Air power has played an increasingly important role in the Libyan conflict. The relatively flat featureless desert terrain of the north and coast means that ground units are easily spotted, with few places to hide. The air forces of both the United Nations-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) and eastern-based commander Khalifa Haftar and his self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) use French and Soviet-era fighter jets, antiquated and poorly maintained. While manned fighter aircraft have been used, for the most part the air war has been fought by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones. With nearly 1,000 air strikes conducted by UAVs, UN Special Representative to Libya Ghassan Salame called the conflict "the largest drone war in the world".

Libya's UN-supported government launched a counterattack on Sunday against a strategic military base used by renegade commander Khalifa Haftar to pound the capital Tripoli with rocket fire. The response came after a missile barrage damaged Tripoli's main airport and set fuel tanks and several aircraft ablaze, with at least six civilians killed in surrounding residential areas in the attacks on Saturday. Meanwhile, Turkey - the Government of National Accord's (GNA) main ally defending Tripoli against Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA) - threatened to step up its attacks against the eastern-based LNA, which has attempted to seize the capital for more than a year. "The forces of war criminal [Haftar] fired more than a hundred rockets and missiles at residential areas in the centre of the capital," the GNA said in a statement on Facebook. The airport was badly damaged and came under renewed rocket fire on Sunday morning, it said.

Current summarization systems only produce plain, factual headlines, but do not meet the practical needs of creating memorable titles to increase exposure. We propose a new task, Stylistic Headline Generation (SHG), to enrich the headlines with three style options (humor, romance and clickbait), in order to attract more readers. With no style-specific article-headline pair (only a standard headline summarization dataset and mono-style corpora), our method TitleStylist generates style-specific headlines by combining the summarization and reconstruction tasks into a multitasking framework. We also introduced a novel parameter sharing scheme to further disentangle the style from the text. Through both automatic and human evaluation, we demonstrate that TitleStylist can generate relevant, fluent headlines with three target styles: humor, romance, and clickbait. The attraction score of our model generated headlines surpasses that of the state-of-the-art summarization model by 9.68%, and even outperforms human-written references.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has become the Tripoli government's last major patron, providing armed drones, armored vehicles and, in the past week, Turkish troops. Turkish officials say their troops will act mostly in an advisory role and avoid front-line combat. But there are indications, from American officials and from videos posted on the internet, that Ankara has deployed Syrian irregulars to Libya, drawn from units that fought the Kurds in northeastern Syria last year. The increasingly prominent foreign role drew an angry rebuke from the United Nations envoy to Libya, Ghassan Salamé, who told reporters on Monday that "probably thousands" of foreign mercenaries had arrived in Libya to participate in the fight. The battle has displaced 300,000 people and caused over 2,200 deaths.

During the presidential elections in Russia last year, a candidate named "Alice" ran for president. She ran her campaign using a slogan like "the president who knows you best" and she did receive a couple thousand votes. To be correct, "Alice" was not a she, but an artificial intelligence (AI) system. Alice's campaign page is still up. "Alice" is not the only AI system to run for public office.

Sarah Jeong, a technology journalist hired by the New York Times and vilified online for tweets comparing "dumbass f****** white people" to dogs and saying they would "all go extinct soon", has been targeted for harassment by dishonest trolls, her former employer has claimed. Editors at The Verge, an online tech magazine, denounced what they called "disingenuous" criticism of Ms Jeong by "people acting in bad faith". The senior writer had been the victim of a Gamergate-style campaign designed to "divide and conquer by forcing newsrooms to disavow their colleagues", they suggested. Ms Jeong, 30, posted a string of offensive and apparently racist messages including "#CancelWhitePeople" and "white men are bulls***" up to five years ago. After being uncovered they quickly spread and were picked up by conservative media including the Daily Caller and Gateway Pundit websites.

Britain's Prince William on Sunday praised "historic ties and friendship" with Jordan and the kingdom's commitment to Syrian and Palestinian refugees, as he began a historic five-day tour that also includes Israel and the Palestinian territories. Though billed as non-political, it's a high-profile visit for William, 36, second in line to the throne. He is meeting with young scientists, refugees and political leaders in a tumultuous region Britain controlled between the two world wars. In Jordan, the prince was hosted by Crown Prince Hussein, 23, a member of the Hashemite dynasty Britain helped install in then-Transjordan almost a century ago. The pair capped the day Sunday by watching England's World Cup match against Panama which the heir to the Jordanian throne had recorded earlier, Press Association said.

KILIS, TURKEY – Turkish troops and allied Syrian fighters captured a strategic hill in northwestern Syria on Sunday as their offensive to root out Kurdish fighters entered a second week. Associated Press reporters in the Turkish border town of Kilis heard constant shelling and clashes as Turkish aircraft flew overhead and plumes of smoke rose in the distance. The Turkey-backed forces have been trying to capture the hill, which separates the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin from the Turkey-controlled town of Azaz, since the start of their offensive on Jan. 20, but have been met with stiff resistance. The Kurdish militia known as the People's Defense Units, or YPG, said Turkey sent reinforcements to the area following intense airstrikes on Sunday. The Turkish military said in a statement that its soldiers and allied Syrian opposition fighters captured Bursayah hill assisted by airstrikes, attack helicopters, armed drones and howitzers.

Apple finally announced the iPhone X this week, complete with a facial recognition system that Apple calls FaceID. Preliminary impressions are that FaceID will be difficult to trick, and should be secure for the average user, but researchers are eager to test its robustness. Consumer facial recognition has been around, but not yet at this scale, inviting questions about what its implications will be, particularly for privacy. Apple's new iOS 11 mobile operating system does have more crucial privacy protections against muggers and government officials alike but researchers detailed doubts this week about the "differential privacy" techniques Apple uses that are meant to aggregate and analyze customer data without invading their privacy. Over at the astounding, ongoing dumpster fire that is the Equifax data breach, Equifax admitted that hackers accessed its network through an Apache Struts web application vulnerability that had a patch available for two months before the initial intrusion.

Turkey's military says Kurdish rebels have detonated an improvised explosive device as a military vehicle passed by, wounding 17 soldiers. A military statement said the attack occurred Monday near the town of Yusekova, in the mainly Kurdish province of Hakkari. The statement said the soldiers were quickly evacuated and hospitalized. Four of them were in serious condition. The Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, has waged a three-decade long insurgency in southeast Turkey.