📌 Pagers Explode, WW II Airfield Reopens, More

Militant group Hezbollah promised to retaliate against Israel after accusing it of detonating pagers across Lebanon on Tuesday.

Nine were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded, including Iran's envoy to Beirut and a young girl. Lebanese Information Minister Ziad Makary condemned the late-afternoon detonation of the pagers as an "Israeli aggression.”

Hezbollah uses pagers rather than mobile phones to send messages because they were compromised in earlier incidents. A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the incident was the "biggest security breach" for the group in nearly a year of conflict with Israel.

The New York Times reported that Israel hid explosive material in the Taiwan-made Gold Apollo pagers before they were imported to Lebanon, citing American and other officials briefed on the operation. The material was implanted next to the battery with a switch that could be triggered remotely to detonate.

UN special coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert deplored the attack in a statement and said it “marked an extremely concerning escalation” in the conflict.

Washington said it was not involved in the explosions and did not know who was responsible. The US renewed calls for a diplomatic solution to tensions between Israel and Lebanon.

The US Air Force is reclaiming an airfield on a small island in the Pacific as it prepares for a possible future fight with China.

The remote island of Tinian, less than 40 square miles, is one of three principal islands in the Northern Mariana Islands, a string of sparsely populated islets in the Western Pacific Ocean that make up the US’s westernmost frontier, along with the major military hub of Guam some 100 miles to the south.

Tinian was known for its strategic value in World War II. It is less than 1,500 miles from Tokyo and a similar distance to China. A US Defense Department plan, costing nearly half a billion dollars, is preparing it to help the US deter or defeat the Chinese military.

The project's completion date is not publicly known. In spring, Fluor Corp., an engineering company based in Irving, Texas, said it had been awarded a $409 million contract for "pavement and transportation support,” with completion scheduled in five years.

Newsweek reviewed imagery captured this year by the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellites. The images showed the airfield reemerging on Tinian's surface, with runways and taxiways cleared of overgrowth. Photographs this month showed its four parallel runways.

A supplier to US prisons is launching a program enabling inmates to use tablets to help them earn a high school diploma.

Advocates say the expansion in virtual education is promising, as many inmates lack basic literacy skills. However, some say prison technology has limits.

The supplier is teaming up with a private online school based in South Florida that will grant the diplomas. The asynchronous classes will be accessible on ViaPath’s tablets — 700,000 are already in use in nearly 2,000 prisons and jails.

A meta-analysis by the RAND Corporation found that education significantly reduces recidivism, suggesting that every $1 invested in education in prisons could save $4-$5 on re-incarceration costs.

Ryan Moser, incarcerated for 11 years and now a freelance journalist and communications consultant, said the tablet enables studying whenever possible, but it isn’t like using a tablet at home. Tablets are generally charged or updated at a central kiosk, and access can be unpredictable.

“I remember it taking four days to get my tablet charged,” Moser said. “If you were a discipline problem or if you were someone that gave them an attitude, they might keep [your tablet] for a week, two weeks.”

Former President Donald Trump was campaigning Tuesday in his first public appearance since the second assassination attempt.

“It's a dangerous business being president,” Trump said, sitting alongside Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his former press secretary, at the Dort Financial Center in Flint, Michigan.

Trump earlier blamed the rhetoric of Democrats, telling Fox News Digital, "Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

Joseph Guajardo, a licensed counselor from Battle Creek, Mich., said he hopes the former president will focus on policy “instead of all the name-calling.”

An attempt was made to assassinate Trump on Sunday when he was playing golf. An agent fired at the suspect, later identified as Ryan Routh, who fled the scene. Routh was later apprehended and charged with two firearms offenses.

Legislation introduced Tuesday would prohibit political groups using AI to misrepresent rivals’ views by pretending to be them.

Lawmakers said the bill would allow the Federal Election Commission to regulate AI in elections like it has regulated other political misrepresentations for decades.

Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, described the bill as a modest first step in addressing the threat posed by deep fakes and other false AI-generated content, arguing that the legislation’s simplicity was an asset.

Congress doesn’t “want to put a rock on top of innovation either and not allow it to flourish under the right circumstances,” Rep. French Hill, an Arkansas Republican, said in August at a reception hosted by the Center for AI Safety. “It’s a balancing act.”

Convicted con artist Anna Sorokin hit the dancefloor on “Dancing With the Stars” with a sparkly ankle monitor.

The so-called ‘fake heiress,’ convicted of defrauding banks, hotels and friends in 2019 after falsely building a reputation as a wealthy German heiress named Anna Delvey, debuted the ballroom-worthy ankle monitor in Tuesday night’s “Dancing With the Stars.”

She and dance pro Ezra Sosa performed a routine set to Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso. “It’s the real star of the show, let’s be honest here,” Sosa said of Sorokin’s bedazzled ankle monitor.

“Hopefully, people will give me a chance to show what I can do. And I served my time, and I repaid my restitution,” she said.

A seal was photographed in the mouth of a humpback whale after being accidentally gulped in the sea off Anacortes, Washington.

The humpback used a lunging feeding technique, opening its mouth wide to take in small fish and water. Afterward, instead of remaining underwater to filter through its baleen, it surfaced and opened and closed its mouth.

Tourists aboard a whale and wildlife tour photographed the whale and checked their shots after the whale submerged. “That’s when we saw the seal,” said the boat’s captain. “It was a funny moment for everybody. I mean, it probably wasn’t that funny for the seal.”

McKeen added: “I’m guessing that this situation probably happens every once in a while just because there’s lots of other stuff that eat these fish too.”

During migration, Humpback whales visit the Salish Sea between British Columbia and Washington state. They were hunted to local extinction in these waters, but numbers have recovered over the last 25 years.