by Joseph Haboush| The Daily Star BEIRUT: The militant who opened fire at the Lebanese Army and Internal Security forces on the eve of Eid al-Fitr late Monday has been killed, an eyewitness told The Daily Star. Abdel-Rahman Mabsout, an Islamist who fought with Daesh (ISIS) in Syria and was arrested by Lebanese security forces in 2016, […]

By David D. Kirkpatrick – nytimes.com —This is an opinion article does not necessarily represent khazen.org opinion

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the 29-year-old commander of the almost negligible air force of the United Arab Emirates, had come to Washington shopping for weapons. In 1991, in the months after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the young prince wanted to buy so much military hardware to protect his own oil-rich monarchy — from Hellfire missiles to Apache helicopters to F-16 jets — that Congress worried he might destabilize the region. But the Pentagon, trying to cultivate accommodating allies in the Gulf, had identified Prince Mohammed as a promising partner. The favorite son of the semi-literate Bedouin who founded the United Arab Emirates, Prince Mohammed was a serious-minded, British-trained helicopter pilot who had persuaded his father to transfer $4 billion into the United States Treasury to help pay for the 1991 war in Iraq. Richard A. Clarke, then an assistant secretary of state, reassured lawmakers that the young prince would never become “an aggressor.” “The U.A.E. is not now and never will be a threat to stability or peace in the region,” Mr. Clarke said in congressional testimony. “That is very hard to imagine. Indeed, the U.A.E. is a force for peace.” Thirty years later, Prince Mohammed, now 58, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, is arguably the most powerful leader in the Arab world. He is also among the most influential foreign voices in Washington, urging the United States to adopt his increasingly bellicose approach to the region.

Prince Mohammed is almost unknown to the American public and his tiny country has fewer citizens than Rhode Island. But he may be the richest man in the world. He controls sovereign wealth funds worth $1.3 trillion, more than any other country. His influence operation in Washington is legendary (Mr. Clarke got rich on his payroll). His military is the Arab world’s most potent, equipped through its work with the United States to conduct high-tech surveillance and combat operations far beyond its borders. For decades, the prince has been a key American ally, following Washington’s lead, but now he is going his own way. His special forces are active in Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Egypt’s North Sinai. He has worked to thwart democratic transitions in the Middle East, helped install a reliable autocrat in Egypt and boosted a protégé to power in Saudi Arabia.

At times, the prince has contradicted American policy and destabilized neighbors. Rights groups have criticized him for jailing dissidents at home, for his role in creating a humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and for backing the Saudi prince whose agents killed the dissident writer Jamal Khashoggi. Yet under the Trump administration, his influence in Washington appears greater than ever. He has a rapport with President Trump, who has frequently adopted the prince’s views on Qatar, Libya and Saudi Arabia, even over the advice of cabinet officials or senior national security staff. Western diplomats who know the prince — known as M.B.Z. — say he is obsessed with two enemies, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Trump has sought to move strongly against both and last week took steps to bypass congressional opposition to keep selling weapons to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. “M.B.Z. has an extraordinary way of telling Americans his own interests but making it come across as good advice about the region,” said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, whose sympathy for the Arab Spring and negotiations with Iran brought blistering criticism from the Emirati prince. When it comes to influence in Washington, Mr. Rhodes added, “M.B.Z. is in a class by himself.” Prince Mohammed worked assiduously before the presidential election to crack Mr. Trump’s inner circle, and secured a secret meeting during the transition period with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The prince also tried to broker talks between the Trump administration and Russia, a gambit that later entangled him in the special counsel’s investigation into foreign election interference.

by vox.com — Kelsey Piper  — In the past five years, machine learning has come a long way. You might have noticed that Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are way better than they used to be, or that automatic translation on websites, while still fairly spotty, is hugely improved from where it was a few years ago. But many still don’t quite grasp how far we’ve come, and how fast. Recently, two images made the rounds that underscore the huge advances machine learning has made — and show why we’re in for a new age of mischief and online fakery. The first was put together by Ian Goodfellow, the director of machine learning at Apple’s Special Projects Group and a leader in the field. He looked over machine-learning papers published on the online open-access repository arXiv over the past five years, and found examples of machine learning-generated faces from each year. Each of the faces below was generated by an AI. Starting with the faces on the left, from 2014, you can see how dramatically AI capabilities have improved:

In 2014, we’d just started on the task of using modern machine-learning techniques to have AIs generate faces. The faces they generated looked grainy, like something you might see on a low-quality surveillance camera. And they looked generic, like an average of lots of human faces, not like a real person. In less than five years, all of that changed. Today’s AI-generated faces are full-color, detailed images. They are expressive. They’re not an average of all human faces, they resemble people of specific ages and ethnicities. Looking at the woman above on the far right, I can vividly imagine a conversation with her. It’s surreal to realize she doesn’t exist. How did we come so far so fast? Machine learning has seen a flood of new researchers and larger research budgets, driving rapid innovations, and a new technique invented in 2014 made a huge difference.

BEIRUT (Xinhua) — French Ambassador to Lebanon Bruno Foucher said Friday that French President Emmanuel Macron will visit Lebanon in the second half of this year after the Lebanese parliament passes the 2019 state budget, local media reported. “The president will come after Lebanon gets over with its 2019 budget. France and the international community […]