Center for Security Policy CEO Fred Fleitz provides insight on'America's News HQ.' DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- Iran said Saturday it plans to enrich uranium up to 20% at its underground Fordo nuclear facility "as soon as possible," pushing its program a technical step away from weapons-grade levels as it increases pressure on the West over the tattered atomic deal. The move comes amid heightened tensions between Iran and the U.S. in the waning days of the administration of President Donald Trump, who unilaterally withdrew America from Tehran's nuclear deal in 2018. That set in motion an escalating series of incidents capped by a U.S. drone strike that killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad a year ago, an anniversary coming Sunday that has American officials now worried about possible retaliation by Iran. Iran's decision to begin enriching to 20% a decade ago nearly brought an Israeli strike targeting its nuclear facilities, tensions that only abated with the 2015 atomic deal. A resumption of 20% enrichment could see that brinksmanship return.

The Pentagon has abruptly sent the aircraft carrier Nimitz home from the Middle East and Africa over the objections of top military advisers, marking a reversal of a weekslong muscle-flexing strategy aimed at deterring Iran from attacking American troops and diplomats in the Persian Gulf. Officials said on Friday that the acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, had ordered the redeployment of the ship in part as a "de-escalatory" signal to Tehran to avoid stumbling into a crisis in President Trump's waning days in office. American intelligence reports indicate that Iran and its proxies may be preparing a strike as early as this weekend to avenge the death of Maj. Senior Pentagon officials said that Mr. Miller assessed that dispatching the Nimitz now, before the first anniversary this Sunday of General Suleimani's death in an American drone strike in Iraq, could remove what Iranian hard-liners see as a provocation that justifies their threats against American military targets. Some analysts said the return of the Nimitz to its home port of Bremerton, Wash., was a welcome reduction in tensions between the two countries.

The president says he will hold Iran responsible if any Americans are killed as the USS Georgia passes through the Strait of Hormuz; Lucas Tomlinson reports. TEHRAN, Iran – The top commander of Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said Friday that his country was fully prepared to respond to any U.S. military pressure as tensions between Tehran and Washington remain high in the waning days of President Donald Trump's administration. Gen. Hossein Salami spoke at a ceremony at Tehran University commemorating the upcoming one-year anniversary of the U.S. drone strike in Baghdad that killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who headed the expeditionary Quds force, on Jan. 3, 2020. At the time, Iran retaliated by launching a ballistic missile strike on a military base in Iraq that caused brain concussion injuries to about 100 U.S. troops. Washington and Tehran came dangerously close to war as the crisis escalated.

Two American B-52 bombers flew another show-of-force mission in the Persian Gulf on Wednesday, a week after President Trump warned Iran that he would hold it accountable "if one American is killed" in rocket attacks in Iraq that the administration and military officials blamed on Tehran. The warplanes' 36-hour round-trip mission from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota was the third time in six weeks that Air Force bombers had conducted long-range flights about 60 miles off the Iranian coast, moves that military officials said were intended to deter Iran from attacking American troops in the region. The United States periodically conducts such quick demonstration missions to the Middle East and Asia to showcase American air power to allies and adversaries. But tensions have been rising in advance of the Jan. 3 anniversary of the American drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the Iraqi leader of an Iranian-backed militia -- deaths that Iranian leaders repeatedly insist they have not yet avenged.

Dubai/Washington – An American nuclear-powered guided-missile submarine traversed the strategically vital waterway between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula on Monday, the U.S. Navy said, in a rare announcement that comes amid rising tensions with Iran. The Navy's 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain, said the Ohio-class guided-missile submarine USS Georgia, accompanied by two other warships, passed through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passageway through which a fifth of the world's oil supplies travel. The unusual transit in the Persian Gulf's shallow waters, aimed at underscoring American military might in the region, follows the killing last month of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist named by the West as the leader of the Islamic Republic's disbanded military nuclear program. It also comes some two weeks before the anniversary of the American drone strike near Baghdad airport in Iraq that killed top Iranian military commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 3. Iran has promised to seek revenge for both killings. The Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarine's presence in Mideast waterways signals the U.S. Navy's "commitment to regional partners and maritime security with a full spectrum of capabilities," the Navy said, demonstrating its readiness "to defend against any threat at any time."

For developing statistical and machine learning models, it is common to split the dataset into two parts: training and testing (Stone, 1974; Hastie et al., 2009). The training part is used for fitting the model, that is, to estimate the unknown parameters in the model. The model is then evaluated for its accuracy using the testing dataset. The reason for doing this is because if we were to use the entire dataset for fitting, the model would overfit the data and can lead to poor predictions in future scenarios. Therefore, holding out a portion of the dataset and testing the model for its performance before deploying it in the field can protect against unexpected issues that can arise due to overfitting. In this article we consider only datasets where each row is independent, that is, we will exclude cases such as time series data. The simplest and probably the most common strategy to split such a dataset is to randomly sample a fraction of the dataset.

Most children beginning around 2-years old can walk up to a digital assistant in their home these days, say "hey goo-goo", and get a weather forecast dictated back to them. In a quickly-growing trend, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is more and more becoming a part of everyday life. While some enjoy the digital help, performing simple tasks around the home, NOAA and Google signed an agreement to use AI in ways that could transform the weather enterprise. AI in weather is certainly nothing new. Before the fancy name (including machine learning and neural networks), scientists relied on handwritten algorithms for weather detection.

After his mother got dementia, Bari became forgetful. It was little things, like hanging up the wet laundry on time so it wouldn't stink; spraying pesticide on their patch of sea wall against the adventures of crabs and mutant fish; checking the AQI meter before leading his mother out for her evening walk along New Karachi's polluted shoreline. Did something break in your brain, too, when you took care of people who once held you on their lap, helped you count the last straggling trees in the mohalla courtyard? Overwhelmed by their needs and your grief, perhaps you were split into two halves, each perpetually being run into the ground. It wasn't like he had a sibling or a spouse to lean on.

Former CIA director, author of the book'Undaunted,' John Brennan provides insight on'Fox News Sunday.' The U.S. military flew a pair of B-52 bombers to the Middle East Thursday from Barksdale AFB in Louisiana the second deterrence mission against Iran in recent weeks and comes on the same day U.S. drones attacked al-Qaeda-linked'explosives experts' in Somalia. "We have seen some indications of increased attack planning by Iranian-linked forces inside Iraq" said one U.S. military official who declined to be identified to discuss the sensitive nature of the information. "Presidential transitions are normally a time when our adversaries try to test us," the official added. U.S. military forces are drawing down to 2,500 in Iraq and Afghanistan before January 20th.

In this work, we study emergent communication through the lens of cooperative multi-agent behavior in nature. Using insights from animal communication, we propose a spectrum from low-bandwidth (e.g. pheromone trails) to high-bandwidth (e.g. compositional language) communication that is based on the cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral capabilities of social agents. Through a series of experiments with pursuit-evasion games, we identify multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms as a computational model for the low-bandwidth end of the communication spectrum.