Exclusive drone footage reveals the extensive destruction in Zabadani, a city near Damascus, which endured heavy shelling from Bashar al-Assad's forces during Syria's war.

It's not every day that you are told to get inside quickly because four drones are watching the compound you are in – probably weaponised United States drones. There is a split-second pause and then you gather your gear and move inside. As we drive into the nondescript building, past the lawn, we are asked to park in the shade, presumably to provide cover from the prying killer robots watching us. It is April 18, one day before Israel launched several drones at Iran after Iran itself launched a barrage of drones and missiles on Israel on April 13. That, in turn, was a response to an Israeli attack on Iran's consulate compound in Damascus which killed 16 people, including two senior generals.

The administration of United States President Joe Biden has imposed new sanctions on Iran in response to its missile and drone attack on Israel, as tensions mount over the possibility of further escalation in the Middle East. In a statement on Thursday, Biden said the sanctions targeted "leaders and entities connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran's Defense Ministry, and the Iranian government's missile and drone program that enabled" the April 13 attack on Israel. "As I discussed with my fellow G7 [Group of Seven] leaders the morning after the attack, we are committed to acting collectively to increase economic pressure on Iran," the US president said. "And our allies and partners have or will issue additional sanctions and measures to restrict Iran's destabilizing military programs." Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in the early hours on Sunday, in retaliation for the deadly bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria's capital, Damascus, earlier this month.

The Palestinian Hamas group has expressed support for Iran after it launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation for a deadly assault on its consulate in the Syrian capital, Damascus. In a statement on Saturday, Hamas, which governs the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, said it affirmed "the natural right" of countries and peoples in the Middle East to defend themselves "in the face of Zionist aggressions". "The military operation carried out by Iran against the Zionist entity is a natural right and a due response to the crime of targeting the consulate in Damascus," it said. The Iranian salvo, fired late on Saturday night, consisted of more than 300 cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and drones, according to the Israeli military. Some 99 percent of the projectiles were intercepted, an Israeli spokesman said, with help from France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Tehran launched its overnight attack in response to the killing of its Quds Force Commander, Major General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who was killed two weeks ago in an air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria.

Current and former U.S. officials expressed fears on Tuesday that Israel's airstrikes on an Iranian embassy compound in Syria could escalate hostilities in the region, and prompt retaliatory strikes against Israel and its American ally. The officials said the attack on Monday, which killed three generals in Iran's Quds Force and four other officers, had dealt a serious blow to the force, the external military and intelligence service of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Ralph Goff, a former senior C.I.A. official who served in the Middle East, called Israel's strike "incredibly reckless." "It will only result in escalation by Iran and its proxies, which is very dangerous" to American troops in the region who could be targeted in retaliatory strikes by Tehran's proxies, Mr. Goff said. Indeed, after the Israeli strike in Damascus, Syria's capital, on Monday, American troops based in southeastern Syria knocked down an attack drone, a Defense Department official said.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has blamed Israel for a strike in Syria that killed four senior members of the group. "The Revolutionary Guards' Syria intel chief, his deputy and two other Guards members were martyred in the attack on Syria by Israel," Iran's Mehr news agency announced, citing an unnamed source. Nour News, another Iranian news agency that allegedly has close ties to the country's intelligence networks, identified Gen. Sadegh Omidzadeh, intelligence deputy of the IRGC's Quds Force in Syria, and his deputy among the dead. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that another Iranian and a Syrian -- unidentified at this time -- also died in the strike. The strike destroyed a building in the western Damascus neighborhood of Mazzeh that the IRGC officials had allegedly used as a base of operations.

This paper presents Nabra, a corpora of Syrian Arabic dialects with morphological annotations. A team of Syrian natives collected more than 6K sentences containing about 60K words from several sources including social media posts, scripts of movies and series, lyrics of songs and local proverbs to build Nabra. Nabra covers several local Syrian dialects including those of Aleppo, Damascus, Deir-ezzur, Hama, Homs, Huran, Latakia, Mardin, Raqqah, and Suwayda. A team of nine annotators annotated the 60K tokens with full morphological annotations across sentence contexts. We trained the annotators to follow methodological annotation guidelines to ensure unique morpheme annotations, and normalized the annotations. F1 and kappa agreement scores ranged between 74% and 98% across features, showing the excellent quality of Nabra annotations. Our corpora are open-source and publicly available as part of the Currasat portal https://sina.birzeit.edu/currasat.

The prescriptions of our two most prominent strands of decision theory, evidential and causal, differ in a general class of problems known as Newcomb problems. In these, evidential decision theory prescribes choosing a dominated act. Attempts have been made at reconciling the two theories by relying on additional requirements such as ratification (Jeffrey 1983) or "tickles" (Eells 1982). It has been argued that such attempts have failed (Lewis 1981a; Skyrms 1982). More recently, Huttegger (forthcoming) has developed a version of deliberative decision theory that reconciles the prescriptions of the evidentialist and causalist. In this paper, I extend this framework to problems characterised by decision instability, and show that it cannot deliver a resolute answer under a plausible specification of the tickle. I prove that there exists a robust method of determining whether the specification of the tickle matters for all two-state, two-act problems whose payoff tables exhibit some basic mathematical relationships. One upshot is that we have a principled way of knowing ex-ante whether a reconciliation of evidential and causal decision theory is plausible for a wide range of decision problems under this framework. Another upshot is that the tickle approach needs further work to achieve full reconciliation.

The Israeli army says one of its drones came down in Lebanese territory, following a reinforcement of its presence at its northern frontier near Lebanon. The drone fell "during IDF operational activity" along the border, the army said in a statement on Sunday. "There is no concern that any information was leaked," it said. Israel's Channel 12 reported that the drone crashed after it experienced a technical failure. Tensions have risen along Israel's frontier with Syria and Lebanon this week after a fighter from the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah was killed in an apparent Israeli strike on the edge of Damascus.