Month: June 2023

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said Friday that a cybersecurity incident involving one of its IT hardware suppliers has led to the leak of the vendor’s company data. 

“TSMC has recently been aware that one of our IT hardware suppliers experienced a cybersecurity incident that led to the leak of information pertinent to server initial setup and configuration,” the company said. 

TMSC confirmed in a statement to Reuters that its business operations or customer information were not affected following the cybersecurity incident at its supplier Kinmax. 

The TSMC vendor breach is part of a larger trend of significant security incidents affecting various companies and government entities. 

Victims range from U.S. government departments to the UK’s telecom regulator to energy giant Shell, all affected since a security flaw was discovered in Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer product last month. 

TSMC said it has cut off data exchange with the affected supplier following the incident.
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Heat waves like the one that engulfed parts of parts of the South and Midwest and killed more than a dozen people are becoming more common, and experts say the extreme weather events, which claim more lives than hurricanes and tornados, will likely increase in the future.

A heat dome that pressured the Texas power grid and killed 13 people there and another in Louisiana pushed eastward Thursday and was expected to be centered over the mid-South by the weekend. Heat index levels of up to 112 degrees (44 Celsius) were forecast in parts of Florida over the next few days.

Eleven of the heat-related deaths in Texas occurred in Webb County, which includes Laredo. The dead ranged in age from 60 to 80 years old, and many had other health conditions, according to the county medical examiner. The other two fatalities were Florida residents who died while hiking in extreme heat at Big Bend National Park.

Scientists and medical experts say such deaths caused by extreme heat will only increase in the U.S. each summer without more action to combat climate change that has pushed up temperatures, making people especially vulnerable in areas unaccustomed to warm weather.

“Here in Boston we prepare for snowstorms. Now we need to learn how to prepare for heat,” said Dr. Gaurab Basu, a primary care physician and the director of education and policy at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Planting more trees to increase shade in cities and investing in green technology like heat pumps for home cooling and heating could help, Basu said.

Extreme heat already is the deadliest of all weather events in the United States, including hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and flooding.

“Heat waves are the deadliest because they affect such large areas and can go on for days or weeks,” said Joellen Russell, a climate scientist who teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson and is currently on a Fulbright scholarship in Wellington, New Zealand. “And they catch people by surprise.”

Phoenix, the hottest large city in America, faces an excessive heat warning headed into the weekend. Dangerously hot conditions are forecast from Saturday through Tuesday, including temperatures of 107-115 degrees (41.6-46.1 Celsius) across south-central Arizona.

“Arizona already understands heat to a certain extent, but it’s getting hotter for us, too,” said Russell. “That means a lot of people will continue to die.”

Counting heat deaths has become a science in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes metro Phoenix. The county tallied 425 heat-associated deaths last year, a 25% increase over 2021.

Located in the Sonoran Desert, Maricopa County counts not just deaths due to exposure but also deaths in which heat is among several major contributing factors, including heart attacks and strokes.

The county’s Office of the Medical Examiner updates suspected and confirmed heat-associated deaths every week through the warm season, which runs from May through October. So far this season, there have been six heat-associated deaths in Maricopa County, home to nearly 4.5 million people.

Dr. Sameed Khatana, a staff cardiologist at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, said deaths in which heat contributed significantly to fatalities from causes like heart failure should also be considered to provide a more complete picture.

Khatana participated in research published last year that suggested that from 2008 and 2017 between 13,000 to 20,000 adult deaths were linked to extreme heat, about half due to heart disease.

Older people and those with diabetes, obesity, heart disease and other serious health conditions are most at risk, he said.

“Hurricanes, flooding and wildfires are very dramatic,” said Khatana. “Heat is harder to see and especially affects people who are socially isolated or living on the margins.”

The city of Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation has opened summertime shelters for homeless people, operates cooling centers in libraries and other community spaces to help people get out of the sun and distributes bottled water, hats and sunscreen. The city also has a “Cool Callers” program with volunteers dialing vulnerable residents who ask to be checked on during hot periods.

Even the Phoenix Zoo is taking measures to cool off the monkeys, big cats and rhinos, spraying them with water, delivering frozen treats, and providing shaded areas and cooled water pools.

Extreme heat deaths are a global problem.

Mexican health authorities this week said there have been at least 112 heat-related deaths so far this year, acknowledging for the first time the deadliness of a recent heat wave that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador previously dismissed as an invention of alarmists.

The report released Wednesday also shows a significant spike in heat-related fatalities in the last two weeks. So far this year, Mexico’s overall heat-related deaths are almost triple the figures seen in 2022.

A flash study released this spring said record-breaking April temperatures in Spain, Portugal and northern Africa were made 100 times more likely by human-caused climate change.

Deaths and widespread hospitalizations were caused by searing heat wave that broiled parts of southern Asia in April with temperatures of up to 113 degrees (45 Celsius) was made at least 30 times more likely by climate change, according to a rapid study by international scientists.
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In the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, women are crafting products from pine needles as part of an initiative that aims at providing them with livelihood opportunities while reducing the risk of forest fires. Anjana Pasricha reports on one project in the district of Mandi. Video: Rakesh Kumar
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SYDNEY – Australia on Saturday will become one of the first countries to recognize psychedelic drugs as medicines. In February, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, Australia’s medical regulator, sanctioned use of psychedelics for some mental health conditions. Experts agree that psychedelic-assisted therapies in Australia are in their infancy.

Starting Saturday, authorized psychiatrists in Australia will be able to prescribe methylenedioxy methamphetamine – MDMA, the active ingredient in such party drugs as ecstasy or molly — to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

They will also be allowed to prescribe psilocybin, a compound found in psychotropic “magic” mushrooms, to treat depression that has not responded to other therapies.

Susan Rossell, a cognitive neuropsychologist at Swinburne University in Melbourne, is conducting one of Australia’s biggest clinical trials of psilocybin. Preliminary results show significant improvements in some patients’ mental health while others have shown no signs of getting better.

Rossell told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that psychedelic therapies research is still in its early stages.

“We have been stuck for very many years in terms of mental health treatments for people with treatment-resistant conditions,” she said. “So, the fact that psychedelic medicines do seem to be working for a number of people is fantastic. However, they are not working for some people as well, and that is where I would note a great deal of caution in this field at the moment.”

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists has issued new guidelines for its members’ use of psychedelic drugs. They must only be administered in a hospital or clinic, where two psychotherapists must stay with the patient for six to eight hours to ensure their safety.

The organization has said that with a lack of mental health professionals in Australia, it is likely that few providers will be able to meet these conditions.

Other experts fear that the new regulations that permit the use of MDMA and psilocybin in Australia have been approved too quickly. They believe there is potential for psychedelic substances to provoke anxiety, panic or cause psychological damage to patients.

Australia’s official medical regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, approved the use of psychedelics to treat some mental health conditions in February, making the country one of the first in the world to recognize the drugs as medicines.

In announcing its decision, the regulators said the “benefits to patients and public health … outweigh the risks.”
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LA PAZ, BOLIVIA – Chinese and Russian companies will invest more than $1.4 billion in the extraction of lithium in Bolivia, one of the countries with the largest reserves of the mineral used in electric car batteries, the government in La Paz said Friday.  

China’s Citic Guoan and Russia’s Uranium One Group — both with a major government stake — will partner with Bolivia’s state-owned YLB to build two lithium carbonate processing plants, Bolivian President Luis Arce said at a public event.  

Lithium is often described as the “white gold” of the clean-energy revolution, a highly coveted component of mobile phones and electric car batteries.  

“We are consolidating the country’s industrialization process,” Arce said.

Bolivia, which claims to have the world’s largest deposits, in January also signed an agreement with Chinese consortium CBC to build two lithium battery plants.  

The country’s energy ministry said in a statement that each of the two new plants would have the capacity to produce up to 25,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate per year.  

Construction will begin in about three months.  

China and Russia are among Bolivia’s main lithium buyers.  

Lithium is mostly mined in Australia and South America. 
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ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO — A team of Italian researchers reached the edge of space Thursday morning, flying aboard Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered plane as the company prepares for monthly commercial flights.

The flight launched from Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, with two Italian Air Force officers and an engineer with the National Research Council of Italy focusing on a series of microgravity experiments during their few minutes of weightless.

One wore a special suit that measured biometric data and physiological responses while another conducted tests using sensors to track heart rate, brain function and other metrics while in microgravity. The third studied how certain liquids and solids mix in that very weak gravity.

Virgin Galactic livestreamed the flight on its website, showing the moment when the ship released from its carrier plane and the rocket was ignited. The entire trip took about 90 minutes, with the plane’s touchdown on the runway prompting cheers and claps by Virgin Galactic staff.

With the ship’s copilots, it marked the most Italians in space at the same time. Colonel Walter Villadei, a space engineer with the Italian Air Force, celebrated by unfolding an Italian flag while weightless.

Next up for Virgin Galactic will be the first of hundreds of ticket holders, many who have been waiting years for their chance at weightlessness and to see the curvature of the Earth. Those commercial flights are expected to begin in August and will be scheduled monthly, the space tourism company said.

Virgin Galactic has been working for years to send paying passengers on short space trips and in 2021 finally won the federal government’s approval. The company completed its final test fight in May.

The Italian research flight was initially scheduled for the fall of 2021 but Virgin Galactic at the time said it was forced to push back its timeline due to a potential defect in a component used in its flight control system. Then the company spent months upgrading its rocket ship before resuming testing in early 2023.

After reaching an altitude of nearly 15,000 meters, Virgin Galactic’s space plane is released from a carrier aircraft and drops for a moment before igniting its rocket motor. The rocket shuts off once it reaches space, leaving passengers weight before the ship then glides back to the runway at Spaceport America.

Virgin Galactic has sold about 800 tickets over the past decade, with the initial batch going for $200,000 each. Tickets now cost $450,000 per person.

The company said early fliers have already received their seat assignments.
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Meta Platforms’ Oversight Board on Thursday called for the suspension of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen for six months, saying a video posted on his Facebook page had violated Meta’s rules against violent threats.

The board, which is funded by Meta but operates independently, said the company erred in leaving up the video and ordered its removal from Facebook.

Meta, in a written statement, agreed to take down the video but said it would respond to the recommendation to suspend Hun Sen after a review.

A suspension would silence the prime minister’s Facebook page less than a month before an election in Cambodia, although critics say the poll will be a sham due to Hun Sen’s autocratic rule.

The decision is the latest in a series of rebukes by the Oversight Board over how the world’s biggest social media company handles rule-breaking political leaders and incitement to violence around elections.

The company’s election integrity efforts are in focus as the United States prepares for presidential elections next year.

The board endorsed Meta’s 2021 banishment of former U.S. President Donald Trump – the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – after the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, but criticized the indefinite nature of his suspension and urged more careful preparation for volatile political situations overall.

Meta reinstated the former U.S. president earlier this year.  

Last week, the board said Meta’s handling of calls for violence after the 2022 Brazilian election continued to raise concerns about the effectiveness of its election efforts.

Hun Sen’s video, broadcast on his official Facebook page in January, showed the prime minister threatening to beat up political rivals and send “gangsters” to their homes, according to the board’s ruling.

Meta determined at the time that the video fell afoul of its rules, but opted to leave it up under a “newsworthiness” exemption, reasoning that the public had an interest in hearing warnings of violence by their government, the ruling said.

The board held that the video’s harms outweighed its news value.
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LONDON – One of the world’s most common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health body, according to two sources with knowledge of the process, pitting it against the food industry and regulators.

Aspartame, used in products from Coca-Cola diet sodas to Mars’ Extra chewing gum and some Snapple drinks, will be listed in July as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” for the first time by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization’s (WHO) cancer research arm, the sources said.

The IARC ruling, finalized earlier this month after a meeting of the group’s external experts, is intended to assess whether something is a potential hazard or not, based on all the published evidence.

It does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume. This advice for individuals comes from a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, known as JECFA (the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization’s Expert Committee on Food Additives), alongside determinations from national regulators.

However, similar IARC rulings in the past for different substances have raised concerns among consumers about their use, led to lawsuits, and pressured manufacturers to recreate recipes and swap to alternatives. That has led to criticism that the IARC’s assessments can be confusing to the public.

JECFA, the WHO committee on additives, is also reviewing aspartame use this year. Its meeting began at the end of June, and it is due to announce its findings on the same day that the IARC makes public its decision – on July 14.

Since 1981, JECFA has said aspartame is safe to consume within accepted daily limits. For example, an adult weighing 60 kilograms would have to drink between 12 and 36 cans of diet soda – depending on the amount of aspartame in the beverage – every day to be at risk. Its view has been widely shared by national regulators, including in the United States and Europe.

An IARC spokesperson said both the IARC and JECFA committees’ findings were confidential until July, but added they were “complementary,” with IARC’s conclusion representing “the first fundamental step to understand carcinogenicity.” The additives committee “conducts risk assessment, which determines the probability of a specific type of harm (e.g., cancer) to occur under certain conditions and levels of exposure.”

However, industry and regulators fear that holding both processes at around the same time could be confusing, according to letters from U.S. and Japanese regulators seen by Reuters.

“We kindly ask both bodies to coordinate their efforts in reviewing aspartame to avoid any confusion or concerns among the public,” Nozomi Tomita, an official from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, wrote in a letter dated March 27 to WHO’s deputy director general, Zsuzsanna Jakab.

The letter, reviewed by Reuters, also called for the conclusions of both bodies to be released on the same day, as is now happening. The Japanese mission in Geneva, where the WHO is based, did not respond to a request for comment.

Debate

The IARC’s rulings can have huge impact. In 2015, its committee concluded that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic.” Years later, even as other bodies like the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) contested this assessment, companies were still feeling the effects of the decision. Germany’s Bayer in 2021 lost its third appeal against U.S. court verdicts that awarded damages to customers blaming their cancers on use of its glyphosate-based weedkillers.

The IARC’s decisions have also faced criticism for sparking needless alarm over hard to avoid substances or situations. It has previously put working overnight and consuming red meat into its “probably cancer-causing” class, and using mobile phones as “possibly cancer-causing,” similar to aspartame.

“IARC is not a food safety body, and their review of aspartame is not scientifically comprehensive and is based heavily on widely discredited research,” said Frances Hunt-Wood, the secretary general of the International Sweeteners Association (ISA).

The body, whose members include Mars Wrigley, a Coca-Cola unit and Cargill, said it had “serious concerns with the IARC review, which may mislead consumers.”

Aspartame has been extensively studied for years. Last year, an observational study in France among 100,000 adults showed that people who consumed larger amounts of artificial sweeteners – including aspartame – had a slightly higher cancer risk.

It followed a study from the Ramazzini Institute in Italy in the early 2000s, which reported that some cancers in mice and rats were linked to aspartame.

However, the first study could not prove that aspartame caused the increased cancer risk, and questions have been raised about the methodology of the second study, including by EFSA, which assessed it.

Aspartame is authorized for use globally by regulators who have reviewed all the available evidence, and major food and beverage makers have for decades defended their use of the ingredient. The IARC said it had assessed 1,300 studies in its June review.

Recent recipe tweaks by soft drinks giant Pepsico demonstrate the struggle the industry has when it comes to balancing taste preferences with health concerns. Pepsico removed aspartame from sodas in 2015, bringing it back a year later, only to remove it again in 2020.

Listing aspartame as a possible carcinogen is intended to motivate more research, said the sources close to the IARC, which will help agencies, consumers and manufacturers draw firmer conclusions.

But it will also likely ignite debate once again over the IARC’s role, as well as the safety of sweeteners more generally.

Last month, the WHO published guidelines advising consumers not to use non-sugar sweeteners for weight control. The guidelines caused a furor in the food industry, which argues they can be helpful for consumers wanting to reduce the amount of sugar in their diet. 
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Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called godfathers of artificial intelligence, on Wednesday urged governments to step in and make sure that machines do not take control of society.

Hinton made headlines in May when he announced he had quit Google after a decade of work to speak more freely on the dangers of AI, shortly after the release of ChatGPT captured the imagination of the world.

The highly respected AI scientist, who is based at the University of Toronto, was speaking to a packed audience at the Collision tech conference in the Canadian city.

The conference brought together more than 30,000 startup founders, investors and tech workers, most looking to learn how to ride the AI wave and not hear a lesson on its dangers.

“Before AI is smarter than us, I think the people developing it should be encouraged to put a lot of work into understanding how it might try and take control away,” Hinton said.

“Right now there are 99 very smart people trying to make AI better and one very smart person trying to figure out how to stop it taking over and maybe you want to be more balanced,” he said.

AI could deepen inequality, says Hinton

Hinton warned that the risks of AI should be taken seriously despite his critics who believe he is overplaying the risks.

“I think it’s important that people understand that this is not science fiction, this is not just fearmongering,” he insisted. “It is a real risk that we must think about, and we need to figure out in advance how to deal with it.”

Hinton also expressed concern that AI would deepen inequality, with the massive productivity gain from its deployment going to the benefit of the rich, and not workers.

“The wealth isn’t going to go to the people doing the work. It is going to go into making the rich richer and not the poorer and that’s very bad for society,” he added.

He also pointed to the danger of fake news created by ChatGPT-style bots and said he hoped that AI-generated content could be marked in a way similar to how central banks watermark cash money.

“It’s very important to try, for example, to mark everything that is fake as fake. Whether we can do that technically, I don’t know,” he said.

The European Union is considering such a technique in its AI Act, a legislation that will set the rules for AI in Europe, which is being negotiated by lawmakers.

‘Overpopulation on Mars’

Hinton’s list of AI dangers contrasted with conference discussions that were less over safety and threats, and more about seizing the opportunity created in the wake of ChatGPT.

Venture Capitalist Sarah Guo said doom and gloom talk of AI as an existential threat was premature and compared it to “talking about overpopulation on Mars,” quoting another AI guru, Andrew Ng.

She also warned against “regulatory capture” that would see government intervention protect the incumbents before it had a chance to benefit sectors such as health, education or science.

Opinions differed on whether the current generative AI giants, mainly Microsoft backed OpenAI and Google, would remain unmatched or whether new actors will expand the field with their own models and innovations.

“In five years, I still imagine that if you want to go and find the best, most accurate, most advanced general model, you’re probably going to still have to go to one of the few companies that have the capital to do it,” said Leigh Marie Braswell of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

Zachary Bratun-Glennon of Gradient Ventures said he foresaw a future where “there are going to be millions of models across a network much like we have a network of websites today.”
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PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA — Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a devoted and very active user of Facebook — on which he has posted everything from photos of his grandchildren to threats against his political enemies — said Wednesday that he would no longer upload to the platform and would instead depend on the Telegram app to get his messages across. 

Telegram is a popular messaging app that also has a blogging tool called “channels.” In Russia and some neighboring countries, it is actively used both by government officials and opposition activists for communicating with mass audiences. Telegram played an important role in coordinating unprecedented anti-government protests in Belarus in 2020, and it currently serves as a major source of news about Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

Hun Sen, 70, who has led Cambodia for 38 years, is listed as having 14 million Facebook followers, though critics have suggested a large number of them are merely “ghost” accounts purchased in bulk from so-called “click farms,” an assertion the long-serving prime minister has repeatedly denied. The Facebook accounts of Joe Biden and Donald Trump by comparison boast 11 million and 34 million followers, respectively, though the United States has about 20 times the population of Cambodia. 

Hun Sen officially launched his Facebook page on September 20, 2015, after his fierce political rival, opposition leader Sam Rainsy, effectively demonstrated how it could be used to mobilize support. Hun Sen is noted as a canny and sometimes ruthless politician, and he has since then managed to drive his rival into exile and neutralize all his challengers, even though Cambodia is a nominally democratic state. 

Controversial remarks

Hun Sen said he was giving up Facebook for Telegram because he believed the latter would be more effective for communicating. In a Telegram post on Wednesday, he said it would be easier for him to get his message out when traveling in other countries that officially ban Facebook use, such as China, the top ally of his government. Hun Sen has 855,000 followers so far on Telegram, where he appears to have started posting in mid-May. 

It is possible, however, that Hun Sen’s social media loyalty switch has to do with controversy about remarks he posted earlier this year on Facebook that in theory could see him get at least temporarily banned from the platform very soon. 

In January, speaking at a road construction ceremony, he decried opposition politicians who accused his ruling Cambodian People’s Party of stealing votes. 

“There are only two options. One is to use legal means and the other is to use a stick,” the prime minister said. “Either you face legal action in court, or I rally [the Cambodian] People’s Party people for a demonstration and beat you up.” His remarks were spoken on Facebook Live and kept online as a video. 

Perhaps because of heightened consciousness about the power of social media to inflame and trigger violence in such countries as India and Myanmar, and because the remarks were made ahead of a general election in Cambodia this July, complaints about his words were lodged with Facebook’s parent company, Meta. 

Facebook’s moderators declined to recommend action against Hun Sen, judging that his position as a national leader made his remarks newsworthy and therefore not subject to punishment despite their provocative nature. 

However, the case was forwarded in March to Meta’s Oversight Board, a group of independent experts that is empowered to render an overriding judgment that could limit Hun Sen’s Facebook activities. They are expected to issue a decision on Thursday. The case is being closely watched as an indicator of where Facebook will draw the line in countries with volatile political situations. 

Hun Sen said his Facebook account would remain online, but that he would no longer actively post to it. He urged people looking for news from him to check YouTube and his Instagram account as well as Telegram and said he had ordered his office to establish a TikTok account to allow him to communicate with his country’s youth.
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U.S. President Joe Biden says he wants to make sure that every American has access to high-speed internet. VOA’s Julie Taboh has our story about the United States’ more than $40 billion-dollar investment to expand the service. (Videographer:  Adam Greenbaum; Produced by Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum)    
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South Korea is changing the way it calculates a person’s age. 

Under a new law that takes effect Wednesday, South Korea is adopting the international method that uses a person’s actual date of birth to determine their age.   

Under its traditional method, South Koreans are considered to be one year old at birth, including their months in the womb, and become a year older every January 1 regardless of their actual date of birth. 

The new law that takes effect Wednesday means all South Koreans will officially become a year or two younger.   

Officials say a separate method of calculation that uses the date a person is born and then adds a year each January 1 will remain in effect for compulsory military service, education and the legal drinking age. 

Some information for this report came from Reuters, Agence France-Presse.  
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Since the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT launched last fall, a torrent of think pieces and news reports about the ins and outs and ups and downs of generative artificial intelligence has flowed, stoking fears of a dystopian future in which robots take over the world.  

While much of that hype is indeed just hype, a new report has identified immediate risks posed by apps like ChatGPT. Some of those present distinct challenges to journalists and the news industry.  

Published Wednesday by New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, the report identified eight risks related to generative artificial intelligence, or AI, including disinformation, cyberattacks, privacy violations and the decay of the news industry.  

The AI debate “is getting a little confused between concerns about existential dangers versus what immediate harms generative AI might entail,” the report’s co-author Paul Barrett told VOA. “We shouldn’t get paralyzed by the question of, ‘Oh my God, will this technology lead to killer robots that are going to destroy humanity?'” 

The systems being released right now are not going to lead to that nightmarish outcome, explained Barrett, who is the deputy director of the Stern Center.  

Instead, the report — which Barrett co-authored with Justin Hendrix, founder and editor of the media nonprofit Tech Policy Press — argues that lawmakers, regulators and the AI industry itself should prioritize addressing the immediate potential risks.  

Safety concerns

Among the most concerning risks are the human-level threats that artificial intelligence may pose to the safety of journalists and activists.  

Doxxing and smear campaigns are already among the many threats that journalists face online over their work. Doxxing is when someone publishes private or identifying information about someone — such as their address or phone number — on the internet.  

But now with generative AI, it will likely be even easier to dox reporters and harass them online, according to Barrett.  

“If you want to set up a campaign like that, you’re going to have to do a lot less work using generative AI systems,” Barrett said. “It’ll be easier to attack journalists.”  

Propaganda easy to make

Disinformation is another primary risk that the report highlights, because generative AI makes it easier to churn out propaganda.  

The report notes that if the Kremlin had access to generative AI in its disinformation campaign surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Moscow could have launched a more destructive and less expensive influence operation.  

Generative AI “is going to be a huge engine of efficiency, but it’s also going to make much more efficient the production of disinformation,” Barrett said.  

That bears implications for press freedom and media literacy, since studies indicate that exposure to misinformation and disinformation is linked to reduced trust in the media.  

Generative AI may also exacerbate financial issues plaguing newsrooms, according to the report. 

If people ask ChatGPT a question, for instance, and are happy with the summarized answer, they’re less likely to click on other links to news articles. That means shrinking traffic and therefore ad dollars for news sites, the report said.  

But artificial intelligence is far from all bad news for the media industry.  

For example, AI tools can help journalists research by scraping PDF files and analyzing data quickly. Artificial intelligence can also help fact-check sources and write headlines.  

In the report, Barrett and Hendrix caution the government against allowing this new industry to make the same mistakes as were made with social media platforms.  

“Generative AI doesn’t deserve the deference enjoyed for so long by social media companies,” they write.  

They recommend the government enhance federal authority to oversee AI companies and require more transparency from AI companies.  

“Congress, regulators, the public — and the industry, for that matter — need to pay attention to the immediate potential risks,” Barrett said. “And if the industry doesn’t move fast enough on that front, that’s something Congress needs to figure out a way to force them to pay attention to.” 
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A dangerous and prolonged heat wave blanketed large parts of the southern United States on Tuesday, buckling highways and forcing people to shelter indoors in what scientists called a climate-change supercharged event. 

Excessive heat warnings were in place from Arizona in the southwest to Alabama in the southeast, with south and central Texas and the Lower Mississippi Valley worst hit, the National Weather Service said. 

Victor Hugo Martinez, a 57-year-old foreman who was leading workers repairing a road in Houston, told AFP: “We can’t keep up with it. It’s too much, we have like 10 or 12 spots like this right now.” 

The crew wrapped bandanas around their heads to protect themselves from the blazing heat, with Martinez explaining they made sure to drink plenty of water and take several breaks to protect their health. 

The National Weather Service meanwhile urged Americans in across the South to drink water, stay indoors, and check on vulnerable friends and relatives. 

Andrew Pershing, a scientist with Climate Central, told AFP the “really unusual thing about this event is how big it is, and how long it has lasted.” 

“There have been places in Texas that have had more than two weeks of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which are just really unusual temperatures for this time of year even in a region that is used to heat.” 

Extreme weather more likely

Accumulated historic greenhouse emissions made the extreme weather event at least five times more likely than otherwise, according to preliminary calculations by a team led by Pershing. 

The sweltering conditions are expected to expand throughout the South beginning Wednesday and continue into the long July 4 holiday weekend.  

The extreme heat appears to have claimed some lives. 

Last week, a 66-year-old postal worker in Dallas fainted while delivering mail as the heat index hovered around 115 F. He died hours later, the U.S. Postal Service told the media, though the cause of death is still being investigated. 

And on Friday, a 14-year-old boy collapsed from exhaustion while hiking in Big Bend National Park in Texas and later died, according to an official statement. 

His stepfather left the scene to hike back to their vehicle to find help while the teen’s brother attempted to carry him back to the trailhead. The father was later found dead in a car crash. 

Power grid strained

The strain is sure to put the power grid in Texas to the test, as millions of people switch on their air conditioners to cope, with demand peaking around late afternoon. 

ERCOT, the state utility operator, has issued a Weather Watch, calling on individuals and institutions to voluntarily save energy to avoid an emergency, and has so far been able to cope, thanks in part to an increasing contribution from solar power in recent years. 

Public cooling centers run by local authorities or the Red Cross are available for vulnerable people. 

Animals, too, were suffering. The Houston Humane Society said 12 cats and one dog were found dead in an abandoned apartment. The group was able to rescue six cats from the property. 

Air conditioning can be climate feedback loop

Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist of the Union of Concerned Scientists said that the widespread use of air conditioning was itself a climate feedback loop. 

“We know that one of the most effective things you can do to prevent heat, illness and death during heat waves is to run the air conditioning,” she told AFP.  “And yet if we are not powering that air conditioning with clean renewable energy sources, we are contributing more carbon emissions to the atmosphere which will further worsen heat which will necessitate greater air conditioning use.” 

Recent years have seen an explosion in litigation aimed at shifting the financial responsibility of climate disasters toward fossil fuel companies.  

Last week, a county in the northwestern state of Oregon filed a lawsuit against major fossil fuel companies seeking more than $51 billion over the 2021 “heat dome,” which blighted Canada and the United States.  

“Communities everywhere are now paying the price for the fossil fuel industry’s decades of climate deception and pollution,” Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, told AFP.   
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