Hodeida (Yemen) (AFP) – Israel pounded Yemen's Huthi-held port of Hodeida with air strikes on Monday for the second time in a month, stoking fears of escalation as it warned Yemen could face the same fate as Iran.

In its latest raids, Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel struck "targets of the Huthi terror regime at the port of Hodeida" and aimed to prevent any attempt to restore infrastructure previously hit.

The renewed strikes on Yemen are part of a year-long Israeli bombing campaign against the Huthis, but the latest threats have raised fears of a wider conflict in the poverty-stricken Arabian Peninsula country.

"Yemen's fate will be the same as Tehran's," Katz said.

His warning was a reference to the wave of suprise strikes Israel launched on Iran on June 13, targeting key military and nuclear facilities.

A Gulf official told AFP there were "serious concerns in Riyadh... that the Israeli strikes on the Huthis could turn into a large, sustained campaign to oust the movement's leaders".

The Huthis withstood more a decade of war against a well-armed, Saudi-led international coalition, though fighting has died down in the past few years.

Any Israeli escalation could "plunge the region into utter chaos", said the official, requesting anonymity because he cannot brief the media.

The Huthis' Al-Masirah television reported "a series of Israeli air strikes on the Hodeida port".

A Huthi security official, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, told AFP that "the bombing destroyed the port's dock, which had been rebuilt following previous strikes."

On July 7, Israeli strikes hit Hodeida and two nearby locations on the coast, with targets including the Galaxy Leader cargo ship, captured in November 2023, which the Israelis said had been outfitted with a radar system to track shipping in the Red Sea.

A Yemeni port employee in Hodeida said the strikes targeted "heavy equipment brought in for construction and repair work after Israeli airstrikes on July 7... and areas around the port and fishing boats".

An Israeli military statement said that the targets included "engineering vehicles... fuel containers, naval vessels used for military activities" against Israel and "additional terror infrastructure used by the Huthi terrorist regime".

It said the port had been used to transfer weapons from Iran, which were then used by the Huthi rebels against Israel.

Fears of escalation after Israel hits Huthi-held Yemen port

^RFI

This article describes what ive been thinking about for the last week. How will these billions of investments by big tech actually create something that is significantly better than what we have today already?

There are major issues ahead and im not sure they can be solved. Read the article.

Bubble Trouble

As I previously warned, artificial intelligence companies are running out of data. A Wall Street Journal piece from this week has sounded the alarm that some believe AI models will run out of "high-quality text-based data" within the next two years i…

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

On a clear February evening in 2020, a smell of rotten eggs started to waft over the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, followed by a green-tinged cloud. A load roar could be heard near the highway that passes the town.

Soon, nearby residents started to feel dizzy, some even passed out or lay on the ground shaking, unable to breathe. Cars, inexplicably, cut out, their drivers leaving them abandoned with the doors open on the highway.

“It was like something you see in a movie, like a zombie apocalypse,” said Jerry Briggs, a fire coordinator from nearby Warren county who was tasked with knocking on the doors of residents to get them to evacuate. Briggs and most of his colleagues were wearing breathing apparatus – one deputy who didn’t do so almost collapsed and had to be carried away.

Unbeknown to residents and emergency responders, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide near Satartia had ruptured and its contents were gushing out, robbing oxygen from people and internal combustion engines in cars alike.

‘Like something you see in a movie’: Trump cuts stir fears of more pipeline ruptures

In Satartia, Mississippi, locals say a CO2 pipeline leak created an aftermath ‘like a zombie apocalypse’

^{Oliver Milman (The Guardian)}

An artist who first accused Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of sexual assault almost three decades ago has told the New York Times that she had urged law enforcement officials back then to investigate powerful people in their orbit – including Donald Trump.

The artist, Maria Farmer, was among the first women to report Epstein and his partner Maxwell of sexual crimes back in 1996 when, according to a new interview with the Times, she also identified Trump among others close to Epstein as worthy of attention.

Farmer repeated that message, she told the Times, when she was re-interviewed by the FBI about Epstein in 2006. She raised Trump’s name specifically because of an unsettling encounter with him late one night in 1995 in Epstein’s offices – which she said she told law enforcement agents at the time and has since recounted publicly.

Jeffrey Epstein accuser urged FBI to investigate Trump decades ago – report

Maria Farmer accused Epstein and Maxwell of sexual crimes in 1996, and identified Trump as worthy of attention

^{Nina Lakhani (The Guardian)}

An artist who first accused Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of sexual assault almost three decades ago has told the New York Times that she had urged law enforcement officials back then to investigate powerful people in their orbit – including Donald Trump.

The artist, Maria Farmer, was among the first women to report Epstein and his partner Maxwell of sexual crimes back in 1996 when, according to a new interview with the Times, she also identified Trump among others close to Epstein as worthy of attention.

Farmer repeated that message, she told the Times, when she was re-interviewed by the FBI about Epstein in 2006. She raised Trump’s name specifically because of an unsettling encounter with him late one night in 1995 in Epstein’s offices – which she said she told law enforcement agents at the time and has since recounted publicly.

Jeffrey Epstein accuser urged FBI to investigate Trump decades ago – report

Maria Farmer accused Epstein and Maxwell of sexual crimes in 1996, and identified Trump as worthy of attention

^{Nina Lakhani (The Guardian)}

The UN World Food Program said in a statement that 25 trucks carrying food entered Gaza on Sunday through the Zikim crossing “destined for starving communities in northern Gaza.”

“Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies,” the WFP said. “As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers, and other gunfire.” The statement added: “These people were simply trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation.”

On Sunday, the health ministry said that 18 people had died from starvation over the past day. A day earlier, the ministry issued an urgent bulletin saying “unprecedented numbers of starving people of all ages are arriving at emergency rooms in a state of extreme exhaustion and fatigue. We warn that hundreds of those whose bodies have emaciated will be at risk of certain death as a result of starvation and their bodies' ability to withstand being overwhelmed.” Multiple reports have documented Palestinians sifting through garbage, scraping spilled food from the ground and eating from trash in the streets. The UN estimates that nearly one in three people is not eating for days.

Palestinians Are Collapsing in Gaza's Streets From Israeli-Imposed Starvation Campaign

A frontline report on a people forced to face death from starvation or being shot in a perilous quest to obtain meager rations

^{Abdel Qader Sabbah (Drop Site News)}

https://alternativeto.net/news/2025/7/mega-launches-new-large-file-transfer-servicetransfer-it-with-no-file-size-limit/

github.com/sapientinc/HRM

Hierarchical Reasoning Model is a new architecture that's inspired by neural computation principles observed in the brain, such as hierarchical processing, temporal separation of neural rhythms, and recurrent connectivity.

The bio-inspired design demonstrates significantly improved efficiency and accuracy on complex reasoning tasks compared with current LLMs.

The HRM architecture is designed to achieve significant computational depth while maintaining stability and efficiency during training. It consists of two interdependent recurrent modules operating at different speeds.

The High-Level module operates slowly and is responsible for abstract planning and deliberate reasoning. The Low-Level module functions rapidly, handling detailed computations.

A dual-module system allows the HRM to perform sequential reasoning tasks in a single forward pass without needing explicit supervision of intermediate steps. The model is also designed to be Turing-complete, meaning it can theoretically simulate any Turing machine, overcoming the computational limits of standard Transformer models.

Another interesting feature is the use of one-step gradient approximation, which improves efficiency by avoiding the computationally intensive backpropagation through time method typically used for recurrent networks. Avoiding backpropagation offers a constant memory footprint, making the model more scalable.

The model also incorporates an Adaptive Computation Time mechanism, inspired by the brain's ability to switch between fast, automatic thinking and slow, deliberate reasoning. The HRM is thus able to dynamically allocate computational resources based on the complexity of the task.

Despite having only 27 million parameters, the HRM achieves nearly perfect performance on difficult tasks like complex Sudoku puzzles and finding optimal paths in large mazes, areas where even advanced models using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods fail completely.

The HRM also outperforms much larger models on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus benchmark for artificial general intelligence. It achieved a 40.3% accuracy, surpassing models like 03-mini-high (34.5%) and Claude 3.7 8K (21.2%).

The model's design means that its training phase is much cheaper as well. It can be trained effectively with a small number of examples (around 1,000) and does not require pre-training or CoT data.

HRM conducts computations within its internal hidden state space which is more efficient than CoT where reasoning is externalized into token-level language. The externalization process can be brittle and requires extensive data to work.

Hierarchical Reasoning Model

Reasoning, the process of devising and executing complex goal-oriented action sequences, remains a critical challenge in AI.

^arXiv.org

Free Gui: Guilherme “Gui” Silva, a Brazilian immigrant, lawyer, and muralist, was detained by ICE earlier this month on San Juan Island in Washington state. Silva was a lawyer in Brazil, and moved to the US about eight years ago to pursue his art. He has a four-year-old daughter with his now ex-wife, and is expecting a child in just a few months with his wife Rachel Leidig. Two Fridays ago, masked ICE agents followed Silva from his home in unmarked vehicles, pulled him from his car, confiscated his cellphone, and detained him. When he asked to see an arrest warrant, they refused. Silva is married to an American citizen and is currently in legal proceedings to apply for a green card. The only blemish on his record that the Seattle Times was able to find was a $100 speeding ticket. The Department of Homeland Security said they detained him because he overstayed his tourist visa, which, let’s say it again together: is a civil violation.

Slog AM: Seattle's Primary Season Is Upon Us, Trump Wants Sports to Be Racist Again, and Scientists Figured Out How Snakes Eat Bones

The Stranger's morning news roundup.

^{Hannah Murphy Winter (The Stranger)}