Most of us don’t give much thought to getting dressed every day, but for the elderly and disabled, seemingly simple tasks – like buttoning a shirt – can prove complicated. Fashion design students recently looked at low-tech ways to make clothes smarter. Tina Trinh reports.
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Month: March 2019
Once stigmatized and banned across the United States, marijuana is now legalized in many parts of the country, primarily for medicinal use, but increasingly also for recreation. As cannabis becomes mainstream, Americans in their 70s and 80s who used to get high on marijuana in their youth, are now using cannabis-infused products to relieve old age aches and pains. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has this report.
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At one atom thick, graphene is one of those miracle materials that many say is the stuff of the future. The future may be now as graphene’s potential is being realized as the key to quick efficient 5G networks, and the future of telecommunications. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Influential figures in Washington are calling for the establishment of a bilateral free-trade agreement with Taiwan, even as U.S. and Chinese officials move toward a resolution of their long-running trade dispute.
“We have a lot of issues with Beijing, and a lot of opportunities with Taiwan,” said Edwin J. Feulner in an interview with VOA. Feulner is the founder and former president of the Heritage Foundation, an influential think tank in Washington known for its conservative views and ties with the Republican Party.
Feulner thinks trade negotiations between Washington and Beijing will most likely conclude within 60 days, at which point a full-force push for a bilateral trade agreement with Taiwan could begin. Those talks would be “more or less independent of what’s going on with bilateral negotiations with Beijing,” he said.
WATCH: Feulner: Taiwan Not Seen by Administration as ‘Bargaining Chip’
Feulner predicted “huge bipartisan support on Capitol Hill” for such an agreement. “Both Republican and Democrat, both House and Senate members, are overwhelmingly positive that a free China can exist, and can be there in the world community today,” he said.
WATCH: Feulner: ‘We Intend to Strengthen Our Friends’
However, any such deal could be expected to anger authorities in Beijing, who see Taiwan as a renegade Chinese province and adamantly oppose any initiatives that treat the island as an independent country or entity.
The international community has seen how Beijing tries to make Taiwan pay for any inroads it makes toward international recognition, said Scott W. Harold, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, a global policy research group. But Beijing’s problem, he said, “is that they’ve dialed the pain up so high, so often, that it’s hard to see what more they can do.”
On Wednesday, Feulner invited Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen to participate by Skype in a conference at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. Tsai, on a stopover in Hawaii after visiting three Indo-Pacific nations that still maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, told the audience her government was enthusiastic about the prospect of bilateral trade talks with the U.S.
“If we can have a breakthrough in trade with the U.S., this will be very helpful in terms of encouraging many other trading partners to do the same,” she said, adding that a trade deal with the United States would reduce Taipei’s reliance on China “as they increase their political influence in Taiwan, primarily using economic actors.”
Tsai expressed hope that talks with Washington will include discussion about Taiwan’s role in the global high-tech supply chain “amid concerns of technology theft and control over 5G networks” by Beijing.
Two prominent members of the U.S. Congress joined Feulner in welcoming Tsai to the U.S. and expressed their support for a bilateral free-trade agreement. Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, a Republican and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the pursuit of a bilateral free-trade agreement with Taiwan “imperative.”
Common values
Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the most senior Republican on its subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific and Nonproliferation, told Tsai and the audience that “trade is important between our nations, but more important than that is our common belief in the values we hold, the democracies that we have together. That in itself is the thing that really binds us together.”
Steve Yates, former U.S. government official and longtime observer of U.S.-Taiwan relations, told VOA that President Donald Trump has “unhesitatingly signed” a series of resolutions and bills in support of closer ties between Washington and Taipei. To him, this signals it might be time “for the administration and Congress to be able to cross that bridge and get some results.”
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Facebook was charged with discrimination by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development because of its ad-targeting system.
HUD said Thursday Facebook is allowing advertisers to exclude people based on their neighborhood by drawing a red line around those neighborhoods on a map and giving advertisers the option of showing ads only to men or only to women.
The agency also claims Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude people that the social media company classified as parents; non-American-born; non-Christian; interested in accessibility; interested in Hispanic culture or a wide variety of other interests that closely align with the Fair Housing Act’s protected classes.
HUD, which is pursuing civil charges and potential monetary awards that could run into the millions, said Facebook’s ad platform is “encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination” because it allows advertisers to exclude people who they don’t want to see their ads.
The claim from HUD comes less than a week after Facebook said it would overhaul its ad-targeting systems to prevent discrimination in housing , credit and employment ads as part of a legal settlement with a group that includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Fair Housing Alliance and others.
The technology at the heart of the clashes is what has helped turned Facebook into a goliath with annual revenue of close to $56 billion.
It can offer advertisers and groups the ability to direct messages with precision to exactly the crowd that they want to see it. The potential is as breathtaking as it is potentially destructive.
Facebook has taken fire for allowing groups to target groups of people identified as “Jew-haters” and Nazi sympathizers. There remains the fallout from the 2016 election, when, among other things, Facebook allowed fake Russian accounts to buy ads targeting U.S. users to enflame political divisions.
The company is wrestling with several government investigations in the U.S. and Europe over its data and privacy practices. A shakeup this month that ended with the departure of some of Facebook’s highest ranking executives raised questions about the company’s direction.
The departures came shortly after CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out a new “privacy-focused” vision for social networking. He has promised to transform Facebook from a company known for devouring the personal information shared by its users to one that gives people more ways to communicate in truly private fashion, with their intimate thoughts and pictures shielded by encryption in ways that Facebook itself can’t read.
However, HUD Secretary Ben Carson said Thursday there is little difference between the potential for discrimination in Facebook’s technology, and discrimination that has taken place for years.
“Facebook is discriminating against people based upon who they are and where they live,” Carson said. “Using a computer to limit a person’s housing choices can be just as discriminatory as slamming a door in someone’s face.”
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.
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Britons desperately wanting some clarity in the country’s interminable Brexit saga were disappointed Wednesday when lawmakers plunged the country’s proposed exit from the European Union, after half-a-century of membership, into further disarray, failing to find a majority for any way forward after a series of so-called indicative votes.
The hope had been a majority might emerge from the eight different options they voted on, which included staying in the EU, leaving with no withdrawal agreement, remaining in the bloc’s customs union and/or single market or holding a second Brexit referendum.
“Parliament Finally Has Its Say: No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.” Britain’s Guardian newspaper announced on its front-page Thursday.
“In summary: the Commons has now overwhelmingly rejected every single type of Brexit, and no Brexit,” tweeted Michel Deacon, the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketch-writer. The option of leaving without a deal was defeated by a huge margin. So, too, was a motion that would see Brexit cancelled altogether.
It wasn’t what the organizers of the indicative votes in the House of Commons had hoped would be the upshot. Backed by the opposition parties and pro-EU Conservative rebels they seized control of the parliamentary agenda from the government, the first time in 140 years that Downing Street hasn’t called the shots on what can be debated and when on the floor of the House of Commons.
“This is going well. Putting the Commons in charge was clearly a brilliant idea,” tweeted Andrew Neil, the arch-Brexiter presenter of a BBC politics show. The EU’s chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker said Britain’s intentions had become more mysterious than those of the mythological sphinxes guarding ancient tombs.
More confusion
To add to the confusion in London, just before the indicative voting, an exhausted Prime Minister Theresa May told her Conservative lawmakers she would relinquish the party leadership and resign as prime minister, but only if her contentious Brexit withdrawal agreement, which parliament has twice rejected, is passed.
May’s announcement was a last-ditch bid to persuade Conservative Brexiters to back her withdrawal agreement, a deal they disapprove of because it would keep Britain closely aligned with the European Union and obedient to its rules while a longer-term trade relationship is negotiated.
A hardcore of Conservative Eurosceptics and ten lawmakers from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, who May has to rely on because her government is a minority one, have adamantly refused to back her deal. They say the plan poses a risk to the integrity of the union of the United Kingdom. The DUP believes if it took effect, it would cause trade differences between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and create in effect a “border down the Irish Sea.”
There were no signs Thursday that May will be able to persuade enough holdouts to vote for her deal, if it is put before the Commons for a third time, leaving Britain on course to crash out of the EU without a deal on April 12, unless the British government requests, for the second time, a Brexit postponement.
EU negotiators have indicated they might be open to another delay, but only if it is a lengthy one of a year or more.
It remains unclear how the political deadlock in London can be broken. The idea of leaving without a transition deal has strong opposition in the Commons and would likely be blocked by a majority of lawmakers.
Frustration on EU side
EU negotiators, out of exasperation, could decide to raise the stakes and decline another Brexit postponement, hoping to force the Commons to stop Brexit altogether, say some analysts. But it is unlikely they would risk such a high stakes gamble, fearing that might push Britain into crashing out by accident as much as by design.
European Council President, Donald Tusk, said last week in Brussels that the European Union will work with Britain for as long as it takes and on Wednesday he urged European lawmakers to be open to a long delay in Britain’s departure.
That leaves Britain trapped — paralyzed by a deadlocked House of Commons, itself a reflection of a country split down the middle over staying a member of the EU or quitting. With all avenues seemingly leading to dead-ends, there is more talk now in the British parliament of the need to hold an general election, hoping that returns a parliament that is not so undecided.
Behind-the-scenes Cabinet ministers and Conservative party officials are war-gaming calling an election three years ahead of schedule. David Davies, a pro-Brexit Conservative MP who quit as Brexit minister, says “a general election is a lot more likely now.” He added: “I don’t say it’s going to happen, but clearly if a government can’t get through on the one issue which we were really elected to deal with at the last election it puts us all in a very difficult situation.”
The problem in calling a snap election is the British public doesn’t want another one so soon after the Conservatives called another early poll two years ago, according to opinion surveys, with just 12 percent backing the idea.
The other problem for the Conservatives is that they would be fighting an election with a leader who has announced she intends to step down soon and heading a party that’s even more deeply and rancorously divided than the main opposition Labour party.
In the division lobbies on Wednesday some Conservative lawmakers on different sides of the Brexit question were spotted cursing each other and one clash prompted the intervention of colleagues, who feared a brawl might break out.
Commons in charge
Organizers of Wednesday’s indicative voting are placing some hopes that the Commons can still break the deadlock. They say clarity could be reached on Monday when lawmakers are due for another session of indicative voting, this time on the options that attracted the most support.
Labour’s Stephen Doughty said they never expected the votes on Wednesday to reveal a majority for one option. The whole idea was to narrow down the alternatives that have the most support and for parliament then to reconsider.
The two closest votes Wednesday were for staying in the EU’s customs union and another for a second referendum confirming any Brexit departure. Both attracted more votes than May’s deal has got the two occasions it was voted on in parliament. Campaigners for a second referendum appear buoyed.
They believe Britons have shifted their attitudes on Brexit since the 2016 referendum, pointing to a new polling study by veteran pollster John Curtice, which indicates voters are becoming increasingly doubtful about Brexit. The study suggests two and half years after the plebiscite, leaving the European Union may not now reflect majority thinking.
British cybersecurity inspectors have found significant technical issues in Chinese telecom supplier Huawei’s software that they say pose risks for the country’s telecom companies.
The annual report Thursday said there is only “limited assurance” that long-term national security risks from Huawei’s involvement in critical British telecom networks can be adequately managed.
The report adds pressure on Huawei, which is at the center of a geopolitical battle between the U.S. and China.
The U.S. government wants its European allies to ban the company from next-generation mobile networks set to roll out in coming years over fears Huawei gear could be used for cyberespionage.
The report noted that Britain’s cybersecurity authorities did not believe the defects were a result of “Chinese state interference.”
Iceland’s budget carrier WOW Air said it had ceased operations and cancelled all flights on Thursday, potentially stranding thousands of passengers.
The collapse of the troubled airline, which transports more than a third of those traveling to Iceland, comes after buyout talks with rival Icelandair collapsed earlier this week.
“All WOW Air flights have been cancelled. Passengers are advised to check available flights with other airlines,” the carrier said in a statement.
“Some airlines may offer flights at a reduced rate, so-called rescue fares, in light of the circumstances. Information on those airlines will be published, when it becomes available.”
WOW Air, founded in 2011, exploited Iceland’s location in the middle of the North Atlantic to offer a low-cost service between Europe and North America as well as tapping into a tourist boom to the volcanic island.
However it had flown into financial trouble in recent years due to heightened competition and rising fuel prices, and had been searching for an investor for months.
On Monday WOW Air said it was in talks to restructure its debt with its creditors after Icelandair ended brief negotiations over buying a stake in the no-frills airline.
WOW Air was left needing $42 million to save the company, according to the Frettabladid newspaper.
The privately-owned airline has undergone major restructuring after posting a pre-tax loss of almost $42 million for the first nine months of 2018.
It has reduced its fleet from 20 to 11 aircraft, eliminating several destinations, including those to the US, and cutting 111 full-time jobs.
A report by a governmental work group has warned that a WOW Air bankruptcy would lead to a drop in Iceland’s gross domestic product, a drop in the value of the krona and rising inflation.
President Donald Trump says the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice will review the case of Jussie Smollett, after Chicago police dropped charges against the television actor who was accused of falsely reporting being a target of a hate crime.
Writing on Twitter, Trump called the case “outrageous” and an “embarrassment to our Nation.” So far there has been no statement from the FBI or Justice Department on the matter.
Smollett’s attorneys announced Tuesday their client’s record had been “wiped clean.
A spokeswoman for the Cook Country prosecutor’s office said “After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr Smollett’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case.” She added that Smollett will forfeit a $10,000 bond payment.
But Chicago police as well as mayor Rahm Emanuel have spoken out angrily about the development. “This is without a doubt a whitewash of justice,” Emanuel said, complaining that the grand jury in the case heard “only a sliver” of the evidence.
Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson said, “”Do I think justice was served? No. What do I think justice is? I think this city is still owed an apology.”
Smollett, who is black and gay, responded publicly to the decision, thanking family, friends, and fans who supported him and vowing, “I have been truthful and consistent on every level since day one. I would not be my mother’s son if I was capable of one drop of what I have been accused of.”
Smollett reported in January that he had been sent a threatening letter and was then attacked on the street by two men he didn’t know who wrapped a rope around his neck and attempted to pour bleach on him while yelling racial and homophobic slurs. He also said they yelled, “this is MAGA country,” referring to President Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
Police later said that Smollett had staged the attack himself, paying two physical trainers $3,500 to carry it out.
Smollett plays a gay character on the television show “Empire,” which is filmed in Chicago.
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So far this year, more than 300 people have contracted measles in 15 states in the U.S. Almost half of those cases occurred in Rockland County, just north of New York City.
Because of the outbreak, which has lasted nearly six months, county officials have declared a state of emergency and are banning anyone who is unvaccinated from frequenting public places.
“Anyone who is under 18 years of age and is not vaccinated against the measles will be prohibited from public places until the declaration expires in 30 days or until they receive their first shot of MMR,” said Ed Day, county executive.
WATCH: New York County Declares Emergency Over Measles
Public places include shopping malls, restaurants, buses and trains. Police will not be asking for vaccination records, but parents can face a fine of $500 and as much as six months in jail if they refuse to vaccinate their children.
The outbreak is concentrated in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
‘Roll of the dice’
The county executive says it is a matter of getting parents to understand how dangerous measles is.
“Every new case is a roll of the dice,” Day said. “It could bring on pneumonia, encephalitis, the swelling of the brain, or cause premature birth, which can lead to complications and even death.”
And, he said, it’s a matter of keeping those who can’t get vaccinated safe.
“What about the infants who are out there with mom and dad? My newborn grandson is an infant. What about those who are pregnant and those with compromised immune systems like cancer patients and survivors? These are the people we all need to step up for,” Day said.
Vaccine rates vary
Vaccine rates in the U.S. are still high. A CDC study found that 94 percent of children in the U.S. receive the first dose of vaccines that protect against measles, mumps, rubella and other vaccine preventable diseases.
But vaccines that require boosters, including the vaccine against measles, had lower rates of coverage.
Some states allow parents who oppose vaccinating their children for religious or philosophical reasons to opt out. Vaccination rates in these states have dropped steadily. And as they have dropped, cases of measles have increased.
Vaccines proven safe
Some parents wrongly believe vaccines can cause autism in children. Study after study has shown that not to be true. Dr. Frank Esper, a pediatrician with the Cleveland Clinic, defends vaccinating children.
“These vaccines are well shown to be safe,” he said. “We have tested them. We have followed children who have received these vaccines. We know how safe they are.”
Still, some parents remain unconvinced. Rockland County is offering free measles vaccinations in an effort to end the outbreak.
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So far this year, more than 300 people have had measles in 15 states in the U.S. Almost half have occurred in Rockland County just north of New York City. County officials are now banning anyone who is unvaccinated from frequenting public places. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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Most of us don’t give much thought to getting dressed every day, but for the elderly and disabled, seemingly simple tasks like buttoning a shirt can prove complicated. Fashion design students recently looked at low-tech ways to make clothes smarter. VOA’s Tina Trinh reports.
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Facebook has announced it is banning praise, support, and representation of white nationalism and separatism on its platform and on Instagram, which it also owns.
The company made the announcement Wednesday in a blog post, saying, “It’s clear that these concepts are deeply linked to organized hate groups and have no place on our services.”
The post says Facebook has long banned hateful speech based on race, ethnicity and religion, though it had permitted expressions of white nationalism and separatism because it seemed separate from white supremacy.
“But over the past three months,” the post read, “our conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world … have confirmed that white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups.”
“Going forward,” it continued, “while people will still be able to demonstrate pride in their ethnic heritage, we will not tolerate praise or support for white nationalism and separatism.”
It said people searching for terms associated with white supremacy will be directed to information about the group “Life After Hate,” which is an organization that helps violent extremists leave their hate groups through intervention, education, support groups and outreach.
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A huge fan of rock legends Queen, Peng Yanzi rushed to see Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic about the band’s late lead singer, Freddie Mercury, while he was traveling in Britain last October.
It was a touching film that made him cry hard, Peng says. He loved it enough to watch it a second time in his home city of Guangzhou after the film garnered a surprise China release.
But the version of Bohemian Rhapsody he saw this past weekend was notably different from the original. Moviegoers in China say key scenes about Mercury’s sexuality have been either abruptly muted or cut altogether.
“The cut scenes really affect the movie,” said Peng, a Chinese LGBT rights activist. “The film talks about how [Mercury] became himself, and his sexuality is an important part of becoming who he was.”
Scenes that were deleted include one in which Mercury reveals to his then-wife that he is not heterosexual. In the part of the film where Mercury tells the band that he has AIDS, the dialogue goes silent.
“It’s a pity” the scenes were removed, said Hua Zile, chief editor of VCLGBT, an LGBT-themed account with more than a million followers on Weibo, one of China’s top social media platforms.
“This kind of deletion weakens his gay identity. It’s a bit disrespectful to his real experience and makes the character superficial,” Hua said. “There is no growth and innermost being of him.” Hua said he also watched both versions of the movie, in the semi-autonomous region of Hong Kong, which enjoys greater freedoms from censorship than mainland China, and the Chinese city of Guangzhou.
The missing scenes confused some moviegoers. Su Lei read Mercury’s biography online before watching the movie Wednesday afternoon so that she could better understand the plot and character development.
“Now it’s a very open era, influenced by some American and British TV dramas. People now can understand and accept this,” said Su, who works for an accounting firm. She called the film “inspiring” and said cutting the gay content was “unnecessary.”
Lu, a freelancer in Shanghai who asked to be identified only by his family name, watched the original version online after seeing the movie in a Chinese theater, where he said he found parts of the dialogue incoherent.
Lu said that despite some lines being erased, it was still obvious the main character is gay. “But the movie has been deleted like this, which affects its entirety,” he said.
Censorship in China
While LGBT content is generally less taboo than other topics that Chinese authorities deem sensitive, same-sex relationships are still virtually absent from mainstream media.
In 2017, a government-affiliated internet TV association warned streaming content providers against depicting homosexuality, labeling it an “abnormal” sexual behavior. A similar move last year from Weibo provoked an outcry that prompted the website to backtrack and state that a “cleanup of games and cartoons will no longer target gay content.”
When Chinese video site Mango TV livestreamed the Academy Awards in February, Bohemian Rhapsody lead actor Rami Malek’s speech was subtitled to read “special group” when in fact he said “gay man.”
Mango TV also censored two LGBT-themed performances during last year’s Eurovision song contest, causing Eurovision to terminate its partnership with the Chinese broadcaster in the middle of the competition season.
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Computers have become so smart during the past 20 years that people don’t think twice about chatting with digital assistants like Alexa and Siri or seeing their friends automatically tagged in Facebook pictures.
But making those quantum leaps from science fiction to reality required hard work from computer scientists like Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. The trio tapped into their own brainpower to make it possible for machines to learn like humans, a breakthrough now commonly known as “artificial intelligence,” or AI.
Their insights and persistence were rewarded Wednesday with the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as technology industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. It comes with a $1 million prize funded by Google, a company where AI has become part of its DNA.
The award marks the latest recognition of the instrumental role that artificial intelligence will likely play in redefining the relationship between humanity and technology in the decades ahead.
“Artificial intelligence is now one of the fastest-growing areas in all of science and one of the most talked-about topics in society,” said Cherri Pancake, president of the Association for Computing Machinery, the group behind the Turing Award.
Although they have known each other for than 30 years, Bengio, Hinton and LeCun have mostly worked separately on technology known as neural networks. These are the electronic engines that power tasks such as facial and speech recognition, areas where computers have made enormous strides over the past decade. Such neural networks also are a critical component of robotic systems that are automating a wide range of other human activity, including driving.
Their belief in the power of neural networks was once mocked by their peers, Hinton said. No more. He now works at Google as a vice president and senior fellow while LeCun is chief AI scientist at Facebook. Bengio remains immersed in academia as a University of Montreal professor in addition to serving as scientific director at the Artificial Intelligence Institute in Quebec.
“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton said in an interview with The Associated Press. “They thought we were very misguided and what we were doing was a very surprising thing for apparently intelligent people to waste their time on. My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what are doing is silly.”
Now, some people are worried that the results of the researchers’ efforts might spiral out of control.
While the AI revolution is raising hopes that computers will make most people’s lives more convenient and enjoyable, it’s also stoking fears that humanity eventually will be living at the mercy of machines.
Bengio, Hinton and LeCun share some of those concerns — especially the doomsday scenarios that envision AI technology developed into weapons systems that wipe out humanity.
But they are far more optimistic about the other prospects of AI — empowering computers to deliver more accurate warnings about floods and earthquakes, for instance, or detecting health risks, such as cancer and heart attacks, far earlier than human doctors.
“One thing is very clear, the techniques that we developed can be used for an enormous amount of good affecting hundreds of millions of people,” Hinton said.
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi says the country has shot down a satellite in low orbit, entering an exclusive club of nations that have developed anti-satellite weapons.
In an unexpected address to the nation Wednesday, Modi called it a major breakthrough in the country’s space capability. A missile fired from eastern India brought down the satellite in low Earth orbit about 300 kilometers away in an operation that lasted “three minutes,” he said.
Modi said the test was not designed to create “an atmosphere of war.”
“I want to assure the world community that the new capability is not against anyone. This is to secure and defend fast-growing India,” he said.
India is the fourth country after the United States, China and Russia to have used an anti-satellite weapon.
“India has registered its name in the list of space superpowers. Until now, only three countries in the world had achieved this feat. There can be no prouder moment for any Indian,” Modi said.
The satellite interceptor was designed domestically by Indian space scientists.
India’s foreign ministry said the test is not directed against any country, but meant to provide the nation with “credible deterrence against threats to our growing space-based assets from long-range missiles and proliferation in the types and numbers of missiles.”
The statement also said that India “has no intention of entering into an arms race in outer space.”
Disputes with China, Pakistan
Security experts in New Delhi called the test significant and said it had been developed with an eye on China, which carried out an anti-satellite test a decade ago.
“Low Earth orbit satellites are usually used by the adversary state for tactical information,” said Bharat Karnad, a security analyst with the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. “We essentially are signaling to China that we can take out your satellites that might be transmitting all kinds of data from onboard sensors, and that China therefore will not have the edge it had until we tested and proved our capability for pre-emption.”
Satellites provide crucial intelligence and communications in modern warfare, and the ability to destroy them is considered an advanced capability.
India has border disputes with both China and Pakistan, and is also wary of the close defense partnership between its two neighbors. It fought a brief war with China in 1963 and three with Pakistan, the last in 1971.
The announcement of the anti-satellite test comes a month after spiraling tensions with archrival Pakistan had raised fears of another conflict between the two countries. The hostilities erupted after unprecedented airstrikes by India inside Pakistan to target a suspected militant camp led to an aerial confrontation between the rivals.
Militarization of space
Experts say previous governments had hesitated from conducting a live anti-satellite test fearing an adverse reaction from major powers, but Modi has taken a tougher line on national security issues.
Security experts in India shrugged aside concerns that have been raised about militarization of space with the development of anti-satellite missiles. “If all the countries are doing it, then India with proven capabilities is not going to fall behind, is it?” according to Karnad.
India’s space program has developed launchers and satellites, and carried out missions to the moon and Mars.
New Delhi also tried to address concerns the debris from such tests can harm civilian and military satellite operations. The foreign ministry statement said India carried out its test in the lower atmosphere to ensure there was no debris and whatever was generated would “decay and fall back onto the Earth within weeks.”
Meanwhile, Modi, who faces elections in two weeks, came under attack from the opposition for trying to score a political point by announcing the test in a nationwide address.
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Health care has re-emerged as a major focus of U.S. political parties with the Trump administration advocating striking down the entire Affordable Care Act and Democrats introducing legislation to strengthen the law that has been in place since 2010.
The Justice Department on Monday backed a federal court ruling declaring the entire ACA unconstitutional on the basis that without the fines for not having health insurance, which a Republican-led Congress passed last year, the mandate for having coverage should not be allowed.
That went against the administration’s earlier position that while some parts of the ACA should be struck down, not all of it should be thrown out.
Trump told reporters Tuesday he wanted alternatives to the law, which was one of the chief policies enacted under his predecessor Barack Obama.
“The Republican Party will become ‘The Party of Healthcare!'” he wrote on Twitter.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer signaled his party is happy to take on the issue, especially following the end of the special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump’s campaign. Schumer said issues such as healthcare and climate change are much more important to voters.
The issue was a key part of the party’s 2018 congressional election strategy, which put Democrats back in control of the House of Representatives.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled Democratic proposals she says would improve upon the existing law, while accusing Republicans of working only to “destroy the affordable health care of America’s families.”
The legislation would seek to make health insurance plans more affordable by boosting subsidies to lower-income households, provide more protections for people with pre-existing conditions, and boost outreach and enrollment efforts to help people better understand what insurance options exist for them.
The legal battle over the existing law could end up at the Supreme Court, which previously upheld the individual mandate with its financial penalties as a legal tax Congress was allowed to impose. The five justices in the majority on that case remain on the court.
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The founder and all-female editorial board of the Vatican’s women’s magazine have resigned to protest what they call a campaign to discredit them and put them under the direct control of men. The editorial committee of Women Church World, a monthly supplement to the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano, claims the daily’s new editor has sabotaged the magazine after it denounced sexual abuse of nuns by the clergy. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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