Lebanon’s entire electric grid collapsed on Saturday when the country’s two main power stations ran out of fuel.
For months, the country had been providing citizens with a few hours of electricity a day, according to The Washington Post. Then yesterday, Lebanon’s state-owned power stations, Deir Ammar and Zahrani, ran out of diesel fuel leaving the entire country with no electricity. The outage is expected to last days.
To solve the situation, the Lebanese government is attempting to get emergency fuel from the army and other sources until the country receives and distributes a shipment of oil from Iraq.
Creating and building a “Secure Smart City” requires strong Private Public Partnerships that incorporate people, policies, processes and technology from both government and industry into the overall strategy process.
This week, The European Parliament, the body responsible for adopting European Union (EU) legislation, passed a non-binding resolution calling for a ban on law enforcement use of facial recognition technology in public places. The resolution, which also proposes a moratorium on the deployment of predictive policing software, would restrict the use of remote biometric identification unless it’s to fight “serious” crime, such as kidnapping and terrorism.
The approach stands in contrast to that of U.S. agencies, which continue to embrace facial recognition even in light of studies showing the potential for ethnic, racial, and gender bias. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 10 branches including the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and Homeland Security plan to expand their use of facial recognition between 2020 and 2023 as they implement as many as 17 different facial recognition systems.
Commercial face-analyzing systems have been critiqued by scholars and activists alike throughout the past decade, if not longer. The technology and techniques — everything from sepia-tinged film to low-contrast digital cameras — often favor lighter skin, encoding racial bias in algorithms. Indeed, independent benchmarks of vendors’ systems by the Gender Shades project and others have revealed that facial recognition technologies are susceptible to a range of prejudices exacerbated by misuse in the field. For example, a report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology details how police feed facial recognition software flawed data, including composite sketches and pictures of celebrities who share physical features with suspects.
Taiwan’s TSMC and Japan’s Sony Group Corp are considering jointly building a chip factory in Japan, with the government ready to pay for some of the investment of about 800 billion yen ($7.15 billion), the Nikkei reported on Friday, October 8 2021. (
Both Sony and TSMC declined to comment. But TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker and major Apple Inc supplier had said in July that it was reviewing a plan to set up production in Japan.
The Chinese government is developing biological weapons that can attack #DNA strands specific to targeted racial groups. According to Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” these “ethnic-specific pathogens” could amount to “civilization killers,” and leave China as the world’s “only viable #civilization.” This development is happening as China amasses the largest collection of American DNA profiles, even larger than what the United States has, through the purchase of DNA sequencing companies. We sat down with Gordon Chang to learn more about why these developments necessitate the immediate attention of the U.S. #government, and of governments around the world.
A FIVE-DAY COURSE of molnupiravir, the new medicine being hailed as a “huge advance” in the treatment of Covid-19, costs $17.74 to produce, according to a report (pdf) issued last week by drug pricing experts at the Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London. Merck is charging the U.S. government $712 for the same amount of medicine, or 40 times the price. (taxpayer funded mind you)
The Covid-19 treatment molnupiravir was developed using funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
As already mentioned, the Saudi Arabian Government officially granted Sophia citizenship in 2017. She is the first and only robot to be an official citizen of a country. Her citizenship sparked some controversy, and not just from people who don’t think robots deserve rights. Rather, many people pointed out the contrast to women’s rights in the country.
Sophia spoke on a stage without wearing the required coverings that women have to wear there. Saudi Arabia is one of the countries lagging the furthest behind in women’s rights. Only a few years ago were women given the right to drive. Still, the country operates under the guardianship system which states that women must always be accompanied by men in public. They can’t go anywhere without permission or do most things without permission. Even to report domestic violence or abuse they need permission from male relatives.
The largest projects started in 2,013 when the US government and the European Commission launched ‘moonshot’ efforts to provide services to researchers that will help to crack the mammalian brain’s code. They each poured vast resources into large-scale systematic programmes with different goals. The US effort — which is estimated to cost US$6.6 billion up until 2027 — has focused on developing and applying new mapping technologies in its BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative (see ‘Big brain budgets’). The European Commission and its partner organizations have spent €607 million ($703 million) on the Human Brain Project (HBP), which is aimed mainly at creating simulations of the brain’s circuitry and using those models as a platform for experiments.
Scientists around the world are working together to catalogue and map cells in the brain. What have these huge projects revealed about how it works?
Comprehensive health, social services and economic well-being for american indian and alaska native elders — larry curley, executive director, national indian council on aging.
Mr. Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation with over 40 years of experience working in the aging and healthcare fields. He has worked with Congress, other branches of the federal government, and national organizations on aging to develop support for programs affecting elder American Indians.
After receiving his master’s degree in public administration at the University of Arizona, along with a certificate in gerontology, Mr. Curley worked as a gerontological planner at an Area Agency on Aging in Pima County, Arizona, where he was instrumental in establishing a county public fiduciary program. As a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., he successfully advocated for the passage of Title VI of the Older Americans Act, an amendment which he wrote.
Mr. Curley directed the Navajo Nation’s Head Start program, one of the five largest Head Start programs in the country, and has served as a nursing home administrator of a tribal, long-term care facility, a hospital administrator in northern Nevada, and as a college instructor at the University of Nevada-Reno and Eastern Washington University.
