Sea lions and dolphins are being sickened by toxic algae off the coast of California, where hundreds of animals have washed ashore. Mike O’Sullivan visited the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, California, where workers are rescuing and treating the ailing animals.
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Day: July 22, 2023
BEIJING – As China geared up for their opening Women’s World Cup fixture in Australia on Saturday, there was cause for optimism for the future back home as more and more young women take up soccer for fun.
Wang Lu, a 32-year-old screenwriter and lifelong soccer fan, is one. Last week, after some two decades of trying, she played her first ever soccer match on a small all-weather pitch on the eastern outskirts of Beijing.
“I feel so happy,” a beaming, slightly emotional-looking Wang said on the touchline afterwards. “It’s like I’ve realized my childhood dream.”
There were only boys teams at her schools, and they would not accept girls. Her home city in Shandong province had no amateur girls teams.
As a kid Wang was so desperate to play she that crafted a makeshift ball out of paper and elastic bands. She practiced, mostly alone, in the yard of her residential compound.
In addition to the lack of resources, Wang’s parents did not support the idea of her playing.
“Our family was relatively inward-looking, and they would even ask, ‘Why do girls like sports?’ And so you had to say why,” she said.
“But why do we need a reason? It’s just that they like it. There are still some stereotypes, and now slowly these stereotypes are disappearing.”
Like several other players, Wang found out about the opportunity to play from a post on Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like app popular with young middle-class Chinese women.
She was playing with Netpals, a club of mainly novice players, so named because they came together online.
Last year Netpals had about 20 players. Now they have a community of around 150, made up of working adults and students, according to coach and founder Kidd Xu.
Several other women’s teams in Beijing have grown in a similar fashion in the last year. There are around 20 amateur teams regularly playing matches, up from five to 10 last year. There is a new league and new teams being established in other cities, he said.
The trend reflects a growing culture amongst young Chinese women of healthy living, trying out new outdoor activities or sports as a hobby. It took off last year when people could not travel because of China’s draconian zero-COVID policy. Women took up pursuits like hiking, skateboarding and the flying disc game known as “ultimate.”
Some have started playing soccer.
“Soccer has boosted my confidence,” said another Netpals player, 16-year-old high school student Jolin Liu.
“When I was young, many people believed that girls shouldn’t play soccer. But now when I play in the neighborhood, I receive praise, and people say that a girl playing soccer is cool.
“It makes me believe that girls can do it too and we shouldn’t let gender limit us. Everyone is more willing to bravely stand up, break free from constraints and be themselves.
“Additionally, with the development of social media, more people’s stories can be heard, and individuals like ‘Old Xu’ are willing to step up and provide opportunities for girls.”
Widen base
Kidd Xu got into women’s soccer in 2021 when he found himself with extra free time because he could no longer travel for his day job, teaching Western-style holistic education methods to Chinese soccer coaches.
In addition to Netpals, he has set up two other women’s teams, helped establish the league and organized several amateur women’s soccer tournaments.
The amateur women’s game has yet to go mainstream or gain a popularity akin to that in the United States. The future of the elite Chinese game is hampered by a lack of young players, who are pressured to prioritize study, as well as by strict, Soviet-style coaching methods, several former elite-level players said.
Still, unlike their male counterparts, the women’s team has a decent record. The Steel Roses are ranked 14th in the world according to FIFA and won the Asian Cup last year. But after a run of poor form and being drawn in a tough group at the World Cup, the team’s fans and even coach acknowledge they will do well just to get to the knockout stages at the tournament in Australia and New Zealand.
Their first match, against Denmark, kicks off at 1200 GMT.
Netpals defender Yin Minghua, 38, said the growing visibility of amateur players might help widen the base of the women’s game.
“In the past when people saw girls playing football, they thought it was a rare species,” said the freelance administrator, who joined Netpals last year soon after the birth of her first child.
“But now more and more people, after they see this, they think that girls playing football is also a part of football, and so this can change slightly people’s views on women.
“I feel we have at least made a little contribution to this change. So maybe I feel a little proud, a little sense of achievement.”
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Kingston Peel, 11, and his 9-year-old brother, Wynn, got woken up early Friday at their home in the Bahamas. Their mother had a surprise for them.
In only a few hours, they’d fly to South Florida to see superstar Lionel Messi make his Major League Soccer debut with Inter Miami.
“We’re here to see Messi,” Kingston and Wynn said in unison. They arrived at DRV PNK Stadium hours before Inter Miami’s match against Mexican club Cruz Azul in the Leagues Cup.
And Friday night, Messi gave an unforgettable thrill to fans young and old who witnessed his first game, converting a free kick from about 25 yards in the 94th minute to give his new team a 2-1 victory.
Troves of fans, some from as far away as Ecuador and Messi’s native Argentina, bounced around the outskirts of the stadium ahead of Messi’s debut. Some, like Kingston and Wynn, wore black-and-pink Inter Miami jerseys with Messi’s No. 10 on the back. Others wore the 36-year-old’s Argentina jersey. Dozens stood in line for team gear. Even more waited to have their Messi flags and jerseys captured in a photo booth.
Kim Kardashian arrived at the stadium about an hour before the start of the match, with one of her children wearing Messi’s Inter Miami jersey. Serena Williams and LeBron James were there, too, and James greeted Messi before the game.
“It’s insane,” said season ticket holder Christian Zinn, who lives in nearby Parkland and attended the match with his son, Oliver. “We normally come a half hour before the game, and it’s like this. Not two hours before the game. We knew it was going to be crazy.”
Messi and fellow newcomer Sergio Busquets checked into the game in the 54th minute, with phones out all around the stadium to capture the moment. Inter Miami led 1-0 at the time, but Cruz Azul tied it shortly after he checked in, setting up the incredible finish.
After months of speculation, Messi signed a 2 1/2-year contract with the team this past weekend. Tens of thousand of people showed up to see the team introduce Messi Sunday night. Inter Miami co-owner David Beckham said online video of the event was viewed 3.5 billion times.
“That’s a gift that Leo has given the sport,” Beckham said. “He’s at the stage of his career where he’s done everything that any soccer player can do in a sport. He’s one of the greatest players if not the greatest player to ever play that game.”
Beckham, an English great who also came to MLS in 2007 after a long career in Europe, said Messi’s move has “raised the bar” for soccer in the United States.
“When I went on the journey in 2007, and when I started my Miami journey 10 years ago, my vision was exactly what we saw the moment that Leo announced,” Beckham said. “That’s what I wanted to see for the sport.”
Miami native Carlos Fierro, who said he’s been a Messi fan his whole life, said Messi’s arrival had a similar impact to James’ signing with the Miami Heat in 2010.
“It’s going to be very different because Messi’s that type of player. He’s going to bring the party,” Fierro said. “We saw it in the presentation how loud it got. I’m expecting everything to be loud and fun. Just typical Miami style.”
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The White House on Friday announced that the Biden administration had reached a voluntary agreement with seven companies building artificial intelligence products to establish guidelines meant to ensure the technology is developed safely.
“These commitments are real, and they’re concrete,” President Joe Biden said in comments to reporters. “They’re going to help … the industry fulfill its fundamental obligation to Americans to develop safe, secure and trustworthy technologies that benefit society and uphold our values and our shared values.”
The companies that sent leaders to the White House were Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI. The firms are all developing systems called large language models (LLMs), which are trained using vast amounts of text, usually taken from the publicly accessible internet, and use predictive analysis to respond to queries conversationally.
In a statement, OpenAI, which created the popular ChatGPT service, said, “This process, coordinated by the White House, is an important step in advancing meaningful and effective AI governance, both in the U.S. and around the world.”
Safety, security, trust
The agreement, released by the White House on Friday morning, outlines three broad areas of focus: assuring that AI products are safe for public use before they are made widely available; building products that are secure and cannot be misused for unintended purposes; and establishing public trust that the companies developing the technology are transparent about how they work and what information they gather.
As part of the agreement, the companies pledged to conduct internal and external security testing before AI systems are made public in order to ensure they are safe for public use, and to share information about safety and security with the public.
Further, the commitment obliges the companies to keep strong safeguards in place to prevent the inadvertent or malicious release of technology and tools not intended for the general public, and to support third-party efforts to detect and expose any such breaches.
Finally, the agreement sets out a series of obligations meant to build public trust. These include assurances that AI-created content will always be identified as such; that companies will offer clear information about their products’ capabilities and limitations; that companies will prioritize mitigating the risk of potential harms of AI, including bias, discrimination and privacy violations; and that companies will focus their research on using AI to “help address society’s greatest challenges.”
The administration said that it is at work on an executive order that would ask Congress to develop legislation to “help America lead the way in responsible innovation.”
Just a start
Experts contacted by VOA all said that the agreement marked a positive step on the road toward effective regulation of emerging AI technology, but they also warned that there is far more work to be done, both in understanding the potential harm these powerful models might cause and finding ways to mitigate it.
“No one knows how to regulate AI — it’s very complex and is constantly changing,” said Susan Ariel Aaronson, a professor at George Washington University and the founder and director of the research institute Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub.
“The White House is trying very hard to regulate in a pro-innovative way,” Aaronson told VOA. “When you regulate, you always want to balance risk — protecting people or businesses from harm — with encouraging innovation, and this industry is essential for U.S. economic growth.”
She added, “The United States is trying and so I want to laud the White House for these efforts. But I want to be honest. Is it sufficient? No.”
‘Conversational computing’
It’s important to get this right, because models like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Anthropic’s Claude will increasingly be built into the systems that people use to go about their everyday business, said Louis Rosenberg, the CEO and chief scientist of the firm Unanimous AI.
“We’re going into an age of conversational computing, where we’re going to talk to our computers and our computers are going to talk back,” Rosenberg told VOA. “That’s how we’re going to engage search engines. That’s how we’re going to engage apps. That’s how we’re going to engage productivity tools.”
Rosenberg, who has worked in the AI field for 30 years and holds hundreds of related patents, said that when it comes to LLMs being so tightly integrated into our day-to-day life, we still don’t know everything we should be concerned about.
“Many of the risks are not fully understood yet,” he said. Conventional computer software is very deterministic, he said, meaning that programs are built to do precisely what programmers tell them to do. By contrast, the exact way in which large language models operate can be opaque even to their creators.
The models can display unintended bias, can parrot false or misleading information, and can say things that people find offensive or even dangerous. In addition, many people will interact with them through a third-party service, such as a website, that integrates the large language model into its offering, but can tailor its responses in ways that might be malicious or manipulative.
Many of these problems will become apparent only after these systems have been deployed at scale, by which point they will already be in use by the public.
“The problems have not yet surfaced at a level where policymakers can address them head-on,” Rosenberg said. “The thing that is, I think, positive, is that at least policymakers are expecting the problems.”
More stakeholders needed
Benjamin Boudreaux, a policy analyst with the RAND Corporation, told VOA that it was unclear how much actual change in the companies’ behavior Friday’s agreement would generate.
“Many of the things that the companies are agreeing to here are things that the companies already do, so it’s not clear that this agreement really shifts much of their behavior,” Boudreaux said. “And so I think there is still going to be a need for perhaps a more regulatory approach or more action from Congress and the White House.”
Boudreaux also said that as the administration fleshes out its policy, it will have to broaden the range of participants in the conversation.
“This is just a group of private sector entities; this doesn’t include the full set of stakeholders that need to be involved in discussions about the risks of these systems,” he said. “The stakeholders left out of this include some of the independent evaluators, civil society organizations, nonprofit groups and the like, that would actually do some of the risk analysis and risk assessment.”
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