Today’s News 24th March 2023

Ramadan started yesterday, Thursday, March 23.

The date was determined as the first moon of a new lunar cycle was unable to be seen in Mecca Tuesday, determining Thursday as the start of the Muslim fasting month.

While the length of Ramadan is the same for all Muslims observing it, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, the length of the daily fast certainly is not.

Because Muslims vow to abstain from eating and drinking during daylight hours, those living further north have to go without food and drink for much longer than their counterparts living closer to the equator or even in the Southern hemisphere which is celebrating Ramadan during winter.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Muslims fasting for Ramadan in Oslo theoretically have to do so for almost 16.5 hours, according to website islamicfinder.com. 

Muslims in Jakarta, Indonesia, fast only for approximately 13 hours and 10 minutes. Finally, Melbourne in the Southern Hemisphere has just under 13 daylight hours depending on the exact day of the Ramadan month.

Some Muslims in Northern countries seem to feel unfairly treated by the lunar forces that govern Ramadan and found alternative solutions. According to reporting by Der Spiegel, the town of Tromsø in the very north of Norway has adopted the fasting hours of Mecca (just under 14 hours in 2023).

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

The US has offered Slovakia attack helicopters and Hellfire missiles as a reward for sending Ukraine Soviet-made MiG-29 fighter jets.

Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said the deal would be for 12 Bell AH-1Z attack choppers, 500 AGM-114 Hellfire II missiles, and training. The sale is worth about $1 billion, and under the offer, the US would provide $660 million in financing, and Slovakia would pay $340 million.

Separately, the EU will compensate Slovakia with $213 million for providing Ukraine with the MiG-29s. Nad said the offer was still being considered but added acquiring the helicopters would “significantly increase the defense capability of Slovakia.”

Without its MiG-29s, Slovakia doesn’t have an air force, and Poland and the Czech Republic are now monitoring the land-locked country’s airspace. Slovakia signed a deal in 2018 to purchase 14 US-made F-16 fighter jets, but they aren’t expected to be delivered until 2024.

The US offer means that Washington must have been involved in Slovakia’s decision to send its 13 MiG-29s to Ukraine, which came after Poland announced it would provide Kyiv with the Soviet-made jets.

The move makes Poland and Slovakia the first NATO members to arm Ukraine with fighter jets.

A video of the four Slovak MiG-29 fighter jets being handed over to the Ukrainian pilots. https://t.co/XgbcoB6t4a pic.twitter.com/ivsk2jtLHp

— Status-6 (@Archer83Able) March 23, 2023

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In March 2022, the Pentagon ruled out sending Polish MiG-29s to Ukraine over concerns that it could escalate the war. NATO officials believed the provision of fighter jets could be viewed in Moscow as the alliance directly entering the war. But one year later, the escalation concerns waned.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via Antiwar.com,

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on Substack on Wednesday that said the CIA was instructed to come up with a cover story for the Nord Stream bombings that was fed to The New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit.

The cover-up story was created to shift blame from the US after Hersh’s bombshell report published on February 8 that said President Biden ordered the attack on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, which connect Russia to Germany. “It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story,” Hersh was told by a source within the American intelligence community.

Hersh said that the CIA was ordered to come up with a cover story after President Biden met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington on March 3. Scholz’s visit was very brief and did not include the routine joint press briefing that usually follows a meeting between the president and another world leader. Hersh was told that his report detailing how the US took out Nord Stream was discussed by Biden and Scholz.

Hersh writes: “I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2.”

The result of the CIA’s work was published in The New York Times and Die Zeit on March 7. The New York Times report was very vague and said US officials are now claiming the Nord Stream bombings might have been carried out by a “pro-Ukrainian group.”

The Die Zeit report claimed German investigators believe it was carried out by six people using a yacht rented in Poland that was owned by two Ukrainians. Other Western media outlets published similar articles reinforcing the cover story in the following days.

Hersh said the information The New York Times received “originated with a group of CIA experts in deception and propaganda whose mission was to feed the newspaper a cover story—and to protect a president who made an unwise decision and is now lying about it.”

The cover story offers a radically different narrative than what Hersh’s February 8 report alleges. Using anonymous sourcing, Hersh reported that the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed by explosives planted by US Navy divers in June 2022 under the cover of NATO drills in the Baltic Sea. The operation was done in coordination with Norway, and a Norwegian spy plane detonated the explosives by dropping a sonar buoy on September 26, 2022.

The last time Scholz visited Washington was on February 7, 2022. Biden vowed during a press conference that day that if Russia invaded Ukraine, he would “bring an end” to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. According to Hersh, the plot to destroy the pipelines was already underway at that time, and the plotters took Biden’s comment as a blatant threat.

Biden in Feb 2022: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Q: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”

Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”pic.twitter.com/e091ddF4Pv https://t.co/DHaCuETo8y

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 27, 2022

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On Scholz’s possible complicity in the operation, Hersh said in his new article: “At this point, it must be noted that Chancellor Scholz, whether or not he was alerted of the destruction of the pipeline in advance—still an open question—has clearly been complicit since last fall in support of the Biden Administration’s cover-up of its operation in the Baltic Sea.”

We’ve heard many heartbreaking stories of American tourists venturing into Mexico only to be kidnapped or, worse, killed in crazy cartel drug war battles. It appears these days, no one is safe across the southern border, not even US-owned companies. 

Bloomberg reported that Mexican marines and police officers seized US construction firm Vulcan Materials’ port terminal near Playa del Carmen in southern Mexico.

Footage from the seizure showed a long line of police and military units entering the property last Tuesday. 

🚨 WATCH: The Mexican military seized a U.S. company’s (Vulcan Materials) marine terminal in Mexico. This is insane, @SecBlinken @JakeSullivan46

More from Bloomberg —> “Vulcan Facility Seizure Adds to Tension Between US and Mexico” https://t.co/el9GMN1Nv8 pic.twitter.com/gvj40ziefz

— Cliff Sims (@Cliff_Sims) March 19, 2023

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In a statement, Vulcan Materials claimed that Mexican officials did not possess any legal documentation to warrant the seizure of the terminal.

“It should be clear that the rule of law is no longer assured for foreign companies in Mexico,” the Alabama-based company said in a statement. “This invasion, unsupported by legal warrants, violates Vulcan’s commercial and property rights.”

AP News pointed out that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the company have been in a multi-year dispute: 

López Obrador needs the dock to get cement, crushed stone and other materials into the area to finish his pet project, a tourist train known as the Train Maya. The president shut down Vulcan’s stone quarries last May, arguing the company had extracted or exported stone without approval.

US lawmakers, including Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, voiced concern about the forced takeover of the terminal. He said this “adds to the trend of misguided and counterproductive behavior” by the Mexican president. 

This presents a significant concern for US companies considering relocating production from China to Mexico – how can they be sure their businesses will be safe from government seizure?

By George Lei, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and analyst

Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded his Russian visit on Wednesday without much progress on peace in Ukraine. China, however, has pushed for deeper trade and investment links with its northern neighbor using its own currency. That suggests the path of least resistance for yuan internationalization now runs through Moscow instead of London or Singapore.  

China and Russia are committed to “significantly” increasing trade volumes by 2030 and pledged to steadily boost the proportion of local currency settlement, according to a joint statement released Tuesday. That might sound like cheap political talk, though a closer look at developments since the war in Ukraine shows the Chinese currency is already making major inroads in all walks of Russian financial life.

The share of yuan in Russian export payments surged 32-fold in 2022 to 16% by year-end, according to the Bank of Russia. Its use in Russian imports also jumped to 23% from 4%. Yuan savings accounted for 11% of Russia’s total FX deposits as of January, compared with practically zero when the war broke out. The Chinese currency has also overtaken the dollar and euro as the most traded FX on the Moscow Exchange.

Never before has the yuan — which is not fully convertible — been so widely used for trade, private savings and FX transactions in a trillion-dollar economy that regularly ranks among the world’s biggest. “Market logic mostly prevails over geopolitics until one day it does not,” wrote Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Western sanctions that sharply curtailed Russia’s dollar and euro access acted as a push factor, while booming trade with China served as a pull. Russia overtook Saudi Arabia to become China’s biggest oil supplier in February while Beijing’s total energy purchases ballooned to $88b over the past 12 months, surging more than 50% from the period ending February 2022. Chinese businesses have also expanded in its northern neighbor, filling the void left by departing Western brands.

Russia is now the 5th biggest user of the Chinese currency, with 2.3% of global yuan payments, behind Hong Kong, the UK, Singapore and the US, according to SWIFT. A year ago, the country didn’t even make the cut for the top 15: Its share in worldwide yuan payments was less than 0.3%. At this speed, Russia is poised to become the biggest yuan user outside Hong Kong in the next couple years.

This week, the Russian central bank made it more costly for commercial lender to have liabilities in dollar and euro by raising the mandatory reserve requirements on “unfriendly” currencies. The longer the war and sanctions drag on, the more entrenched yuan gets in Moscow’s financial ecosystem. Should the current trajectory persist, Russia will probably become the first major economy where the Chinese currency has an equal standing with its American and European counterparts.

Authored by Christian Parenti via TheGrayZone.com,

The lockdowns and the stimulus required to keep the economy alive helped drive inflation. Then the Fed jacked up interest rates. And all hell broke loose…

On Friday March 10th, 2023, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) died of Covid. Alright, it’s a little more complicated than that, but Covid lockdowns followed by massive government stimulus were a critical – and massively under-acknowledged – factor in propelling the bank’s demise.

At the heart of the crisis is the gigantic pile of low-interest debt that was issued during the height of the pandemic. While private-sector pandemic-era debt like corporate bonds also soared, US government debt like Treasury bonds piled up.

In a nutshell, during the pandemic the government issued enormous amounts of extremely low interest government debt — about $4.2 trillion of it. But now interest rates, including on government debt, are higher than they have been in 15 years and investors are dumping their old low-interest debt. As they dump, the resale price of the old debt goes down. The more it declines, the more investors want to dump. And thus, a panic is born. 

To understand the problem fully, the question of US government debt has to be put into its larger context, which is: the pandemic response as a whole.

When news of the Covid virus first broke in December 2019, the 2 Year Treasury bond was being offered at 1.64% interest; the 10 year was at about 1.80%, and the resale value of such bonds on secondary markets was strong. Then, in March 2020, as Covid cases and deaths spiked, the US began to shutter its economy with panicked lockdowns that were supposed to “flatten the curve” or slow the spread of the virus and thus protect the hospitals. But Covid was politicized and the lockdowns were extended.  

As the lockdowns dragged on, the US economy began to collapse, shrinking at a record-shattering annualized rate of 31.4% during the second quarter of fiscal year 2020.

To avoid total economic devastation, the federal government began massive debt-financed spending. In March 2020, Trump signed into law the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill the CARES Act, or Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security. Then, in March 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act which contained $1.9 trillion more in Covid relief. Finally, in April 2021, another trillion or so of Covid relief arrived in the Consolidated Appropriations Act. 

Thanks to these laws, every industry and most people received public money. There was increased and extended unemployment payments, as well as the so-called “stimmy checks” or stimulus payments to everyone earning under $75,000 a year (about half the population). The Paycheck Protection Program spent almost a trillion dollars. The Provider Relief Fund doled out $178 billion to the healthcare system. 

All this debt spending kept millions of people in their homes, and helped feed, employ, and care for millions more. The measures allowed hundreds of thousands of businesses to stay afloat even as many thousands of others went under. The impact of the spending on Americans’ well-being was generally positive. For a moment, the US child poverty rate was cut in half, falling to 5.2%. 

But the economically destructive lockdowns were not necessary and did not work. Covid fanatics maintain that the lockdowns were unavoidable because the virus is so deadly. That, however, is uninformed. Last year I explained in detail how the Lockdown Left got the Covid crisis wrong. Not a single critic has challenged any of the facts I presented so there is little point in rehashing them all here. 

Those who advocated an alternative to ham-fisted lockdowns, like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for “focused protection” of vulnerable groups like the elderly, were viciously targeted in a reputation destruction campaign covertly orchestrated by former NIH director Francis Collins and de facto Covid czar Anthony Fauci. Never mind that the document’s authors were three eminently qualified scientists: Sunetra Gupta, professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University; Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford; and Martin Kulldorff, formerly a professor of medicine and biostatistics at Harvard. They were portrayed as far-right cranks who were almost eager to see millions die. But now, they have been vindicated.

Ultimately, the federal government spent $4.2 trillion propping up the economy that it was simultaneously choking to death with lockdowns. These two contradictory pressures laid the groundwork for the recent bank failures. Government mandated lockdowns hit the economy like a body blow. Factories closed, small businesses went under, ports and logistic hubs reduced operations, and about 2 million mostly older workers simply resigned. But at the same time, the federal government injected vast amounts of purchasing power into the economy, thus boosting consumption.

These two, contradictory government moves imposed almost unbearable pressure on supply chains. As shortages mounted, prices began to surge. Put simply: lockdowns plus stimulus equaled inflation.

Consider just one of the most important bottlenecks in the whole economy. During lockdown, many commercial driving license schools were closed. This helped create a shortage of about 80,000 truckers. If trucks do not roll supplies run low and prices go up.

At first, the official line on inflation – parroted by the Lockdown Left – maintained that inflation was “transitory.” But it was not. Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 while wage growth lagged at about 5%. In April 2020 during the worst of the lockdown, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Funds Rate sank to 0.5%. By February 2022, it had only risen to 0.8%.  

Meanwhile, inflation was surging. By February 2022, inflation had reached 7.9%. Only then did the Fed, in an effort to tamp down prices, begin raising interest rates at the fastest pace rate in its history. The federal Funds rate was around 4.57% when SVB went under. Perhaps a massive wave of taxation could have soaked up enough liquidity to have helped cool prices, but that was a political impossibility. The more politically palatable response in Washington was for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. 

Herein lies the problem. During the height of the lockdowns, banks bought up enormous amounts of government debt. As the Wall Street Journal put it: “U.S. banks are suffering the aftereffects of a Covid-era deposit boom that left them awash in cash that they needed to put to work. Domestic deposits at federally insured banks rose 38% from the end of 2019 to the end of 2021, FDIC data show. Over the same period, total loans rose 7%, leaving many institutions with large amounts of cash to deploy in securities as interest rates were near record lows.” Awash in deposits with not enough demand for loans, the banks bought US government securities. Their purchases surged 53% between 2019 and the end of 2021, to a total of $4.58 trillion, according to Fed data reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Because so much debt was being issued, it carried super-low interest rates. For example, on July 27, 2020, the 10 Year Treasury was offered at an annual interest rate of only 0.55%. This is fine if you are the borrower of money, but if you are the lender (that is to say, a bank giving the federal government money in exchange for a Treasury bond), it means your income stream will be reduced to a mere trickle. If inflation rises, it essentially disappears. 

As the yield on new government debt reached toward 5% and inflation hung stubbornly at around 6.4%, all of that old, low-interest, pandemic-era debt started to look like garbage and banks began unloading it. The more that banks dumped old debt, the less value that debt had on resale markets. The lower its resale value, the more the banks wanted to dump it. SVB lost almost $2 billion selling off Government securities. And when they announced the loss, their stock price plunged by 60%. 

At the same time, many of SVB’s clients were withdrawing money. This was in part because rising interest rates made borrowing new money more expensive and thus incentivized the use of savings in day-to-day business operations. Also, higher inflation and higher interest rates made low-earning bank deposits less attractive and compelled depositors to redeploy their surplus capital towards higher-earning investments. So, just as SVB needed cash, deposits were evaporating.

By the end of the week of March 10, the four biggest banks in the United States had lost $51 billion because of their panicked dumping of pandemic-era debt. Right after SVB was taken under government control, state regulators closed the New York-based Signature Bank. Before the weekend was over the Federal Reserve announced the creation of a new lending facility that would ensure that “banks have the ability to meet the needs of all their depositors.” Furthermore, the Fed said it was “prepared to address any liquidity pressures that may arise.”

It would seem that the federal government is ready to execute another de facto partial nationalization of US banking, just as they did in 2008 via emergency “cash injections” and then the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). In this current crisis, banks can avoid losses on their low-interest debt if they do not sell it before its maturity. For that to happen, the banks need money. The Fed has said it will pour enormous amounts of money into the banks while all of the relevant officials have proclaimed that the banking system will somehow pay for this. All of this will almost certainly mean even more government debt will be issued. 

Already, interest payments on the federal debt are one of the largest single items in the US budget – set to reach $400 billion this year. That is almost half as much as the grotesquely overdeveloped military budget. By comparison, federal spending on housing is only $78 billion.

Shoring up the banking system is necessary because if it collapses, the whole economy goes with it. At least in the short term, Americans are hostages of the US financial system. But government intervention without any new regulations and taxes upon the financial sector will likely mean more inflation and a bigger financial bubble. By refusing to properly tax the top 1%, the federal government also commits itself to more austerity for the many and more welfare for the rich, because rising government debt means a rising portion of our taxes must go toward interest payments. 

This system of crisis-prone, hyper-financialized capitalism seems ever more like a junkie. If it doesn’t get its regular fix of public sector help, it will simply collapse and die. 

Even if the federal government can stanch the current crisis, the pandemic debt story is global and very likely to cause trouble for some time to come. As a 2021 report by the World Bank put it: “The debt buildup during the pandemic-induced global recession of 2020 was the largest in several decades. This was true for all types of debt—total, government, and private debt; and advanced-economy and EMDE [emerging market and developing economy] debt; external and domestic debt. In 2020, total global debt reached 263 percent of GDP and global government debt 99 percent of GDP, their highest levels in half a century.” 

The US intelligentsia and its media elites are finally beginning to reckon with the impact of misguided and authoritarian lockdowns on student learning and the psychological and physical health of millions. But in all the discussion of the current bank runs, the pivotal role of lockdowns in priming the crisis remains overlooked.

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad continues to be brought “in from the cold” and back into the Arab regional fold at rapid pace, with Reuters confirming on Thursday the prior rumors that Saudi Arabia and Syria were on the brink of fully restoring diplomatic ties. They will now reopen embassies – a huge step. Is a return to the Arab League next?

“Syria and Saudi Arabia have agreed to reopen their embassies after cutting diplomatic ties more than a decade ago, three sources with knowledge of the matter said, a step that would mark a leap forward in Damascus’s return to the Arab fold,” Reuters reports.

The mutual embassy openings reportedly are the result of talks between the Saudis and a senior Syrian intelligence official. A source told Reuters they “preparing to reopen embassies after Eid al-Fitr,” in reference to a Muslim holiday in late April.

Most recently, the United Arab Emirates hosted Assad and his wife in an official visit – the first in well over a decade. 

The US and Israel have not been happy at these developments, and the Syria-Gulf rapprochement also comes in the context of Iran and Saudi Arabia normalizing relations. One source told Al Jazeera:

“The prevailing attitude can be defined as, ‘times have changed, the Arab Spring is history and the region is transitioning towards a new future, with new geopolitical characteristics,'” the official, who himself recently reconciled with Damascus after defecting to the Syrian opposition in the summer of 2011, added.

It seems the Gulf has been willing to recognize that the Syrian government won the decade-long war and move on, but not Washington. The US has continued its military occupation of northern Syria, and Israel has extended its bombing campaign, even this week with strikes on Aleppo international airport.

Saudi Arabia will reopen its embassy in Syria, joining a list of several regional countries that reestablished ties with Damascus after failing miserably to overthrow its government for over a decade. Condolences to Israel, US and UK for failing to isolate post-victory Syria

— Hadi Nasrallah (@HadiNasrallah) March 23, 2023

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Far-reaching US sanctions are also still on. But regional leaders have been reaching out to Assad after the deadly earthquake which rocked Turkey and Syria, killing tens of thousands of people. 

Saudi Arabia and allies like Qatar and the UAE had helped the US spearhead regime change efforts in Damascus. Russia and Iran came to the aid of Syria, however, in a war that took hundreds of thousands of lives and left much of the country in rubble.

Authored by Joseph M. Hanneman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Defense attorneys in the Proud Boys seditious-conspiracy trial in Washington D.C. learned late March 22 that one of their own defense witnesses who was about to testify had worked as an FBI informant for at least 22 months.

They asked for an emergency hearing before U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly and filed a motion to compel the U.S. Department of Justice to disclose if the witness has been spying on the defense team.

Judge Kelly suspended the trial until March 24 and converted March 23 from a day of testimony into a motions hearing.

Zachary Rehl, one of five Proud Boys defendants, filed a motion on behalf of his co-defendants seeking a court order to compel prosecutors to disclose any recordings or reports made by confidential human sources (CHS)—informants—about the defendants and their attorneys.

Defense attorney Carmen Hernandez said the information given to the defense team on March 22 raises “serious and substantiated allegations of governmental misconduct surrounding the surreptitious invasion and interference of the defense team by the government through a confidential human source, at the government’s behest.”

Judge Kelly ordered prosecutors to file a response to the motion by 1 p.m. EDT on March 23. A hearing on the matter will begin at 3 p.m.

The trial began Dec. 19, 2022, in U.S. District Court. Prosecutors wrapped up their case on March 17.

Defense Witness was Prosecution Informant

After the close of testimony on March 22, prosecutors disclosed that a witness on the defense list who was due in court on March 23 had worked as an FBI informant from April 2021 through to at least January 2023.

“During this period of time, the CHS [informant] has been in contact via telephone, text messaging, and other electronic means, with one or more of the counsel for the defense and at least one defendant,” the motion said.

“The CHS also participated in prayer meetings with members of one or more of the defendants’ families. The CHS also engaged in discussions with one of the defendant’s family members about replacing one of the defense counsel.”

Defendants in the trial include Rehl, former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, and Dominic Pezzola.

The men are accused of seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct official proceedings, obstruction of official proceedings, and conspiracy to prevent certain federal officers from performing their duties at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Tarrio, Rehl, Nordean, and Biggs face nine criminal counts, while Pezzola is charged with 10.

Disclosure of the FBI informant demonstrates “that there are reasons to doubt the veracity of the government’s explanation and justification for withholding information about the CHSs [informants] who have been involved in the case,” Hernandez wrote.

It was the second time in March that privileged attorney-client communication became the center of controversy.

On March 8, FBI Special Agent Nicole Miller disclosed that investigators had been monitoring communications between Rehl and his now-former attorney, and discussing his trial strategy among themselves.

Defense attorneys also discovered a hidden tab in an FBI evidence spreadsheet containing some of Miller’s emails, “in which the FBI agent admitted fabricating evidence and following orders to destroy hundreds of items of evidence,” according to a March 9 court filing (pdf).

The defense motion called the discovery “a clear and flagrant Sixth Amendment violation” that “screams for a dismissal.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Fang Bingxing – considered the ‘father of China’s Great Firewall’, are joining OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk in raising concerns regarding the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI).

“We’ve got to be careful here,” the 37-year-old Altman told ABC News last week, adding “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this.”

“I’m particularly worried that these models could be used for large-scale disinformation … Now that they’re getting better at writing computer code, [they] could be used for offensive cyber-attacks.”

That said, Altman also thinks it could be “the greatest technology humanity has yet developed.”

OpenAI is the company behind Chat GPT, which launched “GPT-4” less than two weeks ago. The highly sophisticated chatbot can reach almost perfect scores on SAT math tests, and achieve a 90% on the US bar exam.

And it has competitors…

Other AI-based startups are making surprising advancements in the field as well. RAD AI recently launched the first AI marketing platform built to understand emotion, and some of the largest companies on the planet are already using it.

GenesisAI is a startup building a marketplace to allow for any business to integrate AI and automation into their business. Meaning soon AI might be just as much of an integral part of a business as employees themselves. –Benzinga

According to Altman, however, ChatGPT-4 uses deductive reasoning vs. memorization, which can lead to inaccurate results.

“The thing that I try to caution people the most is what we call the ‘hallucinations problem’” Altman told ABC News. “The model will confidently state things as if they were facts (but they) are entirely made up.”

Altman thinks there is a need for regulation of AI in general.

“There will be other people who don’t put some of the safety limits that we put on,” he said. “Society, I think, has a limited amount of time to figure out how to react to that, how to regulate that, how to handle it.”

Also concerned over GPT-4 and similar AI is Fang Bingxing, the father of China’s so-called Great Firewall.

According to Fang, such chatbots can lead to an “information cocoon” (as opposed to the free flow of information in China?)

“People’s perspectives can be manipulated as they seek all kinds of answers from AI,” he told Red Star News, a media affiliate to state-backed Chengdu Economic Daily, as reported by SCMP.

Fang, a computer scientist and former government official, is widely considered the chief designer of China’s notorious internet censorship and surveillance system. He played a key role in creating and developing the Great Firewall, a sophisticated system of internet filters and blocks that allows the Chinese government to control what its citizens can access online.

The Great Firewall has been fortified over the past decade, blocking Chinese netizens’ access to a wide range of foreign websites and online services including Facebook, Twitter and Google. -SCMP

Fang also warned that when AI evolves further, it could pose a threat to humanity.

“Now it’s simply software used in an online chat-like scenario. If it’s incorporated into robots and cars, we need to stay vigilant for the potential harm they could do to humans.”

Early in the day Thursday China’s military said it monitored and then drove away a US warship which had “illegally” entered China-claimed waters of the South China Sea.

The Southern Theatre Command of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) charged that the guided missile destroyer USS Milius entered waters of the disputed Paracel Islands before being warned and driven away. Washington and its allies have long rejected that these are territorial waters of China, after Beijing embarked years ago on the militarization of multiple island chains in the region. 

China presented that it had forced the US destroyer to exit the area, however, the US Navy’s 7th fleet is rejecting the claims.

Calling it a routine operation in international waters, the US Navy’s Lt. j.g. Luka Bakic responded by saying, “USS Milius is conducting routine operations in the South China Sea and was not expelled,” and that “The United States will continue to fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows.”

But a Chinese military spokesman is still calling it an “illegal incursion into Chinese territorial waters … without permission from the Chinese government, harming peace and stability” in the region.

“The theatre forces will maintain a high state of alert at all times and take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and security and peace and stability in the South China Sea,” the PLA spokesman added. 

The Paracels are claimed by US allies Vietnam and Taiwan, making encounters among rival vessels turn into tense standoffs going back years.

The US side in the past has presented these as ‘innocent passages’ – asserting that it is the right of all vessels under international marine law as reflected in the Convention on the Law of the Sea, which means is that permission is not required to transit. But China will continue to challenge this interpretation.

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

USA Today has picked a trans-identified male as it’s ‘woman of the year’ for a second time running, and this time it’s someone who advocates for child sex changes.

The media outlet has chosen Leigh Finke as its ‘woman of the year’ for Minnesota. Finke was the first transgender legislator to be appointed to the Minnesota House of Representatives in November.

Today, @USATODAY released their Women of the Year project, picking one woman to represent each state, and they have selected me as Woman of the Year for Minnesota. https://t.co/cOKwoMrD9b

— Leigh Finke (@leighfinke) March 19, 2023

USA Today says the awards are a way of highlighting “local and national heroines who make a positive impact in their communities every day.”

Finke has made it a priority to ensure children are allowed to have access to gender altering surgery, recently sponsoring a bill to make Minnesota a “trans refuge state.”

As we highlighted last week, the Democrat Governor and lieutenant governor of the state are on an executive mission to force state agencies to push “gender-affirming” health care.

Elon Musk Hits Back At ‘Protect Trans Kids’ Democrat Lieutenant Governor

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