11 attacks may not remember al-Zawahri's name, but many know his face more than two decades on: a man in glasses, slightly smiling, invariably shown in photos by the side of bin Laden as the two arranged the strike on the United States. An Egyptian, al-Zawahri was born June 19, 1951, to a comfortable family in a leafy, drowsy Cairo suburb.

In 2002, when I profiled Ayman al-Zawahiri for The New Yorker, he was called "the man behind bin Laden." But since bin Laden was killed by American special forces in 2011, Zawahiri has been Al Qaeda's leader. Zawahiri and bin Laden were very different men, not friends but allies, using each other for the skills and resources they could each provide. Al Qaeda would not have survived without the dynamic they created together. Zawahiri, reportedly killed in Afghanistan by a U.S. drone strike over the weekend, was a doctor--a highly-educated professional who chose to devote himself to violent revolution.

President Joe Biden announced Monday that the United States had killed Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the world's most wanted terrorists and suspected mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. In a televised address, Biden said the strike in Kabul, Afghanistan had been carried out on Saturday. "I gave the final approval to go get him," he said, adding that there had been no civilian casualties. "Justice has been delivered and this terrorist leader is no more," Biden said. A senior administration official said Zawahiri had been killed on the balcony of a house in Kabul in a drone strike, and that there had been no US boots on the ground in Afghanistan.

In the open book question answering (OBQA) task, selecting the relevant passages and sentences from distracting information is crucial to reason the answer to a question. HotpotQA dataset is designed to teach and evaluate systems to do both passage ranking and sentence selection. Many existing frameworks use separate models to select relevant passages and sentences respectively. Such systems not only have high complexity in terms of the parameters of models but also fail to take the advantage of training these two tasks together since one task can be beneficial for the other one. In this work, we present a simple yet effective framework to address these limitations by jointly ranking passages and selecting sentences. Furthermore, we propose consistency and similarity constraints to promote the correlation and interaction between passage ranking and sentence selection.The experiments demonstrate that our framework can achieve competitive results with previous systems and outperform the baseline by 28% in Figure 1: An example from the HotpotQA dataset, terms of exact matching of relevant sentences where the question should be answered by combining on the HotpotQA dataset.