US to Impose Stricter Screening for Electronics Larger than Cellphones

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration is boosting security measures by requiring any carry-on electronics larger than a cellphone to be screened separately at U.S. airports.

Security officers will ask travelers to take all larger devices out of their bags and put them in a bin by themselves, similar to the screening of most travelers’ laptops, TSA announced Wednesday.

‘An increased threat’

TSA cited an “an increased threat to aviation security” as the reason for the move. The change will not apply to PreCheck lanes.

The new rule eliminates one benefit of leaving laptops at home and traveling with a tablet. In the past, travelers weren’t required to fish out those smaller  electronics from their carry-on bags to be X-rayed.  

In May, the TSA said it was going to test additional screening measures for tablets at 10 U.S. airports. That pilot program was successful and the agency said it planned to expand the rules nationwide “during the weeks and months ahead.”

Worried about laptops

Airlines for America, a trade group representing American, Alaska, Atlas, Federal Express, Hawaiian JetBlue, Southwest, United and UPS airlines “remain committed to working collaboratively with DHS officials to strike the appropriate balance of maintaining the efficiency of the system, while ensuring the highest levels of security are in place.”

The threat of terrorists hiding explosives in laptops prompted the Department of Homeland Security in March to ban electronics larger than cellphones in carry-on bags on direct flights of nine airlines at 10 Middle East airports to the U.S.  That ban has since been lifted as each of the airlines tightened its screening.

John Kelly, the secretary of Department of Homeland Security, then announced tighter security for all 180 airlines flying directly to the U.S. from 280 airports worldwide. The measures that went into effect July 19 applied to 325,000 passengers on 2,000 daily flights.

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Angelina Jolie Reveals Bell’s Palsy Struggle in Interview

Angelina Jolie says she developed high blood pressure and Bell’s palsy last year.

The actor-director told Vanity Fair that she credited acupuncture for her full recovery from the paralysis, which was caused by nerve damage and led one side of her face to droop.

Jolie also opened up about her divorce from Brad Pitt in the magazine’s September cover story, which was released online Wednesday. Jolie filed for divorce in September 2016.

She said they care for each other and for their family and are “both working toward the same goal.” She said she does not want her six children to worry about her and that “it’s very important to cry in the shower and not in front of them.”

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Hacker Summit Puts New Focus on Preventing Brazen Attacks

Against a backdrop of cyberattacks that have grown into full-fledged sabotage, Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos is bringing a new message to hackers and security experts at the Black Hat conference.

In short: It’s time for hackers once known for relatively harmless mischief to shoulder responsibility for helping detect and prevent major attacks.

The Black Hat security gathering, starting Wednesday in Las Vegas, follows a series of attacks and data breaches that have paralyzed hospitals, disrupted commerce, caused blackouts and interfered with national elections.

Stamos, a keynote speaker, is calling for more emphasis on defense — and basic digital hygiene — over the thrilling hunt for undiscovered vulnerabilities.

Stamos joined Facebook from Yahoo, which last year disclosed breaches of more than a billion user accounts.

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Facebook Funds Harvard Effort to Fight Election Hacking, Propaganda

Facebook Inc (FB.O) will provide initial funding for a nonprofit organization that aims to help protect political parties, voting systems and information providers from hackers and propaganda attacks, the world’s largest social network said on Wednesday.

The initiative, dubbed Defending Digital Democracy, is led by the former campaign chairs for Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Mitt Romney, and will initially be based at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, which announced the project last week.

Facebook said it hoped additional participants would turn it into a freestanding information-sharing center controlled by its members. Facebook, with 2 billion monthly users, bills itself as a vehicle for political debate and education, but was also used as a major platform to spread fake news and propaganda during the U.S. presidential race.

Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos announced the company’s backing at the opening of the Black Hat information security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. The event, named after the term for malicious hackers, is aimed mainly at corporate and government security professionals.

Stamos declined to say how much money the Facebook would spend.

“Right now we are the founding sponsor, but we are in discussions with other tech organizations,” Stamos said in an interview before the speech. “The goal for our money specifically is to help build a standalone ISAO (Information Sharing and Analysis Organization) that pulls in all the different groups that have some kind of vulnerability.”

The project will be managed by Eric Rosenbach, a former assistant secretary of defense who is co-director of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

“Most campaigns don’t have the tools right now to defend themselves from cyber attacks,” Clinton campaign chair Robby Mook said in an email. “Our initiative aims to fill that void and to help both Democratic and Republican campaigns defend themselves with greater information-sharing and security tools.”

“This is a forward-looking and bipartisan effort to tackle a real problem,” said 2012 Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades in an email.

Stamos also urged Black Hat attendees, many of whom are leery of government intrusion, to be more open-minded about helping law enforcement track criminals and terrorists.

Unthinking rejection of official requests could lead to legislation forcing companies to break their own encryption, Stamos warned.

Stamos said he would continue to argue against such steps.

“We’re not going to be effective unless we demonstrate that we have the same goals,” he said. “I want to present our position that strong cryptography is a critical part of building a safe, trustworthy future.”

 

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Lebanese Rock Singer Urges Men to Champion Women’s Rights in Middle East

The lead singer of a Lebanese rock band, which has courted controversy for its songs dealing with homophobia and sexism, has urged more men to champion women’s rights in the Middle East.

Hamed Sinno, the openly gay frontman of Mashrou’ Leila, also called for more women in politics and for discriminatory laws to be repealed.

“No one is saying that we should arbitrarily just get rid of all men in power and substitute them with women, but there is a question about … why it is that we still have this many issues with women’s representation, with women in government and other rights,” he said.

Mashrou’ Leila, which is on a world tour, has made headlines for singing about subjects that are largely taboo in the Arabic pop scene, including politics, religion, social justice, and sexual freedom.

The group has garnered a loyal following in the Middle East, but has also received death threats on social media and was banned from playing in Jordan last month.

Jordanian parliamentarian Dima Tahboub suggested in media interviews that the ban was linked to Sinno’s homosexuality.

In a statement on Facebook, Mashrou’ Leila said the ban was symptomatic of “the fanatical conservatism that has contributed in making the region increasingly toxic over the last decade”.

Speaking by phone from New York, Sinno told the Thomson Reuters Foundation there was a lot of work to be done in the struggle for gender equality in the Middle East.

He criticized the lack of female representation in government in the region, wage inequality, women’s right to govern their own bodies, and Lebanon’s rape laws, which include a provision that allows a rapist to avoid punishment by marrying his victim.

The 29-year-old American-Lebanese singer said men should celebrate the achievements of leading women in the Middle East and he praised Muslim feminists, including the writers Mona Eltahawy and Maya Mikdashi, for “disturbing patriarchal codes”.

Sinno, who has described his all-male band as “extremely vocal feminists”, also said he was fed up of western stereotyping of Middle Eastern women as “passive”.

The band’s new music video by female Lebanese director Jessy Moussallem – released last week with their song “Roman” – is intended to challenge the way Muslim and Arab women are portrayed, he said.

The video shows dozens of women wearing traditional Islamic dress uniting around a powerful central figure who performs a striking contemporary dance wearing an abaya (loose-fitting robe) and hijab. Sinno said the video was a celebration of Muslim women’s ability to empower each other.

The male members of the band take a backseat in the video. “Having men there not doing anything was basically what the point was,” Sinno added.

 

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Twitter No Longer at ‘Death’s Door’ as Earnings Report Approaches

Twitter Inc heads toward its quarterly earnings report on Thursday with a stock that has risen more than 40 percent since April when much of Wall Street was ready to write off the tech company.

 

The company’s share price popped after its most recent earnings report in April, when Twitter disclosed better-than-expected user growth.

The number of people on Twitter will be in sharp focus on Thursday, when investors and analysts will see if it has kept up the 6 percent year-over-year growth in monthly active users it reported in April. Twitter said then that it had 328 million users.

“For a company that people thought six months ago was knocking on death’s door and going the way of Myspace and AOL, the double-digit rebound and the continued acceleration in users has really surprised investors,” BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield said.

Twitter shares closed on Tuesday at $19.97, nearly flat on the day but up 41.4 percent since its stock hit an intraday low of $14.12 on April 17.

The S&P 500 information technology index is up 10.6 percent since its April 17 closing price.

The surge of interest is a morale boost for Twitter, which has limped through past earnings announcements, struggled to keep a stable management and suffered unfavorable comparisons to its bigger and more profitable competitor Facebook Inc.

This month, Twitter had a streak of 12 days when its shares closed up.

The business is expected to report quarterly revenue of $536.6 million, according to a Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S forecast average. That would be a drop of 10.9 percent from $602 million a year earlier.

What has investors upbeat, though, is the number of people on the service, which public figures including U.S. President Donald Trump use to blast out 140-character messages.

“People are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if they start to grow again,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said.

Other positive signs cited by analysts include co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey purchasing additional shares and co-founder Biz Stone announcing in May his return to Twitter. Ex-banker Ned Segal starts next month as Twitter’s next chief financial officer.

Meanwhile, advertisers and investors have gotten used to Twitter existing as a niche platform, Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser said. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he said.

 

 

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US Treads Water on Cyber Policy as Destructive Attacks Mount

The Trump administration’s refusal to publicly accuse Russia and others in a wave of politically motivated hacking attacks is creating a policy vacuum that security experts fear will encourage more cyber warfare.

In the past three months, hackers broke into official websites in Qatar, helping to create a regional crisis; suspected North Korean-backed hackers closed down British hospitals with ransomware; and a cyber attack that researchers attribute to Russia deleted data on thousands of computers in the Ukraine.

Yet neither the United States nor the 29-member NATO military alliance have publicly blamed national governments for those attacks. President Donald Trump has also refused to accept conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections using cyber warfare methods to help the New York businessman win.

“The White House is currently embroiled in a cyber crisis of existential proportion, and for the moment probably just wants ‘cyber’ to go away, at least as it relates to politics,” said Kenneth Geers, a security researcher who until recently lived in Ukraine and works at NATO’s think tank on cyber defense. “This will have unfortunate side effects for international cyber security.”

Without calling out known perpetrators, more hacking attacks are inevitable, former officials said.

“I see no dynamics of deterrence,” said ex-White House cyber security officer Jason Healey, now at Columbia University.

The government retreat is underscored by the departure at the end of July of Chris Painter, the official responsible for coordinating U.S. diplomacy on cyber security. No replacement has been named and the future of the position in the State Department is in flux.

Some of Trump’s cyber officials have publicly highlighted a strategy to focus less on building global norms and more on bilateral agreements. Trump and the Kremlin have said Russia and the United States are in discussions on creating a cyber security group.

But at the big Black Hat and Def Con security conferences this week in Las Vegas the U.S. government will have an unusually light footprint. Past government speakers have included a head of the National Security Agency and senior Homeland Security officials.

A session featuring U.S. law enforcement officials discussing the purported theft by Russia of hundreds of millions of Yahoo account credentials was pulled at the last minute. A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the presentation was canceled because the Yahoo expert slated to talk, Deputy Assistant Director Eric Sporre, had been reassigned to run the Tampa FBI office.

The policy vacuum left by the United States is also affecting private security firms, which say they have grown more cautious in publicly attributing cyber attacks to nation-states lest they draw fire from the Trump administration.

Trump suggested in an April interview that the security firm CrowdStrike, which worked on investigating the election hack of the Democratic National Committee, might not be trustworthy because he was told it was controlled by a Ukrainian. It is not.

Cyber policy veterans are particularly alarmed about the lack of U.S. and NATO response to the destructive attack, dubbed NotPetya, in June that struck computers worldwide but was especially harmful for Ukraine, which is in armed conflict with Russia in the east of the country.

Cyber security experts, such as Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a government veteran who advised former President Barack Obama, believe Russia carried out the attack. The Russian defense ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Lewis and others predicted that Trump will not publicly accuse Russia, and NATO has only said it appears to be the work of a government agency somewhere.

“If you are not ringing alarm bells in an eloquent way, then I think you’re dropping the ball,” said retired CIA officer Daniel Hoffman, who worked on Russian issues. “When we fail to do enough, that just emboldens them.”

 

 

 

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Origami Robot Can be Folded into a Variety of Shapes

Origami – the ancient Japanese art of paper folding – can create cranes whose wings flap and frogs that jump. Engineers are taking the same idea and apply it to robotics. VOA’s Deborah Block reports.

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From Humble Start, NASA Engineer Uplifts Herself and Others

Forty-eight years ago this July, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. That image transfixed a little Costa Rican girl as she watched on a neighbor’s TV.  VOA Vero Balderas explains how that moon walk launched Sandra Cauffman’s journey to a leadership role at the U.S. space agency.

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Artist Uses Iraq Refugees, War Veterans in Radio Project

In 2016, an Iraqi-American artist sat down with Bahjat Abdulwahed — the so-called “Walter Cronkite of Baghdad” — with the idea of launching a radio project that would be part documentary, part radio play and part variety show.

 

Abdulwahed was the voice of Iraqi radio from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, but came to Philadelphia as a refugee in 2009 after receiving death threats from insurgents.

 

“He represented authority and respectability in relationship to the news through many different political changes,” said Elizabeth Thomas, curator of “Radio Silence,” a public art piece that resulted from the meeting with Abdulwahed.

 

Thomas had invited artist Michael Rakowitz to Philadelphia to create a project for Mural Arts Philadelphia, which has been expanding its public art reach from murals into new and innovative spaces.

 

After nearly five years of research, Rakowitz distilled his project into a radio broadcast that would involve putting the vivacious and caramel-voiced Abdulwahed back on the air, and using Philadelphia-area Iraqi refugees and local Iraq war veterans as his field reporters. It would feature Iraqi music, remembrances of the country and vintage weather reports from a happier time in Iraq.

 

“One of the many initial titles was “Desert Home Companion,” Rakowitz said, riffing on “A Prairie Home Companion,” the radio variety show created by Garrison Keillor.

Rakowitz recorded an initial and very informal session with Abdulwahed in his living room in January 2016. Two weeks later, Abdulwahed collapsed. He had to have an emergency tracheostomy and was on life support until he died seven months later.

 

At Abdulwahed’s funeral, his friends urged Rakowitz to continue with the project, to show how much of the country they left behind was slipping away and to help fight cultural amnesia.

 

Rakowitz recalibrated the project, which became “Radio Silence,” a 10-part radio broadcast with each episode focusing on a synonym of silence, in homage to Abdulwahed.

 

“The voice of Baghdad had lost his voice,” Rakowitz said, calling him a “narrator of Iraq’s history.”

 

It will be hosted by Rakowitz and features fragments of that first recording session with Abdulwahed, as well as interviews with his wife and other Iraqi refugees living in Philadelphia.

 

Rakowitz and Thomas also worked with Warrior Writers, a nonprofit based in Philadelphia that helps war veterans work through their experiences using writing and art.

 

The first episode, on speechlessness, will launch Aug. 6. It will be broadcast on community radio stations across the country through Prometheus Radio Project.

One participant is Jawad Al Amiri, an Iraqi refugee who came to the United States in the 1980s. He said silence in Iraq has been a way of life for many decades.

 

“Silence is a way of survival. Silence is a decree by the Baath regime, not to tell what you see in front of your eyes. Silence is synonymous with fear. If you tell, you will be put through agony,” he said at a preview Tuesday of the live broadcast. He said he saw his own sister poisoned and die and wasn’t allowed to speak of it.

 

When he came to the U.S. in 1981, his father told him: “We send you here for education and to speak for the millions of Iraqis in the land where freedom of speech is practiced.”

 

Lawrence Davidson is an Army veteran who served during the Iraq War and works with Warrior Writers also contributed to the project. He said the project is a place to exchange ideas and honestly share feelings with refugees and other veterans.

 

The project kicks off on July 29 with a live broadcast performance on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall — what Rakowitz calls the symbolic home of American democracy. It will feature storytelling, food from refugees and discussions from the veterans with Warrior Writers.

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Stories of Survival, Women to Highlight Toronto Film Festival

Stories of survival in turbulent times, including David Gordon Green’s world premiere of Stronger about a victim of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, are among the highlights in store at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My Father, set in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge reign, and horror mystery Mother! by Darren Aronofsky, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, were also among the films announced Tuesday in the first look at the festival’s lineup for 2017.

Audiences can also catch social satire Downsizing, directed by Alexander Payne and starring Matt Damon, and George Clooney-directed crime-comedy Suburbicon. Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical The Shape of Water will also screen.

The Toronto event, which kicks off September 7, has become one of the world’s largest film festivals, known for debuting critically acclaimed films that have later won Academy Awards for best picture.

Stronger stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Jeff Bauman, who lost both his legs during the Boston Marathon, and Tatiana Maslany as his girlfriend.

“It’s a moment of incredible transformation, disruption, change, challenge, so I think you’ll see that reflected in the films we’re showing,” said Piers Handling, chief executive and director of the film festival, now in its 42nd year.

“One of the ideas that struck me is the whole notion of survival,” he said about the films announced so far. “It seems to be a topic that a lot of people are thinking about.”

Hany Abu-Assad’s The Mountain Between Us, starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, is about two strangers stranded on a mountain after surviving a plane crash.

Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier’s Long Time Running is a documentary about the 2016 tour of The Tragically Hip, a Canadian rock band, as frontman Gord Downie battles terminal brain cancer.

Organizers did not announce which film would kick off the 10-day festival, but said the world premiere of C’est La Vie! by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the duo behind The Intouchables, would close.

Women will also grab the festival spotlight, with Haifaa Al Mansour’s Mary Shelley and Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston & the Wonder Women having their world premieres in Toronto.

“We don’t program for themes, but as you begin to step back … and you look at the films that you’ve chosen, some things begin to emerge,” Cameron Bailey, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview.

The festival will run until September 17.

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In ‘Detroit,’ Bigelow Revisits Still-burning Flames of 1967

Kathryn Bigelow hasn’t forgotten the out-of-body experience she felt when she won the best director Academy Award for her 2009 The Hurt Locker. At that moment, she became the first woman to win the award. None have been nominated since.

“The gender inequity that exists in the industry, I thought it would maybe be the beginning of that inequity not being quite so pronounced,” said Bigelow in a recent interview. “Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case. And I don’t know why that is. I just don’t know. But I sort of feel like on behalf of all the women who might yearn to tell challenging, relevant, topical, entertaining stories, that I was standing there for them. And that emboldened me.”

Boldness is not a fleeting quality for Bigelow. Since The Hurt Locker, she has, with the reporter-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, continued to craft an ambitious, intrepid kind of cinema that marries visceral big-screen immersion with deeply researched journalism. Their previous collaboration, the Osama bin Laden-hunt thriller Zero Dark Thirty, proved an unparalleled flashpoint in both Hollywood and Washington, prompting debates over its representation of the role torture played in the manhunt.

“I’m the messenger. I didn’t invent the message,” she said. “I’m just compelled to make these challenging pieces. And I’m compelled by stories that are informational, that tell you what you didn’t know going in — that I didn’t know going in.”

Incident amid 1967 riots

Her latest film, Detroit, is a no less challenging dive into the violent soul of America, but this time, she’s on the home front. The film, also from a script from Boal, is about the Algiers Motel incident, a relatively little-remembered event that took place amid the 1967 Detroit riots — an uprising sparked by a police raid of an after-hours club — and a reaction to a long history of oppression of the city’s African-Americans. The riots, among the largest in U.S. history, left 43 dead and led to the deployment of thousands of national guardsmen to a Detroit that raged in fire and fury.

Detroit seeks to show the historical context and individual reality of the riots, which many say should be called a “rebellion.” Within the chaos was the particularly heinous act at the Algiers Motel. Three unarmed black males were killed in an encounter with police, and nine others (seven of them black) were beaten and terrorized. Three officers were charged with murder, as well as other crimes, but found not guilty.

Boal approached Bigelow about making a film about the incident shortly after a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson, whose fatal shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014 prompted the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. The relevance of the Detroit tale, Bigelow said, fueled her motivation for making it.

“There was something sadly, tragically contemporaneous about this story,” Bigelow said. ” ‘How can this conversation happen in a meaningful way?’ is what I walk away asking. I’m just telling this story in as authentic and truthful and honest a way as we could, given the information that is out there.”

Swept into a nightmare

The story for Boal began with Cleveland Larry Reed. During the riots, Reed (played by Algee Smith in the film) was an 18-year-old singer in the Dramatics, an up-and-coming Motown group whose concert was canceled that night. He and another bandmate hunkered down at the Algiers, only to find themselves swept into a nightmare. Reed, who met with Boal and later with Smith, never recovered from the ordeal; he gave up professional music, singing instead in church choirs.

“In the summer of 2014, I was drawn to this story after meeting Larry Reed and hearing him recount what had happened to him 50 years ago, and then, later on, hearing from other survivors of the Algiers,” Boal wrote in an email. “My idea for the movie was driven from the start by real people, being moved by the fine-grained particulars of what they went through.”

Smith, a 22-year-old actor from Saginaw, Michigan, described the set as a profoundly emotional one where the cast merely needed to “log on to our social medias for inspiration.” 

“We were shooting a movie about history but it felt like today,” he said.

He and other actors playing the terrorized victims weren’t given scripts for much of the production so that their reactions of shock and horror were more genuine.

“She wanted us to have a tomorrow’s-not-promised type of mindset,” Smith said. “We just got there and then the first day it was just total chaos. It was: ‘Put your hands on the wall.’ Screaming. I’m getting lightheaded because I’m breathing so hard in between takes. It was emotionally and physically draining every day for those first two weeks. Will Poulter (who plays the ringleader officer) broke down on set. In the middle of a scene, he just started crying. The whole set just stopped. Everyone stopped. Will went outside and I put my arm around him, but I just started crying, too.”

Not the perfect storyteller

Some may say Detroit is a story that ought to have been told by black filmmakers. Bigelow, who has spent her career either ignoring or exploding gender stereotypes, understands such criticism.

“Am I the perfect person to tell that story? Absolutely not,” Bigelow said. “But I felt honored to tell this story. It’s a story that’s been out of circulation for 50 years. And if it can encourage a conversation about race in this country, I would find that extremely encouraging and important.”

Her films, she said, are about creating empathy and, she hopes, dialogue. Earlier this year, she co-directed an eight-minute virtual reality film about park rangers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Protectors: Walk in the Rangers’ Shoes.

“Institutionalized racism is at the heart of the piece,” Bigelow said of Detroit. “I think the purpose of art is to agitate for change. But you can’t change anything unless you’re aware of it.”

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Musk Says Zuckerberg Naive About Killer Robots

Silicon Valley baron Elon Musk insulted rival billionaire Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, escalating a tech wizard war of words over whether robots will become smart enough to kill their human creators.

“His understanding of the subject is limited,” Musk said in a tweet about the Facebook founder whose algorithms and other technology revolutionized social media and won 2 billion monthly active users.

Previously, Zuckerberg was asked about Musk’s views on the dangers of robots. In his response, Zuckerberg chided “naysayers” whose “doomsday scenarios” were “irresponsible.”

Zuckerberg and Musk, who is chief executive of electric car maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, have been waging a debate at a distance over the past few days on the dangers of artificial intelligence. The two sharply disagree on whether tougher government regulation is needed for the technology.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the tweet, which Musk sent at 3:07 a.m. California time (1007 GMT) from his verified account, @elonmusk.

The term artificial intelligence, or AI, is used to describe machines with computer code that learns as it goes. The technology is becoming widely used in sectors such as healthcare, entertainment and banking.

Fear that machines could become so intelligent that they might rise up and overthrow humanity is a common theme in science fiction.

Musk told a gathering of U.S. governors this month that the potential dangers are not so imaginary, and that they should move to regulate AI.

“I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal,” Musk said, according to a video of the event.

“AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” he added.

On Sunday, Zuckerberg was streaming video live on Facebook while grilling brisket at home and answering viewers’ questions when someone asked him to weigh in on Musk’s comments.

“I’m really optimistic,” Zuckerberg countered, “and I think that people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios, I don’t understand it. It’s really negative, and in some ways I actually think it’s pretty irresponsible.”

Zuckerberg said AI could result in better diagnoses of diseases and the elimination of car wrecks, and he said he did not see how “in good conscience” people could want to slow down the development of AI through regulation.

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Barbara Sinatra, Frank’s 4th Wife and Philanthropist, Dies

Barbara Sinatra, the fourth wife of legendary singer Frank Sinatra and a prominent children’s advocate and philanthropist who raised millions of dollars to help abused children, died Tuesday at 90.

Sinatra died of natural causes at her Rancho Mirage, California, home surrounded by family and friends, said John Thoresen, director of the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center.

With her husband’s help, Barbara Sinatra founded a nonprofit center in 1986 to provide therapy and other support to young victims of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

In the years since, Thoresen said, more than 20,000 children have been treated at the center in the desert city of Rancho Mirage and hundreds of thousands more throughout the world through videos it provides.

A former model and Las Vegas showgirl, Barbara Sinatra was a prominent Palm Springs socialite in her own right before she married her husband in 1976 when he was 60 and she 49. They remained wed until his death at in 1998 age 82.

She met the singer through her previous husband, Zeppo Marx of the famous Marx Brothers comedy team. Marx and Frank Sinatra had been close friends and neighbors in Rancho Mirage until she left Marx.

It was her third marriage, Sinatra’s fourth and the most enduring union for both.

Frank Sinatra had previously been married to Nancy Sinatra (mother of their children Nancy and Frank Jr.), as well as actresses Ava Gardner, who died in 1990, and Mia Farrow.

Over the years, Frank and Barbara Sinatra played an active role in the children’s center.

“Frank would come over and sit and read to the kids,” Thoresen said of the sometimes volatile entertainer.

“But the best way she used Frank,” he added with a chuckle, “was she would say, `I need a half-million dollars for this, so you do a concert and I get half the money.”‘

She remained active at the center until recently, pushing for creation of the video program just last year and making sure the children had anything they needed, Thoresen said.

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Backstreet Boys, Florida Georgia Line Back Together on CMT

Backstreet Boys got their first hit country song this year on a collaboration with country duo Florida Georgia and now the two powerhouse acts are teaming up for a “CMT Crossroads” episode airing Aug. 30.

The cross-genre television show will feature all-star group performances of each other’s biggest singles, including “I Want It That Way,” “As Long As You Love Me,” “Cruise” and “H.O.L.Y.” as well as their partnership on the platinum hit “God, Your Momma, and Me.”

The two groups are popping up together a lot this year. They performed together on the Academy of Country Music Awards this year and are playing a series of baseball stadium tour dates this summer.

Longtime fans

FGL’s Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley are longtime fans of the ’90s boy band icons, who are on an upswing after a successful Las Vegas residency this year. Hubbard said in an email interview with The Associated Press that he’s most looking forward to singing their classic, “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).”

“It’s crazy to think how we grew up listening to this song and now are on stage performing it together,” Hubbard said. “It still gets me every time!”

With the two groups hitting Boston, Minneapolis and Chicago stadiums, Hubbard said watching the Backstreet Boys performances has been a learning experience.

“These guys are master entertainers, no doubt,” Hubbard said. “But, I gotta say that BK and I have learned to really step up our game all the way around.”

Big hit in Las Vegas

Their performance at the ACMs in Las Vegas in April got everyone from Nicole Kidman to Tim McGraw on their feet to dance along. But the country duo acknowledges that it’s pretty complicated to get all seven singers up on stage together to dance.

“The dance moves are still a new thing for us but we love it, so much so that we even added dancers to our stadium shows,” Kelley said.

Debuting in 2002, “CMT Crossroads” has featured musical mashups between Def Leppard and Taylor Swift, Steven Tyler and Carrie Underwood, and John Mayer and Keith Urban. The one-hour show will air at 10 p.m. Eastern/Pacific on Aug. 30.

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8 Indiana Siblings Rack Up 448 Years of Combined Marriage

Eight siblings who grew up in southwestern Indiana have amassed nearly 450 years of combined marriage.

 

Bruce Clinkenbeard of Freelandville, Indiana, and his wife Sally have been married for 53 years, but that’s just the tip of the Clinkenbeard family’s matrimonial iceberg.

 

Bruce and his seven siblings have together racked up a combined 448 years of marriage, and counting. Seven of the eight siblings either have been or were married for more than a half-century. That includes a sister who died in 2013 after 63 years of matrimony.

 

Bill Clinkenbeard has been married 59 years, but he and his wife Karen have always worked out any differences they’ve had. He tells the Vincennes Sun-Commercial their marriage is “a lot of give and take – and a lot of love.”

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The Iron Lady Makes Huge Splash in and out of the Pool

Katinka Hosszu has a case full of medals.

She wants so much more.

From marketing marvel to ambitious businesswoman to fledgling union organizer, the Hungarian swimmer known as the “Iron Lady” knows how to make a splash – in and out of the pool.

Along with American star Katie Ledecky, Hosszu is perhaps the biggest name at the world championships this week, the home-country favorite whose face seemingly appears on every billboard around Budapest, whose every appearance at Duna Arena is accompanied by foot-stomping, flag-waving euphoria.

She lived up to the enormous expectations in her first event of the meet, winning the 200-meter individual medley Monday night.

“Katinka’s Gold!” blared the front-page headline on the country’s largest daily sports newspaper.

While Hosszu and her American husband-coach, Shane Tusup, have built a rapidly growing swimsuit and apparel company based on the “Iron Lady” moniker – it now has about 50 employees and is omnipresent in retail stores around Hungary – the 28-year-old has turned her sights to what she considers an even greater cause.

After governing body FINA changed its the rules to limit the number of events a swimmer could enter on the World Cup circuit, a capricious decision that seemed targeted specifically at Hosszu and her grueling program (that’s how she got her nickname, after all), the swimmer vowed to fight back.

“I’m obviously trying to do a lot more for swimming than what I do in the pool,” Hosszu said. “I think it’s important to put the same effort into it outside the pool.”

She formed the Global Association of Professional Swimmers (GAPS) and quickly drew attention by persuading more than two dozen of her fellow competitors to come on board, including such major stars as Australian sisters Cate and Bronte Campbell, Britain’s Adam Peaty, Sweden’s Sarah Sjostrom and American Katie Meili.

Hosszu has been outspoken in her criticism of scandal-plagued FINA and seems intent on giving swimmers a much bigger voice in governing the sport.

“I’ve been talking to a lot of swimmers lately,” she said. “I had no idea that all over the world, swimmers from different continents, we really speak the same language.”

As swimming’s first millionaire based strictly on her race-prize earnings, Hosszu wants to spread the wealth to others. Given the sport’s enormous popularity during the Olympics and financial strides it made while riding the wave of Michael Phelps, she sees no reason for so many accomplished swimmers to be struggling to make ends meet.

“The main thing is for all these swimmers to come together,” Hosszu said. “That’s something that hasn’t happened before. I think if we can put more effort into swimming, we can push the sport even further.”

She’s still a bit vague about her goals, but it’s clear she wants to give swimmers the same sort of influence that athletes have in sports such as soccer and NBA basketball.

“I don’t think swimming should be watched only during the Olympics,” Hosszu went on. “We deserve to be treated as professional swimmers. We’re partners in this relationship.”

That Hosszu finds herself in such a prominent position would have seemed totally improbable after the 2012 London Olympics, when she was a medal favorite in several events but didn’t make the podium at all. She likely would have retired from the sport if not for Tusup, whom she had first met when both were swimming for the University of Southern California.

Tusup took over as her coach, becoming well known for his boisterous antics on deck, and their personal and professional relationship yielded an Olympics of redemption in Rio de Janeiro last summer. Hosszu won three golds and a silver, more than any other swimmer in individual events.

“I wouldn’t be where I am if it wasn’t for Shane,” Hosszu said.

Tusup returns the compliment, praising his wife for her commitment to the sport beyond winning more championships and selling more merchandise.

“It means so much more than a medal,” he said. “At the end of the day, you’re like, ‘Great, I did all those hours for this?’ The object itself is not that valuable. It’s what it does and what it means. For us, it’s the stories, the process, the journeys.”

Hosszu’s cause seemed to take on increased urgency during these championships.

At a meeting held last weekend in a luxury hotel along the Danube, FINA re-elected its 81-year-old president, Julio Maglione, to a third term after changing the rules to remove the age limits. The organization also retained another top official, first vice president Hussain al-Musallam, even though he is facing bribery allegations.

In Hosszu’s eyes, it’s time for swimmers to start cleaning up the sport.

It’s past time for them to get their rightful share.

“I’m not only talking about the top swimmers getting paid more,” she said. “I’m talking about swimmers trying to be professional, trying to make money from swimming. It should be the goal that all people who make the semifinals can make a living from swimming and not have to worry about their next job. They can just focus on swimming – be like basketball players and football players, just focusing on their sport.”

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Wisconsin Retail Tech Company Offers to Microchip its Staff

A Wisconsin company is offering to microchip its employees, enabling them to open doors, log onto their computers and purchase break room snacks with a simple swipe of the hand.

Three Square Market, also known as 32M, says it expects about 50 employees to take advantage of the technology. The chips are the size of a grain of rice and will be implanted underneath the skin between the thumb and forefinger.

 

32M provides technology for the self-serve break room market. CEO Todd Westby says in a statement that he expects the chip technology to eventually be used in air travel, public transit and retail.

 

The River Falls-based company is partnering with BioHax International, of Sweden, which according to Three Square Market already has chipped many of its employees.

 

 

 

 

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Hollywood’s Rock Hudson Admits AIDS Diagnosis on This Day in 1985

The shocking announcement on July 26, 1985, came via press release.

Rock Hudson, age 59, tall, dark and undeniably handsome, was sick with AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, a disease that was, at the time, disproportionately killing gay men in the United States.

Just four months later, Hudson was dead. 

AIDS had begun to be recognized as a public-health crisis during the early 1980s, but the general public had relatively little knowledge about it. Little knowledge, but plenty of suspicion and fear. 

Despite a small, vocal community of activists calling for a government response to the crisis, AIDS was a deeply stigmatizing burden.

Most Americans believed the complex disease affected only gay men; it was some time before it became known that intravenous drug users, those who received blood transfusions containing the HIV virus and other groups also were at risk. 

President Ronald Reagan would not speak publicly about AIDS and the need to combat the disease for years after he took office in 1981.

He defended his administration’s anti-AIDS research spending during a news conference in September 1985, about two weeks before Rock Hudson died.

The president also expressed skepticism about whether children infected with the AIDS virus should be allowed to remain in school.

That worsened the stigma for those who were afflicted, and it diluted the advice of U.S. government health officials who said “casual person-to-person contact, as would occur among schoolchildren, appears to pose no risk.” 

By 1985, AIDS had killed an estimated 12,000 or more Americans, with a very high mortality rate among those infected.

That same year the U.S. government licensed a blood test to detect the AIDS virus and screening of the national blood supply began, but overall efforts to find drugs to treat, and perhaps cure, sufferers were still moving slowly. 

Double life 

Since his first days in Hollywood in his 20s, rumors about Hudson’s sexual preferences had been common. To suppress a former lover’s threats to expose him as homosexual, and thus very likely wreck his budding film career, Hudson married Phyllis Gates, his business agent’s secretary, in 1955.

Initially, even his wife did not know that her husband was living a lie. 

The union lasted only three years. Gates was silent about their relationship for a quarter-century, but she wrote a book in 1987 that depicted her husband as bisexual, but also indicated that their marriage included sex. 

After his marriage failed, Hudson went on to star in one of his best known films, an unforgettable pairing with actress Doris Day in the comic romance Pillow Talk. He was the main attraction in literally scores of films during the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, and also had a number of popular television roles. 

Although his homosexuality was kept secret – Hudson once said that coming out as gay would have been “career suicide” – some of his close friends, including Doris Day, were fully aware of his private life. Another great friend of his in Hollywood was Elizabeth Taylor, a former co-star. 

Worldwide scope of epidemic 

After Hudson died in October 1985, Taylor became an AIDS activist and formed a foundation to raise funds for research on how to combat AIDS. By the late 1980s AIDS was beginning to be known as no longer simply a “gay scourge,” but a massive threat to public health worldwide. 

Taylor gained fame as a humanitarian for her work on anti-AIDS research, which continued until her death in 2011. She has been credited with helping persuade the scientific establishment to focus more attention on the disease, and for informing the public that AIDS was not a moral stigma to hide due to a gay lifestyle.  

Since the AIDS epidemic began, more than 70 million people around the world have been infected with the HIV virus, and more than 35 million have died, according to the World Health Organization.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the area most severely affected by AIDS, which still kills about 1 million people per year worldwide. 

Thanks in large part to improved detection and more effective medications and treatment, the American share of the AIDS toll has declined sharply. Since the epidemic began, about 675,000 people in the United States have died of HIV/AIDS. 

In less than a decade, the number of HIV infections in the United States has declined 18 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Still, more than one million Americans are living with HIV, and one in seven of them are unaware they have the virus.

 

 

 

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China Escalates Efforts to Shut Down Unauthorized VPNs

In spite of an earlier denial, the Chinese government has tightened its grip on the Internet, stepping up efforts against netizens’ access to unsupervised connections, including those via virtual private networks (VPNs) halfway through its 14-month-long crackdown nationwide.

VPNs are third-party services that help bypass the so-called Great Firewall, installed by state censors to filter traffic between Chinese and overseas servers and block banned websites such as Google, Twitter and scores of international news media, including VOA.

“Some local services have been brought offline, some VPN apps no longer work, and the authorities are targeting other specific VPN providers,” Charlie Smith, a co-founder of Greatfire.org, said in an emailed reply to VOA.

The anti-censorship group’s earlier report showed that China blocked 135 of the world’s top 1,000 websites.

 

VPN crackdown

 

Following the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s announcement in January to clean up unsanctioned VPNs, the authorities were reported to have required the country’s three largest telecommunication firms — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — to shut down what they call illegal networks by February 1.

Guangzhou Huoyun Information Technology Ltd., which operates in around 20 cities across China, was also said to have received a directive from the authorities to start blocking services beginning last Tuesday.

 

Yet the ministry on July 12 denied it has issued any such notice, accusing foreign media of having reported falsely.

 

“The object of the new regulation is those unauthorized enterprises and individuals who haven’t got the license to use VPNs… As for those foreign trade enterprises and multinational companies [which] need to get access to cross-border network, they can rent VPNs from those authorized carriers,” the ministry reiterated, according to local media.

 

Negative impact

 

The tightening move, however, has triggered worries and harsh criticism from online users and expatriates in China, as well as the country’s top-tier academics and researchers, some of whom say their work and competitiveness will be negatively impacted if they are cut off from the outside world.

While some find government-approved carriers acceptable, other users say they can’t possibly seek such carriers to get around the government’s great firewall.

 

Michael Qiao, formerly a journalism professor from Beijing Foreign Studies University, said he hasn’t been able to access free-of-charge VPNs over the past month and one of his two paid VPN services has also ceased to work.

Qiao speculated that the recent tightening may have something to do with the enactment of China’s Cybersecurity Law in June, increased traffic to fugitive tycoon Guo Wengui’s Twitter postings or the upcoming 19th party congress.

The Xi administration has long promoted the concept of “cyberspace sovereignty” — control of China’s own digital space.

Overall, Qiao finds the government’s long-term trend to stifle Internet freedom a violation of basic civil rights.

“It’s within [everyone’s] fundamental human rights to have access to information and communications. Some researchers or intellectuals may argue that their access to information shouldn’t be as restricted as ordinary people. That’ll be an act of discrimination. It’s not right,” he said.

 

Cat and mouse game

 

He added that Beijing can’t possibly win the cat and mouse game, as the precedent of the country’s ban on private satellite dishes has shown.

 

But Greatfire.org’s Smith isn’t as optimistic.

 

“This is a cat and mouse game until the cat gets tired and decides to eat the mouse, and at the moment I can hear Xi Jinping’s large round belly starting to grumble,” he said.

 

Qiao said the all-out ban aims to consolidate Xi’s grip on power while the country risks a brain drain, which will hurt its intellectual creativity and future technological and international trade development.

 

Already, Freedom House, a U.S.-based democracy and human rights non-profit group, has branded China as “the world’s worst abuser of Internet freedom.”

 

Online complaints

 

While lodging complaints over the government’s abuse of internet freedom, many online users took to social media to seek help.

 

On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging platform, a user asked for pointers to VPNs that still work since he has problem connecting many of his usual VPNs.

“If I tell you here, those VPNs will soon cease to work,” one replied while another said jokingly “Are you trying to get our VPNs banned?”

 

Other users compared China’s ban to that in Russia, whose parliament passed a bill on Friday to outlaw VPNs and other proxy services, citing concerns about the spread of extremist materials.

 

“[China] joins hand with the Big Brother,” a Weibo user commented while another mocked “[Other than Russia], come to think of North Korea, suddenly I no longer feel so sad.”

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