Friday, May 23rd
Last update06:58:35 AM GMT
War Glance
On May 7, 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allied forces. The next day, at the insistence of the Soviets, Germany signed a second surrender document in Berlin, which became known as Victory in Europe Day, or VE Day.
Although World War II was not yet over — Japan continued to fight the United States and its allies in the Pacific — Germany's capitulation marked a critical moment for the American troops who had been battling Nazi forces on the continent.
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.”
In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists.
The last plane carrying U.S. forces left Afghanistan on Monday, meeting an Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw U.S. forces from the Taliban-led nation, after 20 years of war that left nearly 2,500 American troops dead and spanned four presidencies.
The Biden administration has spent weeks scrambling to evacuate Americans and Afghan translators who helped the American military after the Taliban quickly gained control of Kabul on Aug. 15.
The withdrawal also comes in the aftermath of an ISIS-K suicide bombing that killed dozens of people, including 13 U.S. service members, on Aug. 26. The U.S. retaliated with airstrikes targeting Islamic extremists on Friday and Sunday.
Evacuations originally began in July with at least 122,000 people evacuated out of Afghanistan as of Monday, including 5,400 Americans.
The four-page pact spells out a timetable for the United States to withdraw its 13,000 troops from Afghanistan; in exchange, the Taliban agreed to sever its ties with al Qaeda, the terrorist group that launched the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S.
It also sets the stage for further negotiations between Afghanistan's government and the Taliban, a militant Islamist group that once ruled Afghanistan and provided safe haven to Osama bin Laden. American officials hope those talks will lead to a power-sharing deal, a permanent end to the bloody conflict, and a full withdrawal of American forces.
On June 6, 1944, Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, forever reshaping the progress of the war and history during the D-Day operation.
Thousands of ships, planes and soldiers from the United States, Britain and Canada surprised Nazi forces.
More than 4,000 Allied soldiers, most of them younger than 20, as well as more than 4,000 German troops died in the invasion. Up to 20,000 French civilians were also reportedly killed in the bombings.
In 2019, veterans and world leaders gathered to honor the soldiers who took part in the invasion, led by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and known then as Operation Overlord.
To mark the historic day, here are 17 photos that show how the battle unfolded.
On Friday, en route to Florida aboard Air Force One, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced that ISIS' "territorial caliphate has been eliminated in Syria."
Sanders showed reporters a before-and-after map of Syria, indicating that ISIS no longer controlled any territory.
Reuters reports that Mazloum Kobani, commander-in-chief of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), told reporters on Monday that he hopes the U.S. will halt plans to fully withdraw from the country, which President Trump announced in December.
“We would like to have air cover, air support and a force on the ground to coordinate with us,” Kobani said at an airbase in Syria, according to Reuters. British and French forces are already in talks to remain in the country, he reportedly added, but stressed that “a partial group of American forces" would ideally remain as well.
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