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TUNIS, Feb 8 (Reuters) - Libya's "5+5" military committee of officers from both main sides of the civil war has agreed on a coordination mechanism for the withdrawal of foreign forces in liaison with neighbouring Sudan and Niger, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

The procedural step would allow for joint coordination and data exchange to facilitate the full withdrawal of mercenaries and foreign fighters from Libya, the U.N. Libya envoy Abdoulaye Bathily announced after a meeting in Egypt.

However, any more concrete moves to pull out the hundreds of foreign fighters believed to be present in Libya after joining different sides in the conflict still face major political obstacles.

Although there has been little open warfare in Libya for nearly three years, the political standoff over control of government and access to state resources persists, with many Libyans fearing a return to conflict.

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The main eastern and western factions fighting from 2014-20 deployed fighters from African countries, Syria, and from the private Russian company Wagner, according to U.N. experts' reports. Turkey also deployed forces in Syria at the invitation of the then internationally recognised government.

According to the terms of the 2020 ceasefire agreement that led to the formation of the 5+5 committee, all foreign forces were meant to be withdrawn within months, but very few are believed to have left.

Reporting by Angus McDowall; Editing by Jon Boyle and Alex Richardson

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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The US has stepped up pressure on its Middle East allies to expel the Wagner Group a military contractor owned by an oligarch with close ties to Russias President from chaos-stricken Libya and Sudan, where it has expanded in recent years, regional officials told The Associated Press.

The US effort described by officials comes as President Joe Biden's administration is making a broad push against the mercenaries. The US has slapped new sanctions on the Wagner Group in recent months over its expanding role in Russia's war in Ukraine.

The group does not announce its operations, but its presence is known from reports on the ground and other evidence.

In Sudan, it was originally associated with former strongman Omar Al Bashir and now works with the military leaders who replaced him. In Libya, it is associated with eastern Libya-based military commander Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

Wagner has sent thousands of operatives to African and Middle East countries including Mali, Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic and Syria.

Wagner tends to target countries with natural resources that can be used for Moscows objectives - gold mines in Sudan, for example, where the resulting gold can be sold in ways that circumvent Western sanctions, said Catrina Doxsee, an expert on Wagner at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

The groups role in Libya and Sudan was central to talks between CIA Director William Burns and officials in Egypt and Libya in January. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also discussed the group with President Abdel Fattah El Sisi in a late-January trip to Cairo, Egyptian officials said.

The group and Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin have been under US sanctions since 2017, and the Biden administration in December announced new export restrictions on its access to technology and supplies, designating it as a significant transnational criminal organisation.

Wagner started operating in Sudan in 2017, providing military training to intelligence and special forces, and to the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, according to Sudanese officials and documents shared with the AP.

Wagner mercenaries are not operating in a combat role in Sudan, officials said. The group, which has dozens of operatives in the country, provides military and intelligence training, as well as surveillance and protection of sites and top officials.

The US is making efforts to convince power brokers in Libya and Sudan to expel the Russian private military company Wagner, regional officials tell The Associated Press. AP

Sudanese military leaders appear to have given Wagner control of gold mines in return. The documents show the group has received mining rights through front companies with ties to Sudans powerful military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

Two companies have been sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for acting as fronts for Wagners mining activities.

The main camp of Wagner mercenaries is in the contested village of Am Dafok on the border between the Central African Republic and Sudan, according to the Darfur Bar Association, a legal group that focuses on human rights.

In Libya, Mr Burns held talks in Tripoli with Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, head of one of Libya's two rival governments.

The CIA director also met with Mr Haftar in eastern Libya, according to Libyan officials.

UN experts said Wagner mercenaries have been present Libya since 2018, helping Mr Haftar's forces in their fight against Islamist militants in the east. The group was also involved in his failed offensive on Tripoli in April 2019.

CIA Director Bill Burns held talks in Tripoli as the US is pressuring allies in the region to expel the Wagner Group from Sudan and Libya. Reuters

Since the 2020 ceasefire, Wagner's activities have centred around oil facilities in central Libya, and they have continued providing military training to Mr Haftar's forces, Libyan officials said. It is not clear how many Wagner mercenaries are still in Libya.

US officials have demanded that mercenaries be pulled out of oil facilities, another Libyan official said.

Mr Haftar did not offer any commitments, but asked for assurances that Turkey and the militias it backed in western Libya would not attack his forces in the coastal city of Sirte and other areas in the central part of the country.

Egypt, which has close ties with Mr Haftar, has demanded that Wagner not be stationed close to its borders.

There is no evidence yet that the Biden administrations pressure has yielded results in either Sudan or Libya, observers said.

Updated: February 03, 2023, 7:06 PM

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US seeks to expel Wagner Group from Sudan and Libya

Jordan Peterson and Rex Murphy: Jagmeet Singh is an empty suit, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma  National Post

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Jordan Peterson and Rex Murphy: Jagmeet Singh is an empty suit, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma - National Post

Twenty-seven years before Steve Jobs unveiled a computer you could put in your pocket, physicist Paul Benioff published a paper showing it was theoretically possible to build a much more powerful system you could hide in a thimble a quantum computer.

Named for the subatomic physics it aimed to harness, the concept Benioff described in 1980 still fuels research today, including efforts to build the next big thing in computing: a system that could make a PC look in some ways quaint as an abacus.

Richard Feynman a Nobel Prize winner whose wit-laced lectures brought physics to a broad audience helped establish the field, sketching out how such systems could simulate quirky quantum phenomena more efficiently than traditional computers. So,

Quantum computing is a sophisticated approach to making parallel calculations, using the physics that governs subatomic particles to replace the more simplistic transistors in todays computers.

Quantum computers calculate using qubits, computing units that can be on, off or any value between, instead of the bits in traditional computers that are either on or off, one or zero. The qubits ability to live in the in-between state called superposition adds a powerful capability to the computing equation, making quantum computers superior for some kinds of math.

Using qubits, quantum computers could buzz through calculations that would take classical computers a loooong time if they could even finish them.

For example, todays computers use eight bits to represent any number between 0 and 255. Thanks to features like superposition, a quantum computer can use eight qubits to represent every number between 0 and 255, simultaneously.

Its a feature like parallelism in computing: All possibilities are computed at once rather than sequentially, providing tremendous speedups.

So, while a classical computer steps through long division calculations one at a time to factor a humongous number, a quantum computer can get the answer in a single step. Boom!

That means quantum computers could reshape whole fields, like cryptography, that are based on factoring what are today impossibly large numbers.

That could be just the start. Some experts believe quantum computers will bust through limits that now hinder simulations in chemistry, materials science and anything involving worlds built on the nano-sized bricks of quantum mechanics.

Quantum computers could even extend the life of semiconductors by helping engineers create more refined simulations of the quantum effects theyre starting to find in todays smallest transistors.

Indeed, experts say quantum computers ultimately wont replace classical computers, theyll complement them. And some predict quantum computers will be used as accelerators much as GPUs accelerate todays computers.

Dont expect to build your own quantum computer like a DIY PC with parts scavenged from discount bins at the local electronics shop.

The handful of systems operating today typically require refrigeration that creates working environments just north of absolute zero. They need that computing arctic to handle the fragile quantum states that power these systems.

In a sign of how hard constructing a quantum computer can be, one prototype suspends an atom between two lasers to create a qubit. Try that in your home workshop!

Quantum computing takes nano-Herculean muscles to create something called entanglement. Thats when two or more qubits exist in a single quantum state, a condition sometimes measured by electromagnetic waves just a millimeter wide.

Crank up that wave with a hair too much energy and you lose entanglement or superposition, or both. The result is a noisy state called decoherence, the equivalent in quantum computing of the blue screen of death.

A handful of companies such as Alibaba, Google, Honeywell, IBM, IonQ and Xanadu operate early versions of quantum computers today.

Today they provide tens of qubits. But qubits can be noisy, making them sometimes unreliable. To tackle real-world problems reliably, systems need tens or hundreds of thousands of qubits.

Experts believe it could be a couple decades before we get to a high-fidelity era when quantum computers are truly useful.

Predictions of when we reach so-called quantum computing supremacy the time when quantum computers execute tasks classical ones cant is a matter of lively debate in the industry.

The good news is the world of AI and machine learning put a spotlight on accelerators like GPUs, which can perform many of the types of operations quantum computers would calculate with qubits.

So, classical computers are already finding ways to host quantum simulations with GPUs today. For example, NVIDIA ran a leading-edge quantum simulation on Selene, our in-house AI supercomputer.

NVIDIA announced in the GTC keynote the cuQuantum SDK to speed quantum circuit simulations running on GPUs. Early work suggests cuQuantum will be able to deliver orders of magnitude speedups.

The SDK takes an agnostic approach, providing a choice of tools users can pick to best fit their approach. For example, the state vector method provides high-fidelity results, but its memory requirements grow exponentially with the number of qubits.

That creates a practical limit of roughly 50 qubits on todays largest classical supercomputers. Nevertheless weve seen great results (below) using cuQuantum to accelerate quantum circuit simulations that use this method.

Researchers from the Jlich Supercomputing Centre will provide a deep dive on their work with the state vector method in session E31941 at GTC (free with registration).

A newer approach, tensor network simulations, use less memory and more computation to perform similar work.

Using this method, NVIDIA and Caltech accelerated a state-of-the-art quantum circuit simulator with cuQuantum running on NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. It generated a sample from a full-circuit simulation of the Google Sycamore circuit in 9.3 minutes on Selene, a task that 18 months ago experts thought would take days using millions of CPU cores.

Using the Cotengra/Quimb packages, NVIDIAs newly announced cuQuantum SDK, and the Selene supercomputer, weve generated a sample of the Sycamore quantum circuit at depth m=20 in record time less than 10 minutes, said Johnnie Gray, a research scientist at Caltech.

This sets the benchmark for quantum circuit simulation performance and will help advance the field of quantum computing by improving our ability to verify the behavior of quantum circuits, said Garnet Chan, a chemistry professor at Caltech whose lab hosted the work.

NVIDIA expects the performance gains and ease of use of cuQuantum will make it a foundational element in every quantum computing framework and simulator at the cutting edge of this research.

Sign up to show early interest in cuQuantum.

Learn more about quantum computing on the NVIDIA Technical Blog.

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What Is Quantum Computing? | NVIDIA Blog

For years, quantum computings news cycle was dominated by headlines about record-setting systems. Researchers at Google and IBM have had spats over who achieved whatand whether it was worth the effort. But the time for arguing over whos got the biggest processor seems to have passed: firms are heads-down and preparing for life in the real world. Suddenly, everyone is behaving like grown-ups.

As if to emphasize how much researchers want to get off the hype train, IBM is expected to announce a processor in 2023 that bucks the trend of putting ever more quantum bits, or qubits, into play. Qubits, the processing units of quantum computers, can be built from a variety of technologies, including superconducting circuitry, trapped ions, and photons, the quantum particles of light.

IBM has long pursued superconducting qubits, and over the years the company has been making steady progress in increasing the number it can pack on a chip. In 2021, for example, IBM unveiled one with a record-breaking 127 of them. In November, it debuted its 433-qubit Osprey processor, and the company aims to release a 1,121-qubit processor called Condor in 2023.

But this year IBM is also expected to debut its Heron processor, which will have just 133 qubits. It might look like a backwards step, but as the company is keen to point out, Herons qubits will be of the highest quality. And, crucially, each chip will be able to connect directly to other Heron processors, heralding a shift from single quantum computing chips toward modular quantum computers built from multiple processors connected togethera move that is expected to help quantum computers scale up significantly.

Heron is a signal of larger shifts in the quantum computing industry. Thanks to some recent breakthroughs, aggressive roadmapping, and high levels of funding, we may see general-purpose quantum computers earlier than many would have anticipated just a few years ago, some experts suggest. Overall, things are certainly progressing at a rapid pace, says Michele Mosca, deputy director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo.

Here are a few areas where experts expect to see progress.

IBMs Heron project is just a first step into the world of modular quantum computing. The chips will be connected with conventional electronics, so they will not be able to maintain the quantumness of information as it moves from processor to processor. But the hope is that such chips, ultimately linked together with quantum-friendly fiber-optic or microwave connections, will open the path toward distributed, large-scale quantum computers with as many as a million connected qubits. That may be how many are needed to run useful, error-corrected quantum algorithms. We need technologies that scale both in size and in cost, so modularity is key, says Jerry Chow, director at IBMQuantum Hardware System Development.

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What's next for quantum computing | MIT Technology Review