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“Each building can only be in the place that it is located,”

“That place involves the climate, the topography, the history, the culture, and the landscape, including the sky and the stars. Yet you don’t have to be from that place to experience it, to feel uplifted, or feel at peace, or feel emotional, or feel good.” Put differently, RCR Arquitectes stands in as a metaphor for appreciating otherness in the world.

For months, worried parents in Flint, Mich., arrived at their pediatricians’ offices in droves. Holding a toddler by the hand or an infant in their arms, they all have the same question: Are their children being poisoned?

To find out, all it takes is a prick of the finger, a small letting of blood. If tests come back positive, the potentially severe consequences are far more difficult to discern.

That’s how lead works. It leaves its mark quietly, with a virtually invisible trail. But years later, when a child shows signs of a learning disability or behavioral issues, lead’s prior presence in the bloodstream suddenly becomes inescapable.

Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.

without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year

The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

Islamic State's official magazine carried a photo on Wednesday of a Schweppes soft drink can it said was used to make an improvised bomb that brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula last month, killing all 224 people on board.

The photo showed a can of Schweppes Gold soft drink and what appeared to be a detonator and switch on a blue background, three simple components that if genuine are likely to cause concern for airline safety officials worldwide.

"The divided Crusaders of the East and West thought themselves safe in their jets as they cowardly bombarded the Muslims of the Caliphate," the English language Dabiq magazine said in reference to Russia and the West. "And so revenge was exacted upon those who felt safe in the cockpits."Western governments have said the Airbus A321 operated by Metrojet was likely brought down by a bomb and Moscow confirmed on Tuesday it had reached the same conclusion, but the Egyptian government said it has still not found evidence of criminal action.

This week’s dose of societal deterioration arrived early, in the form of freshly scrubbed teenage boys. The boys, students at Wisconsin’s Baraboo High School, were apparently at prom last spring when they decided — more than 60 of them — to pose for a photo. Many of the grinning boys further decided, dressed in their dinner jackets and boutonnieres, that their communal pose would be to extend their arms in a Nazi salute.

On Monday, this photo surfaced online (under the hashtag #BarabooProud) and immediately went viral. The photographer later maintained he’d merely asked the boys to wave, though the gesture didn’t resemble a wave made by any hand-possessing human. In response to an outpouring of outrage, the superintendent issued a statement: “We want to be very clear. The Baraboo School District is a hate-free environment.”

In response to various acts of racism, sexism, bigotry and violence, President Barack Obama used the phrase “That’s not who we are” so often — at least 46 times, as compiled in one video montage — that it had the unintended result of upending his assertion. Maybe that’s exactly who we are: a country that is frequently racist, sexist, bigoted and violent.

Facial recognition works by scanning faces of unnamed people in photos or videos and then matching codes of their facial patterns to those in a database of named people. Facebook has said that users are in charge of that process, telling them: “You control face recognition.

But critics said people cannot actually control the technology — because Facebook scans their faces in photos even when their facial recognition setting is turned off.

Rochelle Nadhiri, a Facebook spokeswoman, said its system analyzes faces in users’ photos to check whether they match with those who have their facial recognition setting turned on. If the system cannot find a match, she said, it does not identify the unknown face and immediately deletes the facial data

After The Post presented Facebook with a list of numerous fake accounts, the company revealed that its system is much less effective than previously advertised: The tool looks only for impostors within a user’s circle of friends and friends of friends — not the site’s 2 billion-user network, where the vast majority of doppelganger accounts are probably born.

But the fakes highlight how the company is struggling to use the technology to fulfill its most basic mission — connecting real people around the world.

The limited scale of Facebook’s central technical solution to the fake-account mess also suggests that the site is failing in its pledge to protect users’ personal information, while still urging them to hand over more photos and consent to their broader use.

Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone.

Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events. The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.

exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see. Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake. 

The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Monday, March 7, 2011Monday, March 7, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by The Rise and Fall of John Ensign Chris Good Sarah Palin Feud Watch Tina Dupuy In Wisconsin, the Mood Turns Against Compromise Natasha Vargas-Cooper Business Presented by Credit Card Balances Resume Their Decline Daniel Indiviglio 5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing Derek Thompson America's 401(k)'s Are a Mess, Are Its Pensions? Megan McArdle Culture Presented By 'Spy' Magazine's Digital Afterlife Bill Wyman http://as

To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.

it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.

In light of Friday's attacks on Paris, Facebook activated a feature allowing people to super-impose the French flag over their profile picture.

Some railed against this idea since the feature was not provided after an attack by ISIS on Lebanon just one day earlier.

One site called LunaPics began offering users the option to convert their profile picture into a show of support for Lebanese victims instead.  Now a website called the "All Flags Profile Photo Converter" cropped up.

President Donald Trump's big-dollar fundraiser at his New Jersey golf club went on as planned Thursday night despite the President and staff knowing he had been exposed to coronavirus.

Trump attended three events at the fundraiser: an indoor roundtable, an indoor VIP reception -- donors had a socially distant photo opportunity with him

If donors gave, or raised, $50,000, they were invited to a photo opportunity with Trump.

the rapid rise of Instagram as a popular source for images of famous people in the wild. This is partly because of the spread of smartphones with more-than-decent cameras, and the ability to publish instantly anywhere, anytime, within seconds and reach millions by posting photos publicly across the network of social media sites.

“The old school way was that you would get an e-mail that said, ‘I was on vacation and saw so-and-so and I’d like to sell it to you,’” she said. “Fans are far less likely to do that now. They’d rather share it themselves first on Twitter and Instagram than sell it immediately. People are dedicated to gaining their own followings and that’s the best way to do that.”

Before, she said, the asking price for photos could stretch into the hundreds of thousands, depending on the rarity of the sighting. But now, because most people see them first on sites like Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, it’s harder to command a hefty price tag. Photos can go for a fraction of their historically high cost

North Korea releases unretouched photos of Kim Jong-un

North Korean state media have released high-resolution headshots of more than two dozen top officials in the secretive country, including its leader, Kim Jong-un. Nothing unusual about that.

signs of retouching.

With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers. Without a doubt, development-related aid is an important incentive to host countries, and providing sanctuary for vulnerable populations is just as vital, but what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies. The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland. Galya Benarieh Ruffer is the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a public voices faculty fellow with the OpEd Project.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 180401 Join the Conversation Post a new commentLogin   c

Although the cause of Syrians fleeing their homeland today differs fundamentally from the flight of Palestinians in 1948, one crucial similarity is the harsh reception they are experiencing in neighboring countries. The tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis is palpable in news stories and in the images of those risking their lives in rickety boats on Europe’s shores. More than one-third of Syria’s population has been displaced, and its effects are rippling across the Middle East. For months, more than 1,500 Syrians (including 250 children) have been detained in Egypt. Hundreds of adults are protesting grotesque conditions there with a hunger strike. Lebanon absorbed the most refugees but now charges toward economic collapse, while Turkey will house 1 million Syrians by the year’s end.

The surge of Syrians arriving in urban centers has brought sectarian violence, economic pressure and social tensions. As a result, these bordering countries, having already spent billions of dollars, are feeling less hospitable and are starting to close their borders to Syrians.

Apple announced that iOS 5 would include deep Twitter integration. That means that the 200 million plus people with iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices (or at least the tens of millions able to upgrade to iOS 5) will have the ability to do things like post photos, videos and links to Twitter with a single tap.

"[Twitter] will soon be the social layer of iOS, enabling users to turn individual actions such as snapping a photo or reading an article into instant social activities."

by making Twitter the default in apps like Camera, Safari and YouTube, Apple has dictated where millions of pieces of content will invariably flow.

When former president Bill Clinton traveled to North Korea in 2009 on a humanitarian mission to free two U.S. journalists, he delivered strict instructions to his team ahead of their meeting with dictator Kim Jong Il: “We’re not smiling.”

. “You build trust, don’t talk business, establish camaraderie and allow the Trump charisma to steep and marinate to soften them up.”

The two posed for a photo in the Oval Office with Trump proudly showing off the envelope — an image that White House aides promptly distributed to the public.

They fired shots in the air, and then, the villagers say, turned their guns on fleeing residents, who fell dead or wounded in the monsoon-green rice paddies. The military’s retribution for a Rohingya militant attack on police posts earlier that day had begun.

The Burmese military’s “clearance operation” in the hamlet of Maung Nu and dozens of other villages populated by Burma’s ethnic Rohingya minority has triggered an exodus of an estimated 400,000 refugees into Bangladesh, an episode the United Nations human rights chief has called “ethnic cleansing.

Rights groups say it will take months or years to fully chronicle the devastation the refugees are fleeing. Satellite photos show widespread burning, witnesses recount soldiers killing civilians, and the Burmese government has said that 176 Rohingya villages stand empty. No total death toll is yet available because the area remains sealed by the military.

That’s how former President Jimmy Carter described the photos of him and his predecessor, Gerald Ford, sharing a limousine on the day of his inauguration. Carter had defeated Ford in the 1980 election, and the two men weren’t exactly friends.

“It was incredibly painful for Ford when he lost the election, but you did not let that stand in the way of conceding or doing a good transition because that was the right thing to do,” said David Hume Kennerly, who was Ford’s chief White House photographer and had a remote camera set up in the limo.

This tradition, of the incoming president riding to Capitol Hill with the outgoing president, goes all the way back to the 19th century — although then it was a horse-drawn carriage instead of a bulletproof limo.

New York will allow outdoor dining during phase two of reopening, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Wednesday, with restaurants in seven of 10 regions given the green light beginning on Thursday.

Cuomo also criticized U.S. President Donald Trump for a staged photo holding a Bible in front of a church near the White House, a visit made possible after protesters were cleared with rubber bullets and tear gas.

Under the plan to restart economic activity shut during coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, restaurants and food services are not set to reopen fully until phase three. The hospitality industry and some lawmakers have been pushing to allow outdoor dining to help struggling businesses.