Three West African juntas have turned to Russia. The US has declared a stark policy shift towards three West African countries which are battling Islamist insurgents and whose military governments have broken defence ties with France and turned towards Russia. The state department announced that Nick Checker, head of its Bureau of African Affairs, would visit Mali's capital Bamako to convey the United States' respect for Mali's sovereignty and chart a new course in relations, moving past policy missteps. It adds that the US also looks forward to co-operating with Mali's allies, neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger, on shared security and economic interests. Absent from the agenda is the longstanding American concern for democracy and human rights.

'Extremist movements are using voice-generating bots to recreate the voices and speeches of major figures in their milieu.' 'Extremist movements are using voice-generating bots to recreate the voices and speeches of major figures in their milieu.' Extremists are using AI voice cloning to supercharge propaganda. Experts say it's helping them grow W hile the artificial intelligence boom is upending sections of the music industry, voice generating bots are also becoming a boon to another unlikely corner of the internet: extremist movements that are using them to recreate the voices and speeches of major figures in their milieu, and experts say it is helping them grow. "The adoption of AI-enabled translation by terrorists and extremists marks a significant evolution in digital propaganda strategies," said Lucas Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism and a research fellow at the Soufan Center.

Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Greg Palkot reports on the state of the suspected terrorists in Russia and the Kremlin's'spin machine.' Spain's Ministry of the Interior, on Tuesday, announced that it is on high alert and has activated all alert and response systems to prevent jihadist attacks during the Champions League quarterfinal matches scheduled to take place in Madrid on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to reports. On Tuesday, Real Madrid will take on Manchester City, while on Wednesday, Atlético Madrid will play against Borussia Dortmund. As the quarterfinals approach, threats have been made by the Islamic State terrorist network, which has threatened drone attacks on the soccer tournament, a reminder of the resurgence of the network after several deadly attacks earlier this year in places like Iran and Moscow. The ministry, led by Fernando Grand-Marlask, said the "State Security Forces and Bodies have all their early warning and protection systems activated, as well as their response systems ready" in response to preventing a terrorist attack, according to Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

Document-level event argument extraction poses new challenges of long input and cross-sentence inference compared to its sentence-level counterpart. However, most prior works focus on capturing the relations between candidate arguments and the event trigger in each event, ignoring two crucial points: a) non-argument contextual clue information; b) the relevance among argument roles. In this paper, we propose a SCPRG (Span-trigger-based Contextual Pooling and latent Role Guidance) model, which contains two novel and effective modules for the above problem. The Span-Trigger-based Contextual Pooling(STCP) adaptively selects and aggregates the information of non-argument clue words based on the context attention weights of specific argument-trigger pairs from pre-trained model. The Role-based Latent Information Guidance (RLIG) module constructs latent role representations, makes them interact through role-interactive encoding to capture semantic relevance, and merges them into candidate arguments. Both STCP and RLIG introduce no more than 1% new parameters compared with the base model and can be easily applied to other event extraction models, which are compact and transplantable. Experiments on two public datasets show that our SCPRG outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, with 1.13 F1 and 2.64 F1 improvements on RAMS and WikiEvents respectively. Further analyses illustrate the interpretability of our model.

During his long career as a polemicist and a strategist of terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri often taunted the United States. He hewed to the familiar theme that America was an apostate power at war with Islam. But he also described it as a spent force. In a video released this spring, he said that "U.S. weakness" was responsible for the war triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and he mocked the country's standing "after its defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the economic disasters caused by the 9/11 invasions, after the coronavirus pandemic, and after it left its ally Ukraine as prey for the Russians." The U.S. drone strike in Kabul last Saturday that killed Zawahiri, who was seventy-one, added a punctuation mark to the long search for justice for the victims of 9/11 and of other deadly attacks that Zawahiri directly approved, such as the bombing of two U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998, which killed twelve Americans and more than two hundred Africans.

A man who US officials called the leader of the Islamic State militant group in Syria was killed Tuesday in a drone strike while riding a motorcycle in the northern part of the country, the Pentagon and local organizations said. Maher al-Agal was killed near Jindires in northern Syria, and one of his top aides was seriously injured in the attack, Pentagon Central Command spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Dave Eastburn told AFP. The volunteer Syrian Civil Defense Force, known as the "White Helmets," said the attack targeted the two while they were on a motorcycle outside Aleppo. President Joe Biden said the strike "takes a key terrorist off the field and significantly degrades the ability of ISIS to plan, resource, and conduct their operations in the region." The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed Agal's death and said he was the Islamic State governor for the Levant region.

U.S. troops have started withdrawing from Kabul's airport, marking the beginning of the end of the two-week effort to get foreigners and their local allies out of Afghanistan after the country's capital fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15. The vast majority of NATO nations have flown their troops out of Afghanistan after more than two decades although the United States said its airlifts would continue until the Tuesday deadline even as the number of American troops at the airport starts to dwindle. Britain's ambassador to Afghanistan, Laurie Bristow, published a video on Twitter from the airport saying it was "time to close this phase of the operation now." Britain carried out its final evacuation flights on Saturday. As everyone starts getting ready for the next phase, Taliban forces started closing off the airport to most Afghans on Saturday.

WASHINGTON – About a month ago, Afghanistan's Ministry of Defense posted photographs on social media of seven brand-new helicopters arriving in Kabul, delivered by the United States. "They'll continue to see a steady drumbeat of that kind of support going forward," U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters a few days later at the Pentagon. In a matter of weeks, however, the Taliban had seized most of the country, as well as any weapons and equipment left behind by fleeing Afghan forces. Video showed the advancing insurgents inspecting long lines of vehicles and opening crates of new firearms, communications gear and even military drones. "Everything that hasn't been destroyed is the Taliban's now," said one U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The American retaliation led to a siege of the United States Embassy in Baghdad and then an American drone attack that killed the leader of Iran's elite Quds force, Maj. The cycle of attacks and counterattacks ended more than two weeks later after Iran launched 16 cruise missiles at bases in Iraq that house American forces. No one was killed by the Iranian missile attacks and tensions had appeared to subside. An Iraqi military official said that hours after the attack on Wednesday, the American-led coalition responded with airstrikes on camps used by Kataib Hezbollah near Abu Kamal in Syria, just across the border from Qaim, Iraq. However American officials said the United States had not carried out those strikes.

WASHINGTON – U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he supported expanding the North American Treaty Organization to include Middle Eastern nations, as the United States seeks to limit its troop footprint globally. "I think that NATO should be expanded and we should include the Middle East, absolutely," Trump told reporters at the White House. Trump proposed increased NATO involvement in the Middle East on Wednesday, when he addressed the Iranian strikes against U.S. troops in Iraq, carried out in retaliation for a U.S. drone strike that killed a top Iranian military commander. The military leader, Qassem Soleimani, played a major role in the fight against Islamic State militants in the region. Trump said Islamic State presented an international problem that other countries should help address. "We can come home, largely come home and use NATO," Trump said.