Pakistan says it has carried out air strikes on 10 locations in Afghanistan used to store and launch drones, some of which were used in cross-border attacks. The air strikes on Thursday were carried out as tensions grow between the former allies over attacks by armed groups in Pakistan, which triggered their worst fighting in years in February. The air strikes were "deliberate, precise, calibrated, and proportionate, and strictly limited to identified military objectives directly linked to the attempted attacks against Pakistan", Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar wrote on X. He condemned a "deliberate and unlawful incursion into Pakistan by drones" on Wednesday. "This constitutes a blatant violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and territorial integrity and is a grave and unacceptable act of aggression," he said.

An inquiry into allegations British Special Forces murdered unarmed Afghan civilians has cost UK taxpayers £58m, figures from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) show. When the inquiry was launched in 2023, its chair Lord Justice Haddon-Cave said it would aim to report, at least on an interim basis, within 12-18 months. However, the inquiry has now been running for more than three and a half years, and has yet to publish any findings. In a statement, the inquiry said its work was greater and more complex than it originally envisaged. It added that delays by the MoD in disclosing information had also affected the timetable.

U.S. Open follow modal Personalized Content Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. The Tribute in Light is illuminated above lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center ahead of the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on Sept. 9, 2025. The Tribute in Light is illuminated above lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center ahead of the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on Sept. 9, 2025. Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Twenty-five years later, Sept. 11 remains a watershed moment, one with both personal and global implications. To mark the anniversary, TIME spoke to people with very different connections to the day, to hear about what they experienced at the time as well as the ripple effects. For some, the legacy of the date is one of profound loss. Others know about the tragedy mostly from history class. One thing is clear: The attacks that changed the world also changed lives.

Five former US officials, including a former top military lawyer, have criticised the Pentagon for not acknowledging potential American involvement in a deadly strike on an Iranian school earlier this year. Some of those officials said it was highly unusual not to release even basic details of the strike after such a length of time. A missile hit a primary school in Minab during the opening salvos of the US-Israeli war on February 28, killing 168 people including around 110 children according to Iranian officials. In the two months since then the Pentagon has said only that the incident is under investigation. US media reported in early March that US military investigators believed American forces were likely responsible for hitting the school unintentionally but had not reached a final conclusion.

Pakistan and Afghanistan agree to temporary Eid al-Fitr'pause' in conflict Pakistan and Afghanistan have agreed to a temporary "pause" in hostilities during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr this week, officials said, amid weeks of deadly violence between the neighbouring countries. Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said on Wednesday that the pause - set to run from midnight on Thursday (19:00 GMT on Wednesday) until midnight on Tuesday (19:00 GMT on Monday) - had been requested by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkiye. However, he warned that "in case of any cross-border attack, drone attack or any terrorist incident inside Pakistan, [operations] shall immediately resume with renewed intensity". Shortly after the announcement, a spokesperson for Afghanistan's Taliban government also said it would temporarily suspend military operations against Pakistan. The pause in fighting is set to begin just days after Afghanistan accused the Pakistani military of killing hundreds of people in an air strike on a drug rehabilitation centre in the country's capital, Kabul.

Do Taliban's drone attacks expose a chink in Pakistan's armour? On the evening of March 13, drones struck three locations across Pakistan. Two children were wounded in Quetta. Civilians were also injured in Kohat and in Rawalpindi, the garrison city that houses the headquarters of Pakistan's armed forces and neighbours the capital, Islamabad. Pakistan's military said the drones were intercepted before reaching their targets.

Designing impactful educational technologies in contexts of socio-political instability requires a nuanced understanding of educational aspirations. Currently, scalable metrics for measuring aspirations are limited. This study adapts, translates, and evaluates Snyder's Hope Scale as a metric for measuring aspirations among 136 women learning programming online during a period of systemic educational restrictions in Afghanistan. The adapted scale demonstrated good reliability (Cronbach's α = 0.78) and participants rated it as understandable and relevant. While overall aspiration-related scores did not differ significantly by access to Large Language Models (LLMs), those with access reported marginally higher scores on the Avenues subscale (p = .056), suggesting broader perceived pathways to achieving educational aspirations. These findings support the use of the adapted scale as a metric for aspirations in contexts of socio-political instability. More broadly, the adapted scale can be used to evaluate the impact of aspiration-driven design of educational technologies.

President Donald Trump announced the U.S. is trying to retake Bagram air base from the Taliban, but expert Bill Roggio warns China will prevent this from happening.

Southern Uzbek (uzs) is a Turkic language variety spoken by around 5 million people in Afghanistan and differs significantly from Northern Uzbek (uzn) in phonology, lexicon, and orthography. Despite the large number of speakers, Southern Uzbek is underrepresented in natural language processing. We present new resources for Southern Uzbek machine translation, including a 997-sentence FLORES+ dev set, 39,994 parallel sentences from dictionary, literary, and web sources, and a fine-tuned NLLB-200 model (lutfiy). We also propose a post-processing method for restoring Arabic-script half-space characters, which improves handling of morphological boundaries. All datasets, models, and tools are released publicly to support future work on Southern Uzbek and other low-resource languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet they often exhibit a specific cultural biases, neglecting the values and linguistic diversity of low-resource regions. This cultural bias not only undermines universal equality, but also risks reinforcing stereotypes and perpetuating discrimination. To address this, we propose CulFiT, a novel culturally-aware training paradigm that leverages multilingual data and fine-grained reward modeling to enhance cultural sensitivity and inclusivity. Our approach synthesizes diverse cultural-related questions, constructs critique data in culturally relevant languages, and employs fine-grained rewards to decompose cultural texts into verifiable knowledge units for interpretable evaluation. We also introduce GlobalCultureQA, a multilingual open-ended question-answering dataset designed to evaluate culturally-aware responses in a global context. Extensive experiments on three existing benchmarks and our GlobalCultureQA demonstrate that CulFiT achieves state-of-the-art open-source model performance in cultural alignment and general reasoning.