Category Archives: News

Researchers announce major advance in image-recognition software

The New York Times reports: Two groups of scientists, working independently, have created artificial intelligence software capable of recognizing and describing the content of photographs and videos with far greater accuracy than ever before, sometimes even mimicking human levels of understanding.

Until now, so-called computer vision has largely been limited to recognizing individual objects. The new software, described on Monday by researchers at Google and at Stanford University, teaches itself to identify entire scenes: a group of young men playing Frisbee, for example, or a herd of elephants marching on a grassy plain.

The software then writes a caption in English describing the picture. Compared with human observations, the researchers found, the computer-written descriptions are surprisingly accurate.

The advances may make it possible to better catalog and search for the billions of images and hours of video available online, which are often poorly described and archived. At the moment, search engines like Google rely largely on written language accompanying an image or video to ascertain what it contains. [Continue reading…]

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Hydrogen cars about to go on sale. Their only emission: water

The New York Times reports: Remember the hydrogen car?

A decade ago, President George W. Bush espoused the environmental promise of cars running on hydrogen, the universe’s most abundant element. “The first car driven by a child born today,” he said in his 2003 State of the Union speech, “could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free.”

That changed under Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was President Obama’s first Secretary of Energy. “We asked ourselves, ‘Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen-car economy?’” Dr. Chu said then. “The answer, we felt, was ‘no.’ ” The administration slashed funding for hydrogen fuel cell research.

Attention shifted to battery electric vehicles, particularly those made by the headline-grabbing Tesla Motors.

The hydrogen car, it appeared, had died. And many did not mourn its passing, particularly those who regarded the auto companies’ interest in hydrogen technology as a stunt to signal that they cared about the environment while selling millions of highly profitable gas guzzlers.

Except the companies, including General Motors, Honda, Toyota, Daimler and Hyundai, persisted.

After many years and billions of dollars of research and development, hydrogen cars are headed to the showrooms. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS tightens up its entry requirements

Asharq Al-Awsat reports: If any group could be said to have powerful enemies these days, it is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), making a certain amount of paranoia on the part of the organization and its leaders understandable. It is therefore not surprising that it has just made it harder for jihadist hopefuls to join the group in an effort to weed out spies.

The extremist organization has issued new instructions to Western recruits seeking to join the terrorist group, including the need to obtain a glowing reference from at least one sheikh known to ISIS leadership, according to Islamist leaders in London. The British Islamists informed Asharq Al-Awsat that ISIS recruits will now need this “recommendation” to be allowed into the fold.

The new instructions include detailed advice on what ISIS recruits should wear and carry with them when travelling to Syria and Iraq as well as pointers on how best to avoid detection. The recruits are told to avoid bringing religious books, but should not forget to bring their own cigarettes with them.

“Your clothes should not identify your religion and you should remain silent and not talk too much. The only thing people should know about you is that you are a normal traveler . . . and you should not give any detailed information about yourself,” went the advice.

The latest directives follow ISIS fears that Western intelligence organizations are seeking to infiltrate the group. This is the first time that ISIS has explicitly called for new recruits to provide proof of identity and the new rules mean that ISIS recruits will need at least one affiliated sheikh or recruiter to vouch for them. The instructions add that it would be even better if potential recruits have more than one “recommendation,” the Islamist sources told Asharq Al-Awsat. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS executes nearly 1,500 people in Syria in 5 months

AFP report: The jihadist Islamic State group (IS) has executed nearly 1,500 people in Syria in the five months since it declared the establishment of a “caliphate”, a monitoring group said Monday.

“The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented the execution of 1,429 people since the IS announced its ‘caliphate’ in June,” the group’s director, Rami Abdel Rahman, said.

The majority of IS’s victims in Syria have been civilians, he said.

“Of the total number of people beheaded or shot dead in mass killings by IS, 879 have been civilians, some 700 of them members of the Shaitat tribe.” [Continue reading…]

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Abdul-Rahman Kassig: Idealist ‘simply seeking to help’

BBC News reports: Abdul-Rahman Kassig believed it was his duty to alleviate the suffering of people affected by conflict in the Middle East.

Mr Kassig, known as Peter Kassig before he converted to Islam, founded a humanitarian organisation to help refugees who had fled from Syria.

In interviews and letters to his family, Mr Kassig, 26, said he was driven by a “sense of purpose” and a desire to help others after serving with the US military in Iraq.

In 2012, he wrote: “The truth is sometimes I really think I would like to do something else, but at the end of the day this work is really the only thing that I have found that gives my life both meaning and direction.” [Continue reading…]

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Peace-talks between the ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria

Jennifer Cafarella writes: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is said to have told CBS’s 60 Minutes that he has observed tactical cooperation between the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra (JN). The two global, Salafi jihadist groups are engaged in an ideological struggle, or fitnah. They are competing for the leadership of the fight in Syria and recognition by the al-Qaeda movement, which has been conducting mediation attempts between the two since 2013 and in 2014 recognized JN as its official affiliate in Syria. Director Clapper’s statements challenge recent public reports of their negotiations, which suggest that more fundamental mediation may be underway, indicating the possibility of heightened cooperation in coming months. The interview has not aired, and his statements may be more nuanced than the advanced press publicizing the show. But the issue at hand should not be whether more than tactical cooperation has already been observed, but rather, whether conditions are being set that will favor operational cooperation between ISIS and JN in the medium term. The mediation effort may not quickly result in Baghdadi and his inner circle reconciling with JN leader Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, but the groups are eventually likely to cooperate at the operational and strategic level, as they share mutual goals. In the short term, this may include joint action against the Assad regime, which could relieve pressure on ISIS from the regime in Deir ez-Zour and embolden JN to initiate offensive operations against the regime on battlefronts that have stalled. Furthermore, ISIS is under stress in Iraq, and may pursue the acquisition of manpower and other support from JN in Syria in order to reinforce and retake the offensive.

The publicly released information tells the story of hitherto unsuccessful attempts at cooperation at operational and strategic levels. According to a high-level Syrian opposition official and rebel commander cited by the AP, seven high-ranking members of JN and ISIS conducted a meeting in the town of Atareb, West of Aleppo city, on November 2 from midnight until 4:00 a.m. A “commander of brigades affiliated with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army” corroborated the report, adding that it was organized by a third party. According to the opposition official, the meeting included an IS representative, two emissaries from JN, and attendees from the Khorasan Group, who likely served as both the mediating force and organizing party. The AP also reported that Ahrar al-Sham and Jund al-Aqsa were present, however mistakenly characterized Jund al-Aqsa as a group that has pledged allegiance to ISIS.

Involvement of the Khorasan Group in ongoing attempts to mediate the fitna has also been reported by the Daily Beast, and, if true, likely indicates the veracity of reports of ongoing JN and ISIS negotiations. A number of Khorasan members initially entered Syria in the summer of 2013 as part of AQ’s “Victory Committee,” led by Khorasan member Sanafi al Nasr, that had been deployed by Zawahiri to mediate the growing schism between JN and ISIS. The involvement of these figures in current negotiations is therefore not a departure from past activities in Syria, and is likely a secondary line of effort complimenting the ongoing attempt to develop an attack against the West.

The Syrian opposition official cited by the AP also stated that JN and ISIS agreed to eliminate the moderate, Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF) at this meeting. This may have been a sensationalist claim attempting to inflate the threat to the moderate opposition in order to advocate for increased support from the west to the moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA)-linked rebels in Syria, under which the SRF falls. Since the initiation of U.S. – led airstrikes against both JN-linked “Khorasan Group” targets and ISIS in Syria, moderate rebels have accused the Obama administration of encouraging a future JN and ISIS partnership by giving them a common enemy. This is not an unfounded claim, as civilian discontent with the air campaign has fostered increased support for JN, whose rhetoric has shifted to condemn the air campaign in its entirety in a sign of rhetorical support to ISIS against the coalition. However, there is no indication that JN has yet shifted its disposition to the SRF in southern Syria, where JN and the SRF continue to cooperate in military action against the regime. [Continue reading…]

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Murder videos recruitment tools for ISIS

Thomas Joscelyn writes: Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s Islamic State, the al Qaeda offshoot that controls large portions of Iraq and Syria, has claimed to have beheaded yet another Western hostage, along with more than a dozen captured Syrian soldiers. In a newly-released video, a henchman for the group stands over what appears to be the severed head of Peter Kassig, a former U.S. Army Ranger turned aid worker who was kidnapped in Syria in late 2013.

From the Islamic State’s perspective, such videos serve multiple purposes. They are meant to intimidate the organization’s enemies in the West and elsewhere, show defiance in the face of opposition, and to convince other jihadists that Baghdadi’s state is the strong horse. Al Qaeda, the Islamic State’s rival, long ago determined that graphic beheading videos do more harm than good for the jihadists’ cause, as they turn off more prospective supporters than they earn. But the Islamic State has clearly come to the opposite conclusion, cornering the market on savagery. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq and U.S. find some potential Sunni allies have already been lost

The New York Times reports: When the militants of the Islamic State entered the Sunni Arab area of Al Alam, they gave its tribal leaders a message of reconciliation: We are here to defend you and all the Sunnis, they said, so join us.

But after a group of angry residents sneaked out one night, burned the jihadists’ black banners and raised Iraqi flags, the response was swift.

“They started blowing up the houses of tribal leaders and those who were in the security forces,” Laith al-Jubouri, a local official, said. Since then, the jihadists have demolished dozens of homes and kidnapped more than 100 residents, he said. The captives’ fates remain unknown.

In the Islamic State’s rapid consolidation of the Sunni parts of Iraq and Syria, the jihadists have used a double-pronged strategy to gain the obedience of Sunni tribes. While using their abundant cash and arms to entice tribal leaders to join their self-declared caliphate, the jihadists have also eliminated potential foes, hunting down soldiers, police officers, government officials and anyone who once cooperated with the United States as it battled Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Now, as the United States and the Iraqi government urgently seek to enlist the Sunni tribes to fight the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, they are struggling to undo the militants’ success in co-opting or conquering the majority of them.[Continue reading…]

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Americans’ cellphones targeted in secret U.S. spy program

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.

The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.

Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which mimic cell towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information. [Continue reading…]

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More federal agencies are using undercover operations

The New York Times reports: The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show.

At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice.

At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers, accountants drug dealers or yacht buyers and more, court records show.

At the Agriculture Department, more than 100 undercover agents pose as food stamp recipients at thousands of neighborhood stores to spot suspicious vendors and fraud, officials said.

Undercover work, inherently invasive and sometimes dangerous, was once largely the domain of the F.B.I. and a few other law enforcement agencies at the federal level. But outside public view, changes in policies and tactics over the last decade have resulted in undercover teams run by agencies in virtually every corner of the federal government, according to officials, former agents and documents. [Continue reading…]

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Washington Cathedral’s first Muslim prayer service

The Washington Post reports: In a corner of Washington National Cathedral, several hundred Muslim worshipers and other invited guests gathered Friday afternoon for a first-ever recitation of weekly Muslim prayers at the iconic Christian sanctuary and to hear leaders of both faiths call for religious unity in the face of extremist violence and hate.

The Arabic call to prayer echoed among the vaulted stone arches and faded away, followed by an impassioned sermon from Ebrahim Rasool, a Muslim scholar who is South Africa’s ambassador to the United States. Rasool called on Muslims, Christians and others to come together and make “common cause” in the fight against extremists who appropriate Islam.

“We come to this cathedral with sensitivity and humility but keenly aware that it is not a time for platitudes, because mischief is threatening the world,” Rasool said. “The challenge for us today is to reconstitute a middle ground of good people . . . whose very existence threatens extremism.”

The event was closed to the public, and there was heavy security, with police checking every name and bag. Organizers from several area Muslim institutions said there had been concerns about security and threats after the event was publicized and that they and cathedral officials wanted to limit it to a small and selected group. [Continue reading…]

I abbreviated the headline: “Washington Cathedral’s first Muslim prayer service interrupted by heckler.”

Why did one of the paper’s dunce news editors treat the heckler as more newsworthy than the event? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see news defined in this way.

Likewise, I shouldn’t be surprised that this story served as catnip for a host of venomously Islamophobic readers venting their hatred in the comments thread.

What I do understand is gang warfare. If the gang is going to hold together and protect its turf, it needs to intimidate its opponents. What I don’t understand is how someone can treat their membership in a religion as being little different from belonging to a gang.

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At Guantanamo, force-feeding shrouded in secrecy

AFP reports: Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba) (AFP) – Behind the barbed wire of Guantanamo Bay prison, hunger-striking inmates are routinely force-fed, a practice defended by officials as necessary medical treatment but labeled by critics as torture.

But, for all the debate surrounding the practice, information about it is scarce, and force-feeding remains shrouded in secrecy.

“We don’t talk about this,” said Rear Admiral Kyle Cozad, commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, arguing the silence is designed to prevent inmates scoring misleading propaganda points.

“Detainees manipulate the media, on a routine basis, and I say that with confidence and conviction,” Cozad added, speaking to a small group of journalists at the naval base in Cuba last month. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. weighs expanded CIA training, arming of Syrian allies struggling against Assad

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration has been weighing plans to escalate the CIA’s role in arming and training fighters in Syria, a move aimed at accelerating covert U.S. support to moderate rebel factions while the Pentagon is preparing to establish its own training bases, U.S. officials said.

The proposed CIA buildup would expand a clandestine mission that has grown substantially over the past year, U.S. officials said. The agency now vets and trains about 400 fighters each month — as many as are expected to be trained by the Pentagon when its program reaches full strength late next year.

The prospect of expanding the CIA program was on the agenda of a meeting of senior national security officials at the White House last week. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the meeting or to address whether officials had reached a decision on the matter. [Continue reading…]

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Yazidi girls seized by ISIS speak out after escape

The New York Times reports: The 15-year-old girl, crying and terrified, refused to release her grip on her sister’s hand. Days earlier, Islamic State fighters had torn the girls from their family, and now were trying to split them up and distribute them as spoils of war.

The jihadist who had selected the 15-year-old as his prize pressed a pistol to her head, promising to pull the trigger. But it was only when the man put a knife to her 19-year-old sister’s neck that she finally relented, taking her next step in a dark odyssey of abduction and abuse at the hands of the Islamic State.

The sisters were among several thousand girls and young women from the minority Yazidi religion who were seized by the Islamic State in northern Iraq in early August.

The 15-year-old is also among a small number of kidnapping victims who have managed to escape, bringing with them stories of a coldly systemized industry of slavery.

Their accounts tell of girls and young women separated from their families, divvied up or traded among the Islamic State’s men, ordered to convert to Islam, subjected to forced marriages and repeatedly raped. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS keeps getting better at dodging U.S. spies

The Daily Beast reports: On Thursday, around the same time ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced that he had survived a U.S. airstrike and promised in a recorded message to “erupt volcanos of jihad,” American officials were meeting to discuss just how hard it was to track the militant group.

Baghdadi and his followers have proven exceptionally difficult to track and kill because they’re encrypting their communications and taking steps to avoid being detected by U.S. surveillance, according to several current and former officials. Without American intelligence operatives on the ground in ISIS’s home base of Syria—and with only a limited number of surveillance planes in the air—those communications are one of the only surefire ways to keep tabs on ISIS.

In addition to encryption that American officials say has proven very difficult to crack, ISIS is also using a commercially available service that permanently deletes messages sent via the Internet, making them nearly impossible to intercept, according to an individual who was briefed on the issue Thursday. This person didn’t name the service, but one application widely used in Iraq is called FireChat, which allows users to send messages to each other without connecting to the Internet. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS faces war of attrition in Syria’s Kobane

AFP reports: The Islamic State group is locked in a war of attrition in the Syrian border town of Kobane, where Kurdish fighters backed by US-led air strikes are mounting fierce resistance.

Two months after IS launched a major offensive to try to capture the strategic prize on the Turkish frontier, the jihadists have failed to defeat the town’s Kurdish defenders.

“Several weeks ago, it looked like Kobane would fall, but it is now clear that it will not,” said Romain Caillet, a French expert on jihadist movements. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS says it plans to issue its own currency

The New York Times reports: They have paraded their own flag, formed courts and ministries, issued passports and even license plates. Now, the leaders of the Islamic State, the violent jihadist group that has seized parts of Syria and Iraq, have created their own currency, part of a grandiose plan to restore the caliphate era that dominated the Middle East more than 1,300 years ago.

In an announcement on Thursday heralding a liberation from the “satanic usury-based global economic system,” the Islamic State said it would begin minting gold, silver and copper coins, in likenesses similar to the days of the seventh-century caliphs.

The coins will have standardized weights and values, the announcement said, and they will be the legal tender of the lands controlled by the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Important details such as the exact timing of when the coins would begin to circulate, and how they would be minted, were not disclosed, and a question remained: Can the group really create a viable currency?

Many money historians and other experts said no, describing the announcement as a propaganda exercise, meant largely to reinforce the Islamic State’s self-anointed legitimacy. [Continue reading…]

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