&w=3840&q=100)
Crackdown on Islamic State terrorists, 82 Somalia affiliate operatives arrested in Ethiopia: Official media
The undated photograph shows an Islamic State (Isis) terrorist holding a gun and another holding the group's flag. (Representative Photograph, Credit: Reuters)
Ethiopia has arrested dozens of suspected Islamic State militants, who it claimed have been trained and deployed to carry out operations across the country, the state-affiliated Fana broadcaster reported.
The 82 suspects were part of Islamic State's Somalia affiliate, which operates in the semi-autonomous Puntland region, according to a statement by the National Intelligence Security Services which was shared with Fana.
The Islamic State faction in Somalia has become an increasingly important part of its parent organisation's worldwide network in recent years.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD
'NISS has been closely monitoring the group's cross-border infiltration strategies and its efforts to establish sleeper cells in Ethiopia,' Fana reported late on Tuesday.
With an estimated 700 to 1,500 fighters, Islamic State's Somalia wing has grown in recent years thanks to an influx of foreign fighters and increasing revenues. But it is still much smaller than al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab militant group, which controls large parts of southern and central Somalia.
The US military has carried out periodic air strikes against the group for years and recently intensified the strikes since President Donald Trump took office.
Puntland government forces have captured large portions of territory from IS since announcing a major offensive against them in December.
(This is an agency copy. Except for the headline, the copy has not been edited by Firstpost staff.)

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Mint
12 minutes ago
- Mint
Lok Sabha set to run ‘smoothly' from Monday after Om Birla's all-party meet; ‘Operation Sindoor' on agenda
Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla held a meeting with senior political party leaders on Friday, during which it was agreed that the House would function smoothly starting Monday, PTI reported, citing parliamentary sources. The opposition has been raking up issues such as special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, US President Donald Trump's claim on India-Pakistan 'ceasefire' and the Pahalgam terror attack since the Monsoon session commenced on 21 July. The development came after repeated disruptions in the Lok Sabha for the last five days. 'Lok Sabha will take up a discussion on 'Operation Sindoor' on Monday,' sources told PTI. 'There's a way to register a protest. If you don't want to run the house is adjourned till 2:00 PM today,' Birla said earlier while addressing the lower house, as the Opposition members entered the well of the house, holding placards. Before adjourning, the Speaker urged the opposition members to allow the lower house to function normally and objected to the banners, saying that the 'stalemate' is not good. 'Come, there will be a discussion to end the stalemate. There will also be representatives from the there is disagreement, it should be expressed as per house norms,' Birla said. Earlier in the day, Congress MP Manickam Tagore moved an adjournment motion notice to discuss the 'Mass Disenfranchisement of 52 Lakh Voters in Bihar', which he called a 'deliberate assault on the constitution and democracy by the Modi Government using the Election Commission'. The opposition leaders have been demanding that the Prime Minister address both houses and the nation on crucial issues, including the Pahalgam terror attack and the ongoing SIR exercise being carried out by the Election Commission in Bihar ahead of the upcoming assembly elections. The opposition has also demanded that PM Modi respond to the repeated claims made by US President Donald Trump of initiating a 'ceasefire' between India and Pakistan following Operation Sindoor.


Mint
14 minutes ago
- Mint
US-Japan Trade Deal Hinges on Fund That Remains a Puzzle
The US and Japan this week reached what President Donald Trump called the largest trade deal in history. But the lack of detail over Tokyo's pledge to set up a $550 billion US investment fund is raising questions about the viability of an agreement that's been floated as a potential template for other major trading partners. The fund is a centerpiece of the deal announced by Trump that imposes 15% tariffs on Japanese cars and other goods. While the start date and other basic elements are still unknown, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned this week that the US would monitor implementation and bump the rate up to 25% if Trump isn't satisfied. The two countries' leaders seem at times to be talking at cross purposes. The White House said over $550 billion will be invested under the direction of the US, and Trump said on social media that 90% of the profits will be given to America. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, on the other hand, said Japan would offer a mixture of investment, loans, and loan guarantees up to a maximum of $550 billion. The fund will be supported by government-owned organizations Japan Bank for International Cooperation and Nippon Export and Investment Insurance, according to Ryosei Akazawa, Japan's chief negotiator on the deal, who said he also expected the private sector to be involved. Who exactly will be funding the bulk of the amount and over what time period remains unknown. In the fiscal year 2024, JBIC invested about ¥263 billion in North America, or roughly 0.3% of the figure now being touted. READ: Trump's Japan Trade Deal Raises Fears He Gave Away Too Much 'The Japanese will finance the project and will give it to an operator and the profits will be split 90% to the taxpayers of the United States of America,' Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Bloomberg TV after the deal was struck, citing potential examples like pharmaceutical plants or chip fabs. Ishiba on the other hand is characterizing the fund as a way to support Japanese firms' investment into the US. The prime minister emphasized it will benefit both Japan and the US, and will target strategically important industries. SoftBank Group Corp. last year pledged to invest $100 billion in the US over the next four years, while Nippon Steel Corp. announced an $11 billion investment in United States Steel Corp.'s operations by 2028, following its $14.1 billion purchase of the Pittsburgh-based producer last month. Both companies have also committed to creating significant employment in the US. Whether those figures will be considered part of the deal by the US is also unclear. 'They came to us with the idea of a Japan-US partnership, where they are going to provide equity, credit guarantees and funding for major projects in the US,' Bessent said. He added that the foreign direct investment pledge is 'all new capital.' READ: Trump Strikes Deal With Ally Japan Setting Tariff Rate at 15% The White House factsheet on the trade deal mentions that Japan will also buy 100 Boeing Co. planes as well as US defense equipment worth additional billions of dollars annually. Akazawa said both these pledges were based on existing plans by Japanese airlines and the government, respectively. 'We've explained to the US side Japan's thinking behind defense equipment purchases as part of our efforts to strengthen defense capabilities,' said Akazawa. 'But strengthening defense wasn't a topic in the trade and tariff negotiations.' Akazawa said he hoped the reduced car tariff rate would take effect as soon as possible, and that he expected the broader 15% levy to be imposed from Aug. 1. There has been no discussion of compliance or monitoring, he added. 'I've traveled to the US eight times,' Akazawa told reporters in Tokyo shortly after returning to Japan. 'But I don't remember discussing how we'll be implementing our agreement, or how we'll make sure it's implemented.'


Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots
Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: proving their chatbots aren't "woke." President Donald Trump 's sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving "global dominance" in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home. But one of Trump 's three AI executive orders signed Wednesday - the one "preventing woke AI in the federal government" - marks the first time the U.S. government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behavior of AI. Several leading providers of the AI language models targeted by the order - products like Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot - have so far been silent on Trump's anti-woke directive, which still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules. While the tech industry has largely welcomed Trump's broader AI plans, the anti-woke order forces the industry to leinto a culture war battle - or try their best to quietly avoid it. "It will have massive influence in the industry right now," especially as tech companies are already capitulating to other Trump administration directives, said civil rights advocate Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, senior director of The Leadership Conference's Center for Civil Rights and Technology. The move also pushes the tech industry to abandon years of work to combat the pervasive forms of racial and gender bias that studies and real-world examples have shown to be baked into AI systems. "First off, there's no such thing as woke AI," Montoya-Boyer said. "There's AI technology that discriminates and then there's AI technology that actually works for all people." Molding the behaviors of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they're built and the inherent randomness of what they produce. They've been trained on most of what's on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who've posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online. "This will be extremely difficult for tech companies to comply with," said former Biden administration official Jim Secreto, who was deputy chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, an architect of many of President Joe Biden's AI industry initiatives. "Large language models reflect the data they're trained on, including all the contradictions and biases in human language." Tech workers also have a say in how they're designed, from the global workforce of annotators who check their responses to the Silicon Valley engineers who craft the instructions for how they interact with people. Trump's order targets those "top-down" efforts at tech companies to incorporate what it calls the "destructive" ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion into AI models, including "concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism." The directive has invited comparison to China's heavier-handed efforts to ensure that generative AI tools reflect the core values of the ruling Communist Party. Secreto said the order resembles China's playbook in "using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints." The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation by auditing AI models, approving them before they are deployed and requiring them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989. Trump's order doesn't call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots. "The Trump administration is taking a softer but still coercive route by using federal contracts as leverage," Secreto said. "That creates strong pressure for companies to self-censor in order to stay in the government's good graces and keep the money flowing." The order's call for "truth-seeking" AI echoes the language of the president's one-time ally and adviser Elon Musk, who has made it the mission of the Grok chatbot made by his company xAI. But whether Grok or its rivals will be favored under the new policy remains to be seen. Despite a "rhetorically pointed" introduction laying out the Trump administration's problems with DEI, the actual language of the order's directives shouldn't be hard for tech companies to comply with, said Neil Chilson , a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. "It doesn't even prohibit an ideological agenda," just that any intentional methods to guide the model be disclosed, said Chilson, head of AI policy at the nonprofit Abundance Institute. "Which is pretty light touch, frankly." Chilson disputes comparisons to China's cruder modes of AI censorship. "There is nothing in this order that says that companies have to produce or cannot produce certain types of output," he said. "It says developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments." With their AI tools already widely used in the federal government, tech companies have reacted cautiously. OpenAI on Thursday said it is awaiting more detailed guidance but believes its work to make ChatGPT objective already makes the technology consistent with Trump's directive. Microsoft, a major supplier of online services to the government, declined to comment. Musk's xAI, through spokesperson Katie Miller, a former Trump official, pointed to a company comment praising Trump's AI announcements but didn't address the procurement order. xAI recently announced it was awarded a U.S. defense contract for up to $200 million, just days after Grok publicly posted a barrage of antisemitic commentary that praised Adolf Hitler. Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Palantir didn't respond to emailed requests for comment Thursday. The ideas behind the order have bubbled up for more than a year on the podcasts and social media feeds of Trump's top AI adviser David Sacks and other influential Silicon Valley venture capitalists, many of whom endorsed Trump's presidential campaign last year. Their ire centered on Google's February 2024 release of an AI image-generating tool that produced historically inaccurate images before the tech giant took down and fixed the product. Google later explained that the errors - including generating portraits of Black, Asian and Native American men when asked to show American Founding Fathers - were the result of an overcompensation for technology that, left to its own devices, was prone to favoring lighter-skinned people because of pervasive bias in the systems. Trump allies alleged that Google engineers were hard-coding their own social agenda into the product. "It's 100% intentional," said prominent venture capitalist and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen on a podcast in December. "That's how you get Black George Washington at Google. There's override in the system that basically says, literally, 'Everybody has to be Black.' Boom. There's squads, large sets of people, at these companies who determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems." Sacks credited a conservative strategist who has fought DEI initiatives at colleges and workplaces for helping to draft the order. "When they asked me how to define 'woke,' I said there's only one person to call: Chris Rufo. And now it's law: the federal government will not be buying WokeAI," Sacks wrote on X. Rufo responded that he helped "identify DEI ideologies within the operating constitutions of these systems." But some who agreed that Biden went too far promoting DEI also worry that Trump's new order sets a bad precedent for future government efforts to shape AI's politics. "The whole idea of achieving ideological neutrality with AI models is really just unworkable," said Ryan Hauser of the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank. "And what do we get? We get these frontier labs just changing their speech to meet the political requirements of the moment."