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At least 5 killed in Israeli drone strike on car in occupied West Bank

Al Jazeera

An Israeli air attack on a car in the occupied West Bank city of Tubas has killed at least five Palestinians and left others wounded, local media and medical workers report. Israel said early on Thursday morning that military aircraft took part in "three different attacks" on Palestinian fighters who "posed a threat" to their forces in the Tubas region. Palestinian medics reported that five people were killed in an Israeli air strike targeting a car and two people were injured, one of whom was critical, according to the Palestinian state news agency, Wafa. The Reuters news agency later reported that the number of those killed in the drone attack had risen to at least six. According to Wafa, the attack was carried out by an armed drone, and Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance crews brought the bodies of the five deceased men and two wounded people to the Tubas Turkish Government Hospital.


Authorities in northern Iraq report casualties from Turkish drone strike

Al Jazeera

Local authorities and news outlets in northern Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region have said that several people were killed in a Turkish drone strike on Friday, including two journalists. In an initial statement on Friday, the regional authorities said that a car belonging to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) was struck near the city of Sulaymaniyah, killing a senior PKK official, his guard and his driver. However, a later statement by the Kurdistan regional government's Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani said that the attack targeted a group of journalists, two of whom were killed. "They were two women journalists, not members of an armed force to be a threat to the security and stability of any country or region," Talabani said in a statement. Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a press advocacy organisation, also released a statement denouncing the deaths of the two journalists, identified as 27-year-old Hero Baha'uddin and 40-year-old Golestan Tara from Sterk TV.


Exploring News Summarization and Enrichment in a Highly Resource-Scarce Indian Language: A Case Study of Mizo

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Obtaining sufficient information in one's mother tongue is crucial for satisfying the information needs of the users. While high-resource languages have abundant online resources, the situation is less than ideal for very low-resource languages. Moreover, the insufficient reporting of vital national and international events continues to be a worry, especially in languages with scarce resources, like \textbf{Mizo}. In this paper, we conduct a study to investigate the effectiveness of a simple methodology designed to generate a holistic summary for Mizo news articles, which leverages English-language news to supplement and enhance the information related to the corresponding news events. Furthermore, we make available 500 Mizo news articles and corresponding enriched holistic summaries. Human evaluation confirms that our approach significantly enhances the information coverage of Mizo news articles. The mizo dataset and code can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/barvin04/mizo_enrichment


Fears of AI disinformation cast shadow over Turkish local elections

Al Jazeera

Istanbul, Turkey – As nationwide local elections approach on March 31, there are concerns in Turkey about the growing threat of disinformation and fake media created through artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, a video spread across social media purportedly showing Istanbul's opposition mayor praising President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). Ekrem Imamoglu, of the Republican People's Party (CHP), is seen in the video commending the "great steps" taken in public transport projects when the AK Party controlled Istanbul. While the video was widely discredited due to the substance of Imamoglu's "comments", it raised fears about media manipulation in an election where the AK Party is trying to retake cities won by the opposition in 2019. Political scandals over "leaked" recordings are nothing new in Turkey.


A boy's arduous steps on prosthetic legs after Turkey's earthquake

Al Jazeera

When a devastating earthquake struck Turkey in the early hours of February 6, 2023, the five-storey building in Hatay where 13-year-old Mehmet Koc lived, collapsed, burying him in rubble and killing his older brother Emre, 14, and his mother Didem. But it took 76 hours before rescuers could pull him from the mound of concrete and twisted metal that remained of his home. Later in hospital, doctors determined that his legs were so badly crushed and injured, that both needed to be amputated just below the hip. Hearing of the earthquake in London where he lived and worked, Mehmet's father, Hasan, caught the next available flight to Turkey and travelled to Hatay, in the southeast, desperate for news of his family. The 58-year-old encountered a scene of utter destruction.


DecoderLens: Layerwise Interpretation of Encoder-Decoder Transformers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, many interpretability methods have been proposed to help interpret the internal states of Transformer-models, at different levels of precision and complexity. Here, to analyze encoder-decoder Transformers, we propose a simple, new method: DecoderLens. Inspired by the LogitLens (for decoder-only Transformers), this method involves allowing the decoder to cross-attend representations of intermediate encoder layers instead of using the final encoder output, as is normally done in encoder-decoder models. The method thus maps previously uninterpretable vector representations to human-interpretable sequences of words or symbols. We report results from the DecoderLens applied to models trained on question answering, logical reasoning, speech recognition and machine translation. The DecoderLens reveals several specific subtasks that are solved at low or intermediate layers, shedding new light on the information flow inside the encoder component of this important class of models.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 559

Al Jazeera

Russia launched a drone attack on Ukraine's Danube River port of Izmail, leading to widespread damage to infrastructure, according to the region's governor. The attack came hours ahead of talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which were expected to touch on ways to revive the Black Sea grain deal that Moscow abandoned in July. Ukraine and Romania disagreed over whether the attack on Izmail hit Romanian territory on the other side of the river. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Ukraine had visual evidence of the incident. Romanian Foreign Minister Luminita Odobescu condemned the "cynical" Russian attack on Ukrainian infrastructure but said no Russian drones or debris had fallen on Romanian territory.


Doctored Sunak picture is just latest in string of political deepfakes

The Guardian

The row over a manipulated photo of Rishi Sunak pulling an imperfect pint is the latest example of doctored or deepfake images attempting to disrupt politics. Using false information or imagery to alter public opinion is not new but breakthroughs in artificial intelligence threaten to take deception to a new level. Here are some recent examples of image-based disinformation. Last year a video appeared of the Ukrainian president calling on his soldiers to lay down their weapons and return to their families. It was an amateurish example of a deepfake, the term for a hoax that uses AI to create a phoney image, most commonly fake videos of people.


Russia unleashes drone attack on Ukrainian port city, thousands of tons of grain destroyed

FOX News

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Russian drones on Wednesday hit a Ukrainian port city along the border with Romania, causing significant damage and a huge fire at facilities that are key to Ukrainian grain exports. The attacks followed the end of a deal with Russia that had allowed Ukrainian shipments to world markets from the Black Sea port of Odesa. Since scrapping the deal, Russia has hammered the country's ports with strikes, compounding the blow to the key industry.


Russia targets Odesa port, angering Ukraine and nearby Romania

Al Jazeera

Ukraine's coastal region of Odesa was rattled by Russian drones which hit grain storage facilities in the south of the region, according to authorities in Kyiv. The grain port of Izmail, an inland port across the Danube River from NATO-member Romania, was the main target of Moscow's drone attack. "As a result of the attack, fires broke out at the facilities of the port and industrial infrastructure of the region, and an elevator was damaged," Odesa region Governor Oleh Kiper said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app. Russia's continued attacks against the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure on #Danube, in the proximity of Romania, are unacceptable. These are war crimes and they further affect UA's capacity to transfer their food products towards those in need in the world.