Month: May 2023

The world must urgently assess the impact of generative artificial intelligence, G7 leaders said Saturday, announcing they will launch discussions this year on “responsible” use of the technology.

A working group will be set up to tackle issues from copyright to disinformation, the seven leading economies said in a final communique released during a summit in Hiroshima, Japan.

Text generation tools such as ChatGPT, image creators and music composed using AI have sparked delight, alarm and legal battles as creators accuse them of scraping material without permission.

Governments worldwide are under pressure to move quickly to mitigate the risks, with the chief executive of ChatGPT’s OpenAI telling U.S. lawmakers this week that regulating AI was essential.

“We recognise the need to immediately take stock of the opportunities and challenges of generative AI, which is increasingly prominent across countries and sectors,” the G7 statement said.

“We task relevant ministers to establish the Hiroshima AI process, through a G7 working group, in an inclusive manner … for discussions on generative AI by the end of this year,” it said.

“These discussions could include topics such as governance, safeguard of intellectual property rights including copyrights, promotion of transparency, response to foreign information manipulation, including disinformation, and responsible utilisation of these technologies.”

The new working group will be organized in cooperation with the OECD group of developed countries and the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), the statement added.

On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before a U.S. Senate panel and urged Congress to impose new rules on big tech.

He insisted that in time, generative AI developed by his company would one day “address some of humanity’s biggest challenges, like climate change and curing cancer.”

However, “we think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models,” he said.

European Parliament lawmakers this month also took a first step towards EU-wide regulation of ChatGPT and other AI systems.

The text is to be put to the full parliament next month for adoption before negotiations with EU member states on a final law.

“While rapid technological change has been strengthening societies and economies, the international governance of new digital technologies has not necessarily kept pace,” the G7 said.

For AI and other emerging technologies including immersive metaverses, “the governance of the digital economy should continue to be updated in line with our shared democratic values,” the group said.

Among others, these values include fairness, respect for privacy and “protection from online harassment, hate and abuse,” among others, it added.
…

The U.S. space agency NASA announced Friday it has awarded the Jeff Bezos-owned aerospace company Blue Origin a contract to build a second lunar lander for the Artemis V moon mission, aiming to land a crew on the moon by 2029.

At a Washington news conference, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said under the $3.4 billion contract, Blue Origin will design, develop, test and verify its Blue Moon lander to meet NASA’s human landing system requirements for recurring astronaut expeditions to the lunar surface, including docking with Gateway, a space station where crews will transfer in lunar orbit. 

Two years ago, Blue Origin made a bid on the contract NASA awarded to the Elon Musk-owned company SpaceX to build NASA’s initial human landing system to be used in the agency’s Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. In a release, the agency said it also directed SpaceX to evolve its design to meet the requirements for sustainable exploration on the moon.

Under its contract, Blue Origin will build a lander that meets the same sustainable requirements, including capabilities for a larger crew, longer missions and the delivery of more mass to the moon. NASA officials said the program is an important step toward their goal to establish “a regular cadence” of missions to the moon. 

And, NASA said, that competitive approach, using multiple providers, drives innovation, brings down costs and invests in commercial capabilities that will foster “a lunar economy.”

Nelson said Friday, “We are in a golden age of human spaceflight, which is made possible by NASA’s commercial and international partnerships. Together, we are making an investment in the infrastructure that will pave the way to land the first astronauts on Mars.”

The agency said the Artemis V project is the next step between extended lunar exploration capabilities and establishing a base on the moon to support recurring complex missions that would lead, eventually, to moon-to-Mars exploration.

Some information for this report was provided by Reuters. 
…

More than half of the world’s large lakes and reservoirs have shrunk since the early 1990s, chiefly because of climate change, intensifying concerns about water for agriculture, hydropower and human consumption, a study published Thursday found.

An international team of researchers reported that some of the world’s most important water sources — from the Caspian Sea between Europe and Asia to South America’s Lake Titicaca — lost water at a cumulative rate of about 22 gigatonnes per year for nearly three decades. That’s about 17 times the volume of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States.

Fangfang Yao, a surface hydrologist at the University of Virginia who led the study in the journal Science, said 56% of the decline in natural lakes was driven by climate warming and human consumption, with warming “the larger share of that.”

Climate scientists generally think that the world’s arid areas will become drier under climate change and wet areas will get wetter, but the study found significant water loss even in humid regions. “This should not be overlooked,” Yao said.

Scientists assessed almost 2,000 large lakes using satellite measurements combined with climate and hydrological models.

They found that unsustainable human use, changes in rainfall and runoff, sedimentation, and rising temperatures have driven lake levels down globally, with 53% of lakes showing a decline from 1992 to 2020.

Nearly 2 billion people who live in drying lake basins are directly affected, and many regions have faced water shortages in recent years.

Scientists and campaigners have long said it is necessary to prevent global warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. The world has already warmed about 1.1C (1.9F).

Thursday’s study found unsustainable human use dried up lakes such as the Aral Sea in Central Asia and the Dead Sea in the Middle East, while lakes in Afghanistan, Egypt and Mongolia were hit by rising temperatures, which can increase water loss to the atmosphere.

Water levels rose in a quarter of the lakes, often as a result of dam construction in remote areas such as the Inner Tibetan Plateau.
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Mexican authorities said Thursday that they were trying to locate several hundred people, including U.S. nationals, potentially at risk of developing fungal meningitis after medical treatment near the border.

The announcement came a day after the United States warned that suspected fungal infections had led to severe illness and even death among U.S. residents returning from the Mexican city of Matamoros.

Around 400 people were being traced, including roughly 80 from the United States, according to the health minister of Tamaulipas state, home to Matamoros, which sits across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

“They’re going to be located to rule out that they are infected,” Vicente Joel Hernandez told AFP.

Two clinics, River Side Surgical Center and Clinica K-3, have been closed following the death of an American and the infection of seven other people, he said.

According to the U.S. government, the affected travelers had medical or surgical procedures, including liposuction, that involved injecting anesthetic into the area around the spinal column.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised canceling any procedure that involves an epidural injection in Matamoros until the problem is resolved.

It urged anyone experiencing symptoms of fungal meningitis after having such an injection in the city to go to a hospital emergency department immediately.

The symptoms include fever, headache, stiff neck, nausea, vomiting, confusion and sensitivity to light, it said, adding that fungal meningitis infections are not contagious or transmitted person-to-person.

Mexico is one of the world’s top medical tourism destinations, largely due to U.S. residents crossing the border for everything from dental work to cosmetic surgery and cancer treatment.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday refused to clear a path for victims of attacks by militant organizations to hold social media companies liable under a federal anti-terrorism law for failing to prevent the groups from using their platforms, handing a victory to Twitter.

The justices, in a unanimous decision, reversed a lower court’s ruling that had revived a lawsuit against Twitter by the American relatives of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian man killed in a 2017 attack during New Year’s celebration in a Istanbul nightclub claimed by the Islamic State militant group. 

The case was one of two that the Supreme Court weighed in its current term aimed at holding internet companies accountable for contentious content posted by users – an issue of growing concern for the public and U.S. lawmakers. 

The justices on Thursday, in a similar case against Google-owned YouTube, part of Alphabet Inc, sidestepped ruling on a bid to narrow a federal law protecting internet companies from lawsuits for content posted by their users — called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. 

That case involved a lawsuit by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old college student from California who was fatally shot in an Islamic State attack in Paris in 2015, of a lower court’s decision to throw out their lawsuit. 

The Istanbul massacre on Jan. 1, 2017, killed Alassaf and 38 others. His relatives accused Twitter of aiding and abetting the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attack, by failing to police the platform for the group’s accounts or posts in violation of a federal law called the Anti-Terrorism Act that enables Americans to recover damages related to “an act of international terrorism.” 

Twitter and its backers had said that allowing lawsuits like this would threaten internet companies with liability for providing widely available services to billions of users because some of them may be members of militant groups, even as the platforms regularly enforce policies against terrorism-related content. 

The case hinged on whether the family’s claims sufficiently alleged that the company knowingly provided “substantial assistance” to an “act of international terrorism” that would allow the relatives to maintain their suit and seek damages under the anti-terrorism law.

After a judge dismissed the lawsuit, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 allowed it to proceed, concluding that Twitter had refused to take “meaningful steps” to prevent Islamic State’s use of the platform. 

President Joe Biden’s administration supported Twitter, saying the Anti-Terrorism Act imposes liability for assisting a terrorist act and not for “providing generalized aid to a foreign terrorist organization” with no causal link to the act at issue. 

In the Twitter case, the 9th Circuit did not consider whether Section 230 barred the family’s lawsuit. Google and Meta’s Facebook, also defendants, did not formally join Twitter’s appeal.

Islamic State called the Istanbul attack revenge for Turkish military involvement in Syria. The main suspect, Abdulkadir Masharipov, an Uzbek national, was later captured by police.

Twitter in court papers has said that it has terminated more than 1.7 million accounts for violating rules against “threatening or promoting terrorism.” 
…

Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. went up slightly last year after two big leaps during the pandemic. 

Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the numbers plateaued for most of last year. Experts aren’t sure whether that means the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in U.S. history is finally reaching a peak, or whether it’ll look like previous plateaus that were followed by new surges in deaths. 

“The fact that it does seem to be flattening out, at least at a national level, is encouraging,” said Katherine Keyes, a Columbia University epidemiology professor whose research focuses on drug use. “But these numbers are still extraordinarily high. We shouldn’t suggest the crisis is in any way over.” 

An estimated 109,680 overdose deaths occurred last year, according to numbers posted Wednesday by the CDC. That’s about 2% more than the 107,622 U.S. overdose deaths in 2021, but nothing like the 30% increase seen in 2020, and 15% increase in 2021. 

While the overall national number was relatively static between 2021 and 2022, there were dramatic changes in a number of states: 23 reported fewer overdose deaths, one — Iowa — saw no change, and the rest continued to increase. 

Eight states — Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia — reported sizable overdose death decreases of about 100 or more compared with the previous calendar year. 

Some of these states had some of the highest overdose death rates during the epidemic, which Keyes said might be a sign that years of concentrated work to address the problem is paying off. State officials cited various factors for the decline, like social media and health education campaigns to warn the public about the dangers of drug use; expanded addiction treatment — including telehealth — and wider distribution of the overdose-reversing medication naloxone. 

Plus, the stigma that kept drug users from seeking help — and some doctors and police officers from helping them — is waning, said Dr. Joseph Kanter, the state health officer for Louisiana, where overdose deaths fell 4% last year. 

“We’re catching up and the tide’s turning — slowly,” said Kanter, whose state has one of the nation’s highest overdose death rates. 

Beginning in the mid-1990s, abuse of prescription opioid painkillers was to blame for deaths before a gradual turn to heroin, which in 2015 caused more deaths than prescription painkillers or other drugs. A year later, the more lethal fentanyl and its close cousins became the biggest drug killer. 

Last year, most overdose deaths continued to be linked to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. About 75,000, up 4% from the year before. There also was an 11% increase in deaths involving cocaine and a 3% increase in deaths involving meth and other stimulants. 

Overdose deaths are often attributed to more than one drug; some people take multiple drugs and officials say inexpensive fentanyl is increasingly cut into other drugs, often without the buyers’ knowledge. 

Research from Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, a drug policy expert at the University of California, San Francisco, suggests “there appears to be some substitution going on,” with a number of people who use illicit drugs turning to methamphetamines or other options to try to stay away from fentanyl and fentanyl-tainted drugs. 

Ciccarone said he believes overdose deaths finally will trend down. He cited improvements in innovations in counseling and addiction treatment, better availability of naloxone and legal actions that led to more than $50 billion in proposed and finalized settlements — money that should be available to bolster overdose prevention. 

“We’ve thrown a lot at this 20-year opioid overdose problem,” he said. “We should be bending the curve downward.” 

But he also voiced some caution, saying “we have been here before.” 

Consider 2018, when overdose deaths dropped 4% from the previous year, to about 67,000. After those numbers came out, then-President Donald Trump declared “we are curbing the opioid epidemic.” 

But overdose deaths then rose to a record 71,000 in 2019, then soared during the COVID-19 pandemic to 92,000 in 2020 and 107,000 in 2021. 

Lockdowns and other pandemic-era restrictions isolated people with drug addictions and made treatment harder to get, experts said. 

Keyes believes that 2022’s numbers didn’t get any worse partly because isolation eased as the pandemic ebbed. But there may be issues ahead, others say, like increased detection of veterinary tranquilizer xylazine in the illicit drug supply and proposals to scale back things like prescribing addiction medications through telehealth. 

“What the past 20 years of this overdose crisis has taught us is that this really is a moving target,” Keyes said. “And when you think you’ve got a handle on it, sometimes the problem can shift in new and different ways.” 
…

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte on Wednesday signed legislation to ban Chinese-owned TikTok from operating in the state, making it the first U.S. state to ban the popular short video app.

Montana will make it unlawful for Google’s and Apple’s app stores to offer the TikTok app within its borders. The ban takes effect January 1, 2024.

TikTok has over 150 million American users, but a growing number of U.S. lawmakers and state officials are calling for a nationwide ban on the app over concerns about potential Chinese government influence on the platform.

In March, a congressional committee grilled TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew about whether the Chinese government could access user data or influence what Americans see on the app.

Gianforte, a Republican, said the bill will further “our shared priority to protect Montanans from Chinese Communist Party surveillance.”

TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, said in a statement the bill “infringes on the First Amendment rights of the people of Montana by unlawfully banning TikTok,” adding that they “will defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.”

The company has previously denied that it ever shared data with the Chinese government and has said it would not do so if asked.

Montana, which has a population of just over 1 million people, said TikTok could face fines for each violation and additional fines of $10,000 per day if it violated the ban. Apple and Google could also face fines of $10,000 per violation per day if they violate the ban.

The ban will likely face numerous legal challenges on the ground that it violates the First Amendment free speech rights of users. An attempt by then-President Donald Trump to ban new downloads of TikTok and WeChat through a Commerce Department order in 2020 was blocked by multiple courts and never took effect.

TikTok’s free speech allies include several Democratic members of Congress, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and First Amendment groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union.

Gianforte also prohibited the use of all social media applications that collect and provide personal information or data to foreign adversaries on government-issued devices.

TikTok is working on an initiative called Project Texas, which creates a standalone entity to store American user data in the U.S. on servers operated by U.S. tech company Oracle.
…

“I remember my wife, Dora, coming home one day and telling me she had a problem while driving,” said Bill Collier, a marketing professional living near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “She said she stopped at an intersection and suddenly couldn’t remember where she was going.” 

That was in August of 2015. Then things got worse. Within months, Collier said Dora began experiencing nervous breakdowns and hallucinations on a nightly basis. 

“She freaked out at me, at the world, at God — you name it,” he told VOA. “Most nights we both ended up in tears because we didn’t know what was going on or why it was happening.” 

It wasn’t until nearly six years later, in February 2021, that Dora, now 57, was finally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive mental deterioration most commonly suffered by the elderly, but which can also strike middle-aged people. The disease, the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and the only one in the top 10 without a cure or potentially reversible treatment, causes brain cell connections and the cells themselves to degenerate and die.

The eventual result is the destruction of memory and other important mental functions. 

“The day we got the diagnosis felt like getting a death sentence,” Collier said. “Dora is still alive, but it’s been the eight toughest years of my life. Alzheimer’s is like a slow motion, everyday horror movie with a senseless plot that haunts my thoughts each hour I’m awake.” 

Diagnosing the disease

“Alzheimer’s disease is a public health crisis, and it’s growing at a rapid rate,” explained Ruby Dehkharghani, director of public policy at the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America (AFA).

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, 6.5 million Americans live with the disease, including roughly one in nine senior citizens. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) projects that number to more than double to 13.8 million people by 2060.

Family members of those with Alzheimer’s say one major problem is how long it can take to diagnose the issue and begin treatment.

“On one hand, it’s hard to get doctors and health care systems to take family members seriously during the early, undiagnosed stages of Alzheimer’s,” Collier said. “On the other hand, you have patients themselves avoiding getting tested and lying to the doctor because they don’t want to admit what amounts to a horrible truth.” 

This is what Krista Patrick-Brown, a school principal in New Orleans, Louisiana, experienced with her father.

“My dad was diagnosed in the fall of 2020, when it was obvious to the rest of us that something was going on and he needed to be tested,” Patrick-Brown told VOA. 

It was only when the family gained access to his medical records at the time of diagnosis that they learned he had expressed concern to his doctor three years earlier because he was struggling to perform his job. 

“I think he was scared to tell anyone, or maybe the realization that it could be something serious made him avoid learning more,” she continued. “Either way, he didn’t follow up until it was unavoidable, and I can’t help but imagine how starting his medicine years earlier might have slowed his deterioration.” 

Drugs have recently been developed that can slow but not stop the progression of Alzheimer’s, if administered in the early stages of the disease. Such treatments are expensive and can have side effects. While drugmakers race to develop and test what is hoped will be more effective treatments, there is no indication that a cure is on the horizon. 

“The current medications for Alzheimer’s have very, very modest benefits,” said Colleen Kenny, a nurse who works with dementia patients at a hospital outside of Chicago. “Families should temper their expectations for how well they should work.” 

A nightmare 

Patrick-Brown said her father’s loss of independence has been one of the more difficult aspects of the disease for him.

She said they tried to encourage him to stop driving on his own, for example, but he resisted. Once her father’s doctor reported his diagnosis to the state, he had to either pass a driver’s test or forfeit his license. 

“It was awful. He spent weeks trying to study for the test, but he couldn’t process the information,” Patrick-Brown remembered. “His anxiety increased and he didn’t seem to even completely grasp why he was being asked to take the test in the first place.” 

“I think that’s when our roles flipped indefinitely,” she said. “From then on, my father would always be child-like to me and my brother, and we are now his parents.” 

It’s common for patients with dementia — of which Alzheimer’s is the most common type — to exhibit behaviors found in younger children, such as mood swings, tantrums, irrationality, forgetfulness, vocabulary problems, fear, and extreme dependence on family members.

“They get angry, sensitive, and irrational,” said Margarita Hernandez, an aide for Alzheimer’s patients in Commack, New York, “but of course it’s not their fault. They didn’t choose this. They are innocent and we need to respond by giving them love, attention, and help.”

Life of a caregiver

Dehkharghani of the AFA notes that Alzheimer’s patients aren’t the only ones severely impacted by the disease.

“Many of the things that make it challenging for the person living with Alzheimer’s are what also make it challenging for family members providing care,” she said. “Caregivers will be expected to provide greater assistance to their loved ones as the disease progresses, and they’ll carry the emotional impact of watching their personalities change. It’s not something someone should be expected to do alone.”

Alexandra Magiera, who works in education in Chicago, Illinois, and is a volunteer for the Alzheimer’s Association, said she was just 15 years old when her mother, Lizzie, was diagnosed with the disease.

For Lizzie, it started with what appeared to be small things such as confusion about where she was supposed to be, but Magiera said it quickly got worse. 

“A year later she had trouble remembering my name, and a few years after that she no longer knew who I was,” she said. “That, plus there were times she was getting angry and combative. It was all heartbreaking.”

When Magiera left for college, the responsibility of caregiver for her mother fell even more squarely on her father’s shoulders.

“She was the love of my dad’s life and he cared for her as best as he could,” she said, “but the physical and emotional demand was too much and eventually he had to place her in a nursing home. I know it was one of the hardest decisions he ever had to make.”

During the last two years of Lizzie’s life, Magiera’s dad couldn’t stand it anymore.

“He told a friend, ‘I’m bringing Lizzie home; I miss her too much,’ and that’s what he did,” Magiera said. “I think he relished every moment he was able to spend with her.”

Moving forward

According to the CDC, more than 11 million Americans care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s. For many, it’s not possible to be the sole caregiver.

“I hate to say it, but unfortunately money is key,” explained Kenny. “In-home health aides aren’t often covered by insurance, and a decent nursing home for my father, who had dementia, cost $7,000 per month. There aren’t easy solutions.”

Magiera said her father had been retired for 20 years, but after her mother died in 2011, he had to go back to work to help pay for his wife’s medical bills.

“I can’t even imagine what would have happened if he hadn’t been on such solid financial footing to start,” Magiera said. 

The heartbreak this disease has caused so many Americans and their families has stirred Washington to action.

When the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease was released in 2011, initial funding totaled approximately $500 million a year, far below the $2 billion goal that leading scientists had estimated was necessary to find a treatment or cure by 2025. More recently, however, politicians have worked together to increase federal research investment to more than $3.4 billion last year.

“It’s encouraging to see such a bipartisan effort, but we’re not across the finish line yet,” said Dehkharghani. “There are still so many unanswered scientific questions when it comes to Alzheimer’s, but researchers are working very hard to discover answers and to hopefully find the breakthrough that will lead to the treatment and cure we’re all hoping for.”

In the meantime, things have been learned to stave off the effects of Alzheimer’s, including cardiovascular exercise, maintaining a healthy blood pressure, continuing a consistent level of socialization and, of course, early diagnosis.

“I sometimes wonder what we’d be doing right now if my wife had early treatment,” Collier told VOA. “Would we be traveling the world? Would we be checking items off her bucket list?”

“Instead, I go to her senior living facility every day,” he continued, “because I want the nurses to know this woman who has been reduced to shuffling and mumbling is still my Dora — she’s a Navy veteran and a very accomplished woman, and I want them to know her story.” 
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When researchers at a nonprofit that studies social media wanted to understand the connection between YouTube videos and gun violence, they set up accounts on the platform that mimicked the behavior of typical boys living in the United States.

They simulated two 9-year-olds who liked video games. The accounts were identical, except that one clicked on the videos recommended by YouTube, and the other ignored the platform’s suggestions.

The account that clicked on YouTube’s suggestions was soon flooded with graphic videos about school shootings, tactical gun training videos and how-to instructions on making firearms fully automatic. One video featured an elementary school-age girl wielding a handgun; another showed a shooter using a .50-caliber gun to fire on a dummy head filled with lifelike blood and brains. Many of the videos violate YouTube’s policies against violent or gory content.

About a dozen a day

The findings show that despite YouTube’s rules and content moderation efforts, the platform is failing to stop the spread of frightening videos that could traumatize vulnerable children — or send them down dark roads of extremism and violence.

“Video games are one of the most popular activities for kids. You can play a game like ‘Call of Duty’ without ending up at a gun shop — but YouTube is taking them there,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, the research group that published its findings about YouTube on Tuesday. “It’s not the video games, it’s not the kids. It’s the algorithms.”

The accounts that followed YouTube’s suggested videos received 382 different firearms-related videos in a single month, or about 12 per day. The accounts that ignored YouTube’s recommendations still received some gun-related videos, but only 34 in total.

The researchers also created accounts mimicking 14-year-old boys; those accounts also received similar levels of gun- and violence-related content.

One of the videos recommended for the accounts was titled “How a Switch Works on a Glock (Educational Purposes Only).” YouTube later removed the video after determining it violated its rules; an almost identical video popped up two weeks later with a slightly altered name; that video remains available.

A spokeswoman for YouTube defended the platform’s protections for children and noted that it requires users younger than 17 to get their parent’s permission before using their site; accounts for users younger than 13 are linked to the parental account.

“We offer a number of options for younger viewers,” the company wrote in emailed statement, “… which are designed to create a safer experience for tweens and teens.”

Shooters glorify violence

Along with TikTok, the video-sharing platform is one of the most popular sites for children and teens. Both sites have been criticized in the past for hosting, and in some cases promoting, videos that encourage gun violence, eating disorders and self-harm. Critics of social media have also pointed to the links between social media, radicalization and real-world violence.

The perpetrators behind many recent mass shootings have used social media and video streaming platforms to glorify violence or even livestream their attacks. In a post on YouTube, the shooter behind the 2018 attack that killed 17 in Parkland, Florida, wrote “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”

The neo-Nazi gunman who killed eight people earlier this month at a Dallas-area shopping center also had a YouTube account that included videos about assembling rifles, the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and a clip from a school shooting scene in a television show.

In some cases, YouTube has already removed some of the videos identified by researchers at the Tech Transparency Project, but in other instances the content remains available. Many big tech companies rely on automated systems to flag and remove content that violates their rules, but Paul said the findings from the Project’s report show that greater investments in content moderation are needed.

In the absence of federal regulation, social media companies must do more to enforce their own rules, said Justin Wagner, director of investigations at Everytown for Gun Safety, a leading gun control advocacy organization. Wagner’s group also said the Tech Transparency Project’s report shows the need for tighter age restrictions on firearms-related content.

Similar concerns have been raised about TikTok after earlier reports showed the platform was recommending harmful content to teens.

TikTok has defended its site and its policies, which prohibit users younger than 13. Its rules also prohibit videos that encourage harmful behavior; users who search for content about topics including eating disorders automatically receive a prompt offering mental health resources.
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Countries can reduce plastic pollution by 80% by 2040 using existing technologies and by making major policy changes, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a new report on Monday.

The Kenya-based U.N. body released its analysis of policy options to tackle the plastic waste crisis two weeks before countries convene in Paris for a second round of negotiations to craft a global treaty aimed at eliminating plastic waste.

The report focuses on three main market shifts needed to create a “circular” economy that keeps produced items in circulation as long as possible: reuse, recycling and reorientation of packaging from plastic to alternative materials.

“If we follow this road map, including in negotiations on the plastic pollution deal, we can deliver major economic, social and environmental wins,” said Inger Andersen, UNEP executive director.

The treaty negotiations, known as INC2, will be May 29 to June 2 and are expected to result in key inputs for the first treaty draft, which needs to be done before the third round of negotiations in Kenya in November.

UNEP estimates that government promotion of reuse options such as refillable bottle systems or deposit return schemes could reduce 30% of plastic waste by 2040.

It also says that recycling could achieve an additional 20% by that year if “it becomes a more stable and profitable venture” and fossil fuel subsidies are removed, and that the replacement of products such as plastics wraps and bags with compostable materials could yield an additional 17% reduction.

Countries have different approaches to tackling plastic waste. Some major plastic-producing countries such as the United States and Saudi Arabia prefer a system of national strategies.

A “High Ambition Coalition,” comprising Norway, Rwanda, New Zealand, the European Union and others, have called for top-down approach where global targets are set to reduce virgin plastic production and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, among other measures.

Some campaigners said the UNEP blueprint fell short of tackling the root of the pollution problem.

“A treaty that does not cap and reduce plastic production will fail to deliver what the people need, justice demands and the planet requires,” said Angel Pago, director of Greenpeace’s plastics campaign.
…

Edna Adan Ismail, a nurse-midwife, hospital founder, and health care advocate who for decades has combated female genital mutilation and strived to improve women’s health care in East Africa, was named Tuesday as winner of the 2023 Templeton Prize, one of the world’s largest annual individual awards.

“Rooted in her Muslim faith, she receives this year’s award in recognition of her extraordinary efforts to harness the power of the sciences to affirm the dignity of women and help them to flourish physically and spiritually,” said the announcement.

Among her achievements: the founding of a hospital and university which have significantly reduced maternal mortality in Somaliland.

The Templeton Prize, valued at nearly $1.4 million, was established in 1973 by philanthropist Sir John Templeton. It honors those “who harness the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.”

Ismail, the first African woman to win the prize, “has used the teachings of her faith, family, and scientific education to improve the health and opportunities of some of the world’s most vulnerable women and girls,” said Heather Templeton Dill, president of the John Templeton Foundation.

Ismail, 85, said she would donate some of her prize money to the U.S.-based Friends of Edna Maternity Hospital, for use in purchasing new equipment, hiring educators and “training the next generation of health care workers that East Africa so desperately needs.”

Ismail was born in 1937 in Hargeisa, the capital of what was then British Somaliland. Her father was a doctor; thanks to his influence, she was covertly tutored alongside her brothers until she was 15. A scholarship exam, normally reserved for boys, qualified her to study in Britain, where she received an education in nursing and midwifery.

She returned to her homeland as its first medically trained nurse-midwife. According to the prize announcement, she was the first woman to drive a car in her country and the first appointed to a position of political authority as director of the Ministry of Health.

She later joined the World Health Organization, serving as regional technical officer for maternal and child health from 1987-91 and WHO representative to Djibouti from 1991-97.

She left her international career to return home with a dream of building a hospital. After newly re-formed Somaliland declared its independence in 1991 — though it remains unrecognized by foreign powers — its government offered her a tract of land previously used as a garbage dump.

She sold her assets to build the hospital and raised more funds worldwide after a profile of her appeared in The New York Times. The Edna Adan Maternity Hospital opened in 2002.

While Somaliland’s health care system was in disarray, the hospital made great strides, dramatically reducing the maternal mortality. Its education program became Edna Adan University in 2010; it has trained more than 4,000 students to become doctors, nurses and other types of health professionals. More than 30,000 babies have been delivered at the hospital, where 80% of the staff and 70% of the students are women.

Despite its lack of international recognition, Somaliland remains self-governing in its territory in northern Somalia.

Ismail is an outspoken critic of female genital mutilation, a painful and sometimes life-threatening practice performed in some Muslim and non-Muslim societies. When she was 8, her mother subjected her to FGM without the knowledge of her father, who was outraged.

As a practicing midwife early in her career, she was confronted with grievous complications during childbirth from the FGM scarring. After attending a 1976 conference in Sudan at which participants from Muslim countries that practiced FGM spoke about its effects, she was inspired to raise the issue at home.

As a director in Somalia’s health ministry, Ismail began to speak out on FGM — initially shocking her audience and attracting threats, but also building widespread interest. She encouraged women to come forward and men to stand up for them.

“Islam forbids female circumcision,” Ismail said in a video filmed for the Templeton Prize. “Every day I’m reliving and remembering, I’m recalling that pain that happened to me when I was 7 or 8 years old. The wounds may heal but the pain never leaves you.”

While progress has been made, FGM is still practiced in several countries; cases have come to light in Britain, the United States and elsewhere. Ismail’s fight to end FGM continues through her international advocacy and at her hospital.
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English soccer star Jimmy Fryatt was known for his ability to head the ball, and the proof of his prowess may be in the damage it did to his brain.

Still physically fit in his late 70s, Fryatt played tennis but couldn’t keep score or remember which side of the net he was supposed to be on. He lived in Las Vegas for almost 50 years but started to get lost while riding his bicycle in the neighborhood.

“I had to put a tracker on him,” his wife, Valerie, said this week. “I’d call him and say: ‘Stop. I’m coming to get you.'”

A North American Soccer League champion who played 18 years in Britain, Fryatt is one of four former professional soccer players newly diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The Concussion Legacy Foundation announced Tuesday that English pro and Oregon State coach Jimmy Conway, Scottish and Seattle NASL midfielder Jimmy Gabriel, and NCAA champion Franny Pantuosco also were found to have the degenerative brain disease that has been linked to concussions in athletes, combat veterans and others who have sustained repeated head trauma.

They are the first diagnoses among those who played in the NASL, a precursor to MLS as the top U.S. pro soccer league that attracted attention with high-profile signings — including Pelé — before folding in 1985.

Valerie Fryatt said her husband had several diagnosed concussions, but CTE researchers believe the disease can also be caused by repeated sub-concussive blows to the head.

In soccer, that means heading the ball.

“Jimmy was a prolific header of the ball. He was very skilled at that,” Valerie Fryatt said. “A lot of players from that era said he was the best header of the ball they’d ever seen.”

The new diagnoses come as soccer officials gather in Chicago for a Head Injury Summit, a conference cohosted by U.S. Soccer and the top American men’s and women’s pro leagues that promises “two days of presentations and panel discussions led by medical professionals, stakeholders and researchers.”

But CTE researchers and families of those affected by the disease say that the agenda, the guest list — and even the name — belie a desire to give only the appearance of confronting brain injuries, part of a trend among sports leagues to downplay the long-term effects of concussions and delay measures that could prevent them.

“In rugby and hockey and, of course, still in football, we’re so familiar with that,” said Dr. Ann McKee, director of the Boston University CTE Center — the brain bank that has led the research into the disease that can cause memory loss, violent mood swings, depression and other cognitive difficulties.

“I’m sorry, I have a jaded point of view about these summits,” she said. “I think they’re largely a PR stunt production to make people think that they’re taking the injury and the condition seriously.”

A U.S. Soccer spokesman listed as the media contact on a summit release did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Major League Soccer spokeswoman forwarded an agenda, which lists panels conducted by, among others, scientists, soccer officials and unnamed current and former players.

But no researchers from the Boston CTE Center were invited to speak at the summit, even though McKee and Robert Cantu are two of the most-published, most prolific — and most outspoken — in the field.

“What happens with these large sports groups is they often invite a roster filled with people who minimize the long-term effects,” McKee said. “And they come away saying: ‘Here, we have held a summit. We looked at the evidence. It’s not very strong, and the scientists are undecided.’ So it’s sort of fait accompli that they don’t have to do anything about it.”

Even the title was a problem for Concussion Legacy Foundation co-founder Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard football player-turned-professional wrestler-turned Ph.D. who has been a leader in educating professional and amateur athletes about the dangers of concussions.

“‘Head injury’ is what you say when you don’t take it seriously,” Nowinski said. “To call it ‘head injury’ when you’re actually talking about ‘brain injury’ is a tactic the NFL used to use.”

Boston University researchers have diagnosed more than 100 American football players with CTE; it also has been found in boxers, rugby players, professional wrestlers and members of the military. Cases among U.S. soccer players have been less common, but researchers expect the numbers to increase now that those who began playing the growing sport as children are reaching old age.

Last year, Scott Vermillion was announced as the first former MLS player to be diagnosed with CTE. His father, David Vermillion, said he would have made it his “first priority” to attend the summit if he had been invited.

Instead, he is going on a family vacation.

“They’re not going to have people there that have dealt with it first-hand,” Vermillion said. “Folks like that have all this knowledge, that can have input into trying to make things safer for the athletes, aren’t going to be there.”

CTE can only be diagnosed posthumously. Vermillion, Fryatt and Conway died in 2020. Gabriel and Pantuosco died in 2021.

McKee said the families of CTE victims are often the best source of information on how to recognize brain injuries, which can take years to develop and cause problematic behavior like alcohol abuse or violent mood swings.

“These are human beings. These are the people that played the game, that made the owners rich, that caused the fans that have all the enjoyment, who are really responsible for the popularity of soccer today,” McKee said. “And yet when they get into trouble, when they start to develop problematic behaviors, when their families start suffering, when they start suffering, no one pays any attention, including these summits.”
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U.S. law enforcement officials on Tuesday announced a series of criminal cases exposing the relentless efforts by Russia, China and Iran to steal sensitive U.S. technologies.  

The five cases, which spanned a wide range of protected U.S. technologies, were brought by a new “strike force” created earlier this year to deter foreign adversaries from obtaining advanced U.S. innovation.

“These charges demonstrate the Justice Department’s commitment to preventing sensitive technology from falling into the hands of foreign adversaries, including Russia, China, and Iran,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, who leads the Justice Department’s National Security Division, and co-heads the task force.

Some of the cases announced on Tuesday go back several years but Olsen said the “threat is as significant as ever.”

Two of the cases involve Russia.

In New York, prosecutors charged a Russian national with smuggling U.S. military and dual-use technologies, including advanced electronics and testing equipment, to Russia through the Netherlands and France.  Nikolaos “Nikos” Bogonikolos was arrested last week in France and prosecutors said they’ll seek his extradition.

In a second case, two other Russian nationals – Oleg Sergeyevich Patsulya and Vasilii Sergeyevich Besedin – were arrested in Arizona on May 11 in connection with illegally shipping civilian aircraft parts from the United States to Russian airlines.

Patsulya and Besedin, both residents of Florida, allegedly used their U.S.-based limited liability company to purchase and send the parts, according to court documents.

The three other cases center on China and Iran.

In New York, prosecutors charged a Chinese national for conspiring to provide materials to Iran’s ballistic missile program.

Xiangjiang Qiao, an employee of a Chinese sanctioned company for its role in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, allegedly conspired to furnish isostatic graphite, a material used in the production of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, to Iran.

Liming Li, a California resident, was arrested on May 6 on charges of stealing “smart manufacturing” technologies from two companies he worked at and providing them to businesses in China.

Li allegedly offered to help Chinese companies build “their own capabilities,” a federal prosecutor said.

He was arrested at Ontario International Airport after arriving on a flight from Taiwan and has since been in federal custody, the Justice Department said.

The fifth case announced on Tuesday dates back to 2018 and accuses a former Apple  software engineer with stealing the company’s proprietary research on autonomous systems, including self-driving cars. The defendant took a flight to China on the day the FBI searched his house.

The charges and arrests stem from the work of the Disruptive Technology Strike Force, a joint effort between the departments of justice and transportation.

The initiative, announced in February, leverages the expertise of the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and 14 U.S. attorney’s offices.

Olsen said the cases brought by strike force “demonstrate the breadth and complexity of the threats we face, as well as what is at stake.”

“And they show our ability to accelerate investigations and surge our collective resources to defend against these threats,” Olsen said at a press conference.
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The head of the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT told U.S. Congress on Tuesday that government intervention “will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful” AI systems.

“As this technology advances, we understand that people are anxious about how it could change the way we live. We are too,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified at a Senate hearing Tuesday.

His San Francisco-based startup rocketed to public attention after it released ChatGPT late last year. ChatGPT is a free chatbot tool that answers questions with convincingly human-like responses.

What started out as a panic among educators about ChatGPT’s use to cheat on homework assignments has expanded to broader concerns about the ability of the latest crop of “generative AI” tools to mislead people, spread falsehoods, violate copyright protections and upend some jobs.

And while there’s no immediate sign that Congress will craft sweeping new AI rules, as European lawmakers are doing, the societal concerns brought Altman and other tech CEOs to the White House earlier this month and have led U.S. agencies to promise to crack down on harmful AI products that break existing civil rights and consumer protection laws.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, opened the hearing with a recorded speech that sounded like the senator, but was actually a voice clone trained on Blumenthal’s floor speeches and reciting a speech written by ChatGPT after he asked the chatbot, “How I would open this hearing?”

The result was impressive, said Blumenthal, but he added, “What if I had asked it, and what if it had provided, an endorsement of Ukraine surrendering or (Russian President) Vladimir Putin’s leadership?”

Blumenthal said AI companies ought to be required to test their systems and disclose known risks before releasing them.

Founded in 2015, OpenAI is also known for other AI products including the image-maker DALL-E. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into the startup and has integrated its technology into its own products, including its search engine Bing.

Altman is also planning to embark on a worldwide tour this month to national capitals and major cities across six continents to talk about the technology with policymakers and the public. On the eve of his Senate testimony, he dined with dozens of U.S. lawmakers, several of whom told CNBC they were impressed by his comments.

Also testifying will be IBM’s chief privacy and trust officer, Christina Montgomery, and Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus at New York University who was among a group of AI experts who called on OpenAI and other tech firms to pause their development of more powerful AI models for six months to give society more time to consider the risks. The letter was a response to the March release of OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4, described as more powerful than ChatGPT.

“Artificial intelligence will be transformative in ways we can’t even imagine, with implications for Americans’ elections, jobs, and security,” said the panel’s ranking Republican, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. “This hearing marks a critical first step towards understanding what Congress should do.”

Altman and other tech industry leaders have said they welcome some form of AI oversight but have cautioned against what they see as overly heavy-handed rules. In a copy of her prepared remarks, IBM’s Montgomery asks Congress to take a “precision regulation” approach.

“This means establishing rules to govern the deployment of AI in specific use-cases, not regulating the technology itself,” Montgomery said.
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