North Korean leader's sister says her country will never see the South as a diplomatic partner
Kim Yo Jong, who is one of her brother's top foreign policy officials, denounced the ongoing South Korea-U.S. military drills as a 'reckless' invasion rehearsal and claimed Seoul's peace gestures conceal a 'sinister intention' against Pyongyang.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
10 minutes ago
- New York Times
Oklahoma Proposes ‘America First Test' for Teachers From New York and California
Oklahoma will require teachers coming from New York and California to pass a test to combat what it calls 'woke indoctrination' before being hired, according to the state's public schools superintendent. Its America First Test is designed to filter out teachers with views contrary to Oklahoma values, said Ryan Walters, the state superintendent. It is meant to ensure that educators promote American exceptionalism and help protect against what he called 'radical gender ideology.' 'If you come to Oklahoma, you will abide by our state law, you will abide by our standards and teach those in the classroom,' said Mr. Walters, a Republican, in an interview on Tuesday. The test, designed by PragerU, a conservative nonprofit, is the latest attempt by education officials in Oklahoma to push the state's education system to the right. Critics of Oklahoma's decision argued that the test was more a means to garner attention from the president and his supporters than effect real change. Historically, only a handful of teachers each year move there from New York and California. 'His priority should be educating students,' said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the country's largest teacher's unions, 'but instead, it's getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Fast Company
11 minutes ago
- Fast Company
How AI will radically change military command structures
Despite two centuries of evolution, the structure of a modern military staff would be recognizable to Napoleon. At the same time, military organizations have struggled to incorporate new technologies as they adapt to new domains – air, space and information – in modern war. The sizes of military headquarters have grown to accommodate the expanded information flows and decision points of these new facets of warfare. The result is diminishing marginal returns and a coordination nightmare – too many cooks in the kitchen – that risks jeopardizing mission command. AI agents – autonomous, goal-oriented software powered by large language models – can automate routine staff tasks, compress decision timelines and enable smaller, more resilient command posts. They can shrink the staff while also making it more effective. As an international relations scholar and reserve officer in the U.S. Army who studies military strategy, I see both the opportunity afforded by the technology and the acute need for change. That need stems from the reality that today's command structures still mirror Napoleon's field headquarters in both form and function – industrial-age architectures built for massed armies. Over time, these staffs have ballooned in size, making coordination cumbersome. They also result in sprawling command posts that modern precision artillery, missiles and drones can target effectively and electronic warfare can readily disrupt. Russia's so-called ' Graveyard of Command Posts ' in Ukraine vividly illustrates how static headquarters where opponents can mass precision artillery, missiles and drones become liabilities on a modern battlefield. The role of AI agents Military planners now see a world in which AI agents – autonomous, goal-oriented software that can perceive, decide and act on their own initiative – are mature enough to deploy in command systems. These agents promise to automate the fusion of multiple sources of intelligence, threat-modeling, and even limited decision cycles in support of a commander's goals. There is still a human in the loop, but the humans will be able to issue commands faster and receive more timely and contextual updates from the battlefield. These AI agents can parse doctrinal manuals, draft operational plans and generate courses of action, which helps accelerate the tempo of military operations. Experiments – including efforts I ran at Marine Corps University – have demonstrated how even basic large language models can accelerate staff estimates and inject creative, data-driven options into the planning process. These efforts point to the end of traditional staff roles. There will still be people – war is a human endeavor – and ethics will still factor into streams of algorithms making decisions. But the people who remain deployed are likely to gain the ability to navigate mass volumes of information with the help of AI agents. These teams are likely to be smaller than modern staffs. AI agents will allow teams to manage multiple planning groups simultaneously. For example, they will be able to use more dynamic red teaming techniques – role-playing the opposition – and vary key assumptions to create a wider menu of options than traditional plans. The time saved not having to build PowerPoint slides and updating staff estimates will be shifted to contingency analysis – asking 'what if' questions – and building operational assessment frameworks – conceptual maps of how a plan is likely to play out in a particular situation – that provide more flexibility to commanders. Designing the next military staff To explore the optimal design of this AI agent-augmented staff, I led a team of researchers at the bipartisan think tank Center for Strategic & International Studies' Futures Lab to explore alternatives. The team developed three baseline scenarios reflecting what most military analysts are seeing as the key operational problems in modern great power competition: joint blockades, firepower strikes and joint island campaigns. Joint refers to an action coordinated among multiple branches of a military. In the example of China and Taiwan, joint blockades describe how China could isolate the island nation and either starve it or set conditions for an invasion. Firepower strikes describe how Beijing could fire salvos of missiles – similar to what Russia is doing in Ukraine – to destroy key military centers and even critical infrastructure. Last, in Chinese doctrine, a Joint Island Landing Campaign describes the cross-strait invasion their military has spent decades refining. Any AI agent-augmented staff should be able to manage warfighting functions across these three operational scenarios. The research team found that the best model kept humans in the loop and focused on feedback loops. This approach – called the Adaptive Staff Model and based on pioneering work by sociologist Andrew Abbott – embeds AI agents within continuous human-machine feedback loops, drawing on doctrine, history and real-time data to evolve plans on the fly. In this model, military planning is ongoing and never complete, and focused more on generating a menu of options for the commander to consider, refine and enact. The research team tested the approach with multiple AI models and found that it outperformed alternatives in each case. AI agents are not without risk. First, they can be overly generalized, if not biased. Foundation models – AI models trained on extremely large datasets and adaptable to a wide range of tasks – know more about pop culture than war and require refinement. This makes it important to benchmark agents to understand their strengths and limitations. Second, absent training in AI fundamentals and advanced analytical reasoning, many users tend to use models as a substitute for critical thinking. No smart model can make up for a dumb, or worse, lazy user. Seizing the 'agentic' moment To take advantage of AI agents, the U.S. military will need to institutionalize building and adapting agents, include adaptive agents in war games, and overhaul doctrine and training to account for human-machine teams. This will require a number of changes. First, the military will need to invest in additional computational power to build the infrastructure required to run AI agents across military formations. Second, they will need to develop additional cybersecurity measures and conduct stress tests to ensure the agent-augmented staff isn't vulnerable when attacked across multiple domains, including cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum. Third, and most important, the military will need to dramatically change how it educates its officers. Officers will have to learn how AI agents work, including how to build them, and start using the classroom as a lab to develop new approaches to the age-old art of military command and decision-making. This could include revamping some military schools to focus on AI, a concept floated in the White House's AI Action Plan released on July 23, 2025. Absent these reforms, the military is likely to remain stuck in the Napoleonic staff trap: adding more people to solve ever more complex problems.
CNN
12 minutes ago
- CNN
DC residents feel less safe after Trump takeover: poll
Roughly 8 in 10 Washington, DC, residents oppose President Donald Trump ordering the federal government to take control of the city's police department as well as his deployment of the National Guard and FBI to patrol the city, a new Washington Post-Schar School poll finds. Notably, more than half of those living in the capital city have noticed the increased federal presence and 61% of those people feel less safe as a result of Trump's action. The figures go against the narrative Trump and other top administration officials have touted about the impact of the federal takeover. 'We went from the most unsafe place anywhere to a place that now people, friends are calling me up, Democrats are calling me up, and they're saying, 'Sir, I want to thank you. My wife and I went out to dinner last night for the first time in four years, and Washington, DC, is safe. And you did that in four days,'' Trump said at the White House on Monday. Overall, a 79% majority of DC residents oppose Trump's order, according to the survey, with just 17% supportive of the decision. Most, 69%, say they're strongly opposed. DC residents say, 65% to 20%, that they don't think Trump's actions will reduce the amount of violent crime in the city. By contrast, majorities say they think increased economic opportunities in poor neighborhoods (77%), stricter national gun laws (70%), an increased number of Metropolitan Police officers patrolling communities (63%) and using outreach workers to resolve disputes (57%) would help to reduce violent crime. Trump, who was supported by just over 6% of DC voters in last year's presidential election, remains broadly unpopular in the District, the poll finds, with his overall job approval rating now standing at just 15% among all residents. The poll also finds a significant shift in DC residents' attitudes toward crime since this spring, perhaps reflecting the changing political context of the question — just 31% now describe crime as an extremely or very serious problem in the District (down from 50%) and a 54% majority say they believe the problem of crime in the city is improving (up from 29%). Among the 35% of residents who say they, a family member, or a close friend has been a victim of crime in the past five years, support for Trump's actions stands at 34%, compared with 8% support among those who do not know a recent crime victim. About half of residents say Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser should be doing more to oppose Trump, with 30% saying she is handling things about right and 12% that she should be more supportive. A 71% majority also say DC police should not help the federal government much or at all to deport undocumented immigrants living in the city. Local police officers have been seen participating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement checkpoints over the past week. Bowser's rating stands at 53%, unchanged from a May survey, with 54% saying that DC police are doing a good or excellent job. The Washington Post-Schar School poll was conducted August 14-17 and surveyed 604 DC residents through a combination of live phone interviews and online surveys. Results for the full sample have a margin of error of +/- 4.1 percentage points.
