Group items tagged

Former President Donald J. Trump, who for years falsely claimed vaccines were dangerous and pointedly declined to be seen getting vaccinated against Covid-19 while in office, was booed at an event in Dallas after saying publicly for the first time that he had received a booster shot.

Bill O’Reilly, the author and former Fox News host, when Mr. O’Reilly said that both he and Mr. Trump “are vaxxed.”Mr. O’Reilly then asked, “Did you get the booster?”“Yes,” Mr. Trump said.“I got it too,” Mr. O’Reilly said.

The crowd began to boo, according to a video distributed by one of Mr. O’Reilly’s social media accounts.

A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.

The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.

But weeks later Mr. Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.

September 11, 2001 was supposed to be a typical day for Lieutenant Heather Penney of the District of Columbia Air National Guard. As Penney recalled in a 2016 interview with HISTORY, that morning she was attending a briefing at Andrews Air Force Base, planning the month’s training operations. At about 8:45 a.m., someone leaned into the room and said, “Hey, somebody just flew into the World Trade Center.”

The weather in New York City that day was very clear with blue skies. "We thought it was a small general aviation airplane or, you know, some small aircraft that maybe had...messed up their instrument approach," Penney recalled. It was assumed that a general aviation plane had made a terrible mistake, and they went back to their meeting.

They scrambled to the pre-flight area and donned their flight suits. There was no time to arm their F-16 fighter jets, so they would be flying this mission virtually unarmed, packing only their undaunted courage.

What makes history so hard to predict — the reason there is no neat “cycle” of history enabling us to prophesy the future — is that most disasters come out of left field.

Unlike hurricanes and auto accidents, to which we can at least attach probabilities, the biggest disasters (pandemics and wars) follow power-law or random distributions. They belong in the realm of uncertainty, or what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book “The Black Swan,” calls  “Extremistan.”

What’s more, as I argued in my book “Doom,” disasters don’t come in any predictable sequence.

China has acknowledged for the first time that a “war” is taking place in Ukraine and appears to be holding back aviation supplies from Russia in signs that Beijing may be seeking to put a little distance between itself and Moscow.

In another indication of a shift in attitude, China has been easing government exchange rate controls to allow the Russian rouble to fall faster in value against the yuan to help protect Beijing from economic sanctions on Moscow.

“We hope to see fighting and the war stop as soon as possible,” Wang Yi, the foreign minister, said in a call with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian. The remark, reported by state media, represents a shift in the party line, which had avoided the words “war” and “invasion”.

The United States accurately predicted the start of the war in Ukraine, sounding the alarm that an invasion was imminent despite Moscow’s denials and Europe’s skepticism. Predicting how it might end is proving far more difficult.

At the Pentagon, there are models of a slogging conflict that brings more needless death and destruction to a nascent European democracy, and others in which Mr. Putin settles for what some believe was his original objective: seizing a broad swath of the south and east, connecting Russia by land to Crimea, which he annexed in 2014.

And there is a more terrifying endgame, in which NATO nations get sucked more directly into the conflict, by accident or design.

Tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet/Google have seized a large lead in shaping our potentially A.I.-dominated future. This is not good news. History has shown us that when the distribution of information is left in the hands of a few, the result is political and economic oppression. Without intervention, this history will repeat itself.

The fact that these companies are attempting to outpace each other, in the absence of externally imposed safeguards, should give the rest of us even more cause for concern, given the potential for A.I. to do great harm to jobs, privacy and cybersecurity. Arms races without restrictions generally do not end well.

We believe the A.I. revolution could even usher in the dark prophecies envisioned by Karl Marx over a century ago. The German philosopher was convinced that capitalism naturally led to monopoly ownership over the “means of production” and that oligarchs would use their economic clout to run the political system and keep workers poor.

As the U.S. seeks to contain China’s progress in artificial intelligence through sanctions, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is choosing engagement.

Altman emphasized the importance of collaboration between American and Chinese researchers to mitigate the risks of AI systems, against a backdrop of escalating competition between Washington and Beijing to lead in the technology. 

“China has some of the best AI talent in the world,” Altman said. “So I really hope Chinese AI researchers will make great contributions here.”

Kilimnik shared a secret plan whose significance would only become clear six years later, as Vladimir V. Putin’s invading Russian Army pushed into Ukraine.

Known loosely as the Mariupol plan, after the strategically vital port city, it called for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded and -directed “separatists” were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead. The new republic’s leader would be none other than Yanukovych. The trade-off: “peace” for a broken and subservient Ukraine.

Trump was already suggesting that he would upend the diplomatic status quo; if elected, Kilimnik believed, Trump could help make the Mariupol plan a reality. First, though, he would have to win, an unlikely proposition at best. Which brought the men to the second prong of their agenda that evening — internal campaign polling data tracing a path through battleground states to victory. Manafort’s sharing of that information — the “eyes only” code guiding Trump’s strategy — would have been unremarkable if not for one important piece of Kilimnik’s biography: He was not simply a colleague; he was, U.S. officials would later assert, a Russian agent.

"Things have gotten so bad that everybody is getting more rational about it," Biden said as he returned from his weekend trip to memorialize the 19 children and two teachers killed last week in the nation's worst mass school shooting in a decade.

Questions remain nearly a week after an 18-year-old shot his grandmother before heading to Robb Elementary School in southern Texas armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, killing 21 people and injuring at least 17 others.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Sunday said it would review law enforcement's response at the behest of Uvalde's mayor. Some Texas Democrats also want a separate FBI probe."We deserve better policing... We want answers,” Jessica Morales, 30, who was born and raised in Uvalde but now lives in Houston, said outside her parents' home near the school.

Russia is advancing in the east behind a barrage of artillery that has strained Ukrainian defenses and Western unity over support for a protracted war.

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that the U.S. would be sending Ukraine the high mobility artillery rocket system, or HIMARS. "This new package will arm them with new capabilities and advanced weaponry, including HIMARS with battlefield munitions, to defend their territory from Russian advances," he said in a statement.

He said that combined with their targeting capacity aided by commercial drones and counter battery radars, the systems would provide a “distinct qualitative and quantitative improvement” to Ukraine’s combat capability.

Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.

Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.

They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.

social media gave the revolution a “spirit for destruction.” The constant push for attention, the purity spiraling in which each activist had to prove himself more loyal to the revolution than any other, the disdain for the compromises of politics or the hard work of organizing—the coalition’s problems all seemed to extend from the culture of highly public platforms.

It was, Salem wrote, “group-think on steroids—an abomination of a monster with thousands of arms and no brain.”

Facebook or Twitter is social in the way a large cocktail party is, where you move from one conversation to the next, only half-hearing most of what is said, and where the loudest voice or funniest joke grabs everyone’s attention

North Korea ultimately wants to have more nuclear weapons to use against the U.S. troops in South Korea and Japan in the event of an invasion, according to a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

North Korea currently has the ability to use a small number of nuclear weapons against the United States, said Jeffrey Lewis, a professor on arms control.

State news agency KCNA reported that Kim “gave important instructions on further building up the defense capabilities and nuclear combat forces of the country.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces had seized 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory as the war nears its 100th day.

Ukraine claimed that a counteroffensive had made gains near Mykolaiv.

Western officials hope that weapons from the U.S. and Germany could help Ukrainians turn the tide of the war, especially in the east, where Moscow remains focused on capturing Sievierodonetsk, despite fierce resistance from Ukrainians. It is the last city in the Luhansk region that is not under Russian control.Civilian toll: Zelensky accused Russia of forcibly deporting more than 200,000 Ukrainian children since the start of the war and said that about 14,000 Ukrainian civilians and service members have been killed since the war started.

On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.

I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.

And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse,

A year later, the war in Ukraine has become, to a large extent, the West’s own. True, no American or NATO soldiers are fighting and dying on Ukrainian soil. But the U.S., its European allies and Canada have now sent some $120 billion in weapons and other aid to Ukraine, with new, more advanced military supplies on the way. If this monumental effort fails to thwart President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, the setback would not only undermine American credibility on the world stage but also raise difficult questions about the future of the Western alliance.

“In many ways, we’re all-in, and we’re all-in because the realization has dawned in Europe that showing weakness to President Putin, showing no response to his atrocities, only invites him to go further and further,” said Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, a Dutch politician and member of parliament. “We have also realized that it is not only the safety and security of Ukraine that is at stake but also our own.”

The Russian military’s mixture of unexpected ineptitude and shocking cruelty has pulled the U.S. and allies deeper and deeper into the conflict. With one self-imposed constraint falling after another, Western goals have gradually moved from preventing the obliteration of Ukraine to supporting its military victory over Russia.

Russia’s audacious military mobilization in and around Ukraine is the first major skirmish of a new order in international politics, with three major powers jostling for position in ways that threaten America’s primacy.

Russia and China have built a thriving partnership based in part on a shared interest in diminishing U.S. power. Unlike the Sino-Soviet bloc of the 1950s, Russia is a critical gas supplier to Europe, while China isn’t an impoverished, war-ravaged partner but the world’s manufacturing powerhouse with an expanding military.

To do this, Mr. Putin shifted military units from Russia’s border with China, showing confidence in his relations with Beijing. The two powers, in effect, are coordinating to reshape the global order to their advantage, though their ties stop short of a formal alliance.

On the sidelines of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, head of the Fact-Finding Mission on Libya, Mohamed Auajjar, told journalists that investigators had uncovered further evidence of serious rights violations, which they first made public last October.

Today, tensions remain high after national elections were postponed last December, Mr Auajjar explained, with “two competing governments” still in place.

These abuses against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are detailed in a report which will be presented to the Council on Wednesday, Mr. Auajjar said. His team’s findings include new information on “20 detention facilities, official and unofficial...(and) secret prison networks that are allegedly controlled by armed militias”.

He believed A.G.I. would bring the world prosperity and wealth like no one had ever seen. He also worried that the technologies his company was building could cause serious harm — spreading disinformation, undercutting the job market. Or even destroying the world as we know it.

“I try to be upfront,” he said. “Am I doing something good? Or really bad?”

In 2023, people are beginning to wonder if Sam Altman was more prescient than they realized.