Iranian officials warned that Tehran would decisively respond to any U.S. attacks, as President Biden vowed unspecified action following the deaths of three American soldiers in Jordan. "We hear threats coming from American officials, we tell them that they have already tested us, and we now know one another, no threat will be left unanswered," Iranian Revolutionary Guards' chief Hossein Salami said on Wednesday, Reuters reported, citing the semi-official Tasnim news agency. "We are not after war, but we have no fear of war," Salami, who answers only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said at an event Wednesday, according to the state-run IRNA news agency. Another warning came from Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations in New York. UNITED NATIONS SPOX INSISTS'UNRWA DOES NOT WORK WITH HAMAS' DESPITE CLAIMS EMPLOYEES PARTICIPATED IN OCT. 7 FILE - Iran's United Nations Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani addresses the U.N. General Assembly at U.N. headquarters on Feb. 23, 2023.

An Iran-backed militia group in Iraq says it is suspending attacks on U.S. troops after a drone attack killed three soldiers early Sunday, but the Department of Defense is casting doubt on those claims. The Iraq-based Kataeb Hezbollah said Tuesday it was suspending "military and security operations against the occupying forces to avoid any embarrassment for the Iraqi government." Gen. Ryder speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon on Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2024 in Washington. The group is one of multiple Iranian proxies in the region that are believed responsible for carrying out attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq, Syria, and, most recently, Jordan over the past several months. The groups say the attacks are in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel in its ongoing offensive against Hamas militants in Gaza and the mounting death toll of Palestinian civilians.

On Sunday, January 28, The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group that includes the militias Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba among others, claimed responsibility for a drone attack that killed three US military personnel and injured 34 others in a base in northeastern Jordan, near the Syria border. In the media coverage of the attack, it was repeatedly mentioned that these militias have launched 165 attacks on US troops – 66 in Iraq and 98 in Syria – since October 2023. While it helps put the attack in context, this is a misleading figure. This conflict began much earlier than last October, and thus the total number of attacks the US has faced from these militias is actually much higher. Indeed, Sunday's drone attack was just the latest episode in an undeclared war between the United States and Iran-affiliated Iraqi Shia militias that has been raging across the region for more than five years. More than six years ago, in October 2017, in an article published on this very page, I predicted that US President Donald Trump's controversial decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the "Iran nuclear deal", would result in attacks by Iran-backed Iraqi militias on US forces in Iraq and across the region.

Creativity is core to being human. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) -- including ever more powerful large language models (LLMs) -- holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas, or less creative by anchoring on GenAI ideas. We study the causal impact of GenAI ideas on the production of a short story in an online experimental study where some writers could obtain story ideas from a GenAI platform. We find that access to GenAI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers. However, GenAI-enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone. These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty. This dynamic resembles a social dilemma: with GenAI, individual writers are better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content may be produced. Our results have implications for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners interested in bolstering creativity.

The United States military announced on Sunday that three US soldiers were killed and at least 34 were wounded in a drone attack targeting Tower 22, a remote logistics outpost near the Jordan-Syrian border. The attack has elicited a strong reaction from Washington with President Joe Biden pledging to hold the attackers to account. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed armed groups in the region, claimed the attacks, saying it was in response to US support to Israel's war on Gaza, which has killed more than 26,000 people. Tower 22, which houses a small US logistics outpost, is located in Jordan's northeast close to the borders with Iraq and Syria. Public information about the outpost is limited.

This was the day that President Biden and his team had feared for more than three months, the day that relatively low-level attacks by Iranian proxy groups on American troops in the Middle East turned deadly and intensified the pressure on the president to respond in kind. With three American service members killed and two dozen more injured by a drone in Jordan, Mr. Biden must decide how far he is willing to go in terms of retaliation at the risk of a wider war that he has sought to avoid ever since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas touched off the current Middle East crisis. Until now, the president had carefully calibrated his responses to the more than 150 attacks by Iranian-backed militias on American forces in the region since Oct. 7. He essentially ignored the majority that were successfully intercepted or did little to no damage while authorizing limited U.S. strikes focused mainly on buildings, weapons and infrastructure after attacks that were more brazen, most notably against the Houthis in Yemen who have targeted shipping in the Red Sea. The first deaths of American troops under fire, however, will require a different level of response, American officials said, and the president's advisers were in consensus about that as they consulted with him by secure videoconference on Sunday.

Invasive species in water bodies pose a major threat to the environment and biodiversity globally. Due to increased transportation and trade, non-native species have been introduced to new environments, causing damage to ecosystems and leading to economic losses in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. Therefore, there is a pressing need for risk assessment and management techniques to mitigate the impact of these invasions. This study aims to develop a new physics-inspired model to forecast maritime shipping traffic and thus inform risk assessment of invasive species spread through global transportation networks. Inspired by the gravity model for international trades, our model considers various factors that influence the likelihood and impact of vessel activities, such as shipping flux density, distance between ports, trade flow, and centrality measures of transportation hubs. Additionally, by analyzing the risk network of invasive species, we provide a comprehensive framework for assessing the invasion threat level given a pair of origin and destination. Accordingly, this paper introduces transformers to gravity models to rebuild the short- and long-term dependencies that make the risk analysis feasible. Thus, we introduce a physics-inspired framework that achieves an 89% segmentation accuracy for existing and non-existing trajectories and an 84.8% accuracy for the number of vessels flowing between key port areas, representing more than 10% improvement over the traditional deep-gravity model. Along these lines, this research contributes to a better understanding of invasive species risk assessment. It allows policymakers, conservationists, and stakeholders to prioritize management actions by identifying high-risk invasion pathways. Besides, our model is versatile and can include new data sources, making it suitable for assessing species invasion risks in a changing global landscape.

US and coalition troops are also stationed in the Red Sea after the Iran-backed Houthis began attacking commercial ships in the region. The Yemen-based group says it is targeting vessels in the region in support of Palestinians in Gaza, where Israel is fighting Hamas.

A UK vessel shot down a Houthi drone in the Red Sea, the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence has said, as tensions in the Middle East soar amid the ongoing war in Gaza. "Yesterday HMS Diamond successfully repelled a drone attack from the Iranian-backed Houthis in the Red Sea," read a statement from the ministry published on Sunday on X. "Diamond destroyed a drone targeting her, with no injuries or damage sustained to Diamond or her crew," it added. There was no immediate comment from the Houthis. The Yemen-based group previously pledged to target Israel-linked vessels in the region as part of an effort to pressure the country's government to end its bombardment of Gaza and allow more humanitarian aid supplies into the coastal Palestinian enclave. Gaza has been under heavy bombardment by Israeli forces since October 7, when Hamas fighters stormed communities in southern Israel, killing at least 1,139 people and taking about 240 others captive, according to Israeli officials.

Three US service members have been killed and "many" others wounded during an unmanned aerial drone attack on US forces stationed in northeastern Jordan near the Syrian border, President Joe Biden has said, blaming Iran-backed groups for the attack. The United States military said in a statement that at least 25 people were injured. "While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq," Biden said in a statement on Sunday. Biden said the US "will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner [of] our choosing." Jordanian state television quoted Muhannad Mubaidin, a spokesperson for Jordan's government, as saying the attack happened outside of the kingdom across the border in Syria. There was no immediate comment from Iran.