activescott's Notes

Israel's levelling of these structures comes after Defence Minister Israel Katz's order on 22 March to "accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes" near the Israeli border based on the "model in Gaza" as part of its campaign against Hezbollah.

The systematic demolition of these towns and villages may amount to a war crime, international law experts told BBC Verify.

Katz's plan for an Israeli-controlled "security zone" extending from the border to the Litani river would take up about 10% of Lebanon's territory.

Using verified footage and analysis of available satellite imagery, BBC Verify found evidence of controlled Israeli demolitions in at least seven border towns and villages.

We found more than 460 buildings had been demolished in Aita al-Shaab alone. Excavators and armoured vehicles can also be seen in satellite imagery of the village, according to Tony Reeves, founder of intelligence analysis firm MAIAR.

The deliberate demolition of structures is not a new Israeli military tactic. It has been deployed across swathes of Gaza during the war that was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

Multiple legal experts told BBC Verify the destruction of property is strictly prohibited by international humanitarian law, unless it is demanded by military necessity. The bar for necessity is higher than military convenience or advantage, according to Prof Janina Dill, a global security and international law expert at Oxford University: "It certainly does not cover levelling entire villages as a predicate to long-term national security." It also requires case-by-case analysis when determining which buildings have military significance, said Yuval Shany, a legal expert from the Israel Democracy Institute think tank. The capacity of some civilian buildings to be used for military activity "does not justify a sweeping policy of creating buffer zones next to the border inside which all buildings are to be destroyed", he added.

Dr Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne, co-director of the Centre for International Law at the University of Bristol, reiterated that the "fundamental rule of law" is that civilian objects must not be targeted. "It is not a permissible defence to claim that the total destruction of towns and villages in southern Lebanon is necessary for creating a buffer zone to hold back Hezbollah," he said. "Even if Israel's war in Lebanon can be considered self-defence against attacks from Hezbollah, its conduct seems to go far beyond a limited war of self-defence against specific attacks."

Trump also claimed to have rejected an offer from Iran to reopen the strait three days ago, saying that "it will open when we make a deal".

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian placed the blame on Trump for upending talks — saying the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, the president’s threats of violence against the country and his “breach of commitments” made negotiations untenable.  “World sees your endless hypocritical rhetoric and contradiction between claims and actions,” Pezeshkian wrote on the social platform X.

Vatanka pointed out that the nuclear deal negotiated under the Obama administration took well more than a year to be ironed out. “It’s going to take many months this time, too, but you need to have the ceasefire in place,” he said. “You need to have the Strait of Hormuz open, you need to build trust.” Morgan Viña, who served at the United Nations in Trump’s first term, said the Iranians have a greater ability to withstand pressure than Trump, given his promises to avoid forever wars and his party facing the midterm elections amid high gas prices.  “It is to their advantage to make this as long and as painful,” she said on the “Fault Lines” podcast on Wednesday. “But President Trump being too willing, too eager, to find an agreement here, I think that is to our detriment when it comes to finding a long-term solution.”

And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration was pressured into issuing another 30-day sanctions waiver to allow Russian oil on the market at the request of “more than 10 of the most vulnerable and poorest countries in terms of energy,” during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.  Bessent was criticized by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) for padding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pocket with another $4.5 billion to fund his war in Ukraine.

Full guard sweeps for white belts:

• scissor
• Hip bump
• pendulum
• grapevine

Amal Khalil was a well-known and respected journalist here in Lebanon.

She had actually received direct threats during the last war from an Israeli phone number on WhatsApp, asking her to cease her reporting, in fact, telling her that she should leave Lebanon if she wanted her head to remain on her shoulders.

The Israeli military, in a statement, denied reports that it had been preventing rescue teams from reaching the scene, and additionally, said that they do not target journalists.

But it was less than a month ago that three journalists here in southern Lebanon were killed in a double-tap attack.

Their vehicle was hit. It was hit again, and then, rescue workers who went to the scene were subsequently targeted.

And in a statement after that attack, the Israeli army attempted to smear one of those journalists by posting a photo, which they later admitted was photoshopped, alleging that he was a member of Hezbollah’s elite special forces.

This has been systematic targeting of journalists and medics here in southern Lebanon, and the information minister, Paul Morcos, has called this latest attack a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.

Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark of 86 tasks across 11 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Each task is evaluated under three conditions: no Skills, curated Skills, and self-generated Skills. We test 7 agent-model configurations over 7,308 trajectories.

Curated Skills raise average pass rate by 16.2 percentage points(pp), but effects vary widely by domain (+4.5pp for Software Engineering to +51.9pp for Healthcare) and 16 of 84 tasks show negative deltas. Self-generated Skills provide no benefit on average, showing that models cannot reliably author the procedural knowledge they benefit from consuming. Focused Skills with 2--3 modules outperform comprehensive documentation, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them.

Today we’re releasing OpenAI Privacy Filter, an open-weight model for detecting and redacting personally identifiable information (PII) in text.

It is designed for high-throughput privacy workflows, and is able to perform context-aware detection of PII in unstructured text. It can run locally, which means that PII can be masked or redacted without leaving your machine. It processes long inputs efficiently, making redaction decisions in a quick, single pass.

A good video is at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/22/ai-powered-robot-beats-elite-table-tennis-players-milestone-robotics

Here we present Ace, to our knowledge the first real-world autonomous system competitive with elite human table tennis players. Ace addresses the challenges of physical real-time interaction through a new, high-speed perception system using event-based vision sensors4, and a new control system based on model-free reinforcement learning, as well as state-of-the-art high-speed robot hardware. Evaluated in matches against elite and professional players under official competition rules, Ace achieved several victories and demonstrated consistent returns of high-speed, high-spin shots. These results highlight the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks, suggesting broader applications in domains requiring fast, precise human–robot interaction.

Ace is equipped with a new perception system using event-based vision sensors as well as a control system based on policies learnt using deep RL. In contrast to earlier approaches using RL for robot table tennis, the control policies used by Ace are learnt using an asymmetric actor–critic architecture27,28,29, and the actions produced by the policies exist in an abstract space that is then mapped to a hard constraint for a convex optimization problem. This setup allows learning of collision-free, agile motions, addressing the full challenge of human-competitive robot table tennis.

The perception system uses a combination of conventional APS cameras for ball triangulation and EVS cameras for ball angular velocity estimation to infer the current ball state at high frequencies. The ball state is then provided to two different control components, depending on whether Ace is serving or in a rally. When serving, the robot performs a single-arm serve from a library of serve motions that were found using a genetic algorithm.

During the rally, a fixed deep RL policy (π′) is queried at 31.25 Hz using the robot joint states and the ball position and spin histories. The policy is sampled during the match from a bank of policies trained to perform different skills.

The actions (a) produced by the policy are mapped to a 32-ms segment trajectory, and a corresponding reset trajectory is calculated. If the robot has yet to hit the ball and no collisions are predicted, then the segment trajectory is executed by the robot interface; otherwise, a reset trajectory is executed.

The training of all policies is performed entirely in simulation with custom physics models, noise models and data-driven distributions of the initial ball state. Training is performed asynchronously with multiple instances of the training environment. To aid in the learning process, the critic () is provided with the true ball state, whereas the policy (πi) is given a history of noisy sensor measurements.

bicycle airtag holder

On Sunday, Lightning, a 5-foot-5-inch, bright red humanoid robot, completed a half-marathon in record time, almost completely on its own. But about 220 yards from the finish line, Lightning slammed into a barricade and fell over, almost as if it was giving up.  Despite the tumble, Lightning got back up with the help of its team and completed the race in just under 51 minutes.  Even with the disruption, Lightning outperformed the current world record holder, Jacob Kiplimo, who completed the half-marathon in 57 minutes, 20 seconds.

China has a large lead in robot manufacturing, shipping more than 1,000 humanoid robots, according to The Journal. No American company has shipped more than 500.

Why is there such a push for humanoid robots? Several countries are betting high on humanoid robots, but no country is betting more than China, as Straight Arrow News has previously reported. It makes sense since China has the most to gain from the technology.  China has maintained its position as the world’s largest manufacturer, but a massive issue could erode its dominance. Following decades of its One-Child Policy, China faces population decline. The sentiment among Chinese people has also exacerbated the problem, as fewer people are less eager to work low-paying manual labor jobs.  Robots could eliminate that issue for China, creating an entire labor force using its massive manufacturing infrastructure. China also understands humanoid robots would benefit every country and being the first country to perfect the tech would give the country massive leverage over others.

Many U.S. tech companies understand that advanced humanoid robotics will likely be a massive future tech market but they are focusing more on artificial intelligence. Many of them believe that building more advanced AI systems first allows them to create any technology afterward, only much faster.

In the United States, an executive order is a directive by the president of the United States that manages operations of the federal government.[1] Executive orders are only binding on the federal government's executive branch. The legal or constitutional basis for executive orders has multiple sources. Article Two of the United States Constitution gives presidents broad executive and enforcement authority to use their discretion to determine how to enforce the law or to otherwise manage the resources and staff of the federal government's executive branch. The delegation of discretionary power to make such orders is required to be supported by either an expressed or implied congressional law, or the constitution itself.

Israel is not a normal democracy that abides by the rule of law or legal restraint. It is very much an expansionist state with bold ambitions and a demonstrated willingness to break international law. The events of the past two years have made this reality impossible to ignore.

The “Greater Israel” project, a term that has carried two primary meanings over the decades, has moved from the ideological fringe into the governing coalition of Israeli politics. In its narrower, post-1967 usage, “Greater Israel” referred to Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights. In its maximalist, biblicist form, drawn from Genesis 15:18, it invokes the territory stretching “from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates,” a vast area encompassing parts of modern Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and potentially reaching into Iraq.

Once confined to religious nationalists and settler ideologues, this expansionist vision now sits at the cabinet table. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for Israel to “expand to Damascus,” displayed a map showing Jordan as part of Israel at a 2023 speech in Paris

Netanyahu’s coalition agreement explicitly declares that “Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” and that “the government will promote and develop settlements in all parts of the Land of Israel.”

Perhaps most striking is that this rhetoric is no longer confined to the religious right. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, an ostensibly secular figure, stated in February 2026 that he supports “anything that will allow the Jews a large, broad, strong land,” adding that “the borders are the borders of the Bible.” When even centrist politicians invoke biblical mandates to justify territorial expansion, the ideological transformation becomes undeniable.

Smotrich has repeatedly asserted that the military campaign in Lebanon must result in a “change of Israel’s borders.” On March 23, 2026, he told an Israeli radio program that the campaign “needs to end with a different reality entirely, both with the Hezbollah decision but also with the change of Israel’s borders.” He then declared at a Knesset faction meeting that “the Litani must be our new border with the state of Lebanon, just like the Yellow Line in Gaza and like the buffer zone and peak of the Hermon in Syria,” adding, “I say here definitively, in every room and in every discussion, too.”

Defense Minister Israel Katz has adopted a complementary posture. He announced at the end of March that the IDF will maintain “security control over the entire area up to the Litani River” and that “hundreds of thousands of residents of southern Lebanon who evacuated northward will not return south of the Litani River until security for the residents of the north is ensured.”

And we need to show New Yorkers that we’re able to not only address a generational fiscal crisis, but also able to advance a vision that makes it easier to live in the city, because, frankly, for a working class New Yorker, they measure their life not in the city’s deficit, but in the cost that they have to pay, and it doesn’t mean much to a tenant who’s struggling to pay their rent if the city is facing a $5.4 billion deficit. What means something is if you’re willing to hold a bad landlord accountable, and we’ve held enough bad landlords accountable to win more than $30 million in settlements, have more than 6,000 apartments be repaired, host more than 1,000 New Yorkers at these rental rip-off hearings. And what we’ve found oftentimes is the conditions that people have had to live with have been a part of their life, not just for weeks or months, but for years, sometimes decades, and within that kind of relationship to such impunity, comes a diminished faith in government.

I would say that she’s a good fit for our administration because she’s delivering on our administration’s commitment to make this a safer city and that I do not need to agree with every one of my commissioners or city workers at large about every single issue within their purview. I do, however, need to agree with the decisions that they make and the outcomes that those decisions create.

I would say it is very much the same in terms of being a democratic socialist and believing in government’s ability to transform working people’s lives. I did not think I would think this much about the weather and the relentless nature of it, but the job of a leader is to respond to the crisis, not to ask why the crisis picked them as the leader to respond to.

The president and I disagree on many things in public and in private. We do, however, agree on one thing, which is a love for New York City, and that love, it is one that allows for our relationship to be a productive one, and allows for the city to know that it will not simply be affected by threats, but rather one that, as the president said, the better this city does, the happier he is.

It’s productive, even though he’s “a fascist?” Yes.

I just want to clarify one thing that you said in the beginning, because you mentioned you will need as long as you’re mayor to make good on your three biggest promises. Is that two terms or one term? [Laughing]: Inshallah, it’s two terms.

He trumpeted the securing of $1.2 billion for child care and the fixing of 100,000 potholes across the city. Mamdani also highlighted a new move in conjunction with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to tax secondary homes worth more than $5 million owned by non-New Yorkers. The pied-à-terre tax is expected to generate more than $500 million in revenue per year.

At last Sunday’s rally, Mamdani announced plans to open a city-owned grocery store in East Harlem. He said the store will be in La Marqueta, a market started by then-New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1936 and is expected to open next year.

Mamdani also promised to cut down on commute times by expanding bus service into areas of the city where subway stations are few and far between. He has yet to make progress on his other campaign promises to lower rent and increase taxes to help fund citywide improvements. And he’s still not even close to reaching his goal of free universal child care for all. However, he did promise to use a chunk of the $1.2 billion granted by Hochul to provide 2,000 free spots for two-year-olds in lower-income communities by fall 2026. He said he hopes to grow that 12,000 children by fall 2027 and to reach “full universality” within four years.

Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance

President Donald Trump said Congress must extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) even if it means giving up “rights and privileges.” Section 702 allows for the collection of Americans’ data without a warrant.

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie attempted to introduce three amendments to the legislation that would have required law enforcement to obtain a warrant before collecting Americans’ data. His amendments were rejected.  Trump argued that he and Americans should be willing to sacrifice their 4th Amendment right to privacy in exchange for security.

microG Services is a FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) framework to allow applications designed for Google Play Services to run on systems, where Play Services is not available.

Our data shows that more than 80% of customers surveyed would pay once (as a pay-what-you-want and/or one-time purchase).

Yes, despite what many people assume, and while big tech frequently gravitates toward SaaS or subscription models as the route to sustainability, most customers and developers of OSS would strongly prefer the one-time payment approach. Why does this disconnect exist?

We believe it partially stems from subscription fatigue in an increasingly subscription-heavy digital economy. Insights from our survey comments suggest customers find managing recurring payments painful and exhausting.

revealed an average willingness to pay of approximately $18 USD (a conservative estimate, using the bottom of the selection band). Interestingly, digging deeper showed that those who self-identified as 'frequent' donors to open source projects leaned higher, averaging around $27 USD. It's worth noting this group represented about 10% of our respondents, so consider that context when looking at this higher figure–your mileage may vary.

At the same time, our survey reveals what truly motivates customers to pay for open source projects. A clear roadmap leads the way (68.3%), with usability (63.5%) and funding transparency (59.8%) following closely behind.

The open-source Typeform alternative Build interactive forms, keep full control of your data, and stop overpaying — the way it should be.