Saturday, July 1, 2023
CIA director called Kremlin to assure US had no role in aborted mutiny- US newspapers
CIA Director William Burns called Russian spy chief Sergei Naryshkin after last week's aborted mutiny in Russia to assure the Kremlin that the United States had no role in it, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
Burns' phone call with Naryshkin, the head of Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service, took place this week and was the highest-level contact between the two governments since the attempted mutiny, the Wall Street Journal said.
The boss of Russia's Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, shocked the world by leading last week's armed revolt, only to abruptly call it off as his fighters approached Moscow.
President Joe Biden said on Monday the brief uprising by Russian mercenaries against the Kremlin was part of a struggle within the Russian system and that the United States and its allies were not involved in it.
'AI helping remove Chinese goods made with Uyghur forced labor from corporate supply chains'
Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a role in helping companies and government agencies remove products from the supply chain that are suspected of being tainted by the use of Uyghur-forced labor in China.
The Chinese government persecutes the Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities who reside in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region – requiring them to work in factories against their will and subjecting them to mass incarceration in "reeducation camps" among other human rights abuses. The U.S. and several other countries have said the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) actions amount to genocide. The CCP denies those allegations, claiming the camps are needed for counterterrorism and "vocational training."
Last year, a law known as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) took effect, which requires companies to rebut the presumption that goods and supply chain components sourced from Xinjiang are the product of forced labor and subject to import restrictions.
Altana Technologies, an AI startup that recently raised $100 million in Series B investment, has developed an AI tool called Altana Atlas, which is being used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to track imports. It is also in use by companies like shipping and logistics giant Maersk, pharmaceutical company Merck and Boston Scientific to map their supply chains to comply with UFLPA and root out forced labor and ensure compliance with sanctions regimes.
Evan Smith, the CEO and co-founder of Altana, told FOX Business that the company’s supply chain mapping system is like "Google Maps for the global supply chain" and shows "linkages and product flows from point A to point B" while tracking the companies involved with various shipments.
"We’re using artificial intelligence both to crunch all that messy data – it’s billions of records of really messy shipment data, trade data, corporate registry data and procurement data – and to turn that into one clean, unified picture that can only be done with artificial intelligence," Smith explained. "There’s no way humans can get through that stuff with any kind of reasonable timeframe."
"So we use artificial intelligence to build the map, and then we use artificial intelligence on top of the map to connect our customers into that map and answer questions about supply chain activity, about companies, about product relations, and specifically on forced labor to target it deep into upstream value chains to understand where there’s a high likelihood of there being forced labor tainting those products," Smith continued.
An analysis the company did last year using its platform estimated that about 10% of all the companies in the world that were buying and selling physical goods were using inputs from Xinjiang. Smith said those goods were "typically many hops removed," but "if you follow the chain all the way back, that’s where it’s coming from. So you’re talking about a really vast swath of the world economy."
The types of goods that have been flagged as being potentially produced in whole or in part with Uyghur-forced labor are wide-ranging: Altana has seen imports of textiles, apparel, pharmaceuticals, the chemical supply chain, food, furniture and cars flagged due to forced labor concerns; while Smith said that aluminum and electronics supply chains may be product categories where CBP focuses its forced labor enforcement in the future.
Global supply chain networks that are tainted by forced labor often flow from China’s Xinjiang region to other trans-shipment points, like Hong Kong, Vietnam and India. Altana Atlas is used not only to trace where products from Xinjiang flow downstream, but also to take an import to the U.S. and trace that back upstream.
As goods flow through the supply chain, they can generate records like product orders, customs declarations, freight bookings and other data points that are arranged in different formats and composed in a variety of languages.
"The challenge is to take all that raw, messy data that’s in different languages and somehow clean it and connect it into one canonical representation of all the companies in the world, at all the places in the world that they operate, and then the specific products that move between them at those places. So you’re building this bottoms-up view of all the businesses and product flows between them," Smith explained.
"We’ve been building this bottoms-up view of the world’s physical economy in the form of a supply chain knowledge graph. And again, because the raw materials here, the raw data here is so vast and so messy and there’s no unique identifiers – the only way you can approach that problem is with artificial intelligence."
The company is investing in large language models to allow users to pose questions more flexibly in natural language and have the AI access the Altana Atlas knowledge graph and customer data to allow users to evaluate various scenarios that may impact their supply chains.
"Everything from the big sort of geopolitical scenarios, you know, what happens to my supply chain if China invades or embargoes Taiwan, to help me find potential forced labor exposure on any of the product families in my supply chain that contribute this amount of revenue," Smith said. "Being able to ask questions in natural language and have an analyst co-pilot take the user through, you know, big strategic questions, very small tactical questions, that’s the next frontier here."
Altana is also helping companies evaluate their supply chains to avoid business interruptions due to being over-reliant on particular vendors or distribution hubs to avoid disturbances like what transpired in the supply chain amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
"There’s COVID shocks, there’s geopolitical competition that’s heating up, which is fracturing supply chains. You have all this explosion of regulatory compliance and legislation that’s taking place in the supply chain whether it's the UFLPA in the United States or the EU Supply Chain Due Diligence Directive, which is compelling businesses in the EU to understand their global supply chains and represent that there’s no labor rights, or criminal violations, or other supply chain hygiene issues," Smith explained.
Since it took effect in June 2022, the shipment of goods subject to the UFLPA, where businesses are in Xinjiang, has been reduced by 40%, which Smith said shows the law is having an effect on supply chain behavior. Some of that adaption has manifested itself as goods are increasingly funneled through transshipment hubs like Vietnam, Hong Kong and India.
"What’s not happening is the Chinese government changing their behavior with respect to Uyghur-forced labor, so that manufacturing is still happening, and it’s going to try to find its way into the world economy," Smith said.
'Godfather Of AI' Speaks Out: AI Capable Of Reason, May Seek Control
by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A leading mind in the development of artificial intelligence is warning that AI has developed a rudimentary capacity to reason and may seek to overthrow humanity.
AI systems may develop the desire to seize control from humans as a way of accomplishing other preprogrammed goals, said Geoffrey Hinton, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto.
“I think we have to take the possibility seriously that if they get smarter than us, which seems quite likely, and they have goals of their own, which seems quite likely, they may well develop the goal of taking control,” Hinton said during a June 28 talk at the Collision tech conference in Toronto, Canada.
“If they do that, we’re in trouble.”
Hinton has been dubbed one of the “godfathers of AI” for his work in neural networks. He recently spent a decade helping to develop AI systems for Google but left the company last month, saying he needed to be able to warn people of the risks posed by AI.
While Hinton does not believe that AI will innately crave power, he said that it could nevertheless seek to seize it from humans as a logical step to better allow itself to achieve its goals.
“At a very general level, if you’ve got something that’s a lot smarter than you, that’s very good at manipulating people, at a very general level, are you confident that people stay in charge?” Hinton said.
“I think they’ll derive [the motive to seize control] as a way of achieving other goals.”
AI Now Capable of Reason
Hinton previously doubted that an AI superintelligence that could match humans would emerge within the next 30 to 50 years. He now believes it could come in less than 20.
In part, he said, that is because AI systems that use large language models are beginning to show the capacity to reason, and he is not sure how they are doing it.
“It’s the big language models that are getting close, and I don’t really understand why they can do it, but they can do little bits of reasoning.
“They still can’t match us, but they’re getting close.”
Hinton described an AI system that had been given a puzzle in which it had to plan how to paint several rooms of a house. It was given three colors to choose from, with one color that faded to another over time, and asked to paint a certain number of rooms in a particular color within a set time frame. Rather than merely opting to paint the rooms the desired color, the AI determined not to paint any that it knew would fade to the desired color anyway, electing to save resources though it had not been programmed to do so.
“That’s thinking,” Hinton said.
To that end, Hinton said that there was no reason to suspect that AI wouldn’t reach and exceed human intelligence in the coming years.
“We’re just a big neural net, and there’s no reason why an artificial neural net shouldn’t be able to do everything we can do,” Hinton said.
“We’re entering a period of huge uncertainty. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/godfather-ai-speaks-out-ai-capable-reason-may-seek-control
Musk says Twitter will limit how many tweets users can read
Twitter is limiting how many tweets per day various accounts can read, to discourage "extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation, Executive Chair Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.
Verified accounts are temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that the unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts a day with new unverified accounts limited to 300.
The temporary reading limitation will be increasing soon to 8,000 posts per day for verified users, 800 posts per day for unverified and 400 posts per day for new unverified users, Musk said in a separate post on Twitter without providing further details on when it would be implemented.
Previously, Twitter had announced it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a "temporary emergency measure."
Musk had said that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively", impacting user experience.
Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter's data to train their large language models.
The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who left Twitter under Musk's ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue program.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musk-says-twitter-applies-temporary-172443290.html
Raytheon Calls In Retirees To Help Produce Stinger Missiles
by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
Raytheon has called in retired engineers to help produce Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that the US has been providing Ukraine, Defense One reported on Thursday.
Stingers are shoulder-fired missiles that were out of production for 20 years until the US started sending them to Ukraine when Russia first invaded last year, a policy led by a former Raytheon board member, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
According to the Pentagon, the US has provided Ukraine with over 1,700 Stinger missile systems to date.
"Stinger’s been out of production for 20 years, and all of a sudden in the first 48 hours [of the war], it’s the star of the show and everybody wants more," Wes Kremer, the president of Raytheon Missiles & Defense, said last week.
Raytheon needs to produce the Stingers using blueprints drawn up during the Carter administration, as using more advanced production methods would require redesigning the weapon.
"We were bringing back retired employees that are in their 70s … to teach our new employees how to actually build a Stinger," Kremer said. "We’re pulling test equipment out of warehouses and blowing the spider webs off of them."
The US Army placed an order for Stingers in May 2022 to replace ones sent to Ukraine, but the Pentagon said they won’t be delivered until 2026. Kremer said it would take at least 30 months for the first missiles to be completed due to the time it will take to restart production.
In March 2022, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes explained how the war in Ukraine would be a boon for the weapons maker.
"Everything that’s being shipped into Ukraine today, of course, is coming out of stockpiles, either at DoD or from our NATO allies, and that’s all great news. Eventually we’ll have to replenish it and we will see a benefit to the business over the next coming years," he said.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/raytheon-calls-retirees-help-produce-stinger-missiles
Xanax, Valium Associated With Brain Injury, Suicide
About 30 million Americans are taking benzodiazepines like Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin- about 12.5% of the adult population. Doctors and psychiatrists have prescribed these drugs for decades to treat anxiety. But a new study reveals "benzodiazepine usage and discontinuing usage" can create "nervous system injury and negative life effects."
Researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus said as patients enter the discontinuation phase of Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin, they face significant withdrawal symptoms.
"Despite the fact that benzodiazepines have been widely prescribed for decades, this survey presents significant new evidence that a subset of patients experiences long-term neurological complications," said Alexis Ritvo, M.D, M.P.H., an assistant professor in psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and medical director of the nonprofit Alliance for Benzodiazepine Best Practices. She said the medical community must reevaluate how it prescribes benzodiazepines.
The study was a collaborative effort between CU Anschutz, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and several drug advocacy that specializes in raising awareness of benzodiazepine harms.
"Patients have been reporting long-term effects from benzodiazepines for over 60 years. I am one of those patients. Even though I took my medication as prescribed, I still experience symptoms on a daily basis at four years off benzodiazepines. Our survey and the new term BIND (benzodiazepine-induced neurological dysfunction) give a voice to the patient experience and point to the need for further investigations," said Christy Huff, MD, one of the paper's coauthors and a cardiologist and director of Benzodiazepine Information Coalition.
About 76.6% of the respondents had long-lasting symptoms after discounting the use of benzodiazepines. Almost half of the respondents had these ten symptoms for more than a year:
- low energy
- difficulty focusing
- memory loss
- anxiety
- insomnia
- sensitivity to light and sounds
- digestive problems
- symptoms triggered by food and drink
- muscle weakness
- body pain
The most alarming part of the study was the symptoms listed above were new and distinct and weren't experienced before respondents used Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin. Many respondents reported damaged relationships, job loss, and increased medical costs. Also, 54.4% of the respondents reported suicidal thoughts or attempted suicide.
But don't worry because doctors and the government tell us benzodiazepines are safe, just like they said OxyContin wasn't addictive in the 1990s.
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/study-finds-xanax-valium-associated-brain-injury-suicide
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