On January 22nd, two days after President Trump was inaugurated, he received a memo from his new Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, recommending that the United States launch a military strike in Yemen. In a forty-year career, Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general and a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, had cultivated a reputation for being both deeply thoughtful and extremely aggressive. By law and by custom, the position of Defense Secretary is reserved for civilians, but Mattis was still a marine at heart. He had been out of the military for only three years (the rule is seven), and his appointment required Congress to pass a waiver. For the first time in his professional life, he was going to the Pentagon in a suit and tie. Mattis urged Trump to launch the raid swiftly: the operation, which was aimed at one of the leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen, required a moonless night, and the window for action was approaching. Under previous Administrations, such attacks entailed ...

Next time you drag a document across your desktop and put it in a folder, spare a thought for acid. Organising your files might not seem like a psychedelic experience now, but in 1968, when Douglas Engelbart first demonstrated a futuristic world of windows, hypertext links and video conferencing to a rapt audience in San Francisco, they must have thought they were tripping. Especially because he was summoning this dark magic onto a big screen using a strange rounded controller on the end of a wire, which he called his "mouse". Like many California tech visionaries of the time, Engelbart was an enthusiastic advocate for the mind-expanding benefits of LSD. As head of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute, he and his team would drop acid under test conditions in the hope of inspiring new breakthroughs. His own technological epiphanies while tripping seem to have been limited: in one session, after staring at a blank wall in fascination for hours, he came up with the "tinkle toy", a potty-training aid in the form of a miniature water wheel that would spin and tinkle when peed on.

On this cheerful Tuesday morning, Angela Merkel is at peace with herself and her country. She is standing in a factory loft in central Berlin and listening to Rami Rihawi, a refugee from Syria, who, in his blue suit and only slightly accented German, looks as though he has just jumped out of a glossy brochure on successful integration. After fleeing his homeland to Germany, Rihawi attended a school for computer experts, the site of Merkel's visit. He then received an internship at steel retailer Klöckner before being offered a fulltime job at the company. "We were extremely happy that Rami accepted our job offer," says Klöckner CEO Gisbert Rühl, who is standing proudly next to Rihawi.

U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis (R) greets an airman as he boards a U.S. Air Force C-17 for a day trip to a U.S. military base in Djibouti from Doha, Qatar April 23, 2017. DJIBOUTI -- U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Sunday visited Djibouti to bolster ties with the tiny and impoverished African country that is home to an important base for U.S. counterterrorism forces, including drones. Mattis, the first Trump administration official to visit Djibouti, planned to meet with President Ismail Omar Guelleh and greet U.S. and French troops. He was accompanied by Marine Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, head of U.S. Africa Command. The U.S. operates drone aircraft from Djibouti for surveillance and combat missions against al-Qaida-affiliated extremists in Somalia and elsewhere in the region.

Growth is shifting, disruption is accelerating, and societal tensions are rising. Confronting these dynamics will help you craft a better strategy, and forge a brighter future. "The trend is your friend." It's the oldest adage in investing, and it applies to corporate performance, too. We've found through our work on the empirics of strategy that capturing tailwinds created by industry and geographic trends is a pivotal contributor to business results: a company benefiting from such tailwinds is four to eight times more likely to rise to the top of the economic-profit performance charts than one that is facing headwinds. It's easy, however, to lose sight of long-term trends amid short-term gyrations, and there are moments when the nature and direction of those trends become less clear. Today, for example, technology is delivering astounding advances, and more people are healthy, reading, and entering the global middle class than at any period in human history. At the same time, the post–Cold War narrative of progress fueled by competitive markets, globalization, and innovation has lost some luster. Those contradictions are showing up in politics, and the long-term trends underlying them are reshaping the business environment.

Legal research company Casetext has raised $12 million in a new round of funding. The money will be used to expand its software platform that offers insights into cases cited in legal documents and further develop CARA (Case Analysis Research Assistant), an AI-powered assistant for lawyers. Using natural language understanding, Casetext scans the text of legal briefs to locate and analyze case citations. The company also offers access to 10 million court cases and statutes annotated by a community of litigators. The $12 million funding round was led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures, 8VC, and Red Sea Ventures.

It is not every day that young Saudis wander down the street dressed as the Hulk or Doctor Doom. But for three days over the weekend, some 20,000 Saudis decked out in costumes and face paint queued to get into the kingdom's first-ever Comic Con, where robots, video games and giant anime figures filled a tent in the Red Sea city of Jeddah. The global comics expo was held under the auspices of the Saudi General Entertainment Authority, which has hosted a series of festivals, comedy shows and concerts this year. Saudi Arabia is trying to boost its entertainment sector as part of an economic and social reform drive aimed at creating jobs and weaning the country off its dependence on oil. "The level of entertainment has risen so much from previous years. There used to be no public places like this for families, there was no gender mixing, there was no entertainment, there were no shows," said Modah Al-Bakheet, a Jeddah resident.

Developed so far, multi-document summarization has reached its bottleneck due to the lack of sufficient training data and diverse categories of documents. Text classification just makes up for these deficiencies. In this paper, we propose a novel summarization system called TCSum, which leverages plentiful text classification data to improve the performance of multi-document summarization. TCSum projects documents onto distributed representations which act as a bridge between text classification and summarization. It also utilizes the classification results to produce summaries of different styles. Extensive experiments on DUC generic multi-document summarization datasets show that, TCSum can achieve the state-of-the-art performance without using any hand-crafted features and has the capability to catch the variations of summary styles with respect to different text categories.

WASHINGTON/SANAA/DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – The U.S. military said Thursday it is investigating last weekend's raid by U.S. special operations forces in Yemen and that innocent civilians, including children, were apparently killed. U.S. Central Command said civilians may have been hit by gunfire from aircraft called in to assist U.S. troops, who engaged in a ferocious firefight with militants from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the group's Yemen affiliate. The military said the civilians may not have been visible to the U.S. forces because they were mixed in with combatants who were firing at U.S. troops "from all sides to include houses and other buildings." Nasser al-Awlaki told The Associated Press that among the children killed was his 8-year-old granddaughter Anwaar, an American citizen. Her father was Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Yemeni-American cleric killed in a U.S. airstrike in Yemen in 2011.

In 1872 a British general named Alexander Cunningham, excavating an area in what was then British-controlled northern India, came across something peculiar. Buried in some ruins, he uncovered a small, one inch by one inch square piece of what he described as smooth, black, unpolished stone engraved with strange symbols -- lines, interlocking ovals, something resembling a fish -- and what looked like a bull etched underneath. The general, not recognizing the symbols and finding the bull to be unlike other Indian animals, assumed the artifact wasn't Indian at all but some misplaced foreign token. The stone, along with similar ones found over the next few years, ended up in the British Museum. In the 1920s many more of these artifacts, by then known as seals, were found and identified as evidence of a 4,000-year-old culture now known as the Indus Valley Civilization, the oldest known Indian civilization to date. Since then, thousands more of these tiny seals have been uncovered.