Sources in Israeli intelligence agencies say that Israel approved killing 20 civilians to get one low-ranking HAMAS fighter, who may have been identified only by heuristics.

Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as "dumb bombs", the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants. "You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it's very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],"

If someone's death was not important enough to use a smart bomb, but worth killing 20 civilians, those civilians' lives must have been valued at very little.

A machine learning system has been trained to distinguish bee-eating Asian hornets from other types of wasps.

If this works in practice, I will judge it to be artificial intelligence, since it will have demomstrated some understanding of a narrow but important domain.

The corrupter is seriously attempting to bully courts into letting him be a above the law.

He seems to believe it is possible, and he may be right.

If he can indeed do this, it is a reflection of the fact that these charges are legitimate and his trials are honest. No one facing bogus charges in China, Russia or India could entertain hope of overcoming them this way.

The "Bookseller of Kabul" rebuilds the book store destroyed by the Taliban and accumulates copies of the books they destroyed.

I expect that there is no way to buy from his business except via unjust nonfree software, and that makes me sad. Of course, people in Afghanistan face much bigger attacks on their freedom than this. But this is saddening nonetheless.

US citizens: call on the biggest US banks to stick with the Equator Principles.