Night time celebrations filled the air as Iraqis observed the start of a four-day holiday to mark the withdrawal of US troops and international forces after more than a decade in the country fighting ISIL. Trump amazed that an'Israeli plumber' helped land Flydubai flight It's the'closest thing to an HIV vaccine', but who gets access?

Israeli passengers tell of the horror onboard the Flydubai flight that was diverted after the pilot stabbed his co-pilot in the cockpit. The plane dropped 17,000 feet during the fight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, but landed safely after being diverted to land in Saudi Arabia. Share Passengers tell of'nightmare' onboard diverted Flydubai flight on social media Trump amazed that an'Israeli plumber' helped land Flydubai flight It's the'closest thing to an HIV vaccine', but who gets access?

Is the war entering a new phase? Crowds cheered and waved national flags as two Shahed drones were paraded through Tehran. Iranian-made, low-cost Shahed drones have become a major feature of modern warfare, used in attacks across the Gulf and extensively by Russia in its war in Ukraine. Trump amazed that an'Israeli plumber' helped land Flydubai flight It's the'closest thing to an HIV vaccine', but who gets access?

Trump amazed that an'Israeli plumber' helped land Flydubai flight Trump amazed that an'Israeli plumber' helped land Flydubai flight An amazed US President Donald Trump relayed the story of how an'Israeli plumber' helped land a Flydubai flight after one of the pilots was stabbed. The flight carrying 174 passengers nearly crashed when an altercation broke out in the cockpit between the pilots. Share Trump amazed that an'Israeli plumber' helped land Flydubai flight on social media It's the'closest thing to an HIV vaccine', but who gets access? 'Strong indications' Iran linked to suspected UK airbase plot

Is the war entering a new phase? Kyiv residents have expressed relief after a Russian attack drone landed in a children's playground inside a residential courtyard in broad daylight without exploding. Bomb disposal experts later safely removed the debris. It's the'closest thing to an HIV vaccine', but who gets access? 'Strong indications' Iran linked to suspected UK airbase plot

We have a drug that could transform HIV prevention. So why can't millions get it? It's the'closest thing to an HIV vaccine', but who gets access? But who gets access raises bigger questions about public money, pharmaceutical power, drug prices and shrinking global health funding. Al Jazeera's Mikail Malik looks at the fight over access.

It's time to become an independent and constructive member of society, and Engadget can give you some tips on how to do it. All week we'll be bringing you stories about how to use technology to become a better grownup and navigate our tech-saturated world in a manner befitting a real deal adult. First up, is advice on how to do some good online. A "biomarker" protein hangs out on cells where the virus hides from treatment. AIDS patients must endure a lifetime of drugs because the virus conceals itself in the immune system and reactivates with a vengeance once the treatment stops.

This paper proposes a new method for estimating sparse precision matrices in the high dimensional setting. It has been popular to study fast computation and adaptive procedures for this problem. We propose a novel approach, called Sparse Column-wise Inverse Operator, to address these two issues. We analyze an adaptive procedure based on cross validation, and establish its convergence rate under the Frobenius norm. The convergence rates under other matrix norms are also established. This method also enjoys the advantage of fast computation for large-scale problems, via a coordinate descent algorithm. Numerical merits are illustrated using both simulated and real datasets. In particular, it performs favorably on an HIV brain tissue dataset and an ADHD resting-state fMRI dataset.

Due to physiological variation, patients diagnosed with the same condition may exhibit divergent, but related, responses to the same treatments. Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDPs) tackle this transfer-learning problem by embedding these tasks into a low-dimensional space. However, the original formulation of HiP-MDP had a critical flaw: the embedding uncertainty was modeled independently of the agent's state uncertainty, requiring an unnatural training procedure in which all tasks visited every part of the state space---possible for robots that can be moved to a particular location, impossible for human patients. We update the HiP-MDP framework and extend it to more robustly develop personalized medicine strategies for HIV treatment.

Most real-world networks are too large to be measured or studied directly and there is substantial interest in estimating global network properties from smaller sub-samples. One of the most important global properties is the number of vertices/nodes in the network. Estimating the number of vertices in a large network is a major challenge in computer science, epidemiology, demography, and intelligence analysis. In this paper we consider a population random graph G = (V;E) from the stochastic block model (SBM) with K communities/blocks. A sample is obtained by randomly choosing a subset W and letting G(W) be the induced subgraph in G of the vertices in W. In addition to G(W), we observe the total degree of each sampled vertex and its block membership. Given this partial information, we propose an efficient PopULation Size Estimation algorithm, called PULSE, that correctly estimates the size of the whole population as well as the size of each community. To support our theoretical analysis, we perform an exhaustive set of experiments to study the effects of sample size, K, and SBM model parameters on the accuracy of the estimates. The experimental results also demonstrate that PULSE significantly outperforms a widely-used method called the network scale-up estimator in a wide variety of scenarios. We conclude with extensions and directions for future work.