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Haqqani Network, ISI Behind Kandahar’s Deadly Bombings

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kandar_11_01_2017_dari_sot-mpg_snapshot_00-52_2017-01-11_18-58-50Police chief of Kandahar, Gen. Abdul Raziq accused the Haqqani Network and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) of executing yesterday’s mass-casualty bombings in Kandahar.

Gen. Abdul Raziq called the aim of bombings was to destroy Kandahar's Military Council.

"The bombings was organized by Pakistani ISI and the Haqqani Network. We have informed that they are attempting to destroy Kandahar's Military Council," said Gen. Abdul Raziq.

Rziq noted that the explosion caused by bombs placed in couches before a reception for the visiting United Arab Emirates ambassador and his delegation, killed at least 11 people and wounded 18.

He said five men, who were among 30 construction workers at the site, were arrested and questioned.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) also announced that five members of its diplomatic staff killed in the deadly bombings.

UAE foreign ministry said the officials were on a "humanitarian mission within the program of the UAE to support the brotherly Afghan people."

Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum ordered the nation's flags at half-staff for three days in order to honor "the martyrs who gave their lives in defense of humanitarian causes."

The Haqqanis are thought to have introduced suicide bombing to Afghanistan. They are believed to have been behind several high-profile attacks.

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IEA assures govt employees that they will get paid this month

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The Islamic Emirate said Thursday that US President Donald Trump’s cuts to aid will not affect salaries of Afghan government workers.

This comes in the wake of rumors that government employees would not be paid for the solar month of Dalwa due to Trump’s severe cuts to aid.

Since the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s return to power in August 2021, the salaries of all government employees have been covered by the domestic budget, unlike in the past when donor money helped fund salaries.

In a post on X, Zabihullah Mujahid, the spokesman for the Islamic Emirate, said that all 1.04 million government employees in Afghanistan will receive their salaries this month, as per usual.

He said the Ministry of Finance has assured the IEA that salaries will be paid.

“The country’s budget has a domestic foundation, it has nothing to do with the arrival or non-arrival of foreign aid,” he emphasized.

Mujahid’s statement comes after rumors began circulating that the IEA has suspended payment of salaries to government employees following Washington’s foreign aid freeze.

Trump’s move will however impact a wide range of humanitarian agencies and NGOs in the country.

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Alibaba releases AI model it says surpasses DeepSeek

The predecessor of DeepSeek’s V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May.

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Chinese tech company Alibaba on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3, Reuters reported.

The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.

"Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B," Alibaba's cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta's most advanced open-source AI models.

The Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek's AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup's purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States, read the report.

But DeepSeek's success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models.

Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI's o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.

This echoed DeepSeek's claim that its R1 model rivalled OpenAI's o1 on several performance benchmarks.

The predecessor of DeepSeek's V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May.

The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens - or units of data processed by the AI model - led to Alibaba's cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models.

Other Chinese tech companies followed suit, including Baidu, which released China's first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023, and the country's most valuable internet company Tencent.

Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's enigmatic founder, said in a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July that the startup "did not care" about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal.

OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.

While large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba have hundreds of thousands of employees, DeepSeek operates like a research lab, staffed mainly by young graduates and doctorate students from top Chinese universities.

Liang said in his July interview that he believed China's largest tech companies might not be well suited to the future of the AI industry, contrasting their high costs and top-down structures with DeepSeek's lean operation and loose management style, Reuters reported.

"Large foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants' capabilities have their limits," he said.

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Leftover US military equipment in Afghanistan a ‘risk’ to Pakistan’s security

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Islamabad on Wednesday expressed concern that the US military equipment left behind in Afghanistan is a serious threat to Pakistan’s security.

A day before his inauguration as US president, Donald Trump spoke about America’s leftover weapons in Afghanistan. He said if the Islamic Emirate wants US aid, Afghanistan should return the weapons.

Responding to Trump's statement, Pakistan foreign ministry’s spokesperson Shafqat Ali Khan noted: "The presence of US advanced weapons in Afghanistan, left behind in the aftermath of the withdrawal of its troops in August 2021, has been an issue of profound concern for the safety and security of Pakistan and its citizens.

"These weapons have been used by terrorist organizations, including the TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan), to carry out terrorist attacks in Pakistan. We have been repeatedly calling upon the de facto authorities in Kabul to take all necessary measures to ensure that these weapons do not fall into the wrong hands," he added.

Reports suggest that the US left weapons in Afghanistan worth $7 billion.

The Islamic Emirate, however, has said that all military equipment left over from the US is under the control of the government and no group or individual has access to the stockpile.

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