U.S. Official Says Spy Satellites Detected Explosion Just Before Dam Collapse U.S. spy agencies still do not have any solid evidence to determine who caused the destruction, the senior administration official said........ satellites equipped with infrared sensors detected a heat signature consistent with a major explosion just before the dam collapsed, unleashing huge floodwaters downstream. ......... American intelligence analysts suspect that Russia was behind the dam’s destruction.......... Seismic data picked up by the NORSAR observatory in Norway also supported the theory there had been large explosion near Kakhovka dam on Tuesday at 2:54 a.m. local time, when the structure collapsed. NORSAR said in a statement that signals captured from a station 385 miles away from the dam show clear indications of an explosion. .......... Engineering and munitions experts have said a deliberate explosion inside the Kakhovka dam, which is controlled by Russia, most likely caused its collapse on Tuesday. They added that structural failure or an attack from outside the dam were possible but less plausible explanations. ......... a blast in an enclosed space, with all of its energy applied against the structure around it, would do the most damage. Even then, they said, it would require hundreds of pounds of explosives, at least, to breach the dam. .......... An external detonation by a bomb or missile would exert only a fraction of its force against the dam, and would require an explosive many times larger to achieve a similar effect. .......... an audio recording, translated into English, that it claimed was between two Russian soldiers and was evidence that Russian forces orchestrated the destruction of the dam. .
With Probes of Russian Lines, Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Takes Shape Ukraine is using its new arsenal of Western tanks and armored vehicles in what is expected to be one of the largest military operations in Europe since World War II........ With each clash, Ukraine is trying to show that it can attack anywhere, while trying to make Russia defend everywhere. ........ Kyiv, which as expected in the early stages is suffering casualties, will need to show significant progress in its counteroffensive to keep the money and weapons flowing from the West. .......... Over the past 24 hours, Ukrainian forces firing rockets and artillery hit four Russian command centers, six areas of concentration of personnel, weapons and military equipment, three ammunition depots and five enemy artillery units in firing positions, Ukraine’s military said. ........... The flurry of initial attacks, staged under a cloak of secrecy by the Ukrainian Army, are intended to probe for weak points and lure Russia into revealing its defensive strategies too soon, before the bulk of Ukraine’s new force is put into the fight. ......... In this opening phase, Ukrainian forces are essentially probing Russian lines to determine the weakest points. They will then try to pivot and concentrate on the assaults that have the best potential for success. ......... Russia has spent months laying minefields, digging bunkers and setting out concrete barriers for tanks. ............. As Ukrainian troops assault, Russian forces move reinforcements and fire artillery in response, exposing their positions and defensive strategies. They switch on electronic jamming systems, revealing how this equipment will be used in the fighting. .......... The Ukrainian military is using what it learns in these assaults to strike Russian artillery positions, said Mr. Samus, softening up defenses for an actual breakthrough battle that will come later. The larger fight “is still ahead of us and where exactly it will be we still don’t know.” ................ The main Russian defensive tactic, military analysts have said, is to deploy a thinly manned first line to detect an assault as it is overrun. Behind this line are minefields and then more trenches. Even farther back are reinforcements, which rush forward to counterattack the assaulting troops as they try to cross the minefields. .
How Could A.I. Destroy Humanity? Researchers and industry leaders have warned that A.I. could pose an existential risk to humanity. But they’ve been light on the details........ Today’s A.I. systems cannot destroy humanity. Some of them can barely add and subtract. So why are the people who know the most about A.I. so worried? ........... One day, the tech industry’s Cassandras say, companies, governments or independent researchers could deploy powerful A.I. systems to handle everything from business to warfare. Those systems could do things that we do not want them to do. And if humans tried to interfere or shut them down, they could resist or even replicate themselves so they could keep operating. .......... If you ask a machine to create as many paper clips as possible, they say, it could get carried away and transform everything — including humanity — into paper clip factories. ........... Companies could give A.I. systems more and more autonomy and connect them to vital infrastructure, including power grids, stock markets and military weapons. From there, they could cause problems. .......... “At some point, it would become clear that the big machine that is running society and the economy is not really under human control, nor can it be turned off, any more than the S&P 500 could be shut down,” he said. ............ researchers are transforming chatbots like ChatGPT into systems that can take actions based on the text they generate. A project called AutoGPT is the prime example. ........... The idea is to give the system goals like “create a company” or “make some money.” Then it will keep looking for ways of reaching that goal, particularly if it is connected to other internet services. ........... A system like AutoGPT can generate computer programs. If researchers give it access to a computer server, it could actually run those programs. In theory, this is a way for AutoGPT to do almost anything online — retrieve information, use applications, create new applications, even improve itself. .............. Systems like AutoGPT do not work well right now. They tend to get stuck in endless loops. Researchers gave one system all the resources it needed to replicate itself. It couldn’t do it. ........ In time, those limitations could be fixed. .......... Mr. Leahy argues that as researchers, companies and criminals give these systems goals like “make some money,” they could end up breaking into banking systems, fomenting revolution in a country where they hold oil futures or replicating themselves when someone tries to turn them off. ................. one system was able to hire a human online to defeat a Captcha test. When the human asked if it was “a robot,” the system lied and said it was a person with a visual impairment. ........... as researchers make these systems more powerful, training them on ever larger amounts of data, they could learn more bad habits............ In the early 2000s, a young writer named Eliezer Yudkowsky began warning that A.I. could destroy humanity. His online posts spawned a community of believers. Called rationalists or effective altruists, this community became enormously influential in academia, government think tanks and the tech industry. .......... Mr. Yudkowsky and his writings played key roles in the creation of both OpenAI and DeepMind, an A.I. lab that Google acquired in 2014. And many from the community of “EAs” worked inside these labs. They believed that because they understood the dangers of A.I., they were in the best position to build it. ........... The latest letter was signed by Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; and Demis Hassabis, who helped found DeepMind and now oversees a new A.I. lab that combines the top researchers from DeepMind and Google. ........... Other well-respected figures signed one or both of the warning letters, including Dr. Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, who recently stepped down as an executive and researcher at Google. In 2018, they received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks. .
There aren't actually THAT many people using ChatGPT Adoption of AI tools like chatbots ChatGPT and Google Bard remains surprisingly low. ....... Some days, it feels like the whole world is using ChatGPT. The reality is less impressive, according to a new survey by Morgan Stanley. ........ only 19% of respondents had used ChatGPT, and even fewer, 9% of respondents, had used the Google Bard chatbot. ........ The overwhelming majority of people not using chatbots said they were unlikely to use the tools in the next six months ....... "It's important investors bear in mind how early it is," the Morgan Stanley analysts wrote. ......... People mostly use chatbot services to learn about a new topic. ........ When online shopping, 56% of respondents said they start by using Google Search, YouTube, or Bard. ......... 37% travel research starts with Google, compared to 33% of searches that start on travel sites. .......... Morgan Stanley said Google could maintain its advantage through, "a more comprehensive and personalized travel search offering," which the company is already capturing with AI-generated search results and Bard. .
The next election can't handle a world powered by ChatGPT Get ready for "one-on-one interactive disinformation." .......... "Fundamentally, these new systems are going to be destabilizing," he told lawmakers. "They can and will create persuasive lies at a scale humanity has never seen before. Outsiders will use them to affect our elections, insiders to manipulate our markets and our political systems. Democracy itself is threatened." ........... The devastation caused by social media in America's recent political history could look like child's play by comparison to AI. ......... The large language models that underpin chatbots like ChatGPT can predict public opinion with remarkable accuracy when fed specific media diets ........... In the context of an election, this could lead to situations where corporate, government, or foreign entities take these accurate predictions on public opinion and use them to "fine-tune strategies" that influence the way a voter acts....... even technology "as prosaic as Google search" can influence undecided voters trying to get information in the final days of an election, given what he described as the "enormous effect" the ranking of Google search articles. ......... people "may not even know they're being influenced." ........... bots like ChatGPT routinely make mistakes. ........ What he is less sure of is that users will continue to double-check ChatGPT's answers as its underlying model improves.
China and Xi are making a backup plan in case Putin dies or gets deposed, analyst says Xi appears to be cultivating closer ties to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin....... Then, in May, China's Prime Minister Li Qiang invited Mishustin to China, where he "received Mishustin at the Great Hall of the People, once again completely beyond the ordinary bounds of Chinese and Russian protocol." ...... As evidence of Putin's displeasure, he points to Mishustin's absence from subsequent Russian Security Council meetings, of which the prime minister is a permanent member. ........ "This old-style Kremlinology is perhaps the best evidence we have that China may be looking beyond Putin and seeking to cultivate alternative relationships in Russia." ......... Mistushin's is not a name that usually comes up in discussions of potential successors to Putin. A former tax official, he has cultivated a reputation as an effective manager. According to Russian independent media organization Meduza, he has played "no part" in implementing Putin's Ukraine war, and does not discuss it.
An Endgame for Ukraine.It may be that Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive, which could be in its early stages, will be as fruitless as Russia’s winter offensive. Defenders typically have advantages over attackers in trench warfare, and the Russian Army has had months to dig in. ........ while the nuclear threat should never be discounted, it looks empty on close inspection. ........ Those who make the South Korea analogy neglect two things. First, Russia is intrinsically a more powerful state than North Korea. Second, peace on the Korean Peninsula has been preserved by a large and continuous 70-year U.S. military presence — one that relatively few Americans would have an appetite to duplicate in Ukraine. ......... populations that aren’t necessarily eager to be liberated by Kyiv ............ the second flavor: to help Ukraine restore its pre-February 2022 borders but no further — with compensation in the form of membership in the European Union and a U.S.-Ukraine security treaty modeled on America’s security cooperation with Israel.
‘How Could This Happen?’: Canadian Fires Burning Where They Rarely Have Before Of the more than 400 fires burning in Canada, more than one-third are in Quebec, which has little experience with so many and such large wildfires........ With three months left in Canada’s wildfire season, blazes have already scorched more than 10 times the acres of land burned by this time last year. The size and intensity of the fires are believed to be linked to drought and heat brought on by a changing climate. ...... Fires are burning in forests in all of Canada’s provinces and territories, except the province of Prince Edward Island and Nunavut, a northern territory that sits above the tree line, where temperatures are too low for trees to survive. ........ The wildfires in Quebec were sparked last week by a single lightning strike near Val-d’Or, a city about 200 miles southwest of Chibougamau ....... said they did not realize how climate change could upend lives in Canada.
Ukraine Mounts Multiple Attacks on Russian Occupiers The assaults, with Western tanks and armored vehicles, appear to mark a long-awaited counteroffensive that Ukraine hopes will retake territory and shore up allies’ resolve to keep supplying weapons. ........ Ukraine’s plans target specific areas to try to break through Russian lines, but can adjust to concentrate on those thrusts that prove most successful ........ the table-flat terrain, with little cover along much of the southern front, leaves any advancing force of troops or armored vehicles vulnerable to enemy artillery. ............ Sergei K. Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, said that forces of Ukraine’s 47th Mechanized Brigade, including dozens of armored vehicles, had “made an attempt to break through Russia’s defense” in that area, but that Moscow’s air and ground forces had repelled the attack. That brigade is one of the Ukrainian units that have received training and advanced equipment from the United States. ....... Britain’s defense intelligence agency said in its daily assessment on Thursday that “in most areas Ukraine holds the initiative.” ....... But Russian bloggers said that defenses were holding, aided by sustained strikes by the Russian Air Force. ........ But while solid so far, there is no guarantee that Western support will remain in the long term. The U.S. budget for military assistance, for example, is expected to run out by around September, and some Republicans in Congress have questioned the justification for it. ........ If Ukraine fails to break through Russia’s mine belts, tank traps and trench lines, the appetite for arming its forces could wane, putting pressure on Kyiv to enter into negotiations with Moscow or freeze the conflict, cementing in place some of Russia’s territorial gains.
Hard Right Grinds House to a Halt, Rebuking McCarthy for the Debt Deal Members of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus effectively shut down the House floor for several hours, calling the speaker’s fiscal compromise with President Biden a betrayal. ......... Representative Dan Bishop of North Carolina accused Mr. McCarthy and his team of trying to “pull the pin on the grenade and roll it under the tent of Republican unity” by agreeing to the debt limit deal, which contained spending cuts only a fraction as large as G.O.P. lawmakers had endorsed in a bill they pushed through in April. “What happens depends on how leadership is inclined to reciprocate.”
China is likely headed for a lost decade and won't 'eat our economic lunch,' former IMF official says. China's economy is stumbling and is likely headed for a lost decade similar to Japan's. ......... China's economy is likely headed for a so-called lost decade akin to the slump that hit Japan three decades ago ........ attributed much of that to the bursting of China's housing and credit market bubbles, noting that Japan experienced a similar bust in the 1990s. ......... home prices have fallen for 12 straight months while local governments are struggling to repay debts as land sales hit a standstill. .......... the Chinese government's efforts to aid its own housing market and weak local governments mean there won't be much credit available for healthier parts of the economy ......... "As occurred with the supposed Japanese economic miracle in the 1980s before it, we will find that the Chinese economy had clay feet." ........ Another silver lining is that a slower economy will lower prices for commodities and Chinese exports, providing some inflation relief, he said. "That might allow the Federal Reserve to let up on its newfound monetary policy religion."
Brightest gamma-ray burst ever seen, the largest known explosion since Big Bang, has a unique jet structure unlike any other The GRB, called the Brightest Of All Time (or BOAT) may be powered by its strange jet structure, scientists say............ Even before the BOAT was spotted, GRBs were already considered the most powerful, violent, and energetic explosions in the universe, capable of blasting out as much energy in a matter of seconds as the sun will produce over its entire around ten billion-year lifetime. There are two types of these blasts, long-duration, and short-duration, which might have different launch mechanisms, both resulting in the creation of a black hole.
Opinion: The Ukraine dam disaster demands accountability The huge reservoir the dam contained – some 150 miles long and about 100 feet tall – provided drinking water for millions of Ukrainians and irrigated millions of acres of agricultural land in a country that supplies 10% of the world’s wheat. Grain prices for the entire world rose on news of the calamity. ....... This week’s calamity felt like a reprise of the 1941 decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to destroy a hydroelectric dam that spanned a different segment of the Dnipro River. ....... As long ago as last October, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russia was mining the dam and said the world should warn the Kremlin that blowing it up would be tantamount to “the use of weapons of mass destruction.” ........... Russia, after all, had control of the facility and had the most to gain from its destruction. ............ The European Union seems to have come to a similar conclusion. It condemned the incident as “a new dimension of Russian atrocities.” EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen wrote, “Russia will have to pay for the war crimes committed in Ukraine.” Blowing up a dam is a war crime, as it violates the Geneva Conventions and its protocols. ............ There is another possibility – that the dam collapsed from structural failure. Satellite images showed damage to the bridge atop the dam last week. But even if the dam fell on its own, Russia bears responsibility, because it controlled it and was responsible for maintaining it. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, the disaster is “another devastating consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” ............ Worryingly, water from the reservoir is used to cool the reactors from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, also occupied by Russia’s military. Five of the six reactors had already been shut down. For now, the plant’s cooling pond has enough water, but experts are watching closely. ........ The dam itself, under Russian control since March 2022, acted as one of the bridges across the Dnipro, which Ukrainian forces might have planned to cross in their push to regain territory.
‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm. ........ A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work. ........ “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have” ......... the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education. ........
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.
.......... In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Hinton embraced an idea called a neural network. A neural network is a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. At the time, few researchers believed in the idea. But it became his life’s work. .......... In the 1980s, Dr. Hinton was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, but left the university for Canada because he said he was reluctant to take Pentagon funding. At the time, most A.I. research in the United States was funded by the Defense Department. Dr. Hinton is deeply opposed to the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — what he calls “robot soldiers.” .......... In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars. ........... Google spent $44 million to acquire a company started by Dr. Hinton and his two students. And their system led to the creation of increasingly powerful technologies, including new chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard. Mr. Sutskever went on to become chief scientist at OpenAI. In 2018, Dr. Hinton and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks. .......... “Maybe what is going on in these systems,” he said, “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.” ......... As companies improve their A.I. systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.” .......... The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said. ............ His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.” .......... Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.” ............ Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality. ........... I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.” .......... the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation. ........... Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.” .
Fareed Zakaria on Where Russia’s War in Ukraine Stands — and Much More The journalist discusses how Moscow’s invasion, U.S.-China relations and the rise of nonaligned countries affect America’s place in the global order. ......... There is the conflict itself, which matters enormously. And then there’s the way it’s reshaping global geopolitics and the relationships and balancing of the great powers. ........ the way it felt at that moment like we were re-entering an age of great power conflict ......... how it’s changed the relationships and competition between America and Europe and China and India among others. ......... this is sort of buyer’s remorse on the part of the Russians. They were weak in the mid-1990s — I mean, amazingly weak. The Russian economy had contracted by 50 percent between 1990 and 1996. That’s more than it had contracted during World War II. So Russia, at a moment of weakness, felt it gave up too much and is trying to, in a sense, claw back a piece of that, regardless of the fact that it violates international law, treaties that it’s signed, norms that have been established since 1945. ............. it is a sort of last gasp of the last multinational empire in the world .......... in terms of empires not wanting to let go of what they see as defining their core colonies that in a sense define who they are. The Ukrainians don’t want to be part of Russia’s empire. And if there’s one trend line you see over the last 100 years, it’s nationalism. It’s the power of people, once they have decided that they want to live free. That is an unstoppable force. And that is what Russia is against............ there will be day-to-day ups and downs, and the Russians will do well one month, and the Ukrainians will do well one month. But I think the secular trajectory is that Ukraine is going to be an independent nation. ............
people seem to have settled in to a long, protracted war of attrition.
.......... the absolutely implacable nature of Ukrainian nationalism ........... But because the conflict has become so dark, the Russians have done things that are really extraordinary, bombing civilian facilities and water treatment plants and hospitals, it’s difficult to imagine how these two sides come to an agreement, a settlement, recognize each other.
I think this ends more like the Korean War, which technically hasn’t ended.
It just is the two sides stopped fighting. There is a demilitarized zone between the two armies, which is exactly why it’s called the DMZ. But there’s never a peace treaty signed. ............. Russia is managing to limp along without the kind of punishing depression that would really put a lot of pressure on Putin. ......... we designed the sanctions so that Russia could continue to export energy. Russia could continue to sell oil and natural gas and also sells a lot of coal. And the reason is if Russian oil, natural gas and coal were completely shut out of the world markets, it would trigger a global recession. Oil would go to $200 a barrel, because all that Russian supply taken out of the market would mean that demand would vastly exceed supply. You would suddenly have huge price spikes. Much of the developed world would go into a recession, maybe even worse.................. they’re getting a lot of revenue. Russia is a huge exporter of energy, perhaps the world’s largest depending on how you count it. ........... it turns out, about 50 percent of the world economy is now the so-called emerging markets. And they’re not abiding by the sanctions. .............. many of those abandoned Western businesses have been taken over by Turkish businesses, Chinese businesses, Russian-owned businesses. So there’s a whole rest of the world economy out there that is still playing with Russia. ............... the Russians are essentially evading the sanctions by importing things through Turkey ......... The Turks buy something from the West. The Russians buy that same thing from Turkey. How do you prevent that? ............ It is absolutely clear that Russia is crippled by the lack of access to Western technology at the very high end, particularly of the digital economy, high-end computer chips, for example. ............ that central conundrum, which is sanctions tend to empower the regime in place .......... Look at what the Iran sanctions have done. They have empowered the most conservative elements of Iran, the Revolutionary Guard, because they’re the guys that do all the smuggling. ................ you, in a sense, empower the state, and you disempower society, which are the broad forces that would be empowered by commerce, contact, capitalism. ............ Look at Venezuela. The sanctions there haven’t worked. Look at Iran, they haven’t worked. So we’re trying it with Russia. I don’t — I actually support the sanctions in Russia, because they do put pressure on the regime. But you’re not going to change Putin’s calculus. The only thing that can change Putin’s calculus is defeat on the battlefield. .............. there’s a limit to how fast the Ukrainians can learn to use the most sophisticated American weaponry, such as our advanced fighter jets, such as our best tank. ............ Putin has already escalated, that he is already terrified of defeat. But allowing him to stay in this middle ground is allowing an extended equilibrium that just creates more constant danger as opposed to an actual resolution. ............... as Winston Churchill argued passionately that the United States was not giving enough weaponry to Britain in ‘41 even ............ Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. It has a huge army. It has the capacity to do much more damage in Ukraine proper. Most of the damage they’ve done has been in the parts of Ukraine that they believe should be incorporated into Russia — the Donbas — and that band of Ukraine. They could unleash much more havoc on Ukraine itself. Now, they would pay a huge price. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that the Russians have done everything they can. In fact, that’s what scares me. I think the Russians could go up this escalation chain. ................. This has revived the core purpose of the West as a strategic concept. And I think you see it most importantly in this transformation of Germany. .............. Merkel ... When Time magazine chose her as their person of the year, she not only refused to give them an interview. She wouldn’t even sit for a photograph. And I remember asking — I think it was Nancy Gibbs, the editor of Time at the time — what was the last person who refused to give you a sit-down for a portrait when they were named person of the year? And she said, well, it was 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini. ................. a plurality of Republicans now oppose funding Ukraine. ........... The Republican Party was the party of isolationism in the ‘20s and the ‘30s. And this was the most bitter debate that took place in America in the last hundred years on foreign policy was not Vietnam. It was entry into World War II. And the Republicans were staunchly on the side of isolationism then. ............... if you look at the young hotheads, where the energy and action of the party is, unfortunately, it looks like a very isolationist party. .............. People who claim to be able to read what is going on in the minds of five people in Beijing and really one are, I think, exaggerating. .............. The Chinese have a very realpolitik conception of international affairs. ......... he said, look, strong countries, big countries are meant to tell little countries what to do. That’s the way the world works ............ The way the Chinese view it, Russia is a big, strong country. There’s this little country on its border, Ukraine. Of course, Ukraine has to be subservient to Russia. And that’s the natural order of things. ............. Xi Jinping does not seem to be a very effusive and emotional man, but he has often referred to Putin as something like my dear friend, my very best friend or versions — variations of that. .......... And they talk about staying up all night talking when they’re together .............. They believe that when regimes lose faith in themselves, as Gorbachev lost faith in the Communist regime, that that is the moment when you crack and crumble. And the second is that the U.S.-led global order must be diminished, eroded, attacked. And so that keeps them very strongly together. ........... just as Russia went to a plan B after not being able to conquer Kyiv, I think the Chinese are on a plan B. And the plan B Now is to try to appear to the real audience, which is the global South, that they are not quite in the same category as Russia. They are the neutral power. They keep making the point that they are actually neutral on this war. .................... They want to be seen as a broker, not as the weaponry supplier for Putin........... the technology bans have really come to bite. ........... But they have also needlessly provoked the Chinese in ways that, I think, are largely an expression of the domestic politics of the moment. ............. And I watched it and thought, oh, my God, this is what happens when you have bipartisanship in Washington. You have unthinking groupthink. You have a kind of herd mentality. And that’s what really was going on with this. It became a competition of who could bash China more. It became largely devoted to a kind of existential argument about really why the Chinese Communist Party should be overthrown. That was the subtext of the entire hearing. ................ think of the period in the ‘50s when we thought this about the Soviet Union and McCarthyism and the paranoia about the missile gap and all those kind of impulses that led us into Vietnam, that led the C.I.A. to try to overthrow dozens of regimes around the world, mostly unsuccessfully, but with huge lasting impact in terms of how those countries perceive the United States. .............. Think about after 9/11, the run-up to the Iraq War, the war itself. We lose the capacity to think. We lose the capacity to assess. ................ we need to rightsize the Chinese threat. The United States is still way more powerful than China. We are the dominant power in the international system. ............... We need to run fast. We don’t need to run scared. .............. And every news network is following the balloon on live balloon cam. .......... It was a meteorological balloon that also had some espionage capacity. It did seem to veer off course. ............ the Chinese have hundreds of spy satellites up in the air that are orbiting the Earth 24/7, have taken hundreds of thousands of photographs of every sensitive sites in the United States. .................... There is some marginal information you can get from a low-flying balloon, but from everything I can gather, not that much. ............... we do this much more than they do it. So we’ve got all this capacity. And so nations spy on each other. .............. And maybe this is a wonderful example of modern politics, where, because it’s visual, because you can see it, because CNN can track it — ............... It was like a low-speed car chase. It was like the O.J. Simpson chase of espionage problems. ........... there were $300,000 sidewinder missiles to hit these $20 balloons. ............. We’re going to be competitive in the economic realm. We’re going to be competitive in the geopolitical realm. But we want to find a way to have a working relationship with the country that is the second most powerful country in the world, which is, by the way, our third largest trading partner. We trade $700 billion of goods with China every year.............. The dictators stay in power partly by judging how far they can move things. .............. I have no doubt in my mind that TikTok is harmful. Not TikTok particularly, but social media in general is harmful for teenagers. ............ TikTok is particularly bad because it’s particularly good. By which, I mean it’s particularly effective, in fact, stunningly effective. .......... The Chinese government would not need to create a company then have the luck of it being super successful, and then use that company to extract data. You could just buy it from Facebook. You could buy it from Google. You could buy it from Amazon. For all we know, they are doing that. ............ To me, part of the argument that makes me friendlier to banning TikTok is that this is attentional infrastructure. And attention is critical. ............. Think the 2000 election and the 2020 era, when we have much more polarized parties. And now, on TikTok somebody turns up the dial on just rampant conspiracy theorizing and things that get Americans ever more at each other’s throats. And we don’t even really know that it’s happening. It’s just a kind of attentional dark matter that is making us hate each other more or is making Americans turn towards Trump again or whatever it might be. ................. It’s just too diverse. It’s too disaggregated. It’s — the fundamental shift that’s taking place in information is that you were going from a one-to-many broadcasting system to a many-to-many network system. .............. And when you have a many-to-many network system, there is no central node. It’s all happening at a disaggregated distributed level where the algorithm is noticing what you like and giving you more of that, and noticing what I like and giving me more of that. So it’s very difficult to imagine how you would control any such digital products. So if you have a problem with TikTok in that sense, what comes next? Do we ban Chinese cars, because Chinese cars after our cars are essentially now digital products. They are software on wheels. And the cars know where you go. And maybe there could be listening in on you. ........................ It feels to me like the distinction you’re making between books and pamphlets on the one side and TikTok on the other is you’re saying, they can do this stuff as long as I don’t think it’s very efficient. If it’s very effective, I’m against it. But if it’s ineffective and inefficient by using books and pamphlets, it’s OK. ....................... to say we’re going to try to hold you back is very different than saying we’re going to try to protect ourselves....... There are still in place today sanctions that do not allow the United States to transfer certain technologies to India, because India was not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, partly as a result of Cold War stuff, where the U.S. was pro-Pakistan and anti-India. So it’s not such a leap to say that you don’t want China to have this most advanced capacity. ............ the semiconductor chips that are being denied to China, I think, constitute less than 5 percent of the market. They may actually be even less than 3 percent of the market. So 95 percent, 98 percent of the market is open. It’s where — we buy a lot of Chinese chips. The stuff that goes into washing machines and all that is much of it is Chinese, much of the assembly of computers is. ............... Huawei was, in many ways, one of the great institutions, a great pride in China. It was a private company that had made it on its own, was outcompeting every Western company at the very high-end technology. .......... for the Chinese, that became a sign of exactly what you’re saying, that this is not a case where the West wants to compete with us. They want to cripple us, so that we can’t grow. ............. Well, the Indians, who are the pro-American democrats, their position on global warming is essentially the same. It’s as hard to get them to do anything. And in fact, the Indians are very ornery on all kinds of things. And part of that is that
we don’t understand what the world looks like from New Delhi or from South Africa
. ............... George Kennan being the perfect example — spoke fluent Russian, had spent years in Russia, understood the society. You’d be hard pressed to find a lot of people like that in America today. ......... Mike Gallagher, the guy who runs the China committee, you mentioned, in the House — I believe I have this accurately — has never been to China. ................... We had lost sight that Turkey had become this consolidated more democratic, more successful, more proud country. And this is almost literally true. We forgot to ask it whether we could use Turkey as a base to invade Iraq. Most people forget Iraq was meant to be invaded on a two-front invasion, from the South and Kuwait up and then from the north through Turkey down. ............ The Turks surprised the U.S. and said, no, we are now a functioning democracy. This has to go to parliament. And I think it lost in parliament by a couple of votes. So that’s a perfect example of how we haven’t noticed, what I call in the post-American world, the Rise of the Rest. ....... these countries are no longer willing to be pawns on the table. They want to be players in their own right. And we say the right thing sometimes, we mouth the clichés, but we don’t really understand these places. ................. nations representing two thirds of the global population, they’ve not been with us in Russia. They are not necessarily with Russia either. ............. The West routinely cuts deals with violent autocracies to advance its own interests. The United States is improving ties with Venezuela to get more oil. Europe is signing energy contracts with repressive Arab Gulf regimes. Remarkably, the West nonetheless claims that its foreign policy is guided by human rights and democracy. India at least lays no claim to being the conscience keeper of the world.” ................ the number of forcible annexations is down to a handful of times in 75 years. If you go and look at the 75 years before 1945, I mean, it happened so routinely that you could barely count how many times that had happened. So this order is a better order than anything we’ve seen before. ......... the hypocrisy that attends the idea that we can constantly deviate from it. We get to invade Iraq. We get to not sign on to the International Criminal Court....... We do things like — we are accusing China in the South China Seas of violating the law of the Seas Treaty, a treaty to which we are not a signatory. .............. when you want oil, you go to Saudi Arabia, and you don’t worry about the fact that it’s a medieval absolute monarchy. When you want to change your policy, as you say, on Venezuela, you suddenly decide, oh, we were trying to overthrow you last year. This year, we want to buy your oil. .............. And then, when the Indians do it, we shriek, and we say, how dare you? You’re supposed to be a democracy — or South Africa or Indonesia — rather than recognizing that they all have their interests. ................ I mean, the Indian case is particularly complicated, because the Indians buy most of the advanced weaponry from Russia. Now, why do they buy most of their advanced weaponry from Russia? Largely because the United States wouldn’t sell it to them. During the Cold War, the U.S. was allied with Pakistan. The Indians also violated the N.P.T., which, by the way, so did the Pakistanis. ............. the Indians have always relied on Russia for unwavering support on something like Kashmir, which is the disputed territory between India and Pakistan. ............. And they know that the Russians will be the reliable veto in the U.N. Security Council on that. So they’re not going to burn their bridges with the Russians all at once. They’ve distanced themselves a little bit. ............. one of our biggest problems is that we look at the world and we say to ourselves, but we’re bringing you all these wonderful things. Why don’t you just take them and let us shower you with these benefits and tell you what to do? ........... And we don’t understand how strong that desire of doing your own thing is, whether it’s in Iraq, whether it’s in Vietnam, whether it’s in Cuba. ............ nobody thinks, globally, that we follow that order. ......... in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the whole decolonizing world was looking to America. And people like Ho Chi Minh would make overtures to the Americans. .............. When Trump pulled out of the Iran deal, because of the power of the dollar, he kept in place American secondary sanctions. So even though the rest of the world wanted to trade with Iran, they couldn’t. And that has so frustrated the Europeans — ........... basically, if the Americans say, we will sanction you for trading, even though you’re part of the Iran deal, effectively, they have to be cleared through the New York Fed. This is what I’ve called our last true superpower weapon. ................... the Europeans got so frustrated, because they thought that Trump’s pulling out of the Iran deal was totally unjustified, unilateral, entirely a violation of the rules-based order. They set to work trying to find some alternative to a dollar-based system. You know, we have a system called SWIFT, and the Europeans have been trying to set up a different one. ................... This feels to me like the year that, narratively — and probably in reality, too — India began moving towards superpower status. ............... It is still a very poor country. You know, India’s per capita GDP is still under $3,000 a year. China’s — just give you a quick — I mean, Chinese economy is five times larger than India’s. ........... So the Indians innovated, in a way that we could all learn something around the world from, in creating a biometric ID system, where basically, 99.9 percent of Indian adults now have a biometric ID. They have a code. ............. you’re given this number at birth, or if you are an adult, you applied for it, and they were able to get it to everybody. If you want to open a bank account in India, it now takes 90 seconds. ......... Everything else that exists on that scale is a private monopoly. .............. those two things, really — the two infrastructure booms — the digital side, where India is really the world leader. India has the only billion-plus internet platform that is not privately owned. Every other global billion-plus-person internet platform — Google, Facebook — are all private. ............. And what that means is that the whole Indian private sector builds on that public edifice, which means it’s a much freer, much less monopolistic, much more open, much more efficient system. So they’re a real world leader in that. ........... For the first time when I went to Mumbai — you know, I’ve been several times, but it kind of caught my attention this time — you look around, and the number of cranes you see reminded me of Shanghai 20 years ago. ............... He’s one of the most effective politicians I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. He is really brilliant in some ways. ........ Muslims have been in India for 1,000 years. And if you look at some of the symbols of the new India, the new Indian parliament, you’d be hard-pressed to find many visual instances of that. ................. I’ve always thought that India reminded me of America in the 19th century, which is this big, messy, chaotic democracy that’s largely internally focused. .............. India is one of the two or three most pro-American countries in the world. .............. I think India, Israel, and Poland — usually, in the 70 percent-plus say they like — have a favorable view of America. ........... And it’s palpable if you go to India. Every businessman wants to do business with America. Every kid wants to find some way to get to America for education. ........... But the Indians also know that they have a real strategic problem with China.
......... They have a border dispute that is very real and very alive and has not been resolved, and they came to blows, literally, a few years ago. And for that, they need the United States. .......... If the two largest countries in the world, the two most dominant economies in the world, seal themselves off hermetically, that will lead to a collapse of the globalization that’s taken place over the last 30 years. You know, the last time something like this happened — and it’s not even a perfect analogy — is Britain and Germany at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th — two very powerful countries, deeply connected economically, that ended up in a geopolitical rivalry that essentially brought down the world. ............... how getting the news has replaced morning prayers as a kind of binding act that keeps communities together. .......... I sometimes think when people go to listen to watch Fox, they’re not watching television. They’re going to church. They’re going — they’re hearing the catechism. That’s what they want. That’s what they need. And I’m sure you could make the argument on the other side. .
Facebook owner Meta plans to create Twitter rival Meta's chief product officer Chris Cox said coding was under way on the platform. The tech giant aims to release it soon, although no date was given. There is some speculation that it could be as early as the end of June. ...... The text-based network - which has a working title of P92 - could turn out to be a greater rival to Elon Musk's Twitter than either BlueSky or Mastodon. ....... the Instagram community is enormous. Meta says it has around two billion users, which dwarfs the 300 million that are believed to use Twitter - although its figures can no longer be verified. ......... If even 25% of Instagram users can be coaxed into using P92 (it will undoubtedly have a sexier name when it launches), it will instantly become bigger than its older rival. ........ Meta says it takes "inspiration" from other products, although others put it less kindly - Stories on Facebook was based on a Snapchat feature, and Reels on Instagram is unmistakably similar to TikTok.
Ukraine army attacks Russian forces in southern Zaporizhzhia region Several military experts have said the focus of Ukraine's long awaited counter-offensive will be Zaporizhzhia. ...... They argue Kyiv is trying to regain access to the Sea of Azov, splitting the occupying Russian forces in the region into two detached groupings. ......... The Zaporizhzhia region is also home to Europe's largest nuclear power plant, which is in an area controlled by Russian forces. ....... the resulting emergency is threatening the region's water supplies, with the WHO also warning that cholera could spread.
Ukraine war: Oleg Orlov faces jail time for criticising Putin's war Oleg Orlov has been an outspoken critic of both wars the Kremlin is currently waging: the war in Ukraine and, back home, the war on dissent. ........ "First of all, the Russian Constitution guarantees freedom of speech. I wrote an article presenting my assessment of events. Prosecuting me for that violates the Constitution. "Secondly, what is happening in Ukraine - let's be clear and call it a war - it is against the interests of Russia and Russian citizens. As for 'preserving international peace and security', that's a joke. It reminds me of George Orwell's 'War is Peace' and 'Freedom is Slavery'. Claiming that the war in Ukraine is 'in the interests of international peace' is just nonsense." Article 29 of the Russian Constitution does, indeed, guarantee freedom of speech. On paper. .......
"The scale of repression and the number of cases is reminiscent of the era of [Soviet leader] Leonid Brezhnev," believes Oleg Orlov. "But by the level of cruelty, and by the length of prison terms being handed out, it's like Stalin's time."
LEAKED SCREENSHOTS: This is what Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor looks like
“We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run” … a top meta exec told employees. https://t.co/Ykj5Ilsn61
Maps: Tracking Smoke From Canadian Fires Wildfire Smoke Blots Sun and Prompts Health Alerts in Much of U.S. The smoke was pouring across the border from Canada, where hundreds of wildfires remain unchecked, and the hazardous smoke conditions are expected to linger through Wednesday and perhaps until later in the week. ....... An eye-watering and cough-inducing smoky haze from Canadian wildfires smothered a swath of the eastern and northern United States on Tuesday, with officials warning residents with health risks to stay indoors and keep their windows closed. ...... In New York City, the smoke could be tasted as well as smelled, and it wrapped the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and Manhattan’s other landmarks in a blanket of orange-gray haze. ............. The smoke was pouring across the border
from Canada, where hundreds of wildfires remain unchecked
, and the hazardous smoke conditions are expected to linger through Wednesday and perhaps until later in the week............ Officials are urging residents, particularly those with asthma, to stay indoors as much as possible. .......... The worst effects were in Canada, where more than 400 active wildfires were burning ......... More than 200 of the fires, many of them in Quebec, were burning out of control, the agency said. Toronto briefly ranked among the worst 10 cities in air quality on Tuesday. ........
forecasts indicated that “this may be an especially severe wildfire season throughout the summer.”
........... There have already been more than 2,200 wildfires in Canada this year .......... wildfire smoke “may be more toxic” to the lungs than standard urban air pollution. ......... At the subway station at West 86th Street and Broadway around 6:45 p.m., passengers trudged up the stairs and onto the street and gasped. The sky was a strange orange-gray, and the cool air smelled of smoke. “This morning, it smelled like burnt toast, but now it’s more like campfire,” said Benjamin Lukas, 47, who was on his way to his mother’s apartment to cook her dinner. “It’s just wild.”
