Our daily hop, skip, and a jump around the world

🇦🇺 The Royal Australian Mint unveiled a new $1 coin featuring King Charles III. It marks the first time since 1953 that a new Australian coin won’t have an image of the late Queen Elizabeth II. Australia – alongside Canada, New Zealand, Pakistan, India, South Africa, and 50 other nations – is a UK commonwealth country, which means they acknowledge the British monarch as their symbolic leader and often feature him/her on their currency.

🇺🇸🇹🇷 A US fighter jet shot down an armed Turkish drone after it was deemed a threat to American troops in Syria. The Pentagon says its decision to use military force against Turkey, a fellow NATO member, was made out of “due diligence and the inherent right of self-defense” after one of Turkey’s armed drones came within 550 yards of American troops stationed in Syria. US officials also say there’s no indication that Turkey was intentionally targeting American troops, while the Turkish government claims the drone didn’t belong to them. Despite being fellow NATO members and committed military allies, the US and Turkey currently support opposing sides in Syria’s ongoing civil war.

🇦🇪 UAE researchers are developing the world’s most advanced Arabic AI model. While ChatGPT, Meta’s LLaMA, and other large language models currently have Arabic-language capabilities, they were mostly trained on English data and lack the ability to understand cultural nuances and dialects. To rectify this, the UAE announced a partnership with Silicon Valley AI firm Cerebras to help build a new AI model called Jais, which officials say will carry essentially the same capabilities as other LLMs – but with more accessibility for Arabic speakers.