Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A team of ancient literature experts have deciphered a Mesopotamain text that was missing for over 1,000 years. Etched on clay tablets, the Hymn to Babylon describes the ancient megacity in "all of its majesty," and gives new insights into the everyday lives of those who resided there. The text is detailed in a study published in the journal Iraq. Founded in Mesopotamia around 2,000 BCE, Babylon was once the largest city in the world.

Recent advancements in large language models have shown impressive performance in general chat. However, their domain-specific capabilities, particularly in information extraction, have certain limitations. Extracting structured information from natural language that deviates from known schemas or instructions has proven challenging for previous prompt-based methods. This motivated us to explore domain-specific modeling in chat-based language models as a solution for extracting structured information from natural language. In this paper, we present ChatUIE, an innovative unified information extraction framework built upon ChatGLM. Simultaneously, reinforcement learning is employed to improve and align various tasks that involve confusing and limited samples. Furthermore, we integrate generation constraints to address the issue of generating elements that are not present in the input. Our experimental results demonstrate that ChatUIE can significantly improve the performance of information extraction with a slight decrease in chatting ability.

Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the high-level Iranian general killed by an American drone strike in 2020, kept the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria on a tight leash. That was largely because, for most of his tenure, war was raging in both countries, and he commanded the militia to fight Americans and then Islamic State terrorist groups. But when Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani succeeded him, most of those conflicts had settled, and General Ghaani assumed a hands-off leadership style, setting only broad directions, according to analysts. General Ghaani, commander in chief of the Quds Forces, the branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps tasked with overseeing the proxies, has nonetheless been involved in coordinating the strategy toward Israel and the United States for the various militias during the current war in Gaza. He led a series of emergency meetings in late January in Tehran and Baghdad with strategists, senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards and senior commanders of the militia to redraw plans and avert war with the United States, according to two Iranians affiliated with the Guards, one of them a military strategist.

The US says it was behind a drone strike in Iraq's capital Baghdad that killed two commanders of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia group linked to the killing of three US troops last month.

US Central Command (Centcom) confirmed that the attack had been carried out at 21:30 local time (18:30GMT), and had killed the "commander responsible for directly planning and participating in attacks on US forces in the region".

The U.S. and Iraq held an initial round of formal talks about ending the U.S.-led military mission in the country to fight against the Islamic State. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani announced Sunday that he had sponsored "the commencement of the first round of bilateral dialogue between Iraq and the United States of America to end the mission of the Coalition in Iraq," according to a report from The Associated Press. That statement was followed by one from the coalition, which said military officials will assess "the threat of Daesh (IS), operational and environmental requirements and Iraqi Security Force capabilities" and a higher military commission will "work to set the conditions to transition the mission in Iraq," according to the report. U.S. soldiers train at al-Asad air base in western Iraq. While the initial talks come as U.S. forces have been under increased attacks in the region, including a drone attack in Jordan Sunday that killed three U.S. service members and injured 25 more, U.S. officials say that plans to end the mission in Iraq were first discussed last year and that the timing of the talks with Iraq were not related to the increased attacks.

A U.S. Special Operations drone strike in Baghdad on Thursday killed a senior figure in an Iran-linked militant group that is part of Iraq's security apparatus, drawing sharp criticism from the Iraqi government, as well as allied groups. The Pentagon acknowledged responsibility for the strike, saying in a statement that U.S. forces had taken "necessary and proportionate action," adding that the attack "was taken in self-defense" and that no civilians had been harmed. A missile fired by the drone struck a vehicle carrying three men near the logistics headquarters for the 12th brigade of the group, Harakat al-Nujaba, killing a brigade commander known as Abu Taqwa and two others, according to Iraqi security officials. The group, closely linked to Iran, was designated as a global terrorist organization by the State Department in 2019. Nujaba, however, has remained part of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella organization that is in turn part of the government's broader security forces.

Fox News senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram has the latest on the foreign policy issues facing the Biden administration on Your World. Four members of an Iran-aligned Iraqi militia group -- including a high-ranking Iraqi militia commander -- were killed in a drone strike in Baghdad on Thursday, according to reports by The Associated Press and Reuters. A U.S. official has confirmed to Fox News that the U.S. was responsible for the strike which targeted an Iraqi militia leader in Baghdad who is believed responsible for attacks on U.S. forces. The official says this was a precision strike on a vehicle and not a hit on a whole facility as other outlets have reported. The strike targeted a leader of the Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, an Iraqi Shi'ite military group, the U.S. official said.

Iraq's government has accused the United States-led international coalition forces of carrying out a drone strike targeting an Iran-aligned paramilitary group in the capital, Baghdad, that killed and wounded several people. The strike on Thursday targeted the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), also known as Hashd al-Shaabi. Hajj Mushtaq Talib al-Saidi (Abu Taqwa), a senior PMF commander, was among those killed. The total number of casualties was not immediately clear, but the Reuters news agency reported that four PMF members were killed and six wounded. "The Iraqi armed forces hold the forces of the international coalition responsible for this attack," Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani's office said in a statement, calling it a "dangerous escalation and aggression".

FOX News contributor Dr. Rebecca Grant tells'FOX News Live' that she believes tensions in the Middle East can be contained to just Israel. The State Department on Sunday updated its travel advisory for Iraq to include the ordered departure of all non-emergency U.S. government personnel and eligible family members. Americans are warned "do not travel to Iraq due to terrorism, kidnapping, armed conflict, civil unrest, and Mission Iraq's limited capacity to provide support to U.S. citizens." On Oct. 20, the State Department already ordered the departure of eligible family members and non-emergency U.S. government personnel from U.S. Embassy Baghdad and U.S. Consulate General Erbil "due to increased security threats against U.S. government personnel and interests." In recent days, Iran-backed militias attacked United States military bases in Iraq.