Militia leader Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted for his role in the January 6 attack, is asking potential new members and supporters to send money. Stewart Rhodes announced last week that he is relaunching the Oath Keepers, his anti-government militia which virtually disappeared after dozens of its members--including Rhodes--were arrested for their roles in the January 6 attack on the Capitol . Rhodes, speaking to the Gateway Pundit this week, says that he sees the relaunched group as playing a role in combating what he labeled an "insurrection by the left" on the streets of US cities. "Right now, under federal statutes, president Trump can call us up as the militia if he sees it necessary, especially for three purposes: to repel invasions, to suppress insurrections, and to execute the laws of the union," Rhodes said. But in the days since Rhodes announced their return, experts, former members, and online chatter suggest there is little to no interest in restarting what was, at one point, one of the largest militias in America with a leaked database listing 38,000 supposed members in 2021. This hasn't stopped Rhodes from asking potential new members and supporters to send money in support of the cause.

Plus dire wolves' bad knees and other weird things we learned this week. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. What's the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you'll have an even weirder answer if you listen to's hit podcast . It's your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of can muster.

Games have long played a role in AI research, both as a test-bed, and as a moving goal-post, constantly driving innovation. From the heyday of chess agents, when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, to more recent advances, like AlphaGo's dark horse ascent to fame, games have both assisted AI research and provided something to aim for. As the AIs got better, the games they were applied to also got more complex. New game mechanics, such as the fog of war in StarCraft and the stochasticity of Poker, pushed researchers to adapt their methods to ever greater generality. In this paper, we argue that the deck-building strategy game Dominion [1] deserves to join the ranks of AI benchmark games, providing an RL-based bot in service of that benchmark. Dominion has all of the abovementioned elements, but it also incorporates a mechanic that is not present in other popular RL benchmarks: every game is played with a different set of cards. Since each dominion card has a specific rule printed on it, and the set of 10 cards for a game are randomly picked from among hundreds of cards, no two games of Dominion can be approached the same way. Thus a key part of playing Dominion is adapting one's inductive bias of how to play to the specific cards on the table.

Launched as if from a trebuchet at the end of April, Manor Lords is the latest in a string of explosively successful video games that have been released this year. Indeed, the rise of this unassuming-looking city-builder is arguably more impressive than the enormous launch of Helldivers 2, or the breakout Poker phenomenon Balatro. Developed largely by one person and releasing in an incomplete state, Manor Lords shifted a million copies in its first 24 hours on sale. The scale of Manor Lords' success is remarkable, but contrary to appearances, it hasn't emerged from nowhere. Momentum around the game has been building for years, part of a broader surge in popularity for city-building games in general.

For decades, Israel and Iran have fought a shadow war across the Middle East, trading attacks by land, sea, air and in cyberspace. A recent round of strikes -- mainly an aerial barrage by Iran against Israel last weekend -- has brought the conflict more clearly into the open and raised fears of a broader war. A retaliatory Israeli strike on an Iranian air base on Friday, however, appeared limited in scope, and analysts said it suggested an effort to pull back from the dangerous cycle and potentially move the war back into the shadows. August 2019: An Israeli airstrike killed two Iranian-trained militants in Syria, a drone set off a blast near a Hezbollah office in Lebanon and an airstrike in Qaim, Iraq, killed a commander of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia. Israel accused Iran at the time of trying to establish an overland arms-supply line through Iraq and northern Syria to Lebanon, and analysts said the strikes were aimed at stopping Iran and signaling to its proxies that Israel would not tolerate a fleet of smart missiles on its borders. January 2020: Israel greeted with satisfaction the assassination of Maj.

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.

Four months into the war between Israel and Hamas, the combatants, their allies, and their neighbors are closer than ever to reaching a cease-fire or even a settlement of their disputes--and are also equally close to seeing it spin out of control into a widening regional conflict. They are tracing this thin line between negotiated peace and escalating mayhem along every front of the Middle East's hot spots, which are intensifying, enlarging, and mingling with one another--a fact that makes it harder but also potentially more manageable to douse the flames. On Friday, U.S. combat planes fired 125 precision-guided missiles and drones at 85 targets into seven facilities--command-control and intelligence centers, supply lines and storage sites for rockets, missiles, and drones, as well as other military targets--all run by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria. The attack was in retaliation to a Jan. 28 drone strike launched by one of those militias in Iraq that killed three U.S. soldiers at a base in northeastern Jordan, near the Iraqi and Syrian borders. Militias had fired 165 drones or missiles at U.S. forces in the region since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, but this was the first strike that killed Americans.

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.

On Sunday, January 28, The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group that includes the militias Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba among others, claimed responsibility for a drone attack that killed three US military personnel and injured 34 others in a base in northeastern Jordan, near the Syria border. In the media coverage of the attack, it was repeatedly mentioned that these militias have launched 165 attacks on US troops – 66 in Iraq and 98 in Syria – since October 2023. While it helps put the attack in context, this is a misleading figure. This conflict began much earlier than last October, and thus the total number of attacks the US has faced from these militias is actually much higher. Indeed, Sunday's drone attack was just the latest episode in an undeclared war between the United States and Iran-affiliated Iraqi Shia militias that has been raging across the region for more than five years. More than six years ago, in October 2017, in an article published on this very page, I predicted that US President Donald Trump's controversial decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the "Iran nuclear deal", would result in attacks by Iran-backed Iraqi militias on US forces in Iraq and across the region.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Iran announced late Monday that it had launched strikes against a "spy headquarters and the gathering of anti-Iranian terrorist groups" shortly after missiles hit an area near the U.S. consulate in Irbil, the seat of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Soon after, a statement from Iran's Revolutionary Guards on state media said it had struck "terrorist operations" including Islamic State targets in Syria "and destroyed them by firing a number of ballistic missiles." Another statement claimed that it had hit a headquarters of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, in the Kurdish region of Iraq.