The Yemen-based branch of Al Qaeda said on Sunday that its leader, Khaled Batarfi, had died. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, known as A.Q.A.P., released a video announcing Mr. Batarfi's death, showing images of him wrapped in a white funeral shroud overlaid with a black Al Qaeda flag. It did not explain how he had died. The United States government once considered Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to be one of the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations. The group tried and failed at least three times to blow up American airliners, and has been targeted by American drone strikes for two decades.

Large Language Models~(LLMs) drive current AI breakthroughs despite very little being known about their internal representations, e.g., how to extract a few informative features to solve various downstream tasks. To provide a practical and principled answer, we propose to characterize LLMs from a geometric perspective. We obtain in closed form (i) the intrinsic dimension in which the Multi-Head Attention embeddings are constrained to exist and (ii) the partition and per-region affine mappings of the per-layer feedforward networks. Our results are informative, do not rely on approximations, and are actionable. First, we show that, motivated by our geometric interpretation, we can bypass Llama$2$'s RLHF by controlling its embedding's intrinsic dimension through informed prompt manipulation. Second, we derive $7$ interpretable spline features that can be extracted from any (pre-trained) LLM layer, providing a rich abstract representation of their inputs. Those features alone ($224$ for Mistral-7B/Llama$2$-7B and $560$ for Llama$2$-70B) are sufficient to help solve toxicity detection, infer the domain of the prompt, and even tackle the Jigsaw challenge, which aims at characterizing the type of toxicity of various prompts. Our results demonstrate how, even in large-scale regimes, exact theoretical results can answer practical questions in language models. Code: \url{https://github.com/RandallBalestriero/SplineLLM}.

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.

In 2002, when I profiled Ayman al-Zawahiri for The New Yorker, he was called "the man behind bin Laden." But since bin Laden was killed by American special forces in 2011, Zawahiri has been Al Qaeda's leader. Zawahiri and bin Laden were very different men, not friends but allies, using each other for the skills and resources they could each provide. Al Qaeda would not have survived without the dynamic they created together. Zawahiri, reportedly killed in Afghanistan by a U.S. drone strike over the weekend, was a doctor--a highly-educated professional who chose to devote himself to violent revolution.

The drone strike was the latest in a series of American military operations against ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria, which have been relatively rare since the fall of the Islamic State's so-called caliphate in 2019. On June 16, Army Delta Force commandos seized Hani Ahmed al-Kurdi, a top Islamic State bomb maker and operations facilitator also known as Salim, in a ground raid in Aleppo, Syria. Nine days later, the United States carried out an airstrike in Idlib Province that the military said killed Abu Hamzah al Yemeni, a senior leader of Hurras al-Din, Al Qaeda's branch in Syria. The U.S. attack on Tuesday came as Mr. Biden prepared to depart for Israel and Saudi Arabia, his first visit to the Middle East as president. The trip will largely focus on Iran's nuclear program and malign activities in the region.

Ibrahim al-Asiri is seen in these images supplied to Yemeni police as part of a terror suspect handbook. A top Al Qaeda bomb maker who masterminded a plot to bring down an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen last year, a senior U.S. official told Fox News Monday. The Associated Press previously reported that Ibrahim al-Asiri was dead, citing a tribal leader and an Al Qaeda-linked source who said that he was killed in the governate of Marib in eastern Yemen. The tribal leader said that al-Asiri was struck by the drone, along with two or four of his associates, as he stood beside his car. Al Qaeda itself has remained silent about its top bomb maker.

During a recent four-day trip to Marib with a group of Western journalists and researchers, I saw a town struggling for a sense of normalcy -- and even progress -- despite the collapsed country around it. The trip was organized by the Sana Center for Strategic Studies, a research institute focused on Yemen, and led by Farea al-Muslimi, an energetic young Yemeni scholar, who said he worried that the international community was forgetting about Yemen, to the peril of both. "We can't stop the war in Yemen right now, but at least we can cause more conversation about it," he said. "We want to bring the world to Yemen and bring Yemen to the world." Marib's unlikely success is partly a symptom of the near complete shattering of the Yemeni state, which has left regions to fend for themselves in providing life's basics for their people.

But a widely publicized new memoir about America's covert drone war fails to mention the "outflow increases," as one internal Air Force memo calls it. One might ask Velicovich to explain the deaths of Warren Weinstein, an American citizen, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian citizen -- both aid workers who were killed by an American drone strike that was targeting Al Qaeda members in Pakistan. In the acknowledgments section of the memoir, Velicovich mentions that the forthcoming movie will be directed and produced by Michael Bay, the filmmaker behind "Transformers," "Pearl Harbor" and "Armageddon." Alex Edney-Browne (@alexEdneybrowne) is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, where she is researching the psycho-social effects of drone warfare on Afghan civilians and veterans of the U.S. Air Force's drone program.

More than two years after a multi-sided civil war erupted inside Yemen that allowed Al Qaeda's local franchise to amass power and seize territory, President Trump has directed the Pentagon to embark on a complicated counter-terrorism campaign. Trump's decision, just six weeks into his presidency, intends to reverse the largely unchecked expansion across southern Yemen of the group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The willingness to expand counter-terrorism operations inside war-torn Yemen was the latest signal that Trump is more willing to defer to military commanders on national security policy than President Obama, who was criticized publicly by three of his four Defense secretaries and privately by uniformed officers for micromanaging the military. Over two days this week, armed drones and warplanes conducted more than 30 airstrikes against suspected Al Qaeda positions in three Yemeni provinces, marking the first U.S. attacks in the country since an ill-fated Navy SEAL raid in January that killed two dozen civilians, including women and children, Al Qaeda militants and Chief Petty Officer William "Ryan" Owens. The aerial bombardment is expected to continue into the coming week.

More than two years after a multi-sided civil war erupted inside Yemen that allowed Al Qaeda's local franchise to amass power and seize territory, President Trump has directed the Pentagon to embark on a complicated counter-terrorism campaign. Trump's decision, just six weeks into his presidency, intends to reverse the largely unchecked expansion across southern Yemen of the group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The willingness to expand counter-terrorism operations inside war-torn Yemen was the latest signal that Trump is more willing to defer to military commanders on national security policy than President Obama, who was criticized publicly by three of his four Defense secretaries and privately by uniformed officers for micromanaging the military. Over two days this week, armed drones and warplanes conducted more than 30 airstrikes against suspected Al Qaeda positions in three Yemeni provinces, marking the first U.S. attacks in the country since an ill-fated Navy SEAL raid in January that killed two dozen civilians, including women and children, Al Qaeda militants and Chief Petty Officer William "Ryan" Owens. The aerial bombardment is expected to continue into the coming week.