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Pakistan says it launches air strikes on Afghanistan after drone attacks

Al Jazeera

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.


British Columbia sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over Tumbler Ridge mass school shooting

The Guardian

Canada's British Columbia is suing OpenAI over the school killings and alleges CEO Sam Altman promised reforms after the attack but never followed through. Canada's British Columbia is suing OpenAI over the school killings and alleges CEO Sam Altman promised reforms after the attack but never followed through. Canadian province alleges deadly attack could have been prevented if company had warned police of shooter's ChatGPT use British Columbia has sued OpenAI in California, saying a mass shooting at a school in the province could have been prevented if the company had warned local law enforcement that the shooter had used ChatGPT to plan the massacre. The lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court on Monday names OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, as defendants. It is seeking damages to fund recovery efforts in the province after the February attack, as well as an order directing changes to the way the company handles ChatGPT conversations that could lead to violence.


Iraq probes drone strikes on Saudi Arabia, shuts three crossings to Iran

Al Jazeera

Did Iran capture a US submarine? Iraq has closed some border crossings with Iran while investigating drone attacks on Saudi Arabia's East-West oil pipeline that it confirms were launched from its territory. The Iraqi government temporarily closed three of its crossings into Iran after drone launch sites were discovered in the country, an Iraqi security source told Al Jazeera on Saturday. He said that Iraq had primarily ordered the closure of the crossings over fears that the perpetrators of attacks could flee to Iran. Hewson also said the al-Tayyib border area of the southeastern province of Maysan had been shut after drone launchers were discovered there, and a search operation was under way.


Houthis and government trade attacks as Yemen slides back to full-scale war

Al Jazeera

Government forces have carried out dozens of attacks on Houthi positions across Yemen in the past 24 hours, the latest sign that a return to full-scale war in Yemen may be approaching. In the past day, government forces have carried out 81 attacks on Houthi positions that led to the "neutralisation" of a number of Houthi fighters and field commanders, government spokesperson Majed Abdullah al-Nuzaili said Thursday. They "successfully" hit a target at Najran airport and an Aramco facility in the province, Saree said. There was no immediate confirmation of the attacks from Saudi Arabia. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which supports the Houthis, warned on Thursday that Saudi Arabia would be "unable to contain" the Houthis as the rebels ramp up attacks on the kingdom.


Canadian province sues OpenAI over alleged ChatGPT-linked shooting warnings

Al Jazeera

The Canadian province of British Columbia is preparing to sue OpenAI, alleging the US company failed to alert police after its staff internally flagged violent ChatGPT conversations linked to the person responsible for February's Tumbler Ridge mass shooting . Attorney General Niki Sharma announced Tuesday that the province has hired legal teams in British Columbia and California to "explore all legal avenues to hold OpenAI and its decision-makers accountable for its documented failure to notify law enforcement regarding explicit, flagged threats made by the perpetrator on the company's ChatGPT platform." The move stems from the February 10 attack in the remote mountain community of Tumbler Ridge, where authorities say 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed their mother and half-brother before going to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and opening fire. Five children between the ages of 11 and 13 and one educator were killed at the school. Twenty-seven other people were wounded before Van Rootselaar died from what police described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.


Twelve killed in China fireworks shop blast during Lunar New Year

Al Jazeera

An explosion at a fireworks shop in central China's Hubei province has killed at least 12 people, state media reported, marking the second deadly blast linked to fireworks as the country celebrates the Lunar New Year . The explosion tore through the shop in Xiangyang on Wednesday afternoon. Officials said five children and seven adults died in the explosion. The victims included the shop owner and customers who had been buying fireworks for holiday celebrations. Some had travelled from other areas to visit relatives during the festive period .





A Doubly Robust Machine Learning Approach for Disentangling Treatment Effect Heterogeneity with Functional Outcomes

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Causal inference is paramount for understanding the effects of interventions, yet extracting personalized insights from increasingly complex data remains a significant challenge for modern machine learning. This is the case, in particular, when considering functional outcomes observed over a continuous domain (e.g., time, or space). Estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects, known as CATE, has emerged as a crucial tool for personalized decision-making, but existing meta-learning frameworks are largely limited to scalar outcomes, failing to provide satisfying results in scientific applications that leverage the rich, continuous information encoded in functional data. Here, we introduce FOCaL (Functional Outcome Causal Learning), a novel, doubly robust meta-learner specifically engineered to estimate a functional heterogeneous treatment effect (F-CATE). FOCaL integrates advanced functional regression techniques for both outcome modeling and functional pseudo-outcome reconstruction, thereby enabling the direct and robust estimation of F-CATE. We provide a rigorous theoretical derivation of FOCaL, demonstrate its performance and robustness compared to existing non-robust functional methods through comprehensive simulation studies, and illustrate its practical utility on diverse real-world functional datasets. FOCaL advances the capabilities of machine intelligence to infer nuanced, individualized causal effects from complex data, paving the way for more precise and trustworthy AI systems in personalized medicine, adaptive policy design, and fundamental scientific discovery.