President Biden has recently started to use a CPAP machine to treat his sleep apnea, the White House confirmed Wednesday.
Driving the news: “Since 2008, the President has disclosed his history with sleep apnea in thorough medical reports. He used a CPAP machine last night, which is common for people with that history," White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.
No Labels, the bipartisan group plotting an independent presidential campaign, is claiming that a new poll — commissioned by Democratic and Republican strategists determined to stop them — actually bolsters their case.
But it should be. The Doomsday clock maintained by Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is currently set to 90 seconds to midnight. NATO and Russia are playing a game in Ukraine that has drawn informed comparisons to an extended Cuban Missile Crisis. Nuclear arms control has collapsed. New generations of nuclear weapons are being developed by the U.S., Russia and China. Wherever history ends up ranking the new “Oppenheimer,” it’s a very well-timed entry to a long movie tradition of reckoning with the bomb and its effects on human beings at every level, from the civilizational to the cellular.
With that in mind, here’s our guide to essential atomic movies.
Jets of red gas bursting into the cosmos, and a glowing cave of dust: NASA marked a year of discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope Wednesday with a spectacular new image of Sun-like stars being born.
Survival of the fittest.
The Nordic country's weaknesses included: how open the culture is to external ideas, as well as how flexible and adaptable people are when they face new challenges.
The order affects 49 teacher-training centers and 198 support facilities across the country, according to a source at the ministry who spoke to Radio Azadi on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Around 5,600 instructors and other staff were employed by the training centers. Created under the previous Western-backed Afghan government, the centers were aimed at improving the quality of education in the war-torn country.
In the interim period, the company said it’ll send over “experienced technicians from Taiwan to train the local skilled workers for a short period of time” to bridge the skills gap. Last month, Nikkei Asia reported that a “task force” of more than 500 experienced workers will be heading to the US to help set up specialized equipment.
Construction on the Arizona microchips manufacturing plant, which was supposed to start producing 4 nanometer chips next year, is now due to start in 2025. The opening of a second fab, which will produce smaller and more complex 3nm chips, is still on track for 2026.
TSMC on Thursday said its under-construction chip fab in Arizona won't be up and running until at least 2025 because of a shortage of skilled workers.
During the Taiwanese giant's Q2 earnings call, CEO Mark Liu acknowledged the biz can't get enough workers to complete the building project on its original timeline. TSMC had hoped to start producing 4nm-node chips at the plant sometime next year.
All V-Cs were consulted while framing the common syllabus. The aim is to upgrade higher education, make it easy for students to move from one university to another and improve the universities’ standing in the National Institutional Ranking Framework, he averred.
He reiterated that language subjects will be the same for aided, government and autonomous colleges.
A sizable graphics card refurbishing operation has been arrested in China, with seven of the 22 detained in custody, and millions of dollars worth of stock confiscated.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces nearly three-quarters of the world’s cobalt, an essential component in rechargeable batteries powering laptops, smartphones and electric vehicles. But those who dig up the valuable mineral often work in horrific and dangerous conditions, says Siddharth Kara, an international expert on modern-day slavery and author of Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. In an in-depth interview, he says the major technology companies that rely on this cobalt from DRC to make their products are turning a blind eye to the human toll and falsely claiming their supply chains are free from abuse, including widespread child labor. “The public health catastrophe on top of the human rights violence on top of the environmental destruction is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the modern context,” says Kara. “The fact that it is linked to companies worth trillions and that our lives depend on this enormous violence has to be dealt with.”
The cancellation of the deal was announced on Monday, as per a Reuters story. A Foxconn spokesperson was quoted therein as saying: "Foxconn has determined it will not move forward on the joint venture with Vedanta".
Every finished product stands at the end of a long line of prototypes, and Sony have recently shared an interview and images of their PlayStation VR2 prototypes.
Following outbreaks in Spain and France, we assess the actual risk of mosquito-borne diseases to travellers
A new option emerges.
A recent House committee investigation exposed political interference when it came to figuring out the origins of COVID. But why?
The wonder of life.
Two stories on the same day nicely illustrated Hong Kong’s attitude to mental illness.
Eighty-six percent of the new cases were in ðstanbul, Minister Koca has revealed, citing immigration as a contributing factor to the increase in measles cases.
We have the ability to transform women's health in three years, not 30.
Researchers at the University of Turku found that healthy fat cells can be utilised in treatment of breast cancer.
In a major change that will broaden access for women and teenagers, U.S. officials have approved the first over-the-counter birth control pill. Women’s health groups have long pushed to expand access to the pills.
The F.D.A. and the powerful beverage industry protested the new findings, and a second W.H.O. group stood by its standard that the sweetener is generally safe.
If the World Health Organization’s warning about the artificial sweetener has you worried, try these other refreshers.
Federal lawmakers this week introduced a bill aimed at reducing the more than 20,000 pregnancies that end in stillbirth every year in the U.S.
The Maternal and Child Health Stillbirth Prevention Act would explicitly allow federal funding earmarked for mothers and children to also be used for stillbirth prevention, including initiatives that encourage expectant parents to be aware of and track their babies’ movements in the womb.
The majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to an AP-NORC poll released Wednesday.
Kobe and Tokyo—On a brisk morning in late February, I met Reiko Masai at a community center in the outskirts of Kobe, about three hours from Tokyo by bullet train. A lifelong advocate for gender equality in Japan, Masai, 73, has come here every Saturday since 2011, offering an open consultation for struggling women. Chie Matsumoto contributed to the reporting. This article was supported by the Social Science Research Council’s Abe Fellowship for Journalists.
A study from researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine found that an estimated 795,000 Americans suffer permanent disability or death as the result of medical misdiagnoses, and there's a chance the number could even be as high as 1.02 million people.
Of the patients who are misdiagnosed, the researchers said, nearly half (371,000) die.
Danyelle Holmes of Poor People’s Campaign Mississippi said, “We still hold fast to our position, Jackson residents have a right to safe drinking water and neither EPA nor JXN Water have shown that our water is safe. According to the EPA, lead exposure may cause health problems ranging from stomach distress to brain damage. No amount of lead is safe for residents to consume. EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act standards are not fully health protective and also Interim Third-Party Manager Ted Henefin’s position that Jackson’s water is safe for all is undermined by his reports of two new violations of federal drinking water standards. We believe that every citizen deserves access to clean and safe drinking water and every resident has a right to live and not to be in fear of dying or becoming deathly ill due to unclean and unsafe drinking water.”
Johns Hopkins Medicine describes psilocybin as a compound found in hallucinogenic mushrooms known to cause profound alterations of consciousness and visual and auditory hallucinations. In 2016, researchers at Johns Hopkins made significant strides by discovering that psilocybin, when combined with psychological support, reduced existential anxiety and depression in individuals with a potentially life-threatening cancer diagnosis.
From Wade v. Univ. of Michigan, decided yesterday by the Michigan Court of Appeals (Judges Mark Cavanagh and Deborah Servitto); the ban covered all university property, which I take it includes dorms and open spaces: [...]
Since the mid-2000s, the United States has seen year-after-year increases in the number of deaths and injuries from guns "that would mirror what we would consider to be a sudden increase consistent with an epidemic," Carter said.
The link between gun deaths and gun ownership is much stronger than the link between violence and mental health issues. If it were possible to cure all schizophrenia, bipolar, and depressive disorders, violent crime in the US would fall by only 4 percent, according to a study from Duke University professor Jeffrey Swanson, who examines policies to reduce gun violence.
Can China and the rest of the world agree on how to regulate AI? It may be a more serious question than we think.
This is pretty amusing to see. Nothing really related to Linux / Steam Deck gaming, but more a state of the industry post that I thought you might also find fun. Redditors managed to trick an AI-powered news scraper.
Self-driving cars often use LiDAR — think of it as radar using light beams. One limitation of existing systems is they need some method of scanning the light source around, and that means moving parts. Researchers at the University of Washington have created a laser on a chip that uses acoustic waves to bend the laser, avoiding physically moving parts. The paper is behind a paywall, but the University has a summary poster, and you can also find an overview over on [Geekwire].
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) revealed on Thursday that the recently disclosed Citrix zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-3519 has been exploited against a critical infrastructure organization.
CISA has not attributed the attack to any known threat actor, but the agency has shared tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) obtained from the targeted critical infrastructure organization to help others detect potential attacks.
Oh... OH! This was not my printer. A fact I could tell from the subtly different model number, the public IP address, and that the user interface was in Cyrillic.
To celebrate Franco-German friendship, German Transport Minister Wissing and his French counterpart Beaune came up with something special: 30,000 free Interrail tickets per country for travel in Germany and France for young adults between 18 and 27. Codename: “Passe France Allemagne”
However, many things went wrong when the Interrail passes were distributed. In the following, we want to take you on a journey through the stages of the not-so-well-implemented ticket and show you how you could still get a pass after registration ended.
This can vary depending on the operating system, browser, and font stack. If you don’t conduct much cross-device testing, you might not even be aware that your colorful emoji is shown as a plain single-color symbol for some users.
AI is about to make this issue much more complicated, and could drastically expand the types of laws that can be enforced in this manner. Some legal scholars predict that computationally personalized law and its automated enforcement are the future of law. These would be administered by what Anthony Casey and Anthony Niblett call “microdirectives,” which provide individualized instructions for legal compliance in a particular scenario.
Made possible by advances in surveillance, communications technologies, and big-data analytics, microdirectives will be a new and predominant form of law shaped largely by machines. They are “micro” because they are not impersonal general rules or standards, but tailored to one specific circumstance. And they are “directives” because they prescribe action or inaction required by law.
At this point, no one should be surprised that AI bots would make up non-existent products. But what's interesting here is that the LLMs know the latest real version of certain products -- smart phones and movie sequels among them -- and won't fabricate information about those. This shows that the technology is capable of separating fact from fiction but has glaring blind spots.
Considering that Google is now building an AI tool to "help" journalists write news and that some prominent websites are using bots like Bard and ChatGPT to write articles, we're likely to see a lot more articles about products that don't yet -- and might never -- exist.
OpenAI has suffered severe staff losses. Dave Willner, an industry veteran who has led the AI ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹Trust and Security team for the past year and a half, has announced that he is leaving the company and moving into a consulting role. He plans to spend more time with his family. His departure comes at a critical time for AI as questions arise around the world about how to regulate AI and how to minimize its potentially harmful impact.
Researchers at cloud security startup Wiz have an urgent warning for organizations running Microsoft’s M365 platform: That stolen Microsoft Azure AD enterprise signing key gave Chinese [attackers] access to data beyond Exchange Online and Outlook.com.
“Our researchers concluded that the compromised MSA key could have allowed the threat actor to forge access tokens for multiple types of Azure Active Directory applications, including every application that supports personal account authentication, such as SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive,” Wiz researcher Shir Tamari said in a document posted online.
Incredibly as it sounds, and it really does deserve wider coverage, someone somehow obtained one of Microsoft's internal private cryptographic keys used to digitally sign access tokens for its online services. With that key, the snoops were able to craft tokens to grant them access to Microsoft customers' email systems and, crucially, sign those access tokens as the Windows giant to make it look as though they were legitimately issued.
With those golden tokens in hand, the snoops – believed to be based in China – were able to log into Microsoft cloud email accounts used by US government officials, including US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. The cyber-trespassing was picked up by a federal government agency, which raised the alarm.
Well, almost. The original reports of the breach centered on a set of compromised encryption keys for Microsoft’s Exchange online email services. But Microsoft’s latest blog post still doesn’t completely connect all the dots of what happened. That has led some reporters, such as Andy Greenberg of Wired magazine, to speculate on several scenarios on how the keys were stolen or mishandled.
“The threat actor was able to obtain new access tokens by presenting one previously issued from this API due to a design flaw,” the new report from Wiz says, though it has since been fixed. These tokens were used to access emails from Outlook Web Access and Outlook.com services.
However, the report from Wiz goes further. “The compromised signing key was more powerful than it may have seemed and was not limited to just those two services,” Wiz reports. It found this key could be used to obtain access to a variety of services that use Azure Active Directory or AAD for authentication using the “login with Microsoft” sequence.
Ransomware is obviously a significant threat, and it’s been for the last several years. Now, we know that ransomware actors don’t care who they target. In fact, they’re looking to target entities that have little tolerance for downtime. So that includes hospitals or just critical infrastructure entities. If they think you can’t live without your networks or you can’t operate without your networks, they’re going to go after you. And I think that’s what makes it so insidious and difficult is because they’re just constantly targeting. There’s new variants all the time. There’s new actors, affiliates going between the different variants, which makes it a really difficult ecosystem. As we get into talking about what the FBI is doing about it, it’s that ecosystem concept that we really need to think about. It’s not just a person developing something and then deploying it. It’s a lot of different people working across variants, working across services, cryptocurrency exchanges, marketplaces. And I think that’s that broader effort among all of the criminals that’s really putting a lot of U.S. networks at risk.
With his lawsuit, Schneider wants to stop the practice of US digital corporations such as Meta, Google and Microsoft of indiscriminate and error-prone searches of private messages for supposedly suspicious content (so-called voluntary chat control or chat control 1.0) and overturn the corresponding EU regulation from 2021. The background to the lawsuit is a planned successor regulation, with which this message and chat control, which has so far only been practised by US providers, is to become mandatory for all providers of email, messenger and chat services (so-called chat control 2.0 or child sexual abuse regulation, CSAR).
The EU Department of the Interior DG Home claims to have proven with a Eurobarometer opinion poll that the vast majority of the EU population wants total chat control. Unfortunately this was never asked for, or only in a misleading way.
The issue last night was about the powers in the Online Safety Bill that will allow Ofcom to force tech companies to scan chat messages on behalf of the government. Given the scale of use of these services, it will effectively introduce a form of mass surveillance and all experts agree that the necessary technological solution will compromise end-to-end encryption. The powers would also enable Ofcom to give similar mandates to public social media platforms and other services.
EU Member State governments are planning to adopt their official position, called a ‘general approach’, on the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) at the meeting of Justice and Home Affairs ministers on 28 September 2023. The Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP) – who have been negotiating this text on behalf of their countries for the last year – will have its last meeting before the Summer break on 26 July.
Their discussions will be based on Council text 11518/23 which puts forward the latest suggested changes to the draft CSAR by the Spanish Presidency. Here, we sound the alarm about the following major issues with the Council’s latest text: [...]
“It is disappointing that peers have failed to protect the privacy and security of the 40 million people in the UK who use messaging apps to communicate with friends, family and colleagues.
“As it stands, the Online Safety Bill will give Ofcom the power to ask tech companies to scan our private messages on the government’s behalf.
“Despite having cross party support, the opposition withdrew an amendment that would at least ensure judges have oversight over these powers for government-mandated surveillance.
Any time you’re driving a Tesla, it’s collecting data in the background. An autonomous vehicle can collect up to 19 terabytes of data per day, from an array of sensors and cameras. All that data requires increasingly powerful computers to process, secure, and store, particularly as the demand for Teslas and other autonomous EVs soars.
Essentially, this data consists of all the information fed to the car’s 12 sensors and eight external cameras mounted to provide 360-degree visibility for a range of up to 250 meters to enhance safety and convenience for everyone on board.
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 provides a legal framework for the use of investigatory powers by the UK security and intelligence agencies, law enforcement and other relevant public bodies. These powers include the interception of communications; the retention and acquisition of communications data and; equipment interference for obtaining communications and other data. The act also provides powers to the security and intelligence agencies’ relating to the retention and examination of bulk personal datasets.
The freshly declassified April 11 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinion concerns the controversial Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows the Feds to snoop on foreigners' electronic communications.
The timing is especially significant: it comes as Congress considers whether to reauthorize Section 702 before it expires at the end of the year. Let's just say it's likely to have one less supporter on the Senate floor.
News of the latest violations comes as the Biden administration faces a difficult battle in persuading Congress to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows spy agencies to collect swaths of emails and other communications.
Already this year, U.S. spy officials have disclosed that the FBI improperly searched Section 702 databases for information related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and the 2020 protests following the police killing of George Floyd.
According to the screenshot, the company describes the feature as "Twitter Hiring" which is a "free" feature for "verified organisations to post jobs on your company profile, and attract top talent to your open positions."
Moreover, the verified organisations will be able to add up to five job positions to their profiles.
What’s often been left out of the debate over KOSA is how young people feel about this. In fact, many teenagers already oppose the bill. Young TikTok users have been rallying one another to call and email legislators to push back on the bill, and videos describing what’s wrong with KOSA have received hundreds of thousands of views. The common sentiment on TikTok, which is primarily used by young people, is that the billwould be disastrous, leading to privacy invasions, account deletions, and even suicides. Petitions and calls to action against it on Tumblr, where 48% of the active users and 61% of new ones are from Generation Z, have gone viral multiple times. The common critiques of the bill are that it requires surveillance of minors by parents, that it would lead to huge holes in what information and platforms are accessible by young people online, and that it would force all users to upload their IDs to verify their ages.€
Plans to evacuate thousands of Filipinos there are constantly updated, defense chief Gilbert Teodoro says.
Goal of early morning raids is to instill fear, commentators say.
“The Afghan regime desperately needs cash. It cannot show the Bamiyan Buddhas for the good reason it blew them up. But it would take tourists to the site for a fee,” he stated.
According to the author, the Taliban smashed the sixth-century CE giant statues in 2001 with artillery fire and by detonating anti-tank mines.
Now, the public can only see the empty niches where these masterpieces of Buddhist sculpture once stood, and meditate there. But this not for free, but by paying money to the regime, Bitter Winter reported.
The first time I heard the controversial social media personality Andrew Tate speak on women, Western society, and masculinity, I immediately thought that he was a radical Islamic extremist. A defector from the Taliban, perhaps? Over the next few months I would hear Tate make outlandish remarks such as, “Women should shut the f**k up, have kids, sit at home, be quiet and make coffee.” And more: speaking of women in general, Tate said, “If I have a degree of responsibility over her, then I must have a degree of authority… You can’t be responsible for a dog if it doesn’t obey you.”
So, when we learned on July 18, 2023, that Tate, who last year converted to Islam, was hoping for, and celebrating the fact of the imminent Islamization of Britain, I cannot say that I was surprised.
Responding to the news of a Muslim billionaire winning rights to turn the Trocadero, one of London's most famous landmarks, into a mosque, Tate expressed his happiness and had this to say about Islamic culture: [...]
Seconded staff and operations at the Swedish embassy in Baghdad have been relocated temporarily to Stockholm for security reasons after it was stormed by protesters, the Swedish Foreign Ministry said on Friday.
A statement from the B.C. Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU) on Friday said gang members, their families and their friends are expected to descend on their White Rock Chapter clubhouse in Langley, B.C., and other communities in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
"It is well documented that many Hells Angels, members of their supporting outlaw motorcycle gangs, and friends and associates, are involved in significant levels of criminal activity, including trafficking potentially deadly fentanyl and violent offences like assaults and homicide," said CFSEU Staff Sgt. Lindsey Houghton.
Besides describing the attack against its Embassy as "unacceptable", Sweden summoned the Iraqi diplomatic representative in Stockholm.
Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, told FRANCE 24 that he had decided to open fresh investigations into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the ongoing fighting in Sudan. He said his office had received numerous reports from many sources of crimes such as destruction of property, executions, killings and rapes.
India on Thursday approved in principle the purchase of 26 French marine Rafale jets and three Scorpene-class submarines, a day before Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be guest of honour at the Bastille Day parade in Paris.
The Kremlin’s disclosure of the meeting with Yevgeny V. Prigozhin and other Wagner group commanders hinted at the power they wield, but left many questions unanswered.
Russia came under pressure at the U.N. Security Council from its ally China and developing countries as well as Western nations to avert a global food crisis and quickly revive Ukrainian grain shipments. Moscow was also criticized by the U.N. and council members Friday for attacking Ukrainian Black Sea ports after it pulled out of the year-old grain deal on Monday and destroying critical port infrastructure. China’s deputy U.N. ambassador Geng Shuang expressed hope that Russia and the U.N. will work together to resume exports from both countries “at an early date.” Several developing countries warned of the impact of the cutoff in Ukrainian grain shipments, which has already led to a rise in wheat prices.
The Italian prime minister will travel to the White House on July 27 to meet with US President Joe Biden and discuss the transatlantic relationship.
After ending its participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative, Russia has launched daily missile strikes along the Ukrainian coast from the sea.
A Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow-annexed Crimea caused the "detonation" of an ammunition depot Saturday, the Russia-installed leader of the peninsula said, ordering the evacuation of people living within five kilometres of the site. Also on Saturday, the governor of Russian border region Belgorod said that Kyiv had used cluster munitions in an attack there on Friday.
For the past six months, Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers in the Dnipropetrovsk region have been recycling weapons left behind by Russian soldiers pushed back by Ukraine's counteroffensive. “A thousand rockets were just lying there,” Ukrainian soldier Stepan told FRANCE 24. “The Russians left them behind, so we took them.” Stocked in a workshop, the equipment is refurbished, repurposed and eventually used on the Ukrainian front line. As the front line slowly moves forward, the workshop goes with them.
A prominent Russian hardliner who accused President Vladimir Putin of weakness and indecision in Ukraine was detained Friday on charges of extremism, a signal the Kremlin has toughened its approach with hawkish critics after last month's abortive rebellion by the Wagner mercenary company.
Russian investigators took prominent Russian nationalist and military veteran Igor Girkin into custody on Friday for criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian performance in the War in Ukraine. Miroslava Reginskaya, Girkin’s wife, informed the public about his detention.
Six weeks into a major counteroffensive that Ukrainian military commanders and political leaders hope will decisively change the course of the 17-month Russian invasion, this is where things stand.
Pavel Gubarev, an associate of Igor Girkin, the former military commander of Moscow-backed separatists in Ukraine who was sent to pretrial detention following his criticism of Putin, was detained by security forces in Moscow after picketing the Meshchansky district court to demand Girkin's release.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on July 21 that the Crimea bridge connecting Russia with occupied Crimea "must be neutralized."
Russian shelling and air strikes on Ukrainian civilian areas and grain export infrastructure have killed at least four people, including two children, and caused massive material damage over the past 24 hours, the military and regional officials said on July 22.
Ukraine and Turkey are discussing the possibility of reviving the Black Sea grain agreement, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on July 21 after a telephone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Russian police have detained the former leader of Moscow-backed separatists in Ukraine, Igor Strelkov (aka Girkin), on extremism charges, his wife said on Telegram on July 21.
Russian cruise missiles have destroyed farm storage buildings in the Odesa region. Ukrainian officials said three missiles hit early Friday. The Kremlin’s forces are expanding their targets following three days of bombardment of the region’s Black Sea port infrastructure. Other Russian missiles also damaged what officials described as an “important infrastructure facility” southwest of the port of Odesa. It appeared to be part of an ongoing Kremlin effort to cripple Ukraine’s food exports after Moscow abandoned a wartime deal allowing the shipment of grain via the Black Sea. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Western countries should address Russia’s demands to restore the Black Sea grain corridor.
As Ukraine begins using the widely condemned munitions, what will the consequences be?
Children are both remarkably resilient and vulnerable. However hard a society may try to shelter its children, a war such as Ukraine’s invades lives. For kids who have experienced loss, these summer camps are a corrective.
The Turkish leader has been a key mediator between Russia and Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began last February.
A fourth day of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian Black Sea port installations on July 21 set grain storage facilities in the Odesa region on fire and destroyed a huge amount of food stored for export, causing damage and injuries, regional officials and the military said, as fighting continued along the whole eastern front.
Russia held exercises demonstrating its power to sink ships and stop those that try to run its blockade. For Ukrainian food exports to resume, Moscow said, a list of demands must be met.
With the ruble weakening and the government spending ever more money on the war in Ukraine, Moscow took unexpectedly sharp action to curb inflation.
Somalia, Ethiopia and others in the Horn of Africa could be hit the hardest, a leader of an aid group said.
On Friday, July 21, a court ordered the arrest of Igor Strelkov (whose real surname is Girkin), a convicted war criminal, former commander of troops fighting for the self-proclaimed Donetsk “people’s republic,” former FSB officer, and, until today, pro-war and anti-Putin blogger. The criminal case against him was opened on charges of making “public calls for extremist activity on the Internet.” Russian authorities reportedly brought charges against Strelkov at the request of former Yaroslavl municipal deputy Dmitry Petrovsky, who himself went to fight in Ukraine as a “civilian volunteer” and who was outraged that Strelkov criticized the Russian army and Putin. Meduza looks at Strelkov’s backstory and explains how he went from FSB officer to commander of a Russian proxy militia, to one of the most implacable critics of the Kremlin.
We collect reports already available publicly and determine their geolocation markers, adding only the photos and videos that clear this process.
Millions of people have been affected by the use of cluster munitions by the US in countries like Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, even years after the wars have ended. The same plight awaits civilians in the current war zone in Ukraine
Russia's Justice Ministry on July 21 declared journalist of independent Latvia-based Dozhd TV channel Mikhail Kozyrev a foreign agent.
Law enforcement officers have arrested Telegram blogger Igor Strelkov (real surname — Girkin), who also led the troops of the Russia-backed self-proclaimed “DNR” in 2014.
On the night of July 21, Russian troops struck grain terminals in the Odesa region with missiles, Suspilne reports citing Natalia Gumenyuk, a representative of the AFU operational command South. According to Gumenyuk, the Kalibr missiles were launched from a ship in the Black Sea.
Oleg Kryuchkov, advisor to the head of the administration of annexed Crimea, urged Russians not to film the Crimean bridge during active air raid alarms.
Russian schools will study the basics of combat drone use as part of a new basic military training course starting September 1, Senator Artem Sheikin, deputy chairman of the Council for the Development of the Digital Economy of the Federation Council, told RIA Novosti.
Andrei Kartapolov, head of the State Duma Committee on Defense, announced that the lower limit for the age of conscription would remain the same, while the upper limit would be raised. That means that males between 18 and 30 years old will be eligible for the biannual draft.
Even today, some Oppenheimer case documents remain partly classified and remarkably time-consuming for historians to review. In 2017, I filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to review Hoover’s 69-page memo. Six years later, in March 2023, the National Archives finally released to me a copy of the memo with more than 70 redactions, citing an exemption that permits the government to withhold parts of a document in order to protect a “confidential source.”
The redactions shielded the identity of multiple informants, including one who said Oppenheimer participated in a Communist Party meeting in fall 1940, and another who said Oppenheimer had “in effect, delayed or attempted to delay the development of the H-bomb.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer made his greatest contribution to physics in 1939. It was three years before he met Gen. Leslie Groves, three years before they built a town in the New Mexico desert, and three years before they recruited thousands of scientists and their families to live in that desert town where they worked toward a single-minded goal: a weapon of such destructive power that it would end World War II, perhaps even all wars. Hitler had just invaded Poland, and Oppenheimer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was working on a paper that used Einstein’s theory of relativity to identify what we now call black holes.
Last year, Italy was exposed to extreme temperatures longer than most other European countries, enduring three major heat waves. Almost 30 percent of the 61,000 people estimated to have died last summer from extreme heat in Europe were Italians, with age playing a significant factor. The number of Italians over 80 is now about 4.5 million, almost double the number of 20 years ago.
The measure is set to tackle two issues at once. “The polluting cruise is not in line with Amsterdam’s sustainable ambitions,” said Ilana Rooderkerk, the local leader of the D66 party, which introduced the motion. “Cruise ships in the city center also do not fit in with the task of combating mass tourism.”
Greece closed the ancient Acropolis during the hottest part of the day on Friday to protect tourists, while Croatian villagers cleaned up after a wildfire as a fierce heatwave swept across southern Europe.
More than a third of Americans were under extreme heat advisories, watches and warnings Thursday as a blistering heat wave that's been baking the nation spread further into California, forcing residents to seek out air conditioning or find other ways to stay cool in triple-digit temperatures.
Temperatures of 35 deg C and above continued to menace other parts of China.
The airline industry has missed 98 percent of its previous environmental targets, yet is still planning to at least double passenger numbers by 2050. The ‘Fly Net Zero’ plan addresses as little as one half of aviation’s climate impact and ignores the non-carbon effects of flights.
Research indicates that additional flights being taken due to their promotion by advertising could result in up to 34 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in a year.
So why should you care what Ben McKenzie thinks about [cryptocurrency]? The short answer is ... I don’t exactly know. As a general rule, people probably shouldn’t listen to celebrities about money. McKenzie’s answer is that he studied economics as an undergraduate, so he knows about money, and he’s an actor, so he knows about lying. He’s testified about [cryptocurrency] before Congress, too. And he’s not trying to get you to buy anything (except maybe his book).
Whatever the case, McKenzie, 44, has now fashioned himself as the famous face of the [cryptocurrency] skepticism movement. I spoke with him for about an hour in mid-July about his theory on the case of [cryptocurrency], his experiences looking into it, and why he hopes people will pay attention.
With 20 million road cyclists in China, the industry is expected to be worth $21.8 billion by 2026.
Now Ms. Ellison is poised to be a star witness at Mr. Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial, which is scheduled for Oct. 2.
The Turkish state has been releasing only 200 cubic meters of water per second instead of 500 cubic meters. This violates the 1987 protocol between Syria and Turkey.
The level of the Euphrates has dropped a lot due to the water being cut off for 30 months. The lakes behind three dams on the Euphrates River in Syria, the largest of which is the Euphrates Dam at Tabqa, have decreased significantly.
Ibrahim Al-Dakhiri, director general of the Arab Organization for Agricultural Development, noted the need to accelerate the pace of integration and cooperation to produce food.
Nothing here constitutes financial advice. As a matter of fact, everything said here is based on logic and statistics.
Exactly one year ago, in July of 2022, I wrote an article with a few predictions for the next 12 months.
I was very wrong about one of them: the grain crisis resulting from the Black Sea embargo and the Russo-Ukrainian War. It didn’t happen so far.
This was supposed to occur during the first half of 2023, but a grain deal between Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey saved the day — a deal that right now is at serious risk.
I have to thank local€ golf€ enthusiasts for providing a great deal of innocent amusement for those of us who have no strong feelings about the game, and perhaps subscribe to the observation – first recorded in 1910 and often misattributed in a crisper version to Mark Twain — “to play€ golf€ is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk.”
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Wednesday that it was criminally charging 78 people for their alleged involvement in healthcare fraud schemes. The alleged fraud schemes totaled over $2.5 billion and targeted the elderly, people with HIV, pregnant women and others.
Fewer meetings, post-decision press conferences and more board member interaction with staff have been given a tick by the governor of the Reserve Bank.
Philip Lowe has signed off on a range of recommendations from an independent review released in April.
Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe says it’s “possible” there will be further increases to interest rates, despite keeping them on hold at the last meeting.
The governor says it’s unclear if monetary policy has more work to do, and was “very conscious” the full force of the tightening to date had not yet been felt.
There’s been a modest uptick in the number of ANZ customers asking for help but the head of the big four bank says borrowers, overall, are proving resilient.
ANZ chief executive officer Shayne Elliott said some customers were struggling as rising interest rates pushed up borrowing costs but most were “managing their way through” the current financial pressures.
Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe has toned down his language around more interest rate hikes, but says more tightening is still possible even after keeping the cash rate on hold this month.€
The governor says it’s unclear if monetary policy has more work to do and was “very conscious” the full force of the tightening had not yet been felt.
It’s summer 2020. The world is under a series of lockdowns as the pandemic continues to run its course. And in academic and foreign policy circles, digital currencies are one of the hottest topics in town.€ China is well on its way to launching its own central bank digital currency, or CBDC, and many other…
The Biden administration has just announced that it will take unilateral action to make childcare more affordable and accessible to American families. The US Department of Health and Human Services announced on Tuesday that it has proposed a new rule to reduce the out-of-pocket costs for families who receive federal childcare subsidies while offering financial support to providers who accept those subsidies. It’s a far more limited action than what President Joe Biden had been seeking at the start of his administration—only 900,000 families get a childcare subsidy—but it will mean significant relief for the people it reaches.
A few months back I attended a workshop regarding keeping children on the internet safe, and at some point a debate broke out over whether social media was “more like” cigarettes or chocolate (i.e., obviously addictive and harmful or just a little unhealthy in large doses), and a long term trust & safety executive who was in the room told me it was driving them crazy, because it’s just not an analogy that works. Chocolate and cigarettes are things you literally consumer in your body, and they have a clear, and pretty well understood, impact on your body.
The newest version of the European Parliament’s proposed Nature Restoration Law faced an impasse within a European Parliament committee on Tuesday, failing to secure a majority vote. The Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety rejected the proposal in a tie 44–44 vote.
Linda Burney wants Australians to remember that behind the stark statistics about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health there are real people.
The Minister for Indigenous Australians addresses the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday, when she will speak about the upcoming referendum on a First Nations voice.€
Companies have also committed to having their AI systems tested through a third party before being released. One example of that will take place at the DEF-CON hacking convention in Las Vegas next month. Some of the companies, including Google and OpenAI, will have their AI systems tested there, at the encouragement of the White House. Beyond that, there isn't a clear outline of who the third-party checks would be, and how they are selected.
But the White House says these agreements are just a first step.
How the Growing Rift between Peace, Climate and Social Justice Movements Is Cementing a Ruinous Status Quo.
Ooof. We're somewhat speechless with revulsion but nonetheless feel a compunction to point out that a former mob boss "president," leading GOP contender for the once-venerated presidency, and multi-indicted - five at last count - grifter and sociopath is still not only free but posting dark, baneful, apocalyptic threats to law enforcement and anyone else who stands in his malignant way. His barbs are accompanied by the sound of alien tripods killing people in Spielberg's "War of the Worlds." Nothing to see here.
Hungarian President Katalin Novak an anti-abortionist, shocked some leading delegates with her presence when she spoke at the Women Deliver conference in Kigali, Rwanda.
“We were taken aback,” said conference attendee Bruna Martinez, a Brazilian activist told The Guardian. “We don’t understand why a woman like this would be invited.”
Unfortunately this is where the story will stop too. The free tier we were using to collect this data was cut off last week. Between the headlines and the trend we are seeing in this data, it just doesn’t make sense to pay for access to this data. The last day we were able to save twitter data was July 12th, 2023, exactly two years from the start of our experiment. And with that, we say “so long” to infosec twitter.
It seems to happen over and over again, and the mainstream media always makes it worse. The mainstream media hears about a “TikTok challenge,” reports on it like crazy, and people freak out that TikTok is destroying the children or some such.
“I have been living with a proverbial boot on my neck for going on years now.”
Sentence imposed after he swapped anthem for banned protest song in Olympic footage
The Taliban's Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice on July 19 released photos of the blaze. The ministry declared music is un-Islamic and promotes "immorality that has caused the youth to go astray and society to be destroyed."
Widely condemned by Afghans on social media, the move is seen as part of the Taliban's war on music.
The extremist group banned music soon after seizing power in 2021 and has burned instruments and beaten musicians. That has led hundreds of musicians to flee the country in fear of their lives.
While most subreddits have ended their protests against the social network's profiteering, the popular r/malefashionadvice has held out — and now, Reddit is punishing its mods by taking it over.
As we reported last week, the moderators of r/malefashionadvice, a subreddit with than 5 million subscribers, had taken the community private and were pushing its users toward Discord and Substack instead. At the time, the moderators expected to be removed after receiving a message from a Reddit admin (employee), ModCodeofConduct, telling them they would be replaced if they didn’t reopen.
Three former moderators of r/malefashionadvice tell The Verge that they were removed from the subreddit on Thursday. “We more or less have been expecting the removal for the past few days,” one former mod, who asked to go by “Walker,” says in an email to The Verge. Now, the community’s modlist currently has just one moderator: ModCodeofConduct. Though despite the subreddit’s “restricted” status, somebody was able to make a post on Thursday that encourages community members to join the Discord.
If you have access to an IP range that has never seen the light of day, a stable residential connection, or access to your university network, you can help thousands of people connect to the internet in Turkmenistan.
This is just one episode in the history of the Islamic Republic’s vast and ongoing operations to pressure, suppress and silence the opposition beyond Iranian borders. These actions harm and endanger freedom of expression in democratic countries but, unfortunately, governments there have not done much, if anything, to prevent or to counter these threats.
Anti-blasphemy protests outside schools and cinemas by conservative Muslims are becoming a threat to national security, a new report has warned.
The review by the Henry Jackson Society think tank has warned that the failure to protect teachers and others from intimidation is amounting to a tacit anti-blasphemy law.
The government's harsh response to the veterans' protest has triggered widespread anger in Iran, which has been the scene of regular protests over soaring inflation and rising poverty and unemployment.
The separate moves by both majority-Muslim countries, announced in statements late Thursday, came amid heightened tensions between Sweden and Iraq over a Sweden-based Iraqi refugee who last month burnt pages of the Muslim religious text outside Stockholm's main mosque.
It's extremely hot in Iraq right now, the Iraqi government is headed by a religious political party and it is also the beginning of the second holiest month on the Islamic calendar, Iraqi political consultant Jassim Mohamad said as he explained the intensity of reactions from Iraq.
In particular the latter "means that the mood of the Iraqi street tends towards religious extremism," Mohamad, director of the European Centre for Counterterrorism and Intelligence Studies, based in the western German city of Bonn, told DW.
"It could also be an opportunity for the cleric al-Sadr's group to reappear on the political scene and position itself in opposition to the Iraqi government," he added. Al-Sadr officially exited Iraqi politics in 2022, but the religious leader still has the ability to call large numbers of demonstrators onto the street.
The Social Media Law, enacted on October 1, 2020, imposes an obligation on social media providers with over one million users in Turkey to have a legal representative within the country. Failure to adhere to this requirement can result in progressive sanctions, including monetary fines, advertising bans, and bandwidth throttling for non-compliant platforms.
Since being sent to prison, he has reportedly been subjected to torture in an effort to extract a confession that he supports the People's Mujahedin of Iran, which is outlawed in Iran.
The rate of executions in Iran has been rising sharply, particularly in the wake of widespread protests that swept across the country last year following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in police custody for an alleged head scarf violation.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his legal team believe that Assange may be extradited to the United States before the end of summer.
It is unfortunately time for us to prepare for court proceedings, and so far, you came through for us marvelously.
Speaking after Sherwan Sherwani was sentenced to 4 years in prison, journalist Umêd Beroà Ÿki said: "It is Mesrur Barzani's decision to sentence à žêrwan à žêrwani to 4 years in prison. The country cannot be ruled by a police and military mentality. Opposition in Kurdistan is being silenced. Those who silence the opposition voices of Behdinan today will silence all of us tomorrow. For this reason, we all need to take to the streets to oppose this unlawful decision.”
Journalist Umêd Beroski was allegedly abducted by KDP forces on Thursday night, just hours after criticizing Mesrur Barzani.
“Ted Lasso” star Jason Sudekis and other top movie and TV actors joined picket lines alongside screenwriters Friday on the first full day of a walkout that has become Hollywood’s biggest labor fight in decades.
Diversity advocates are pushing to end legacy admissions while conservatives are taking steps that will make it harder for students of color to go to college, critics say.
“We are demanding a safe work environment where we are not straining, pulling muscles from lifting heavy packages, or tripping over boxes falling off the conveyor belt,” said Alicia Ozier, one of the strikers at the delivery station.
> She and her co-workers walked out after Amazon retaliated by refusing to accommodate her when she sustained an injury on the job.
On Wednesday, both SAG-AFTRA and the WGA filed formal unfair labor practice charges against Universal Pictures for retaliating against picketers. SAG-AFTRA claimed that the studio had tried to direct the picket line to an unsafe construction site across the street. When workers picketed in front of the studio instead, SAG-AFTRA alleges that the studio trimmed the trees in response. An investigation by the city of Los Angeles found that no permits had been issued for the trimming—meaning that Universal Pictures had trimmed the trees in violation of city policy.
Improbable as it may seem, Hollywood, Calif., is now arguably the epicenter of labor strife in the United States. For more than two months, the screenwriters have been out on strike. Now, Hollywood’s actors have joined them. It is the first time in 63 years that writers and actors have struck simultaneously. Roughly 160,000 actors belong to SAG-AFTRA, and 11,500 writers are members of the Writers Guild of America. That’s an awful lot of people flexing their economic muscle simultaneously.
Beginning in May, the Taliban instituted a policy allowing only male medical students to take the Exit Supplementary Exam, according to the latest updated issue of the U.N.'s Human rights situation in Afghanistan report.
Women's rights have been eroded heavily in Afghanistan since the Taliban re-established control over the country and its population of 40.1 million in late August of 2021.
Women in the western Afghan city of Herat say they have been harassed and threatened by members of the Taliban’s notorious morality police for not wearing the hijab, or Islamic head scarf.
The complaints come a week after the Taliban deployed more members of the morality police across Afghanistan’s third-largest city, according to local residents who spoke to RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.
But the charity, which has over 10,000 volunteers across Iran, has come under mounting pressure from the authorities in recent years. In 2021, an Iranian court ordered the independent NGO be dissolved, a ruling that was upheld by an appeals court last year.
In July 2021, the charity's founder, Sharmin Meymandinejad, was arrested and charged with insulting Iran's leaders. He was kept in detention for months, during which he alleges he was tortured.
And indeed, AI could herald a sea change in film and television production, which has alarmed the unions representing the screenwriters and actors. Writers fear that programs like ChatGPT could be used to write entire screenplays. And actors are fighting for the right to their own image and voice: Modern algorithms can create a digital likeness of them that could be used endlessly without additional payment, and the same could be done with voices, say concerned Hollywood creators.
Iranian rights activist Sepideh Gholian was removed from a court during a public session of her trial because she refused to accept a judge's order to wear a "chador," a traditional full-body cloak that leaves only the face exposed.
The judiciary-affiliated Mizan news agency said Gholian entered the court on July 19 with a "very small" piece of cloth on her head, which she later removed, prompting the judge to order her removal.
After we got the go-ahead to start developing PCAS (see an update on PCAS here), I had meetings with a wide range of liberal arts and sciences faculty.
My main activity for the last year has been building two new courses for our new Program in Computing for the Arts and Sciences (PCAS), which I’ve blogged about recently here (with video of a talk about PCAS) and here where I described our launch.
The report, titled Five Walled Gardens, analyzes the problems caused by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta (Facebook). Mozilla conducted a survey to find out how users around the world use browsers, and it wasn't impressed with the results. Over 6000 participants from Australia, U.S., U.K., France, India and Kenya took the survey, they were asked about their experience with using web browsers, changing the default browser, etc.
This was not huge news at the time. Kids today certainly don’t read about it in history class. And yet the impact of the policy shift, along with court rulings limiting the scope of antitrust law, has been enormous. In the four decades since, the American economy has grown dangerously concentrated, dominated by a shrinking number of airlines, banks, tech companies, and pharmaceutical firms (to name just a few examples). Corporate titans have amassed outsize influence over the political process, smothered start-ups, and often treated consumers with shocking indifference. Study any dysfunction in American economic life long enough—runaway health-care costs, baby-formula shortages, regional inequality—and you’re likely to find corporate concentration among the causes.
The rap producer known as Pone, who has A.L.S., speaks through a computer that makes him sound robotic. He asked a comic impersonator to try to recapture his distinctive sound.
The kerning is rather awful in all of these PDF specimens, at times jarringly so. I suspect, or at least hope, the problem is with the web version of Word (which I presume has its own text rendering engine), not the fonts themselves. Look, for example, at the words milliner and Uncle (which looks like “Unde” in some of them) in the sample text. If these fonts were available for download, I’d have typeset the specimens using better software, but they’re not, so I can’t. I suppose I could fish out the web fonts used by Microsoft 365, but this whole endeavor has consumed enough of my time as it is.
Judge Orrick warned them that their claims – that the fact AI could generate images based on text descriptions containing their names violated copyright laws – are unlikely to hold up in court on their own.
"I don't think the claim regarding output images is plausible at the moment, because there's no substantial similarity between images created by the artists and the AI systems," he said.
Neither Time nor BuzzFeed News sought permission from Brauer or Hunley to license and use these photographs in their reporting for the respective events. Both Hunley and Brauer filed a class action lawsuit against Instagram for allowing image embedding without the original artists’ permission. The lawsuit accuses Instagram of “inducement of copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and vicarious copyright infringement.”
Amid ongoing trilogue negotiations over the EU’s AI Act, music industry organizations including the IFPI, IMPALA, and GESAC are urging lawmakers to assure that the legislation compels artificial intelligence systems to “comply with the existing EU copyright framework.”
The mentioned entities, in addition to the ICMP, the IMPF, and a number of non-music media representatives, jointly called for “meaningful transparency obligations on AI” via a brief release that was emailed to DMN.
A complaint filed by DirecTV in Argentina has led to raids on the alleged operators of Digital TV, a pirate IPTV platform servicing an estimated 85,000 customers. A specialist cybercrime unit led by a local prosecutor identified a 22-year-old IT technician as the service's founder and now the general public knows him too. Local media immediately published his name while local TV channel Canal26 went on to broadcast images of the suspect to 4.5 million viewers.
Most pirate sites do everything they can to avoid getting noticed by anti-piracy groups and investigators. Spanish torrent site DonTorrent is clearly playing in a different league. The site's operators openly taunt the most effective anti-piracy coalition ACE, while ridiculing OSINT investigators that approach them.
So, Mirka was driving. I don't know the make and / or model of the vehicle because (one) I am oblivious to the automobile world and (two) everything else happening may have been a bit distracting. In the passenger's seat was an abomination. What sort of abomination was it? It could have been a very kind abomination for all I know. I am unsure. Whatever personality traits it had, it was still an abomination, and I'm not only stating that in regard to its appearance. There was a particular smell. It wasn't exactly a stench, but had a way of worming itself into the molecular structure of the atmosphere itself. It spoke from time to time, but only to Mirka, and in a guttural tongue unlike Czech or Spanish or English or any other language I've heard in the last few millennia.
Here is some of what I have planned for the official Project Gemini capsule in the near future. It's not a complete list, but it's stuff I'm ready and feel the need to share at this point.
As mentioned in my previous news post about the FAQ updates, there will be a second round of FAQ updates to come. The second update will be less substantial than the first, rest assured! The focus will be mostly on section 4, "Protocol design", which went through the previous update with minimal change. In particular, I want to re-write the "design criteria" section, to put more emphasis on some things and less on others.
I am painfully aware that on the face of it this has the feel of trying to rewrite history, but I promise I'm not trying to change what Gemini is or was about. It's just that some things that really were fundamental guiding principles, like non-extensibility, are mentioned in passing in individual answers rather than being clearly highlighted like they should have been. Other things, like giving full control of styling to the client, weren't considered such a huge deal in the early days of the project when the FAQ was first written, but today this is considered by many to be one of Gemini's core strengths, and from the point of view of somebody coming from the web who is trying to understand Gemini it's a really major difference which ought to be emphasised. Maybe it falls under the broader banner of "user autonomy", which is again something that really served as a guiding principle but didn't make the cut when the early FAQ was written with a target audience of gopher and pubnix geeks. In short, the updates to section 4 will be a retrospective reframing of the real, actual, genuine design history for a wider audience. I just want folks to actually understand what we are and are not trying to do here!