Turkey's Instigations and Return Of the Fallen Keeping Mossad Busy

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                   

     Tourist Guides in Idlib Province, Syria, July 9, 2026

Early on Tuesday, August 18, 2026, air strikes hit the runway and storage facilities at the Abu al-Duhur military airport in Syria's northwestern Idlib province. 

 Syria's state media and military sources blamed Israel for the attack.     

Yes, Overnight, Israeli jets struck the Abu al-Duhur military airport in the eastern countryside of Idlib, Syria. According to the Sabereen news agency, runways and storage facilities were targeted by four aircraft.

Sabereen News is an influential digital media channel and Telegram-based network launched in Iraq around 2020. It acts as a mouthpiece and propaganda arm for pro-Iranian militia groups and the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU).

 It is one of the largest and most prominent military bases in northern Syria. There were reportedly no casualties.

              TURKEY'S INVOLVEMENT

 Prime Minister Netanyahu's office issued a  

statement saying: "Israel and Syria agreed on a 

status quo in security matters, which Syria almost 

violated by allowing Turkish soldiers to deploy at 

the air force base near Aleppo. 

To deploy at an airport means to send or position personnel, 

equipment, or technology into an airport facility to perform a 

specific, active operational duty. This can refer to moving 

military troops through a transport hub, sending federal law 

enforcement or security agents to assist with checkpoint 

lines, or installing new air traffic systems.

Israel has repeatedly warned Syria that such a deployment would pose a threat to Israel's security - and Syria has chosen to ignore the warnings.

 Israel will not tolerate threats to its security, and will welcome a return to the status quo." 

US Ambassador to Turkey and the Trump administration's special envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, said that the strike “carried a real risk of rapid escalation into a direct military confrontation between Israel and Turkey as well as Syria.”

The base was being reconstructed with significant Turkish assistance, and Israel was concerned about them being used and about the possible deployment of air defense systems that could threaten Israel’s control of the airspace, as well as advanced drones.

 A Turkish delegation visited the base only recently. 

Israel has previously conveyed messages to Turkey that it would not accept the rebuilding of the Syrian military or any threat to its air superiority.

 Israel struck the same airfield in April, 2025.In April 2025, Israel launched airstrikes targeting the T4 military airbase (Tiyas) in Syria's Homs province. The strikes occurred amid moves by Turkey to expand its military and aerial presence in the area following the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime.

Mossad is  (the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations) functions as Israel's primary foreign intelligence agency, making it roughly equivalent to the United States' CIA. One core job of the CIA is to collect, analyze, and evaluate foreign intelligence to protect national security and they keep a watch on Gaza. It's amazing to me that Hamas terrorists are always trying to fool Israel but fail,  I hope at least 95% of the time.  

The IDF carried out an airstrike against several Hamas commanders in the Shati area near Gaza City’s port, who were planning attacks against Israeli forces. The IDF said measures were taken before the strike to reduce harm to civilians, including the use of precise munitions and aerial surveillance.

On another sadder note, the IDF confirmed Tuesday that the remains of Staff Sgt. Yehuda Yekutiel Katz, an armored corps soldier who had been missing since the Battle of Sultan Yacoub in the First Lebanon War 44 years ago, were returned to Israel and formally identified.  Israeli leaders hailed the country’s commitment to bring back every missing or fallen soldier.

The battle, 44 years ago, was a skirmish between the Israel Defense Forces and the Syrian army in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. It claimed the lives of 21 Israeli servicemen and injured more than 30.

Katz, a tank soldier, went missing during the battle, along with Sgt. First Class Zachary Baumel and Sgt. First Class Zvi Feldman. Sheba's Humanitarian Missions .

Keep WatchingThe IDF said his remains were located in an operation led by Military Intelligence (MID)  and conducted jointly with the Mossad. Katz’s return completes the recovery of all Israeli soldiers who had also remained missing from the Battle of Sultan Yacoub.  

                                              

                             Staff Sgt. Yehuda Yekutiel Katz, from the

                                 Battle of Sultan Yacoub.  

Another IDF, Staff Sgt. Zachary Baumel’s remains were returned to Israel in 2019 from the Battle of Sultan Yacoub.                       

A third, Staff Sgt. Tzvi Feldman was returned in 2025, lost to us also in the Battle of Sultan Yacoub. 

 Tzvi Feldman was returned in 2025.

AI In Trouble With Trump's Security

 Nadene Goldfoot                                          

                                What AI looks like

Fareed Zakaria just told us this morning about an AI company that was given 90 minutes to get their product off the market.  What power!!!  Last Friday, the U.S. government did something extraordinary. It forced one of America’s leading artificial intelligence companies to withdraw its most advanced product from the market. Anthropic, the maker of the frontier AI model Mythos and its commercially available cousin Fable, was given little warning and, according to reports, roughly 90 minutes to comply.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) does not have a physical body; it is a set of computer algorithms. In the physical world, AI looks like everyday technology—such as computer servers, microchips, or a blank text box on your screen. Visually, it is often represented by circuit boards, glowing blue tech graphics, or shiny humanoid robots.

Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable are highly advanced, "Mythos-class" frontier AI models engineered for demanding software engineering, scientific research, and complex reasoning. Frontier artificial intelligence models like Anthropic's Claude Mythos and Fable 5 are highly specialized for rigorous, dual-use scientific and technical fields. Because of their advanced capabilities and potential risks, access to these systems is heavily monitored or restricted to qualified experts.

The two models share the exact same underlying intelligence but serve distinct purposes: 

• Claude Mythos 5: An unrestricted version meant exclusively for cyber-security professionals, government entities, and trusted infrastructure providers (via the Anthropic Project Glasswing program) to proactively identify and patch critical software vulnerabilities. 
• Claude Fable 5: The commercially available version offered to enterprise clients and general subscribers. It features built-in safety classifiers that prevent the AI from generating functional cyber-attacks or addressing sensitive biology and chemistry queries. 

Doesn't a business who invents something unique, and even perhaps got the patent for it have rights?

Businesses and countries keep competitor inventions off the market by acquiring, suppressing, or legally protecting them. This anti-competitive behavior is primarily achieved using sleeping patents, patent thickets, or government invention secrecy acts. 

It could be done most nicely and secretly.  Get the inventor in their clutches, wine and dine them, treat them like a king and offer a great price to buy the patent-or give them the rights to ownership somehow.  Evidently Trump was in a 90 minute hurry. Here's what happened with the AI invention:  

The Trump administration issued this 90-minute ultimatum to the AI company Anthropic to take its advanced "Fable 5" and "Mythos 5" artificial intelligence models offline over national security and cybersecurity concerns.

The  dramatic standoff—and Fareed Zakaria's subsequent critique—unfolded with these key specifics:

• The Catalyst: Security researchers at Amazon found a "jailbreak" that allowed users to bypass the AI's safety guardrails. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy directly contacted U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to alert the administration, leading to an immediate federal crackdown. Jassy is the son of Margery and Everett L. Jassy of Scarsdale, New York. Of Jewish Hungarian ancestry, his father was a senior partner in the corporate law firm Dewey Ballantine in New York City,  Jassy joined Amazon as a marketing manager in 1997. Early in his Amazon career, he helped run the company's first marketing team and later its compact disc business. He subsequently served as Jeff Bezos's first technical adviser, or "shadow", a role in which he accompanied Bezos to meetings and discussed potential business opportunities with him.
•  In 2003, he and Bezos came up with the idea to create the cloud computing platform that became known as Amazon Web Services (AWS), which launched in 2006. Jassy headed AWS and its original team of 57 people.
• In 2015, Jassy and Amazon executive James Hamilton helped lead Amazon's acquisition of Annapurna Labs, an Israeli semiconductor company whose technology became part of Amazon's effort to design its own data-center chips. In 2016, Jassy was promoted from senior vice president to chief executive officer of AWS. 
• The Ultimatum: On Friday, the White House and Commerce Department gave Anthropic executives just 90 minutes to comply with orders to pull the models down. 
• The Shutdown: Anthropic initially pushed back but ultimately complied by disabling global access to the models for all users. 
• The Political & Media Reaction: The ad-hoc, hurried nature of the ban drew heavy criticism, notably from foreign policy and technology commentator Fareed Zakaria. 
• In his Washington Post column, Zakaria argued that critical AI regulation cannot be governed by a "grudge" or arbitrary weekend bureaucratic fights. 
• He stated: "In its 90-minute demand to Anthropic... America was telling partners around the world: If your economy becomes dependent on American AI infrastructure, Washington can arbitrarily, and without warning or explanation, use its on-off switch." 
• Zakaria has instead advocated for establishing an independent regulatory body—an "AI Fed"—similar to the Federal Reserve to properly manage the industry.
• I'm wondering how many inventors have been bypassed by the USA interests and have gone to China, instead, to be bought and kept off the market because of competition.  I suppose this has been happening even in the USA as well.  That may just be classified as business, something very Democratic.  Here the inventor thinks it will sell like hotcakes and  reality is that no one will ever see it.  
• Anthropic's new Mythos model has sparked significant concern regarding its fearsome AI power and the potential risks it poses to global security.⁠ Sounds like it's good security to get it off the market. It's too smart.
• However, Mythos can hurt other businesses by accelerating cyberattacks to "machine speed," autonomously exploiting hidden software vulnerabilities faster than human teams can patch them. This leaves businesses—especially those relying on older, unpatchable systems in industries like energy and finance—vulnerable to severe breaches, operational downtime, and massive data theft.