U.S., China diplomats communicating - but not militaries: White House

 U.S. diplomatic communications with China remain open after the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon this month, but contact between the countries' militaries "unfortunately" remains shut down, the White House said on Friday.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also said it was not the "right time" for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to travel to China after he postponed a Feb. 5-6 trip over the balloon episode, but President Joe Biden wanted to speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping when it was "appropriate."

Kirby told a White House news briefing that U.S. and Chinese diplomats can still communicate despite tensions over the balloon incident.

"I recognize that there are tensions, but Secretary Blinken still has an open line of communication with the foreign minister. We still have an embassy in Beijing ... and the State Department also can communicate directly with the PRC embassy personnel here," he said, referring to the People's Republic of China.

"Unfortunately, the military lines aren't open, and that's really what we would like to see amended," he said.

China cut several military-to-military communication channels and other areas of bilateral dialogue after an August visit to the Chinese-claimed island of Taiwan by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which took Washington-Beijing relations to a dangerous low.

On Thursday, Biden gave a speech focusing on the balloon incident. He said he expected to speak with Chinese leader Xi about it and hoped to get to the bottom of the affair.

In answer to a question, Kirby said Washington had not formally requested a call with Xi, but added: "That does mean it’s not going to happen, that the president ... doesn’t want to talk to President Xi. He will."

"There's no preconditions for a call," Kirby said. "The president will want to have a conversation with President Xi at the appropriate time."

White House officials say Biden and Xi last spoke at a November meeting on the island of Bali and both sides saw Blinken's Beijing trip as an opportunity for follow-up efforts to stabilize increasingly fraught ties.

Kirby's comment came as U.S. officials have been looking at the possibility of a meeting between Blinken and China's top diplomat Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference that began on Friday.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is also in Munich for the conference, defended the administration's handling of the balloon incident and the shooting down of three other unidentified objects.

"It needed to be shot down because we were confident that it was used by China to spy on American people," she told MSNBC.

"We will maintain the perspective that we have in terms of what should be the relationship between China and the United States," Harris said. "That is not going to change, but surely and certainly that balloon was not helpful."

China reacted angrily when the American military shot down the 200-foot (60-meter) balloon off South Carolina on Feb. 4 after it transited the continental U.S. China said the airship was for monitoring weather conditions and had blown off course.

The United States said on Friday it had successfully concluded recovery efforts to collect sensors and other debris from the balloon and investigators were now analyzing its "guts."

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/u-china-military-unfortunately-not-193104296.html

Amazon asks corporate staff to be in offices 3 days a week

 Amazon will require its corporate employees to return to the office at least three days a week.

CEO Andy Jassy announced the policy Friday in a memo to staff. It marks a shift from Amazon's current policy of allowing leaders to determine how their teams worked. The change will go into effect May 1.

Many companies have been calling their employees back to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to operate virtually.

Last month, Starbucks told its corporate employees to plan to work from the office three days a week. Disney is asking employees to plan for four in-office days starting in March. And Walmart said this week that it would require its tech teams to plan regular in-office work days.

Jassy said in his memo that Amazon made its decision after observing what worked during the pandemic. Among other things, he said the senior leadership team watched how staff performed and talked to leaders at other companies. He said they concluded employees tended to be more engaged in person and collaborate more easily.

The move could help local economies, he said.

“I’m also optimistic that this shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations in the Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and the dozens of cities around the world where our employees go to the office,” Jassy wrote.

Jassy said the details of the policy haven’t been finalized. He said he wanted to share the decision — made at a meeting of the company's senior leadership team this week — as early as possible. He said there will be certain roles that will be exempted from the policy, “but that will be a small minority.”

Last month, Amazon announced it would trim 18,000 corporate positions in its efforts to prune payrolls that rapidly expanded during the pandemic lockdown. Other big tech companies, including Salesforce and Google, have been doing the same.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/amazon-asks-corporate-staff-offices-203350298.html

New York's JFK Airport terminal to reopen after power outage

 New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) will reopen its Terminal 1 for limited operations on Saturday, after it remained closed on Friday due to an electrical power outage.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/new-yorks-jfk-airport-terminal-remain-shut-after-power-outage-2023-02-17/

'Master' Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, "Master The World": Klaus Schwab

 by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Klaus Schwab, chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), during an event in Dubai, called on global governments to work together and control new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to decide the fate of humankind, contradicting Musk’s recent warning at the same event.

In 2015, Schwab wrote a book called The Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which he mentioned more than 20 technologies that will change the world. “All those technologies have become reality,” he said at the World Government Summit in Dubai this week while adding that humanity is moving into the “exponential phase” of technology transformation.

Schwab cited technologies like AI, metaverse, cryptocurrencies, space tech, and synthetic biology that will change the world. “Our life in 10 years from now will be completely different, very much affected. And who masters those technologies in some way will be the master of the world,” Schwab stated.

The engineering of organisms to develop unique purposes and abilities, which are not inherently available, is known as synthetic biology. It involves changing the organism’s genetic code by infusing it with another creature’s DNA, a radical step-up from genome editing. The WEF is a proponent of the methodology.

“You cannot catch up with the new technologies. You have to be a frontrunner because otherwise, you will be on the losing outside.” One of the main concerns is how to shape “necessary policies” to ensure that technologies “serve” humankind.

“Change goes so fast in our world, and we go even faster. How can we make sure that the individual, each citizen, doesn’t feel overwhelmed by change because he cannot understand really what’s going on?” Schwab said, while adding that if people do not understand change, they can turn fearful and react negatively.

The WEF head called on governments “to have the ambition and the vision to show that those technologies can serve for the good.”

Schwab also raised fears of new technologies getting out of control. “If we do not walk together on a global scale, if you do not formulate, shape together the necessary policies, they (technologies) will escape our power.”

Danger of Too Much Government Cooperation

The WEF head’s call for close cooperation between governments globally to shape the future of the human race stands in stark contrast to that of industrialist Elon Musk, who on Wednesday warned at the World Government Summit against a “single world government.”

“We should be a little bit concerned about actually becoming too much of a single world government … If I may say, we want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having—frankly, this might sound a little odd—too much cooperation between governments,” Musk said.

He pointed out that throughout history, multiple civilizations have risen and fallen. However, these events did not result in the doom of humanity as a whole since these were separate civilizations that were separated by great distances.

“It sounds a little odd, but we want to have some amount of civilizational diversity such that if something does go wrong with some part of civilization, then the whole thing doesn’t just collapse and humanity keeps moving forward,” the entrepreneur warned.

‘Role Model’ China, Stakeholder Ideology

In his speech at the World Government Summit, Schwab did not detail what system he believes the world should adopt in the future.

But back in November, during an interview with Chinese state-run television network CGTN, Schwab had called China a “role model” for other nations, even though the communist regime in Beijing is known to suppress free speech, conduct blatant and widespread human rights abuses, and crack down on fundamental freedoms. The “Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries,” he said at the time.

In Dubai, Schwab also pushed forward his “stakeholder” ideology whereby governments bring “directive power,” businesses bring “innovative power,” civil society brings “concerned power,” academia brings “the power of truth,” and media brings a “critical dimension in this dialogue,” with all of them working to “shape together the future.”

In a September 2021 commentary at The Epoch Times, John Mac Ghlionn, a researcher and essayist, pointed out that the push for ideologies like “stakeholder capitalism” sound similar to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s idea of “common prosperity” that claims to be aimed at addressing the wealth gap.

“Both purport to benefit broader society, especially the most vulnerable, and both purport to be vehicles for positive change. In reality, they benefit no one but those who already have too much power. Although it might sound obvious, power is a finite resource,” Ghlionn wrote.

“The more of its governments have, the less of its citizens have. The same goes for control. Stakeholder capitalism, similar to ‘common prosperity,’ involves giving more control to those who already control society.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/those-who-master-artificial-intelligence-synthetic-biology-will-be-master-world-klaus

Combat AI ‘robodogs’ follow telepathic commands from soldiers

 A breakthrough in artificial intelligence being tested by the Australian military reportedly allows soldiers to control robot dogs solely with their minds.

Called a brain robotic interface, the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence — through a high-tech biosensor headset — analyzes brainwave readings and feeds them from a person’s visual cortex into the advanced “robodog,” Newsflash reported.

“The whole process is not difficult to master. It’s very intuitive. It only took a couple of sessions,” said 5th Combat Service Support Battalion Sergeant Damian Robinson, who test-drove the HoloLens headset.

Robinson and fellow soldiers did course training with the mind-reading headsets and robodogs, in which they were able to successfully navigate harsh terrain and bad weather on a makeshift battlefield.

The current key to keeping the bots on course are flickering beacons — seen as augmented reality in the headsets — which work as waypoints that the canine-like automatons move toward.

Soldiers can now operate robodogs using only their minds as part of a major breakthrough.

Newsflash
“You don’t have to think anything specific to operate the robot, but you do need to focus on that flicker,” Robinson said. “It’s more of a visual concentration thing.”

The technology, which was buoyed by a $1.2 million military investment, was worked on for the past three years in a collaboration between the University of Technology Sydney and the army’s Robotic and Autonomous Implementation and Coordination Office (RICO).

So far, the dog — manufactured by Ghost Robotics — is capable of nine different commands during a fixed time, according to Prof. Chin-Teng Lin.

Doing so came via a breakthrough that minimized noise from both an operator’s environment and their own body.

A new high-tech headset allows soldiers to control robot dogs using only their thoughts.

Newsflash
The HoloLens’ unprecedented efficiency comes by way of an ultra-thin compound known as graphene, which is described as being “many times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible.”

“We’ve been able to combine the best of graphene, which is very biocompatible and very conductive, with the best of silicon technology, which makes our biosensor very resilient and robust to use,” said Professor Francesca Iacopi, a fellow project leader.

https://nypost.com/2023/02/17/combat-ai-robodogs-follow-telepathic-commands-from-soldiers/

‘Airbag Jeans’ save motorcyclists in a crash — for a hefty price

 It’s giving Michelin Man — or Sam Smith.

Riding a Harley is fun and games until it isn’t — fatalities and injuries among motorcyclists have steadily increased over the years. In 2020, there were more than 5,000 deaths and 83,000 injuries.

While helmets and other protective gear are encouraged for riders, they do very little to provide a cushion in the case of a serious accident.

Cue: “Airbag Jeans.”

Swedish design company Mo’cycle has crafted a pair of inflatable denim trousers meant to break the wearer’s fall using CO2. A cartridge installed inside the jeans releases the gas as the rider topples off the bike during a mishap.

But the price of safety isn’t cheap – the jeans retail at $499 and will be available to order later this month.

Upon first glance, the jeans look completely normal.

Mo'Cycle / SWNS

When a fall triggers the pants, CO2 fills the internal airbags to create a cushion.

Mo'Cycle / SWNS

Marketed as the “world’s first” inflatable jean, Mo’cycle’s pants are made from abrasion-resistant and water-repellent fabric, yet feel like true denim. Before the airbag deploys, the trousers seem just like any other pair of pants – that is, until the airbag is triggered. Within “milliseconds,” the website claims, the jeans inflate.

The company also engineered an Airbag Vest and an Airbag Outfit, inflatable alternatives to standard cyclist gear.

Videos on their website show the products in action, showing interested consumers how the cutting-edge technology operates. The inflatable pants, specifically, are tethered to the bike – when they’re yanked from the seat, they inflate as the motorcyclist tumbles to the ground after being thrown from their bike.

Videos on Mo’cycle’s website show the pants in action.

Mo'Cycle / SWNS

As a cyclist falls, the pants inflate with help from CO2.

Mo'Cycle / SWNS

The pants are completely reusable, the website claims, and the CO2 cartridge can be replaced after it’s used. To wash the pants – which will be launching on the crowdfunding campaign sire Indiegogo – just remove the airbag components.

“The only impact protection you have in regular motorcycle jeans is basically the knee protectors and sometimes you get hip protectors,” said founder and designer Moses Shahrivar, per the Daily Mail.

“Most injuries occur on the lower body in a serious motorcycle accident, so for 17 years I’ve been trying to solve this problem,” he added, referencing his nearly two-decade-long pursuit to create the safest pair of jeans.

The inflatable trousers are triggered by a tether attached to the bike.

Mo'Cycle / SWNS
For this launch, which is the third-generation design of Shahrivar’s motorcycle jeans, Mo’cycle teamed up with airbag vest creation company Helite to make the pants available in the US this year.

https://nypost.com/2023/02/17/bizarre-airbag-jeans-save-motorcyclists-in-a-crash-for-a-hefty-price/