World roundup: April 26 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Chad, Ukraine, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

April 26, 1803: At around 1 in the afternoon a hail of some 3000 rock fragments, weighing around 37 kilograms in total, rains down upon the town of L’Aigle in France’s Normandy region. A French scientist named Jean-Baptiste Biot was dispatched to catalog and study the event by the French Academy of Sciences. His fieldwork determined conclusively that the fragments were of extraterrestrial origin, establishing near-definitive proof for the hitherto widely questioned existence of meteors. Biot’s work at L’Aigle birthed an entirely new field of study, meteoritics, and was the first of many significant scientific contributions he would make in his career.

April 26, 2005: Under considerable international pressure due to its suspected involvement in the February 14 assassination of then-Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic al-Hariri, the Syrian government withdraws the last of its occupation forces from Lebanon. Syria had invaded Lebanon in May 1976 during the Lebanese Civil War, in support of Maronite and conservative Muslim factions and in opposition to the Palestine Liberation Organization and leftist militias. Tensions later emerged between the Syrians and some Maronite leaders, like current Lebanese President Michel Aoun. Initially the Syrian military presence in Lebanon was legitimized by the Arab League under the auspices of a peacekeeping force, but by the mid-1980s the Arab League had stopped renewing its mandate and the Syrian presence in Lebanon could be considered a full-fledged military occupation.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

+972 Magazine’s Sophia Goodfriend discusses the human component of the Israeli military’s (IDF) AI-orchestrated slaughter in Gaza:

Earlier this month, investigative reporting in +972 and Local Call revealed AI’s pivotal role in the bloodshed. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, the military used an AI machine nicknamed “Lavender” to generate tens of thousands of “human targets” for assassination on the grounds that they are allegedly part of the armed wings of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. These outputs were then fed into an automated tracking system known as “Where’s Daddy?” enabling the army to kill each one inside their home, along with their whole family and often many of their neighbors.

These revelations follow an earlier investigation by +972 and Local Call, which shed light on another AI target-generating system known as “Habsora” (“The Gospel”). Whereas Lavender generates human targets, Habsora marks buildings and structures that allegedly serve a military function. One former intelligence officer told +972 that this technology enables the Israeli army to essentially operate a “mass assassination factory.”

The latest investigation made waves in the international press, where commentators conjured scenes of AI-powered weapons systems exceeding the power of their human operators and killing at whim. But experts in international law and AI warfare underlined to +972 that the carnage in Gaza is the result of concerted human decisions. And alongside the top brass of Israel’s military and political establishments, entire swaths of the global civilian technology sector may be implicated in the slaughter.

Elsewhere: