Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? Drone strike hits Al-Rasheed hotel in Baghdad's Green Zone near US embassy, no casualties reported A prominent hotel in central Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone was struck by a drone, amid reports that Iraqi air defences intercepted an attack over the United States Embassy. The strike on Monday evening hit the top floor of Al-Rasheed Hotel, causing damage but no casualties, according to two Iraqi security officials cited by The Associated Press (AP) news agency. Security sources told the Reuters news agency that two Katyusha rockets had been intercepted that evening near the US Embassy in the Green Zone, which houses diplomatic missions as well as international institutions and government offices. Earlier Monday, the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah announced that Abu Ali Al-Askari, a prominent security official with the paramilitary group, had been killed, without giving details on the circumstances.

Iraq's Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani faces pressure to act against Iran-backed terrorist groups following increased attacks on U.S., European, and Kurdish assets in the country.

British forces based in Iraq shot down two Iranian drones overnight, Defence Secretary John Healey has said. But some drones in the attack hit the coalition base in the Iraqi city of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region, and injured a number of US troops. There were no British casualties. Brigadier Guy Foden said the base and another in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad were struck a number of times on Wednesday night and British personnel are currently in Erbil helping to defend that base. Since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, US bases in Iraq have been targeted in retaliation.

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.

- The field of natural language processing (NLP) has dramatically expanded within the last decade. Many human-being applications are conducted daily via NLP tasks, starting from machine translation, speech recognition, text generation and recommendations, Part-of-Speech tagging (POS), and Named-Entity Recognition (NER). However, low-resourced languages, such as the Central-Kurdish language (CKL), mainly remain unexamined due to shortage of necessary resources to support their development. The POS tagging task is the base of other NLP tasks; for example, the POS tag set has been used to standardized languages to provide the relationship between words among the sentences, followed by machine translation and text recommendation. Specifically, for the CKL, most of the utilized or provided POS tagsets are neither standardized nor comprehensive. To this end, this study presented an accurate and comprehensive POS tagset for the CKL to provide better performance of the Kurdish NLP tasks. The article also collected most of the POS tags from different studies as well as from Kurdish linguistic experts to standardized part-of-speech tags. The proposed POS tagset is designed to annotate a large CKL corpus and support Kurdish NLP tasks. The initial investigations of this study via comparison with the Universal Dependencies framework for standard languages, show that the proposed POS tagset can streamline or correct sentences more accurately for Kurdish NLP tasks.

It's not every day that you are told to get inside quickly because four drones are watching the compound you are in – probably weaponised United States drones. There is a split-second pause and then you gather your gear and move inside. As we drive into the nondescript building, past the lawn, we are asked to park in the shade, presumably to provide cover from the prying killer robots watching us. It is April 18, one day before Israel launched several drones at Iran after Iran itself launched a barrage of drones and missiles on Israel on April 13. That, in turn, was a response to an Israeli attack on Iran's consulate compound in Damascus which killed 16 people, including two senior generals.

This year, the U.S. military carried out strikes against Iranian forces and allied militias in Syria and Iraq in response to a drone attack in Jordan that killed three American soldiers. And in 2020, the United States killed a top Iranian commander, Maj. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak confirmed that Britain had helped defend Israel against the Iranian attack, saying that Britain's air force had shot down "a number of Iranian attack drones" and would now work with allies to de-escalate tensions. "What we now need is for calm heads to prevail," Mr. Sunak told the BBC on Sunday. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, Israel's chief military spokesman, said that Israel had intercepted most of the 200 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles launched by Iran with "some assistance" from its allies.

Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin has the latest on the strike on'The Story.' The U.S. carried out a drone strike in Baghdad late Wednesday that killed three members of the powerful Kataib Hezbollah militia – including a high-ranking commander connected with a drone strike that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan late last month. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said forces conducted a unilateral strike in Iraq around 9:30 p.m. in response to a drone strike that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan on Jan. 28. The strike, which occurred on a main thoroughfare in Baghdad's Mashtal neighborhood, was considered a "high-value individual target," Fox News is told. People inspect the vehicle targeted by airstrike in Baghdad, Iraq on February 07, 2024.

Joseph Votel discusses tensions in the Middle East and how the Biden administration could respond to a drone attack that killed three U.S. soldiers, on'The Story.' An Iran-backed militant group in Iraq has promised to continue attacks on U.S. troops after three American soldiers were killed by a drone strike in Jordan on Sunday. In a statement released Friday, Harakat al-Nujaba, one of the strongest Iraqi militias, announced that it plans to continue military operations against U.S. forces while allied factions have backed off their attacks after the Biden administration said there will be retaliation. Akram al-Kaabi, the group's leader, called for an end to the Israeli military operations in Gaza and withdrawal of the "American occupation of Iraq," in a statement posted on X. The announcement comes after Kataib Hezbollah, another powerful Iranian-backed Iraqi militia, which is closely monitored by the U.S. government, said on Tuesday that it would "suspend military and security operations against the occupying forces" to avoid embarrassing the Iraqi government.

During a call with the parents of fallen service member Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, Biden claimed he "lost" his son, Beau Biden, to the war in Iraq. President Biden repeated a dubious claim about the death of his son, Beau Biden, during a call with the parents of a U.S. service member who was recently killed in an attack on a base in Jordan near the border with Syria. While speaking on Tuesday to the parents of 24-year-old Specialist Kennedy Ladon Sanders, who lost her life in an Iran-backed drone strike this month in northeast Jordan that killed three service members total and injured 25 others, Biden said he lost his son to the war in Iraq. During the call, which was first shared by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Biden told Shawn Sanders and Oneida Oliver-Sanders that their daughter was being posthumously promoted to sergeant.