Abram Leyzorek
5/3/2018
Current Events
- Russia Today: Czech president Milo Zeman has admitted to Barrandov TV Channel that his country produced small amounts of Novichok, which was then destroyed, proving the argument of Russia, which has been accused of poisoning ex-Russian spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia, that any of several countries could have produced the nerve agent A230, aka Novichok.
From: https://www.rt.com/uk/425826-czech-zeman-skripal-novichok/.
2. Russia Today: Facebook announced last month that it will rank the trustworthiness of news sources and popularize the “trustworthy” ones and suppress the “untrustworthy” ones and these rankings will be made based on feedback from users and news organizations, such as those that Zuckerburg met with at the F8 conference on May 1, 2018; in addition to cracking down on “Hate Speech” which it defines as a “direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics- race, ethnicity…”, etc, Facebook will carry out “content policing” of news will winnow out false statements and “false narratives,” which it defines as “intentionally divisive headlines and language that exploits disagreements and sow conflict,” in addition to cracking down on impersonators and tricks used to expand the audience to a particular message.
From: https://www.rt.com/usa/425661-facebook-trusted-media-sources-ranking/.
3. Russia Today: The U.S. support for the Syrian based group known as the white helmets, who some say are terrorists and others say are heroes, is, according to CBS News, under “active review,” and the organization hasn’t received funding from the U.S. in weeks; this comes after a meeting of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague, Netherlands, during which Douma, the Syrian city that was the site of a recent alleged chemical weapons attack blamed on Syria, residents testified that a video made by the White Helmets in which children were being hosed down with water, that was used as a justification for the U.S., U.K., and France to launch over 100 missiles to Syria on April 14, was staged by the White Helmets and completely fake.
From: https://www.rt.com/news/425810-white-helmets-us-funding-freeze/.
4. BBC: On Tuesday, a new Utah law sponsored by State Senator Lincoln Fillmore that allows parents who believe their children to be of “sufficient age and maturity” to leave them unsupervised without fear of neglect charges and their children being snatched by Child Protective Services, as happed Danielle and Alexander Meitiv who in late 2014 left their children at park and were later visited by CPS agents after the police brought the children home when they were seen walking home alone, who threatened to take custody of the children and later materialized that threat when the kids were left again at a very familiar park, past curfew.
From: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43997862.
5. BBC: Launched on an Atlas rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 04:05 (BST) on May 5, 2018, the InSight probe will touch down on Mars in November and will monitor seismic activity using special seismometers designed to survive the stresses of lift off, to determine the interior structure and composition of the Red Planet.
From: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43981895.
6. Astute News: The century old organization, previously known as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), but now known as Scouts BSA, has already accepted 3,000 female members aged 7-10 to its Cub Scouts branch and be opening up all services to girls next year, and will also accept transgender individuals.
From: https://astutenews.com/2018/05/06/boy-skirts-of-america-century-old-youth-club-caves-to-pc-police/.
7. PBS: Vladimir Putin was inaugurated for his fourth term as president of Russia on May 7, 2018 after he revieved seventy-seven percent of the vote.
From: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/vladimir-putin-sworn-in-for-fourth-term-as-russian-president.
8. Science: Ali Rahimi, a researcher for Google based in San Francisco California, in a talk last December stated that research into machine learning algorithms has become a kind of ”alchemy” in its trial and error approach, because researchers have no idea why some work and others don’t, and in a recent paper presented on April 30 the International Conference on Learning Representations in Vancouver, Canada, Rahimi et. al. explain how this leads to wasted effort and poor results by adding unnecessary components to an algorithm or completely relying on overlays when the core of the algorithm is broken; it is just one of the problems that field is suffering from, such as the reproducibility problem, i.e. researchers cannot replicate each other’s experiments, and the interpretability problem, i.e. researchers don’t understand how an AI thinks.
From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/ai-researchers-allege-machine-learning-alchemy.
9. Nature: In a paper published in Nature on May 7, 2018, Lenzen et. al. show how the carbon footprint of the tourism industry is eight times worse than previously estimated, as previous analyses only considered the effect of air travel, and not the immense tourism infrastructure and the product consumption of the tourists themselves; it was found that air travel only accounts for twelve percent of tourism emissions, which was about eight percent of the entire world’s emissions in 2013, or 4.5 billion metric tons of CO2.
From: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0141-x.
10. The Guardian: In mid-2017, Australian courts scrutinized a constitutional clause stating that members of parliament (MPs) cannot have dual citizenship, and since then fourteen MPs have been forced to resign or found ineligible for office, the most recent five all resigning on May 9, 2018 after the first one, labor senator Katy Gallagher, was ruled ineligible because she had failed to renounce her UK citizenship before the nomination deadline in 2016 preceding the elections, and the other three, Labor MPs Josh Wilson, Susan Lamb, and Justine Keay, and Centre Alliance MP Rebekha Sharkie, all resigned after that ruling set the precedent; some will have a shot at reelection at byelections to be held as early as June, but Gallagher has been replaced by her running mate and must wait until next year’s elections and also will have to renounce her UK citizenship because her defense that she took “all reasonable steps” to renounce it in 2016 did not hold up to a joint decision of five Australian justices that said that her defense only works if the country in which the candidate holds dual citizenship does not allow the candidate to renounce it, thus presenting an “insurmountable obstacle,” but Gallagher holds dual citizenship in the UK which has no such onerous laws.
From: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/may/09/australia-citizenship-crisis-reignites-as-senator-and-four-mps-quit.
11. The Washington Post: While the European Union tries to salvage the Iran Nuclear Deal from which the United States is withdrawing, the US plans to reinstate sanctions on Iran which may also affect European companies that have moved into Iran since the deal took effect, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says that their business licenses will be voided and the US Ambassador to Germany stated on Twitter that German companies operating in Iran ought to wind down operations immediately.
12. NPR: The California energy commission approved new legislation on May 9, 2018 that requires all new low rise, residential building with sunlight exposure to have solar panels installed in an effort to reduce the cost of utilities and reduce greenhouse gas emissions will come into effect in 2020 if the Building Standards Commission also approves it.
From: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/09/609779542/california-moves-forward-with-plan-to-require-solar-panels-on-new-homes.
13. Fox News: On May 10, 2108, Iran launched unprovoked from Syria twenty rockets into Israel’s military outposts in the Golan Heights, but did not cause any damage, and Israel retaliated with the largest air strike since 1973 that targeted nearly all of Iran’s infrastructure in Syria, including the missile launcher that fired the twenty rockets into the Golan Heights, but, according to Syrian Brigadier General Ali Mayhoub, the “large part” of the Israeli missiles were intercepted by Syrian defense systems and only hit a radar station, a munitions warehouse, and several air defense units with an unkown number of casualties; Israel does not intend to escalate further, according to Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, an IDF spokesperson.
From: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/05/10/israel-strikes-nearly-all-iranian-infrastructure-in-syria-after-iran-rocket-attack-minister-says.html.
14. Fox News: Early May 10, 2018, US President Donald Trump met the three “former hostages” of North Korea, who have been detained since 2015, at the Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, along with Vice President Mike Pence and First Lady Melania Trump; North Korea’s primary state news agency KCNA said that the gesture was in response to an “official suggestion” of the US president.
From: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/05/10/trump-greets-american-detainees-freed-from-north-korea.html.
