Sam Smith

Det krävs en juristexamen eller stor uppmärksamhet, ännu hellre båda delar, för att hålla reda på de många rättsfallen mot Donald Trump. Totalt står han åtalad för 91 brott i två delstatsdomstolar och två olika federala distrikt, som alla kan leda till fängelsestraff. Han har också ett civilrättsligt mål i New York som kan tvinga fram drastiska förändringar i hans affärsimperium. The Atlantic har sammanfattat de viktigaste rättsfallen mot Trump, inklusive viktiga datum, en bedömning av hur allvarliga anklagelserna är och sannolikheten för att Trump döms. Fraud. Hush money. Election subversion. Mar-a-Lago documents. One place to keep track of the presidential candidate’s legal troubles. By David A. Graham 30 October, 2023 Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Today, merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both. In all, Trump faces 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts, any of which could potentially produce a prison sentence. He’s also dealing with a civil suit in New York that could force drastic changes to his business empire, including closing down its operations in his home state. Meanwhile, he is the leading Republican candidate in the race to become the next president. If the court cases unfold with any reasonable timeliness, he could be in the heat of the campaign trail at the same time that his legal fate is being decided. Here’s a summary of the major legal cases against Trump, including key dates, an assessment of the gravity of the charges, and expectations about how they could turn out. This guide will be updated regularly as the cases proceed. In the fall of 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump, his adult sons, and his former aide Allen Weisselberg, alleging a years-long scheme in which Trump fraudulently reported the value of properties in order to either lower his tax bill or improve the terms of his loans, all with an eye toward inflating his net worth. When? A judge ruled against Trump and his co-defendants in late September, concluding that many of the defendants’ claims were “clearly” fraudulent—so clearly that he didn’t need a trial to hear them. (He also sanctioned Trump’s lawyers for making repeated frivolous arguments.) A trial to determine the amount of damages Trump must pay is ongoing in Manhattan, and could stretch for weeks or even months. Justice Arthur Engoron, the presiding judge, has already fined Trump a combined $15,000 for violating a gag order in the case. How grave is the allegation? Fraud is fraud, and in this case, the sum of the fraud stretched into the millions—but compared with some of the other legal matters in which Trump is embroiled, this is pretty pedestrian. The case is civil rather than criminal, and though it could end with Trump’s famed company barred from business in New York, the loss of several key properties, and millions of dollars in fines, the stakes are lower, both for Trump and for the nation, than in the other cases against him. How plausible is a guilty verdict? Engoron has already ruled that Trump committed fraud. The outstanding questions are what damages he might have to pay and what exactly Engoron’s ruling means for Trump’s business and properties in New York. Although these other cases are all brought by government entities, Trump is also involved in an ongoing defamation case with the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s. When he denied it, she sued him for defamation and later added a battery claim. When? In May 2023, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. A second defamation claim remains under consideration. How grave is the allegation? Although this case doesn’t directly connect to the same fundamental issues of rule of law and democratic governance that some of the criminal cases do, it is a serious matter, and a judge’s blunt statement that Trump raped Carroll has been underappreciated. How plausible is a guilty verdict? Trump has already been found liable for defamation and sexual assault, and a further finding of defamation is possible and perhaps likely. In March 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring felony charges against Trump, alleging that the former president falsified business records as part of a scheme to pay hush money to women who said they had had sexual relationships with Trump. When? The case is set to go to trial on March 25, 2024. In September, the judge overseeing the case signaled that he is open to changing that date, given the various other court cases that Trump is juggling, but he also said he didn’t think it was worth discussing until February. How grave is the allegation? Falsifying records is a crime, and crime is bad. But many people have analogized this case to Al Capone’s conviction on tax evasion: It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t really why he was an infamous villain. That this case alleges behavior that didn’t undermine democracy or put national secrets at risk makes it feel more minor—though those other cases have set a grossly high standard for what constitutes gravity. How plausible is a guilty verdict? Bragg’s case faces hurdles including the statute of limitations, a questionable key witness in the former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, and some untested legal theories. In short, the Manhattan case seems like perhaps both the least significant and the legally weakest criminal case. Some Trump critics were dismayed that Bragg was the first to bring criminal charges against the former president. Jack Smith, a special counsel in the U.S. Justice Department, has charged Trump with 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office. The charges include willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Trump took boxes of documents to properties where they were stored haphazardly, but the indictment centers on his refusal to give them back to the government despite repeated requests. When? Smith filed charges in June 2023. Judge Aileen Cannon has set a trial date of May 20, 2024. Smith faces a de facto deadline of January 20, 2025, at which point Trump or any Republican president would likely shut down a case. How grave is the allegation? These are, I have written, the stupidest crimes imaginable, but they are nevertheless quite serious. Protecting the nation’s secrets is one of the greatest responsibilities of any public official with classified clearance, and not only did Trump put these documents at risk, but he also (allegedly) refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide them, and lied to the government through his attorneys. How plausible is a guilty verdict? This may be the most open-and-shut case, and the facts and legal theory here are pretty straightforward. But Smith is believed to have drawn a short straw when he was randomly assigned Cannon, a Trump appointee who has sometimes ruled favorably for Trump on procedural matters. In Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis brought a huge racketeering case against Trump and 18 others, alleging a conspiracy that spread across weeks and states with the aim of stealing the 2020 election. When? Willis obtained the indictment in August. The number of defendants makes the case unwieldy and difficult to track. In late September, one defendant who breached election equipment struck a plea deal. Three more, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, pleaded guilty in late October. No date has been set for the other defendants’ trial, but it likely won’t come until 2024. How grave is the allegation? More than any other case, this one attempts to reckon with the full breadth of the assault on democracy following the 2020 election. How plausible is a guilty verdict? Expert views differ. This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The racketeering law allows Willis to sweep in a great deal of material, and she has some strong evidence—such as a call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” some 11,000 votes. Three major plea deals from co-defendants may also ease Willis’s path. But getting a jury to convict Trump will still be a challenge. Special Counsel Smith has also charged Trump with four federal felonies in connection with his attempt to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. This case is in court in Washington, D.C. When? A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1. A trial is scheduled for March 4, 2024. As with the other DOJ case, Smith will need to move quickly, before Trump or any other Republican president could shut down a case upon taking office in January 2025. But even before the trial begins, heated legal skirmishes are under way: In October, following verbal attacks by Trump on witnesses and Smith’s wife, Judge Tanya Chutkan issued an order limiting what Trump can say about the case. How grave is the allegation? This case rivals the Fulton County one in importance. It is narrower, focusing just on Trump and a few key elements of the paperwork coup, but the symbolic weight of the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting the attempt to subvert the American election system is heavy. How plausible is a guilty verdict? It’s very hard to say. Smith avoided some of the more unconventional potential charges, including aiding insurrection, and everyone watched much of the alleged crime unfold in public in real time, but no precedent exists for a case like this, with a defendant like this. © 2023 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Open AI:s vd Sam Altman räds inte konsekvenserna på arbetsmarknaden som AI-revolutionen leder till. Det sa han på Wall Street Journals årliga konferens Tech Live i veckan: – Varje teknologisk revolution får följder för arbetsmarknaden. Jag är inte det minsta rädd för det. Under mötet samlades världens techledare – från bland annat Meta och Arm – för att diskutera de snabba förändringar som AI medför för näringslivet och politiken. Tidningen listar här några höjdpunkter från samtalen. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Chris Cox and others spoke at WSJ’s annual event. By WSJ Staff

The Wall Street Journal, 18 October 2023 Tech leaders convened on The Wall Street Journal’s annual Tech Live conference this week, where discussions focused on the fast-paced changes wrought by artificial intelligence across business, technology and policy-making. Here are some highlights from interviews. AI has been a central topic this year, as its impact on business and society is hotly debated. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said the two things that will matter the most over the next few decades are abundant and inexpensive intelligence, and abundant and cheap energy. OpenAI is working to make ChatGPT cheaper and faster, so that it can be more broadly accessible. “If we can get these two things done in the world then it’s almost, like, difficult to imagine how much else we could do,” he said. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Inflection AI, said the race to build AI chatbots is reminiscent of the rush to build websites at the dawn of the internet or apps after the advent of smartphones. “This is really just the beginning of a complete transformation in the way we interact with computers,” said Suleyman, whose company makes a ChatGPT rival called Pi, short for personal intelligence. Meta is also optimistic about the impact of AI. “One of the most profoundly impactful applications in the near term for AI is helping businesses be more effective,” said Meta Platforms Chief Product Officer Chis Cox. Meta last month unveiled its own AI chatbots based on celebrities such as Naomi Osaka and Snoop Dogg. Cox said Meta is making it clear these characters aren’t the real people. “Having products that experiment with what is possible is great, but having anything that doesn’t make clear to people what is going on is a problem,” he said. Consumers are going to gravitate to TikTok, ChatGPT and other applications powered by generative artificial intelligence, instead of using traditional search engines, said Michael Wolf, co-founder and CEO of consulting firm Activate. He predicts that domination within the $100 billion search industry is “up for grabs,” adding that the rise of open-source AI models is paving a pathway for smaller entrants to meaningfully compete with large, established companies. Professionals from physicians to writers have been fearing that AI will entirely replace some jobs. “Every technological revolution affects the job market. I’m not afraid of that at all,” said OpenAI’s Altman. “That’s the way of progress. And we’ll find new and better jobs.” Still, it’s not going to be a seamless process. “The thing that I think we do need to confront as a society is the speed at which this is going to happen,” he added. Adam Wenchel, chief executive of AI company Arthur, took a more sanguine view of the job impact from AI than some other panelists at Tech Live. “These systems are going to roll out over time, very gradually, people are going to adapt to them and it’s going to be OK,” he said. Indeed, companies are still determining how to implement new AI technology. “Even at the highest levels, we’re still trying to figure out what does all of this mean to our business model,” said Vince Marin, chief information officer of law firm Sidley Austin. Charles Sims, chief technology officer at United Talent Agency, said AI makes it more important for people to have generalized skill sets that enable them to adapt as technology replaces specific specialties. “If you’re talking to a college student today, it’s about generalization, it’s about trying to learn as many things as you can,” he said. Elise Smith, CEO of Praxis Labs, said it is critical to involve the next generation of workers in discussions about how to use technology: “They want to be brought in and brought along on the journey,” she said. “They want to be doing the innovation day, the hackathon, where they’re getting to give ideas around how AI can transform their business.” Adobe’s president of digital media business, David Wadhwani, said that despite fears, he sees artificial intelligence as a tool that will boost employment rather than put people out of jobs. Tools like Adobe’s Firefly, which can generate images and logos, allow more people to become creative professionals, he said. “We will have creative professionals being more productive than ever before and more creative professionals in the world,” he said. Arm CEO Rene Haas said the chip company is using artificial intelligence to help in some of the areas where they struggle to hire enough talent, such as with debugging and testing chips. But he said the semiconductor industry faces some challenges in its role powering artificial intelligence. He described a future when energy shortages could constrain AI advancement, and a shortage of talent could limit production of semiconductors. “The kind of people we are looking to hire are hard to find. We are looking for really expert engineers,” Haas said. Investors are weighing whether it’s too late to get into AI. “Most investments in AI today—venture investments—will lose money,” said venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Khosla, who founded Khosla Ventures almost two decades ago, said AI investing had entered a hype cycle, and only highly disciplined investors will reap the benefits of the transformative technology. The buzzy new technology has generated significant concerns, though. “We’ve got a fierce task ahead of us to figure out what are these downsides and discover, understand them, and build the tools to mitigate them,” said OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. For instance, sometimes chatbots confidently espouse information that doesn’t seem to be justified by its training data. “We’ve made a ton of progress on the hallucination issue with GPT-4, but we’re not where we need to be. We’re sort of on the right track.” Murati said. OpenAI is continuing to use techniques including reinforcement learning with human feedback to reduce the number of times that its model makes up information. It is also working on technology that can help detect the provenance of an image, Murati said. Suleyman, CEO of the company behind Pi, said another problem is that Pi and other AI chatbots aren’t designed to doubt themselves, which makes it hard to know when they’re wrong. He suggested that a possible safeguard for users would be to have responses ranked by their accuracy. “This skill of uncertainty estimation is a critical part of intelligence and actually key to making them reliable,” he said. Suleyman said he and his peers are also discussing the potential risk of AI interfering with next year’s U.S. presidential elections, and he hopes to build parameters that will prevent Pi from recommending political candidates. One of the leading risks to the development of the nation’s AI sector is the imbalance between public and private sector investment in what will soon be a technology as ubiquitous as electricity, said Fei-Fei Li, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a former vice president at Google. U.S. government investment and incentives should at least match the U.S.’s investment in space exploration decades ago with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “This technology is as big or even bigger than the space technology,” Li said. “We cannot just leave it to the private sector.” Li said the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies should urgently take a role in regulating AI. “It is very hard to imagine one ring that rules them all,” Li said. Roblox CEO David Baszucki said the gaming company is treading carefully when it comes to training artificial intelligence models, and isn’t harvesting anyone’s code without permission. “That’s a big societal discussion right now,” he said. The energy costs associated with powering artificial-intelligence programs have also been a concern for climate advocates. But former Meta Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer, whose new firm Gigascale Capital invests in climate-focused companies, said AI will save energy in other ways. “It will be a large consumption of power, but you also have to think of the replacement costs,” he said, referring to efficiencies that AI is expected to provide. Cryptocurrency is another area in tech rife with pitfalls. Anthony Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital, said he should have been more wary of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who is on trial in New York facing fraud and conspiracy charges. “I took the aura of all of that too seriously, and I probably should’ve been more of a skeptic,” Scaramucci said. “He committed a crime and I believe he has to go to jail for a very long time.” Executives and advocates also highlighted the risks of social media, especially for young people. Larissa May, founder and executive director, of nonprofit #HalfTheStory, said kids are spending an average of eight hours a day on their devices. “We better be looking at the place where they’re spending more time than anywhere else in their life, including sleep,” May said. Social-media companies should think about more than how much time young people are spending on social media app—they should find ways to measure whether apps are supporting or hurting them. “It’s so much bigger than just a dollar sign,” May said. Comedian and creator Elsa Majimbo said social media can be too negative. She called X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, “a soft dark web” that should have a minimum age requirement of 18. Award-winning musician John Legend, who is launching his first-ever tech startup, agreed that AI has its limits. He said computer-generated music won’t replace songwriters, in part because audiences like the artists’ stories behind their music. “There’s just something that’s still so human about music, songwriting and that interaction we have with our audience,” he said. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he is aware of AI use in Hollywood and has heard a fake version of his voice. Whether or not his likeness will be used by AI in the future is a point his children will have to negotiate, the 76-year-old actor said. “I will not be around, even though I want to live forever,” he said. Even venture capitalist Khosla has tried his hand at it. When his daughter got married earlier this year, he asked ChatGPT to turn a speech he wrote into rap lyrics and then turned those lyrics into a song through an AI startup called Splash. He blared the song over speakers. “It extended my capabilities,” he said. “It meant a lot to me.” In addition to the uncertainties of AI, technology leaders are also now dealing with critical questions regarding the impact of geopolitics on the sector. Venture capitalist Khosla said that winning the race to develop advanced AI would give the U.S. an economic and political advantage over China. “I think the world’s political system—what influences Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America—is at stake,” he said. “Western values are at stake in this technology battle, so we should do whatever we can to win this battle and beat China at it.” Khosla also warned against making the code behind advanced AI models available to the public, which some technologists have championed as a way to bolster the technology’s development. “You don’t open-source the Manhattan Project,” he said, referencing America’s clandestine efforts to build an atomic bomb during World War II. The war between Hamas and Israel, which has been a tech hub for years, was also a focal point of TechLive this year. Palmer Luckey, founder of defense technology company Anduril Industries, said U.S. corporate chiefs should be more vocal in their support for Israel. “It reflects very poorly on our billionaire class that you aren’t seeing a whole-of-country effort to become involved and to speak up about these issues. That you are seeing hedging on the condemnation of Hamas for fear of saying the wrong thing either in the court of public opinion or because it hurts their business interests,” Luckey said. Charlie Shrem, general partner of Druid Ventures, was asked about the use of cryptocurrency by Hamas to fund its attacks in Israel. He said it is “a really sad thing to see something that we were all involved in creating early on become used in these negative ways.” When it came to domestic politics, Schwarzenegger said aging leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties should step aside and make room for a new generation. The former California governor alluded to recent instances of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell freezing and falling silent, and said people in that position should “start thinking about stepping aside and letting a newer generation step in and fill the vacuum.” Sarah E. Needleman, Annie Gasparro, Berber Jin, Mengqi Sun, Georgia Wells, Sarah Krouse, Heather Somerville, Tom Dotan and Deepa Seetharaman contributed to this article.

Det brukade vara lätt att hitta havsänglar. Det rockliknande hajsläktet fanns spritt från Skandinavien till västra Sahara, nu är den listad som akut hotad och i princip omöjlig att hitta för biologer. Men med hjälp av den banbrytande tekniken eDNA (environmental DNA) som görs på vattenprover har forskare lyckats spåra dem, skriver Washington Post som besökt ett projekt utanför Korsika. Runt om i världen håller eDNA på att förändra hur biologer arbetar för att bevara arter. De kan upptäcka invasiva skadedjur i ekosystem innan någon har sett dem och följa hur djurens migration drivs på av klimatförändringar utan att behöva skicka ut en armé av människor för att spåra dem. (Svensk översättning av Omni). Armed with new DNA tools, scientists are tracking animals' genetic trail, helping us understand the breath of life on Earth like never before. By Dino Grandoni 29 September, 2023 OFF THE COAST OF CORSICA - Nicolas Tomasi has never laid eyes on it. He has worked these waters for years without seeing one but has heard the tales from old-timers - of a patient predator, hiding under the sand off this French island's shores, waiting for the right moment to strike. The angel shark does not want to be found. But it can hide no longer. On a hot August afternoon, Tomasi lowered a long, plastic tube attached to a weight over the edge of a dinghy and into the indigo water. With the push of a few buttons, an electric pump began sucking up a small portion of the Mediterranean Sea - and with it, the ocean's secrets. The thin stream of siphoned water looked ordinary, but floating in it were microscopic particles laden with DNA from dozens of ocean animals. If an angel shark was below, this device could detect it. Today, said Tomasi, a project manager with the Natural Marine Park of Cap Corse and Agriate, we can find rare sea life "sans avoir à plonger." Without having to dive. This is environmental DNA, or eDNA, a revolutionary technology that is helping scientists detect the treasure trove of genetic information animals leave in their wake and understand the breadth of life on Earth like never before. Before, biologists had to drag nets through the sea or run electric currents through the water to incapacitate and count animals. Now, they can tally biodiversity simply by sampling water, soil or even air for the DNA animals shed in their environments daily. Around the world from the Arctic to the Amazon, eDNA is rewriting the way biologists do conservation, allowing them to spot invasive pests entering ecosystems before anyone has seen them and to follow animals' migration fueled by climate change without deploying an army of people to track them. But the most promising place for deploying eDNA may be Earth's oceans, where many species remain unknown and many threats, such as warmer waters and ocean acidification, are mounting. In the case of France's elusive angel shark, eDNA helped scientists rediscover an animal many thought to be lost for good, and gave ocean managers key information about where it lives so that they can protect it. "They are always surprised that from a sample of water, you can detect the species," said Stéphanie Manel, a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études who was showing Tomasi how to collect DNA. "But this is DNA," she said. "DNA is there. So it's not magic." Her ambitions extend beyond the angel shark. Her goal is nothing short of "a map of the biodiversity in the Mediterranean." It used to be easy to find an angel shark. A 19th century zoologist in the British Isles wrote it "haunts our coasts in abundance." Once widespread from Scandinavia to the Western Sahara, it was so plentiful in Europe's seas that the crystal-blue water off Nice in the French Riviera is named Baie des Anges, or the Bay of Angels. With a flattened body and eyes on top of its head, the common angel shark, or squatina squatina, lies on the bottom of the ocean, burying its body in the sand. For hours it waits in shallow waters until - whoosh! - it pops its head up, opens its jaws and sucks an unsuspecting fish into its mouth. For as long as humans have known about the shark, they have exploited them. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder lauded its rough skin for its ability to polish ivory and wood. But it was the advent of modern fishing that really did the carnivorous fish in. That lie-and-wait strategy for ambushing prey also made it easy for fishermen to scoop it up in trawls scraping the sandy sea bottom, even when trying to catch other fish. Slow to grow and reproduce, the fish's population plummeted and the Mediterranean lost a key predator. Today, the common angel shark is no longer common, with the International Union for Conservation of Nature listing the species as critically endangered. By 2015, its last stronghold appeared to be the Canary Islands off northwestern Africa. The shark had disappeared everywhere else. Or so scientists thought. But locals in Corsica knew better. "I've seen the bite," Sébastien Leccia said. As a teenager, he remembered a man showing him a scar on his arm. "We knew," said Leccia, now an official with the Office of the Environment of Corsica. "But it wasn't studied." Until in 2019, a fisherman shared pictures of the odd, flat fish caught off the northeastern coast with biologists. Some were juveniles, suggesting a hidden shark nursery. Another series of photos from a diver further confirmed Corsica's angel sharks were no myth. But those fleeting images only painted a partial picture. Where else around Corsica did the angel shark swim? Did these sharks stay put, or mingle around the Mediterranean? In 2020, during covid lockdowns, the sharks started "to come back to the shore," said David Mouillot, a University of Montpellier professor collaborating with Manel. Had the decline in beach and boat activity during the pandemic made angel sharks less shy? "We don't know whether it's covid, climate" or something else, he said. For the past several years, Manel and Mouillot's team have been siphoning water along the Corsican coast to find its genetic finprint and map its whereabouts. In late August, a 56-foot trimaran named the Victoria IV cut a course along the island's northwestern shoreline to continue the search. After dropping the tube into the blue water on that hot August afternoon, the eDNA team waited as a pump whooshed water through a fist-sized amber capsule. Inside, an accordion-shaped filter collected tiny DNA-laden particles. After half an hour running the pump, Tomasi snapped on rubber gloves and poured a bottle of clear solution into the amber capsule, preserving the genetic material so it could be sent to a lab onshore. There, the snippets of DNA would be multiplied using a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR - a technique also used for detecting covid in humans - and then compared to DNA from a database to see what species were swimming below. The plunging cost of analyzing DNA over the past decade opened the door for this work. So far, the team has used eDNA to find at least seven spots along the Corsican coast where angel sharks were still patrolling, according to a paper the team published in May. But more may be lurking undetected. "Because it is endangered, the DNA is rare," Manel said. Manel first got interested in eDNA after geneticists found invasive frogs in French wetlands. Much of the first eDNA work, in fact, was done in freshwater ecosystems, where DNA lingers in abundance. More recently, scientists have refined ways of extracting strands of genetic material from saltwater, soil and air. Depending on conditions, DNA can last for days in the ocean after an animal has shed it. "When we started nobody believed it would work," Mouillot said of their marine eDNA work as the boat chugged along Corsica's rocky coast lined with modern steel wind turbines and medieval stone towers once used to watch for pirates. "Everyone thought we are crazy. It's a waste of money." In the Mediterranean, the team was on the lookout for another invader: the rabbitfish. The rabbitfish doesn't look much like a rabbit. But it shares with its land counterpart one crucial and devastating trait: It reproduces like crazy, overwhelming ecosystems. The fish has infiltrated the eastern Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, one of some 3,500 harmful invasive species costing society more than $423 billion a year. It hasn't been spotted near Corsica. But it's only a matter of time, scientists say. "It's inevitable at some point," said Rick Stuart-Smith, a marine biologist from the University of Tasmania in Australia who joined Manel and Mouillot on the Victoria IV. But biologists are doing more than just tracking endangered and invasive species. Today they use eDNA to diagnose infections in insects and reconstruct entire food webs by combing through feces. "We got to the point where we could detect one or two molecules," said Colin Simpfendorfer, a shark scientist at James Cook University in Australia conducting his own eDNA work. "That's how powerful those sorts of techniques can become." "What eDNA can deliver for conservation is massive," he said. "It is revolutionizing a lot of the work that we do." Yet the field is still new, and going through growing pains. DNA is the blueprint for life, made up of four bases - adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine - strung together in an order distinctive to every type of organism. To match DNA collected from the environment to a specific species, researchers must check samples against a reference database. Yet the databases available right now are incomplete and disjointed. To confirm that particular sequence of A's, T's, G's and C's came from angel sharks, for instance, Manel and Mouillot's team had to test their method on angel shark tissue provided by fishers in Corsica and by an aquarium in Spain. There is also a lack of standardization for filtration methods as well as a lack of communication with other scientific disciplines, said Louis Bernatchez, editor in chief of the scientific journal Environmental DNA. Many of the scientists sampling tissue from animals and sequencing DNA don't focus on the parts of the genome that eDNA methods are good at detecting. "It's still a young science," said Bernatchez, a professor at Laval University in Canada. "It just keeps improving." Then there are the privacy concerns. Wild animals aren't the only ones shedding DNA everywhere. Humans do, too. Spikes in the viral genetic signatures in sewer water, for instance, are allowing health officials to predict covid outbreaks. In a paper this year, University of Florida biologist David Duffy and colleagues showed sleuths can recover medical and family information from genetic traces left in the environment by humans, suggesting one day police departments and insurance companies may be able to spot genetic disorders and surveil populations using eDNA. "Essentially what we have shown is that humans are not really very different," Duffy said. "The same technologies that can allow us to recover a tiger's DNA from the environment actually can recover human DNA as well." And eDNA still can't capture some vital information. It can't say much yet about the quantity or body size of fish - though researchers are working on linking the amount of DNA they find in the water to the abundance of a species. And there are other fish that don't shed a lot of DNA to begin with, making eDNA detection difficult. Some fish "don't piss a lot," Stuart-Smith said. "They don't have soft skin or mucus." Finding some creatures requires taking a plunge. Stuart-Smith bobbed his head up and down and side to side, letting out big puffs of glistening air bubbles from his scuba gear. In one hand he held a pencil and in the other, a piece of special waterproof paper. Swimming along a 50-meter tape measure laid along the seafloor, he counted every rainbow wrasse, painted comber and other vibrant fish he could spot. His colleague Graham Edgar passed him going the opposite direction, snapping pictures of the seafloor. Once Stuart-Smith got to the end of the tape measure, he spun around to swim the line again - this time gently brushing away seagrass with his hand and plunging headfirst into crevices to get a better look at the life on this stretch of rocky seafloor near the small island of Giraglia at the northern tip of Corsica. In one of the cracks he spotted a cardinal fish, a neon-orange animal that looks like a living piece of gummy candy. "Nothing out of the ordinary," Stuart-Smith, who is also co-founder of the Reef Life Survey, said back aboard the Victoria IV. This is a tried-and-true method for surveying sea life. For the past 16 years, the Reef Life Survey has trained professional scientists and amateur divers alike to conduct underwater surveys the same standardized way. Their catalogues, which include not only the species but also the abundance and body sizes of different reef fish at thousands of sites around the world, has provided marine managers with crucial baseline data. This old-school approach can complement eDNA analysis. Visual surveys, for instance, aren't very good at spotting sea creatures swimming in deep waters or hiding under rocks. And other fish simply flee at the first sight of divers. "The first thing to recognize when you're surveying marine life is that no method is perfect," said Edgar, also a University of Tasmania marine biologist. Back on the deck, the pair enter data into their laptops. No angel sharks. No fish, in fact, bigger than 6 inches. In other areas off the coast of Corsica where Stuart-Smith went diving, fish were also small and skittish, a sign of overfishing even in areas that are supposed to be protected. Both eDNA and visual surveys can let government agencies know if fishing restrictions are working, or being ignored by poachers. "They were all very shy," he said. "If it's meant to be no entry, the fish are telling me no." As the Victoria IV clipped up a stretch of dry coastline, Mouillot drew in a breath of ocean air. "I'm very excited to swim," he said. "Do you smell the angel shark?" Sure, eDNA is the shiny new technology. But there is nothing quite like seeing a shark face to face. Snapping on flippers and swim caps, Moullot and Manel plunged into the water near a smattering of beachgoers enjoying the last days of summer. This sandy cove is near one of the spots the eDNA team had detected the shark in two years ago. To find an angel shark, look for its silhouette. Often, the only thing to see is its outline in the sand. "You don't see the angel shark," said Jose A. Sanabria-Fernandez, another reef diver looking for the shark. "You see the shape of the angel shark." The pair swam at a brisk pace along the coast, overhead strokes and eyes down, scanning for the outline of the shark under the sand. After several minutes of searching, Mouillot stopped. "Many beautiful fish," he said, bobbing in the water. "But no angel shark." The eDNA samples collected on the trip may reveal the sharks once they are analyzed in the coming weeks. But he and Manel care about more than just the angel shark. Their latest survey involves an eDNA method called metabarcoding that can detect not just one species, but whole groups of animals. "People need to be aware that you need to protect species," Manel said. "The angel shark is maybe an emblematic species." The pair want not just to measure biodiversity but bolster it, by someday moving some of Corsica's sharks to the French mainland coast and giving Nice's Baie des Anges its angels back. Mouillot acknowledged the political and legal hurdles. "It's a very controversial idea," he said. "It would be the greatest challenge of the end of my career," he added, "because it means that we can reverse the decline of biodiversity." © 2023 The Washington Post. Sign up for the Today's Worldview newsletter here.

Den ständigt leende talmannen föll på eget grepp. ”Han ägnade nio månader åt att försöka blidka en omedgörlig grupp i Republikanernas högerflank och böjde sig för deras krav på ett sätt som skadade representanthuset som institution”, skriver Washington Post-redaktören Paul Kane i en analys efter att republikanen Kevin McCarthy igår röstades bort. Men flanken nöjde sig aldrig utan vände sig emot McCarthy med Floridarepublikanen Matt Gaetz i spetsen. Han vädjade då till representanthusets demokrater – men möttes av frustration och ilska. – Han har skapat kaos i representanthuset, och han säger att vi löser problemet genom att behålla honom i den positionen? Det argumentet håller inte, säger demokraten Adam Smith till tidningen. (Svensk översättning av Omni). Kevin McCarthy learned a painful lesson: There's a price to pay for helping set fire to an institution and then asking the fire department to come save your office. By Paul Kane October 3, 2023 The California Republican spent nine months as House speaker trying to placate an intractable group of hard-right Republicans, bowing to their demands in ways that hurt the House as an institution. They were never satisfied and turned on McCarthy, setting in motion Tuesday's vote to expel him as speaker. By late Monday, after enough Republicans had made their intentions known, it was clear that McCarthy could not win just from votes on his side of the aisle, as is the House tradition. So he turned to Democrats to ask for help putting out the fire of an internal GOP rebellion that he helped start. It wasn't even a close call. "Nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy. Nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a leading liberal, told reporters after a raucous morning caucus. With that, the always-smiling Republican got expelled from the speaker's office nine months to the day he lost the first 14 of 15 ballots in trying to win the gavel. After all the concessions McCarthy had made to his right flank to finally win, Democrats could not believe some Republicans were asking them to save McCarthy's political life. Some of their voices filled with anger, they said they no longer saw him as the good-natured young Republican who befriended them a decade before in the House gym and planned bipartisan, group bike rides. They viewed him as morphing - fairly quickly over the past three years - into a craven, unprincipled leader just trying to cling to power for the sake of power alone. Some Democrats pitied him and all his efforts to appease a group of intransigent right-wing radicals. But they said he had to pay a price for making so many promises and backing away from them. They recalled how, immediately after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, McCarthy blamed President Donald Trump and called for an independent commission to investigate, only to throw his support behind Trump after he left office and to oppose a deep investigation. "He has brought chaos to the House, and he's saying keeping him in that position is how we solve that problem? That's an argument that just isn't selling," said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee and co-author of a Pentagon policy bill that won the panel's approval 58-1. In a letter to Democrats minutes before Tuesday's pivotal vote, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) cited that legislation as a key example of McCarthy's deceit. Rather than advance such a bill with broad support, he caved to a few hard-right Republicans and loaded the legislation up with culture-war policy riders that passed on a narrow partisan vote. Jeffries, who has held a cordial public relationship with McCarthy, left no doubt that his party would unanimously support taking the gavel from him, rating McCarthy as no different from the most extreme elements of the GOP. "Given their unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism in an authentic and comprehensive manner, House Democratic leadership will vote yes on the pending Republican Motion to Vacate the Chair," Jeffries wrote to Democratic lawmakers just minutes before votes started, referring to Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan. So when the House began its vote series, after 1:30 p.m., the biggest remaining issue was whether Democrats had so many absences, for health and family reasons, that McCarthy might narrowly skate by. That ended when 11 Republicans joined 207 Democrats to defeat a procedural motion that would have cut off the effort, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a longtime irritant to the speaker who has spent weeks preparing for this vote. In fact, after formally making the motion Monday, Gaetz told reporters on the Capitol steps that he expected some Democrats to give McCarthy a political lifeline. "That's the likely outcome," he said, predicting failure and suggesting he would keep offering motions to defeat the speaker. "This won't be the only time." Instead, Gaetz got to oversee one hour of debate before the final vote, decamping to the Democratic side of the aisle to work at a table usually reserved for leading liberals who despise him. On the final vote, 208 Democrats and eight Republicans voted against McCarthy, with 210 GOP lawmakers supporting him. McCarthy's allies had hoped that senior Democrats who care for the institution, particularly Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, who served 20 years in leadership and has traveled abroad with McCarthy, would find a way to give him enough support. First elected in 2006, McCarthy spent his first 12 years in office well liked on both sides of the aisle. He worked out in the House gym with a bipartisan crowd. Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), a close McCarthy confidant who is now serving as acting speaker, noted that McCarthy tried to treat Jeffries better than then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) treated him the previous four years. He warned that expelling a speaker midterm will be a major "inflection" point by expelling a speaker midterm. McCarthy did call Jeffries on Monday evening, but no one is sure what the two men discussed. On Tuesday morning, McCarthy told reporters he would not be offering concessions to win over their votes. If Democrats were to save him, it would just have been out of the rapport they had with him or for the sake of avoiding throwing the House into the chaos that now consumes it. Instead, Democrats said that the McCarthy they knew and liked from his days about a decade ago, when he held a junior GOP leadership post, had become unrecognizable compared with the man who gave in to so many hard-right demands. "I don't distinguish that sharply between Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz," Rep. Jaime B. Raskin (D-Md.) said Monday. Raskin, a manager in Trump's second impeachment trial, noted that McCarthy, in the aftermath of the Capitol attack, was the first high-ranking leader to call for an independent commission to investigate. But within weeks of the assault, McCarthy traveled to visit Trump and made amends, then worked against a commission and the eventual House Jan. 6 committee. When he won the speaker's race in early January, McCarthy did so only by agreeing to weaken the motion that Gaetz used this week against him, making it far easier for a tiny faction to force chaos. "This speaker and Republican Conference have done everything they can to bring us to this point of chaos, to have an unstable House of Representatives," Rep. Mark Takano (R-Calif.) told reporters Tuesday. In May, McCarthy clinched a debt-and-budget deal with President Biden that set a framework for federal agency funding for the next two years while also allowing the Treasury Department to continue borrowing. Within weeks he backed away from that deal when he faced pressure from hard-right Republicans, who contended they had won promises from him that set spending much lower. Faced with two competing promises, McCarthy went with the GOP lawmakers and ordered the House Appropriations Committee to slash more than $100 billion from the budget. And in September, after publicly promising to hold a vote to launch impeachment proceedings against Biden, he declared on his own that an "impeachment inquiry" was underway, even though his own rank-and-file cast doubt about allegations against the president. "Kevin McCarthy hasn't done anything that would be speaker-trustworthy," Takano said. Of course, Republicans who voted to oust him Tuesday said they had the same problem: trust. Over and over, they said, McCarthy would make a commitment to them for some legislation or favor, only to learn that he had some other commitment to another set of Republicans that was in direct conflict. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who holds moderate views on abortion rights, said she thought she had pledges from him to advance bills to expand access to birth control and rape kits, only to see nothing happen because of antiabortion opposition inside the caucus. "I've made deals with Kevin McCarthy, with the speaker, that he has not kept to help women in this country," she told reporters after the vote. His actions the past week summed up his time as speaker, leaving so many people feeling burned by McCarthy. After moving hard to the right on government funding bills, he hit the Saturday deadline to force a government shutdown or pass legislation with Democrats. He had told conservatives for weeks that he wouldn't pass legislation with Democrats - only to decide to do just that in a last-minute pivot. Conservatives were infuriated. McCarthy then publicly clashed with Biden over whether he had made a private pledge for legislation to fund military support for Ukraine, leaving all sides of that debate confused about his position. And on a Sunday show appearance that was shown to the rank-and-file Democrats on Tuesday, the now ex-speaker blamed the near shutdown of the federal government on Democrats. "We are not saving Kevin McCarthy," Jayapal said afterward. © 2023 The Washington Post. Sign up for the Today's Worldview newsletter here.

Det har blivit dags för kvalvecka i Idol och nu ska de 22 som tagit sig vidare från slutaudition tävla om platserna i fredagsfinalerna. Under veckans gång får vi höra dem sjunga live och det är nu upp till tittarna att rösta vidare sina favoriter. Men, den här gången blir det annorlunda jämfört med tidigare år – det finns nya regler! ”I år skruvar vi till Kvalveckan med nya regler. Vi tävlar i fyra heat. Kvalmåndag, Kvaltisdag, Kvalonsdag, Kvaltorsdag. Det är som vanligt nu makten går över till tittarna som röstar via telefonnummer, sms eller på TV4 Play”, förklarar Malin Knave, exekutiv producent på TV4. Det är nytt i Idols kvalvecka Nytt för i år är att den som får mest antal röster per kväll är klar som fredagsfinalist och tar sig direkt vidare till den första fredagsfinalen den 6 oktober. Och den som får minst antal röster per kväll får lämna Idol. ”De övriga som inte fått mest eller minst röster får hoppas på Juryns Wild Card för att tävla vidare på fredag i Kvalfinalen, nu på fredag”, förklarar Malin Knave vidare. Vi behöver inte heller längre vänta på resultatshowen efter programmet. I år kommer kvällens resultat att presenteras redan i huvudprogrammet. Och det är ett gäng chockade deltagare som får ta del av den nya informationen, när vi i en video på Idols Instagram ser att de nås av de nya reglerna i ett brev från juryn. Det sjunger deltagarna under kvalveckan Först ut under kvalveckan ser vi Aus Ayob, Olivia Alotti, Antranik Khantarashian, Liza Frisk och Fredrik Strand! Måndag Aus Ayob sjunger ”Bring Me to Life” av Evanescence Olivia Aliotti sjunger ”Unstoppable” av Sia Antranik Khantarashian sjunger ”When We Were Young” av Adele Liza Frisk sjunger ”Telephone” ft. Beyoncé av Lady Gaga Fredrik Strand sjunger ”Stad i ljus” av Tommy Körberg Tisdag Nikolina Lekic sjunger ”Writing’s on the Wall” av Sam Smith Filip Jukic sjunger ”All Night Long (All Night)” av Lionel Richie Cimberly Wanyonyi sjunger ”Think” av Aretha Franklin My Cronblad sjunger ”Creep” av Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox Emil Eriksson sjunger ”Gravity” av John Mayer Isak Uddström sjunger ”Måndagsbarn” av Veronica Maggio Onsdag Louisa Hoxha sjunger ”It’s a Man’s Man’s World” av James Brown Tilda Vodusek sjunger ”You Shook Me All Night Long” av Jill Johnsson & Charlotte Perrelli Love Strandberg sjunger ”Far Away” av Yebba Theo Söderqvist sjugner ”Falling” av Harry Styles Rasmus Dahlström sjunger ”Josefin” av Albin Lee Meldau Deya Boström Säfström sjunger ”Till slutet av augusti” av Moonica Mac Torsdag Alicia Goncalves sjunger ”Oscar Winning Tears.” av RAYE Jordan Rawling sjunger ”Wish You The Best” av Lewis Capaldi Simon Näslund sjunger ”Himlen runt hörnet” av Lisa Nilsson Ida Zohlen Danielsson sjunger ”Ex’s & Oh’s” av Elle King Saga Ludvigsson sjunger ”Unhealthy ft. Shania Twain” av Anne-Marie

Svåra moraliska dilemman om att skjuta eller låta bli är grundläggande delar av mänsklig krigsföring. Men vem ska bära ansvaret för misstag som sker i framtida krig där AI kan fatta beslut att döda? Det är en komplex etisk fråga som saknar ett enkelt svar, skriver MIT Technology Review. Enligt experter är det dock viktigt att hitta en balans i att utnyttja tekniken effektivt utan att förlora den mänskliga kontrollen. AI is making its way into decision-making in battle. Who’s to blame when something goes wrong? By Arthur Holland Michel 16 August, 2023 In a near-future war—one that might begin tomorrow, for all we know—a soldier takes up a shooting position on an empty rooftop. His unit has been fighting through the city block by block. It feels as if enemies could be lying in silent wait behind every corner, ready to rain fire upon their marks the moment they have a shot. Through his gunsight, the soldier scans the windows of a nearby building. He notices fresh laundry hanging from the balconies. Word comes in over the radio that his team is about to move across an open patch of ground below. As they head out, a red bounding box appears in the top left corner of the gunsight. The device’s computer vision system has flagged a potential target—a silhouetted figure in a window is drawing up, it seems, to take a shot. The soldier doesn’t have a clear view, but in his experience the system has a superhuman capacity to pick up the faintest tell of an enemy. So he sets his crosshair upon the box and prepares to squeeze the trigger. In different war, also possibly just over the horizon, a commander stands before a bank of monitors. An alert appears from a chatbot. It brings news that satellites have picked up a truck entering a certain city block that has been designated as a possible staging area for enemy rocket launches. The chatbot has already advised an artillery unit, which it calculates as having the highest estimated “kill probability,” to take aim at the truck and stand by. According to the chatbot, none of the nearby buildings is a civilian structure, though it notes that the determination has yet to be corroborated manually. A drone, which had been dispatched by the system for a closer look, arrives on scene. Its video shows the truck backing into a narrow passage between two compounds. The opportunity to take the shot is rapidly coming to a close.  For the commander, everything now falls silent. The chaos, the uncertainty, the cacophony—all reduced to the sound of a ticking clock and the sight of a single glowing button: “APPROVE FIRE ORDER.”  To pull the trigger—or, as the case may be, not to pull it. To hit the button, or to hold off. Legally—and ethically—the role of the soldier’s decision in matters of life and death is preeminent and indispensable. Fundamentally, it is these decisions that define the human act of war. It should be of little surprise, then, that states and civil society have taken up the question of intelligent autonomous weapons—weapons that can select and fire upon targets without any human input—as a matter of serious concern. In May, after close to a decade of discussions, parties to the UN’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons agreed, among other recommendations, that militaries using them probably need to “limit the duration, geographical scope, and scale of the operation” to comply with the laws of war. The line was nonbinding, but it was at least an acknowledgment that a human has to play a part—somewhere, sometime—in the immediate process leading up to a killing. But intelligent autonomous weapons that fully displace human decision-making have (likely) yet to see real-world use. Even the “autonomous” drones and ships fielded by the US and other powers are used under close human supervision. Meanwhile, intelligent systems that merely guide the hand that pulls the trigger have been gaining purchase in the warmaker’s tool kit. And they’ve quietly become sophisticated enough to raise novel questions—ones that are trickier to answer than the well-­covered wrangles over killer robots and, with each passing day, more urgent: What does it mean when a decision is only part human and part machine? And when, if ever, is it ethical for that decision to be a decision to kill? For a long time, the idea of supporting a human decision by computerized means wasn’t such a controversial prospect. Retired Air Force lieutenant general Jack Shanahan says the radar on the F4 Phantom fighter jet he flew in the 1980s was a decision aid of sorts. It alerted him to the presence of other aircraft, he told me, so that he could figure out what to do about them. But to say that the crew and the radar were coequal accomplices would be a stretch. That has all begun to change. “What we’re seeing now, at least in the way that I see this, is a transition to a world [in] which you need to have humans and machines … operating in some sort of team,” says Shanahan. The rise of machine learning, in particular, has set off a paradigm shift in how militaries use computers to help shape the crucial decisions of warfare—up to, and including, the ultimate decision. Shanahan was the first director of Project Maven, a Pentagon program that developed target recognition algorithms for video footage from drones. The project, which kicked off a new era of American military AI, was launched in 2017 after a study concluded that “deep learning algorithms can perform at near-­human levels.” (It also sparked controversy—in 2018, more than 3,000 Google employees signed a letter of protest against the company’s involvement in the project.) With machine-learning-based decision tools, “you have more apparent competency, more breadth” than earlier tools afforded, says Matt Turek, deputy director of the Information Innovation Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “And perhaps a tendency, as a result, to turn over more decision-making to them.”   A soldier on the lookout for enemy snipers might, for example, do so through the Assault Rifle Combat Application System, a gunsight sold by the Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems. According to a company spec sheet, the “AI-powered” device is capable of “human target detection” at a range of more than 600 yards, and human target “identification” (presumably, discerning whether a person is someone who could be shot)at about the length of a football field. Anna Ahronheim-Cohen, a spokesperson for the company, told MIT Technology Review, “The system has already been tested in real-time scenarios by fighting infantry soldiers.”  Another gunsight, built by the company Smartshooter, is advertised as having similar capabilities. According to the company’s website, it can also be packaged into a remote-controlled machine gun like the one that Israeli agents used to assassinate the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2021.  Decision support tools that sit at a greater remove from the battlefield can be just as decisive. The Pentagon appears to have used AI in the sequence of intelligence analyses and decisions leading up to a potential strike, a process known as a kill chain—though it has been cagey on the details. In response to questions from MIT Technology Review, Laura McAndrews, an Air Force spokesperson, wrote that the service “is utilizing a human-­machine teaming approach.” Other countries are more openly experimenting with such automation. Shortly after the Israel-Palestine conflict in 2021, the Israel Defense Forces said it had used what it described as AI tools to alert troops of imminent attacks and to propose targets for operations. The Ukrainian army uses a program, GIS Arta, that pairs each known Russian target on the battlefield with the artillery unit that is, according to the algorithm, best placed to shoot at it. A report by The Times, a British newspaper, likened it to Uber’s algorithm for pairing drivers and riders, noting that it significantly reduces the time between the detection of a target and the moment that target finds itself under a barrage of firepower. Before the Ukrainians had GIS Arta, that process took 20 minutes. Now it reportedly takes one. Russia claims to have its own command-and-control system with what it calls artificial intelligence, but it has shared few technical details. Gregory Allen, the director of the Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies and one of the architects of the Pentagon’s current AI policies, told me it’s important to take some of these claims with a pinch of salt. He says some of Russia’s supposed military AI is “stuff that everyone has been doing for decades,” and he calls GIS Arta “just traditional software.” The range of judgment calls that go into military decision-making, however, is vast. And it doesn’t always take artificial super-­intelligence to dispense with them by automated means. There are tools for predicting enemy troop movements, tools for figuring out how to take out a given target, and tools to estimate how much collateral harm is likely to befall any nearby civilians. None of these contrivances could be called a killer robot. But the technology is not without its perils. Like any complex computer, an AI-based tool might glitch in unusual and unpredictable ways; it’s not clear that the human involved will always be able to know when the answers on the screen are right or wrong. In their relentless efficiency, these tools may also not leave enough time and space for humans to determine if what they’re doing is legal. In some areas, they could perform at such superhuman levels that something ineffable about the act of war could be lost entirely. Eventually militaries plan to use machine intelligence to stitch many of these individual instruments into a single automated network that links every weapon, commander, and soldier to every other. Not a kill chain, but—as the Pentagon has begun to call it—a kill web. In these webs, it’s not clear whether the human’s decision is, in fact, very much of a decision at all. Rafael, an Israeli defense giant, has already sold one such product, Fire Weaver, to the IDF (it has also demonstrated it to the US Department of Defense and the German military). According to company materials, Fire Weaver finds enemy positions, notifies the unit that it calculates as being best placed to fire on them, and even sets a crosshair on the target directly in that unit’s weapon sights. The human’s role, according to one video of the software, is to choose between two buttons: “Approve” and “Abort.” Let’s say that the silhouette in the window was not a soldier, but a child. Imagine that the truck was not delivering warheads to the enemy, but water pails to a home.  Of the DoD’s five “ethical principles for artificial intelligence,” which are phrased as qualities, the one that’s always listed first is “Responsible.” In practice, this means that when things go wrong, someone—a human, not a machine—has got to hold the bag.  Of course, the principle of responsibility long predates the onset of artificially intelligent machines. All the laws and mores of war would be meaningless without the fundamental common understanding that every deliberate act in the fight is always on someone. But with the prospect of computers taking on all manner of sophisticated new roles, the age-old precept has newfound resonance.  “Now for me, and for most people I ever knew in uniform, this was core to who we were as commanders: that somebody ultimately will be held responsible,” says Shanahan, who after Maven became the inaugural director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and oversaw the development of the AI ethical principles.  This is why a human hand must squeeze the trigger, why a human hand must click “Approve.” If a computer sets its sights upon the wrong target, and the soldier squeezes the trigger anyway, that’s on the soldier. “If a human does something that leads to an accident with the machine—say, dropping a weapon where it shouldn’t have—that’s still a human’s decision that was made,” Shanahan says. But accidents happen. And this is where things get tricky. Modern militaries have spent hundreds of years figuring out how to differentiate the unavoidable, blameless tragedies of warfare from acts of malign intent, misdirected fury, or gross negligence. Even now, this remains a difficult task. Outsourcing a part of human agency and judgment to algorithms built, in many cases, around the mathematical principle of optimization will challenge all this law and doctrine in a fundamentally new way, says Courtney Bowman, global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering at Palantir, a US-headquartered firm that builds data management software for militaries, governments, and large companies.  “It’s a rupture. It’s disruptive,” Bowman says. “It requires a new ethical construct to be able to make sound decisions.” This year, in a move that was inevitable in the age of ChatGPT, Palantir announced that it is developing software called the Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows for the integration of large language models into the company’s military products. In a demo of AIP posted to YouTube this spring, the platform alerts the user to a potentially threatening enemy movement. It then suggests that a drone be sent for a closer look, proposes three possible plans to intercept the offending force, and maps out an optimal route for the selected attack team to reach them. And yet even with a machine capable of such apparent cleverness, militaries won’t want the user to blindly trust its every suggestion. If the human presses only one button in a kill chain, it probably should not be the “I believe” button, as a concerned but anonymous Army operative once put it in a DoD war game in 2019.  In a program called Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy (URSA), DARPA built a system that enabled robots and drones to act as forward observers for platoons in urban operations. After input from the project’s advisory group on ethical and legal issues, it was decided that the software would only ever designate people as “persons of interest.” Even though the purpose of the technology was to help root out ambushes, it would never go so far as to label anyone as a “threat.” This, it was hoped, would stop a soldier from jumping to the wrong conclusion. It also had a legal rationale, according to Brian Williams, an adjunct research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses who led the advisory group. No court had positively asserted that a machine could legally designate a person a threat, he says. (Then again, he adds, no court had specifically found that it would be illegal, either, and he acknowledges that not all military operators would necessarily share his group’s cautious reading of the law.) According to Williams, DARPA initially wanted URSA to be able to autonomously discern a person’s intent; this feature too was scrapped at the group’s urging. Bowman says Palantir’s approach is to work “engineered inefficiencies” into “points in the decision-­making process where you actually do want to slow things down.” For example, a computer’s output that points to an enemy troop movement, he says, might require a user to seek out a second corroborating source of intelligence before proceeding with an action (in the video, the Artificial Intelligence Platform does not appear to do this).  In the case of AIP, Bowman says the idea is to present the information in such a way “that the viewer understands, the analyst understands, this is only a suggestion.” In practice, protecting human judgment from the sway of a beguilingly smart machine could come down to small details of graphic design. “If people of interest are identified on a screen as red dots, that’s going to have a different subconscious implication than if people of interest are identified on a screen as little happy faces,” says Rebecca Crootof, a law professor at the University of Richmond, who has written extensively about the challenges of accountability in human-in-the-loop autonomous weapons. In some settings, however, soldiers might only want an “I believe” button. Originally, DARPA envisioned URSA as a wrist-worn device for soldiers on the front lines. “In the very first working group meeting, we said that’s not advisable,” Williams told me. The kind of engineered inefficiency necessary for responsible use just wouldn’t be practicable for users who have bullets whizzing by their ears. Instead, they built a computer system that sits with a dedicated operator, far behind the action.  But some decision support systems are definitely designed for the kind of split-second decision-­making that happens right in the thick of it. The US Army has said that it has managed, in live tests, to shorten its own 20-minute targeting cycle to 20 seconds. Nor does the market seem to have embraced the spirit of restraint. In demo videos posted online, the bounding boxes for the computerized gunsights of both Elbit and Smartshooter are blood red. Other times, the computer will be right and the human will be wrong.  If the soldier on the rooftop had second-guessed the gunsight, and it turned out that the silhouette was in fact an enemy sniper, his teammates could have paid a heavy price for his split second of hesitation. This is a different source of trouble, much less discussed but no less likely in real-world combat. And it puts the human in something of a pickle. Soldiers will be told to treat their digital assistants with enough mistrust to safeguard the sanctity of their judgment. But with machines that are often right, this same reluctance to defer to the computer can itself become a point of avertable failure.  Aviation history has no shortage of cases where a human pilot’s refusal to heed the machine led to catastrophe. These (usually perished) souls have not been looked upon kindly by investigators seeking to explain the tragedy. Carol J. Smith, a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute who helped craft responsible AI guidelines for the DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit, doesn’t see an issue: “If the person in that moment feels that the decision is wrong, they’re making it their call, and they’re going to have to face the consequences.”  For others, this is a wicked ethical conundrum. The scholar M.C. Elish has suggested that a human who is placed in this kind of impossible loop could end up serving as what she calls a “moral crumple zone.” In the event of an accident—regardless of whether the human was wrong, the computer was wrong, or they were wrong together—the person who made the “decision” will absorb the blame and protect everyone else along the chain of command from the full impact of accountability.  In an essay, Smith wrote that the “lowest-paid person” should not be “saddled with this responsibility,” and neither should “the highest-paid person.” Instead, she told me, the responsibility should be spread among everyone involved, and the introduction of AI should not change anything about that responsibility.  In practice, this is harder than it sounds. Crootof points out that even today, “there’s not a whole lot of responsibility for accidents in war.” As AI tools become larger and more complex, and as kill chains become shorter and more web-like, finding the right people to blame is going to become an even more labyrinthine task.  Those who write these tools, and the companies they work for, aren’t likely to take the fall. Building AI software is a lengthy, iterative process, often drawing from open-source code, which stands at a distant remove from the actual material facts of metal piercing flesh. And barring any significant changes to US law, defense contractors are generally protected from liability anyway, says Crootof. Any bid for accountability at the upper rungs of command, meanwhile, would likely find itself stymied by the heavy veil of government classification that tends to cloak most AI decision support tools and the manner in which they are used. The US Air Force has not been forthcoming about whether its AI has even seen real-world use. Shanahan says Maven’s AI models were deployed for intelligence analysis soon after the project launched, and in 2021 the secretary of the Air Force said that “AI algorithms” had recently been applied “for the first time to a live operational kill chain,” with an Air Force spokesperson at the time adding that these tools were available in intelligence centers across the globe “whenever needed.” But Laura McAndrews, the Air Force spokesperson, saidthat in fact these algorithms “were not applied in a live, operational kill chain” and declined to detail any other algorithms that may, or may not, have been used since.  The real story might remain shrouded for years. In 2018, the Pentagon issued a determination that exempts Project Maven from Freedom of Information requests. Last year, it handed the entire program to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,which is responsible for processing ​America’s vast intake of secret aerial surveillance. Responding to questions about whether the algorithms are used in kill chains, Robbin Brooks, an NGA spokesperson, told MIT Technology Review, “We can’t speak to specifics of how and where Maven is used.” In one sense, what’s new here is also old. We routinely place our safety—indeed, our entire existence as a species—in the hands of other people. Those decision-­makers defer, in turn, to machines that they do not entirely comprehend.  In an exquisite essay on automation published in 2018, at a time when operational AI-enabled decision support was still a rarity, former Navy secretary Richard Danzig pointed out that if a president “decides” to order a nuclear strike, it will not be because anyone has looked out the window of the Oval Office and seen enemy missiles raining down on DC but, rather, because those missiles have been detected, tracked, and identified—one hopes correctly—by algorithms in the air defense network.  As in the case of a commander who calls in an artillery strike on the advice of a chatbot, or a rifleman who pulls the trigger at the mere sight of a red bounding box, “the most that can be said is that ‘a human being is involved,’” Danzig wrote.  “This is a common situation in the modern age,” he wrote. “Human decisionmakers are riders traveling across obscured terrain with little or no ability to assess the powerful beasts that carry and guide them.” There can be an alarming streak of defeatism among the people responsible for making sure that these beasts don’t end up eating us. During a number of conversations I had while reporting this story, my interlocutor would land on a sobering note of acquiescence to the perpetual inevitability of death and destruction that, while tragic, cannot be pinned on any single human. War is messy, technologies fail in unpredictable ways, and that’s just that.  “In warfighting,” says Bowman of Palantir, “[in] the application of any technology, let alone AI, there is some degree of harm that you’re trying to—that you have to accept, and the game is risk reduction.”  It is possible, though not yet demonstrated, that bringing artificial intelligence to battle may mean fewer civilian casualties, as advocates often claim. But there could be a hidden cost to irrevocably conjoining human judgment and mathematical reasoning in those ultimate moments of war—a cost that extends beyond a simple, utilitarian bottom line. Maybe something just cannot be right, should not be right, about choosing the time and manner in which a person dies the way you hail a ride from Uber. To a machine, this might be suboptimal logic. But for certain humans, that’s the point. “One of the aspects of judgment, as a human capacity, is that it’s done in an open world,” says Lucy Suchman, a professor emerita of anthropology at Lancaster University, who has been writing about the quandaries of human-machine interaction for four decades.  The parameters of life-and-death decisions—knowing the meaning of the fresh laundry hanging from a window while also wanting your teammates not to die—are “irreducibly qualitative,” she says. The chaos and the noise and the uncertainty, the weight of what is right and what is wrong in the midst of all that fury—not a whit of this can be defined in algorithmic terms. In matters of life and death, there is no computationally perfect outcome. “And that’s where the moral responsibility comes from,” she says. “You’re making a judgment.” The gunsight never pulls the trigger. The chatbot never pushes the button. But each time a machine takes on a new role that reduces the irreducible, we may be stepping a little closer to the moment when the act of killing is altogether more machine than human, when ethics becomes a formula and responsibility becomes little more than an abstraction. If we agree that we don’t want to let the machines take us all the way there, sooner or later we will have to ask ourselves: Where is the line?  © 2023 Technology Review, Inc. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Värmeböljor skapar problem för företag världen över. Turistnäringen lider särskilt mycket, som när Greklands Akropolis tvingades stänga på grund av extremvärmen. Byggsektorn, industrier, jordbruk och transport påverkas också, med minskad produktivitet och högre kostnader. Effektiviteten i arbetsstyrkan sjunker med stigande temperaturer och infrastrukturen slits snabbare. Det förändrade klimatet har redan kostat världsekonomin enorma summor. Nu måste näringslivet anpassa sig till de nya förutsättningarna, skriver Financial Times. As record-breaking heatwaves become the new normal, a range of industries brace themselves for changes to the way they do business. By Attracta Mooney, Camilla Hodgson and Ian Smith in London and Aime Williams in Washington

Financial Times, 21 July 2023 The Acropolis has stood above the city of Athens for centuries, its ancient walls and pillars withstanding war, siege and conquest. But as temperatures crested 40C across southern Europe this month, Greece’s top tourist attraction briefly fell victim to extreme heat. Officials shut the site for several hours during the hottest parts of the day, after holidaymakers queueing to enter required medical attention. The Cerberus heatwave — named after the three-headed dog who guarded the gates to hell in Greek mythology — has shone a spotlight on just how vulnerable the Mediterranean’s huge tourism industry is to the heatwaves that are becoming increasingly common in Europe. But the economic impact of what experts warn could be a new era of record-breaking heat goes far beyond tourism. Industries ranging from construction, to manufacturing, agriculture, transport and insurance are all bracing for changes to the way they do business as high-temperature days become more routine because of climate change. Scientists are clear that extreme weather events, including heatwaves, will become more frequent and intense with every fraction of a degree of warming. In July, with average temperatures already at least 1.1C hotter globally than pre-industrial levels, swaths of the US, Europe and Asia sweltered under “heat domes.” Record highs were reached from China to Italy. Business leaders and policymakers are now counting the cost of shuttered companies and decreased productivity. A study published by academics at Dartmouth last year found that heatwaves, brought on by human-caused climate change, cost the global economy an estimated $16tn over a 21-year period from the 1990s. Extreme heat is “pulling down our growth,” says Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center at the Atlantic Council, and “dragging down our economies . . . the runways are buckling, metros are closing, restaurants have to shut down because the kitchen staff are too hot.” But those costs are likely to spiral in coming decades as economies reorient themselves for peak seasons of ever more extreme heat, to mitigate against the risks and disruption they will bring. “Extreme heat is one of the very serious consequences of climate change,” says Dan Jørgensen, Denmark’s climate minister. “The very tragic news is that this is probably only going to get worse.” One of the main reasons that extreme heat poses an economic threat is because it makes it harder to work. High temperatures go hand in hand with low productivity. In hot conditions, human beings typically “work slower, we take on more risk, our cognitive function decreases”, says Laura Kent of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, a professional association which recently produced a report on how industry will need to adapt to extreme heat. A study by the International Labour Organization, the UN agency for workers, projected that by 2030, the equivalent of more than 2 per cent of total working hours worldwide would be lost every year, either because it is too hot to work or because workers have to work at a slower pace.  Around 200mn people in cities today are at risk from extreme heat, a number that is expected to grow eightfold by 2050, according to Sachin Boite, director of climate resilience at the C40 network of mayors pushing for environmental action. Yet few countries have a maximum temperature for when work must stop. In the UK, for example, where extreme heat has not historically been a problem, there is only a recommended threshold for stopping work in cold, not hot, temperatures. The poorest and least able to cope are often hit hardest by extreme heat — with productivity losses often concentrated in jobs where wages tend to be lower than average.  Outdoor workers — especially those in agriculture or construction — are particularly at risk of death, injuries, sickness and reduced productivity because of heat exposure, according to the ILO. Between 1992 and 2016, 285 construction workers in the US died from heat-related causes, about a third of all the country’s occupational deaths from heat exposure, according to academic research. But those working inside are at increasing risk as intense heatwaves become more frequent, including the world’s 66mn textile workers, who often work inside factories and workshops without air conditioning. Many are situated in the global south, where peak temperatures are even more extreme and dangerous.  After British Columbia in Canada suffered a devastating heatwave in 2021, heat-related workplace injuries requiring compensation increased by 180 per cent when compared to the previous three-year average, according to research. More than a third of those came from indoor workers, compared to 20 per cent on average. The impact of extreme heat on workers has become “an issue of human rights,” says Italy-based environmental economist Shouro Dasgupta, and one that calls for stronger labour protection policies. “The right to a safe and healthy working environment is a human right [that] is being eroded,” he adds. “Governments will need to step in.” Beyond the consequences of extreme heat on their employees, industries are being forced to rethink more existential issues, such as where their businesses are based and how they operate. The construction industry is one area that might require a radical reinvention, says Daisie Rees-Evans, who works on policy at the Chartered Institute of Building, a professional body. “Not only do extreme weather conditions impact construction work on sites but it actually impacts material,” she says.  Steel can warp in hot conditions, while concrete becomes difficult to work with and sets much more quickly — leaving it more prone to cracking and affecting its strength and durability. There is also the risk concrete will spoil before it can be poured.  All of this adds up to additional costs for the sector, says Rees-Evans. Companies faced with having to reorder materials such as steel that warped often find themselves battling with other companies who also need to repurchase goods, driving up prices in the process. Any delays to projects can also come with additional costs, including fines levied for exceeding the agreed completion date, she adds.  Manufacturing is another sector that faces significant changes. Factories and warehouses “are just not designed for the temperatures we are seeing now and expected to see,” says Kent of the mechanical engineers’ association.  This means that equipment might not work as effectively or wears out more quickly, which comes with higher operational costs. “A vast majority of our industry rely on some sort of heating or cooling process,” she says. “If you are heating or need to cool down to a certain temperature and the ambient temperature is already hotter, that difference is harder to overcome.” At the same time, the availability of water can come under intense pressure during periods of higher heat — a huge problem for the industrial sector, which needs water for functions from cooling and transportation.  Along the Rhine, one of Europe’s most important waterways, companies have faced disruptions due to low water levels for three out of the past five years, including in 2018 when barges struggled to travel, hitting fuel and chemical supplies.  “For the longest time, we have put industries next to rivers,” says Johanna Lehne, programme lead at climate consultancy E3G, but companies are now faced with questions about where they should be based and what they are able to produce.  Then there is the risk to infrastructure. Heat stress is “going to shorten lifespans”, says David Carlin of the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative. That affects everything from train tracks to roads and airports. “Not only do you have potential infrastructural damages like bridge collapses, but you also have the need to replace these things faster, which is increasing costs.” For agriculture, extreme heat can result in decreasing crop yields, fuelling rising prices and food insecurity in the process. Research from Arsht-Rock found corn, the most widely produced US crop, is losing about $720mn in revenue annually because of extreme heat, which will increase to a projected $1.7bn by 2030.  As work becomes riskier in a range of sectors, insurance costs will rise. Climate change “will significantly shape how the sector will choose to manage and absorb risks,” says Mohammad Khan, general insurance leader for consultancy PwC’s UK arm. According to data from reinsurer Swiss Re, heat-related catastrophe losses for insurers, such as crop failures from drought or wildfire damage to properties, amounted to $46.4bn in the five years to 2022, up from $29.4bn in the previous five years. In California, one of the areas most affected by wildfires, some big US insurers have pulled back. Allstate cited the growing bill from wildfires as among the reasons it paused selling new home insurance policies in California last year. State Farm, another big home insurer, warned of “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure” when it did the same earlier this year. That has fed a growing debate about the affordability of insurance for both individuals and companies as climate change effects intensify, with more people falling into public safety nets.  A couple of generations down the line, humans will have to find new ways to adapt their societies as temperatures rise ever higher. Climate pledges made by countries put the world on track for temperature rises of between 2.4C and 2.6C by 2100. This is far ahead of the 1.5C threshold after which scientists have warned of potentially irreversible changes to the planet and devastating consequences for citizens.  “This [extreme heat] is not going to go away anytime soon. It’s going to be more frequent, it’s going to be more intense, it’s going to be longer as well,” says Carolina Cecilio, policy adviser at E3G.  Some countries are waking up to the issue. Greece appointed its first chief heat officer in 2021, while Spain said earlier this year it would ban outdoor work during periods of extreme heat. Companies are introducing measures such as using “misting” on animals and employees to keep cool. Others are switching working hours, trying to do more at night or during the early hours of the morning — although this can be met with objections from local governments and residents.  As the world warms, so-called passive cooling is likely to become more important for economies, says Kent.  Many of the materials that buildings and roads are made from — such as tar and concrete — absorb and retain energy from the sun’s rays, warming their surroundings, while factories and warehouses are often found in industrial parks that lack green spaces and allow heat to build up. Cost effective solutions included “cool roofs” that are painted white to reflect the heat, or adding shade through the use of “overhang” on buildings or increased tree cover. Rees-Evans says construction firms are starting to use AI to factor forecasted weather into a project’s running order. This would allow them, for example, to hold off ordering steel if they expected a prolonged period of hot weather was on the cards.  Internationally, adaptation is expected to be high on the agenda of the international COP28 climate negotiations. Politicians are increasingly looking at how money can be raised to help countries, especially those in the global south, deal with extreme temperatures because of climate change.  But Baughman McLeod says businesses and policymakers needed to act now to prepare for extreme heat. A big rethink of our economies may be needed, she says, as countries that depend on tourism see visits plummet during peak seasons, or companies can no longer do business for key months of the year. “There is not a solution for every place, but there is a solution for every person.” ©The Financial Times Limited 2023. All Rights Reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.

Det är ingen som verkar veta riktigt varför, men kvinnliga fotbollsspelare löper minst två till tre gånger större risk att drabbas av en främre korsbandsskada (ACL) än deras manliga motsvarigheter. I ett djupgående artikel har The New York Times har dykt ned i ACL-mysteriet. Varför tycks problemet bara växa sig större inom damfotbollen, och vad kan ligga bakom det? The World Cup is missing some of the sport’s biggest stars because of a knee injury epidemic. No one can say for sure why it’s happening, or how to fix it. By Rory Smith 19 July, 2023 The third time around, Megan Rapinoe’s reaction to a potentially career-ending knee injury went no further than an eye roll. She had torn her anterior cruciate ligament. She could reel off the recovery schedule from the top of her head. She could see, crystal clear, the next nine to 12 months spooling out in front of her. The surgery, the painstaking rehab, the grueling weeks in the gym, the anxious first steps on the turf, the slow journey back to what she had once been. As she considered it in 2015, she felt something closer to exasperation than to despair. “I was like, ‘I don’t have time for this,’” she said. The first time had been different. She had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee at age 21, when she was a breakout star in her sophomore year at the University of Portland. At that time, she felt what she called “the fear” — the worry that it might all be over before it had begun. A year later, she had done it again: same ligament, same knee, same arduous road back. It did not stop her from doing all that she had dreamed of doing. She turned pro. She was named to an all-star team. She represented her country. She won a gold medal at the Olympics. She moved to France. She played in two World Cups. She won one of them. And then, during a training session in Hawaii in December 2015, months after her 30th birthday, it happened again. This time, it was the right knee, and this time, her reaction was different. “It changed for me as I got older,” she said. “That one was like an eye roll. ‘This is annoying. I know what it is going to take to come back’. But generally, I think there’s this fear. Is this going to be the end? Am I going to come back from this? Am I going to have pain forever?” Over the last year or so, that fear — and the searching questions it prompts — has coursed through women’s soccer. The sport has at times seemed to be in the grip of an epidemic of A.C.L. injuries, one so widespread that at one point it had sidelined a quarter of the nominees for last year’s Ballon d’Or. Alexia Putellas, the Spain midfielder who won that award and the consensus pick as the best player of her generation, has recovered in time to grace the World Cup, the sport’s showpiece event. But countless other stars have not. They will, instead, spend their summer at home, nursing their injuries, cursing their luck. The list is a long one. Catarina Macario, the U.S. forward, tore the A.C.L. in her left knee last year and could not regain her fitness in time. She will not be present in Australia and New Zealand. Nor will two of the stars of the England team that is hoping to dethrone the United States: The team’s captain, Leah Williamson, and its most productive goal-scorer, Beth Mead, both fell victim to A.C.L. injuries this season. The Olympic champion, Canada, has lost Janine Beckie. France has not been able to call upon Marie-Antoinette Katoto or Delphine Cascarino. The Netherlands, a finalist in 2019, is without striker Vivianne Miedema. But these are just the famous names, the familiar faces, the notable absentees. The problem has become so acute that, at times, it has strained tensions between national teams and the clubs that employ the players from which their rosters are drawn, with at least one high profile European coach suggesting that too much was being asked of the athletes. Miedema herself pointed out that, this season alone, almost 60 players in Europe’s five major leagues had torn their A.C.L.s. “It is ridiculous,” she said earlier this year. “Something needs to be done.” Working out precisely what that might be, though, is more complicated than anyone would like. There is fear, of course, for players who are enduring those long weeks of recovery, but it is not the only type of fear. In Europe particularly, over the last 12 months, the sheer scale of the issue — the numbers of players being struck down by torn A.C.L.s — set off a psychological contagion. A number of national associations, as well as local offices of FIFPro, the global players’ union, reported inquiries from active players — those who had seen teammates or opponents or friends condemned to months on the sideline — seeking reassurance, solace or even just basic information. “The players are asking for research,” said Alex Culvin, FIFPro's head of strategy and research in women’s soccer. “We’ve had a lot of feedback from players saying they feel unsafe. You saw it last season — at times, players were not going in for tackles as they normally would because they were worried about injury.” The problem, Culvin said, is there is not enough research available for anyone to give the players clear answers. European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, has been running an injury surveillance study on men’s soccer, for example, for more than two decades. The women’s equivalent has been operating for only five years. “That lack of knowledge creates fear,” Culvin said. It is established fact that women are more at risk of suffering an A.C.L. injury than men. Quite how much more at risk is a little murkier. Martin Hagglund, a professor of physiotherapy at the University of Linkoping in Sweden, puts the risk at “two to three times greater, based on a systematic review of studies.” Culvin goes a little higher: Some studies, she said, suggest the risk for women could be “six or seven” times as great as that for men. “There is a real range,” she said. The issue of why that might be is more contested still. Traditionally, much of the research has focused on biology. “There are obvious anatomical differences” between men’s and women’s knees, Hagglund said. Not just the knees, in fact — the whole leg. Some studies have suggested that women’s A.C.L.s are smaller. There are differences in the hips, the pelvis, the engineering of the foot. Increasingly, too, there is a body of evidence to suggest there is a link between hormonal fluctuations and susceptibility to injuries in general, and A.C.L. injuries in particular. Chelsea, one of the leading clubs in England’s Women’s Super League, now tailors players’ training loads at specific phases of the menstrual cycle in a bid to mitigate the impact. As a paper published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in September 2021 pointed out, though, the instinct to focus purely on physiological explanations is both rooted in and serves to reinforce the misogynistic stereotype that “women’s sport participation is dangerous predominantly due to female biology.” It also runs the risk, in Hagglund’s mind, of turning a blind eye to the host of other issues that may have played a part in depriving the World Cup of so many of its brightest lights this month. “The focus on anatomical differences means we have left out the other parts, the extrinsic factors,” he said. It just so happens that those are the ones that might, feasibly, be addressed. It is perhaps natural that for the players themselves, the cause of the run of A.C.L. tears is obvious. “We keep adding games left, right and center,” said Miedema, one of four players at Arsenal alone who have sustained the injury this season. “Instead of 30 games a season, we now play 60. But we don’t have the time and investment that is needed to keep players fit.” Kristie Mewis, a U.S. midfielder, contended that the “intensity” with which women’s soccer is now played had compounded that effect. It is not just that there are more games, she said. It is that they are exponentially faster, more physical and more demanding than ever before. “As the game is growing, it’s getting more competitive,” she said. “Maybe stress has something to do with it.” Rapinoe would endorse both ideas — “the load and intensity are different,” she said — and would add that while women’s soccer has professionalized on the field at breakneck speed, it has not always matched that pace off it. “We don’t generally charter; we don’t fly private,” she said. “We don’t have the resources. So with recovery, you’re being asked to produce a bigger load than you ever have but with less resources than you really need to do that.” To Hagglund, that is only the start of a long list of possible structural, cultural factors that might be at play. “Women’s soccer does not have the same organizational support as men’s,” he said. That applies not just to travel, but to the number and the quality of medical staff members, physiotherapists, nutritionists. Likewise, young female players, until relatively recently, did not have the benefits of the same sort of specialized strength and conditioning training that is commonplace in boys’ academies. Women’s teams have what he called smaller “competitive” squads — they rely heavily on a handful of high-profile players, ones who cannot afford to be rested. “That means they are more exposed to fixture congestion, there is less rotation, they are more likely to play with an injury,” he said. And then there are the environmental problems. Women’s teams do not play on the same perfectly manicured lawns that top men’s teams do. “In Scandinavia, certainly, it is still quite common for teams to play on artificial turf,” he said. The players must do so, often, while wearing shoes designed with men’s feet, rather than women’s, in mind. As diffuse as all of those problems are, they come down to much the same thing in Culvin’s mind. “It is a question of value,” she said. “What value do we place on an athlete? The players might be professional, but the conditions around them are not always suitable for professional athletes. There is not equity in the workplace until we value them properly in all components — the fields, the stadiums, the support staff around them.” Laura Youngson is always surprised, even now, by the number of players she encounters who have convinced themselves that soccer cleats are designed to be uncomfortable. “That’s the perception,” she said. “That they’re supposed to feel like that, and that women, in particular, are just supposed to put up with it. They’re really not meant to be like that.” Still, the belief is widespread. Earlier this year, an in-depth study conducted by the European Club Association and St. Mary’s University, London, found that 82 percent of elite female players experienced “pain or discomfort” from the footwear they wore while playing. The reason for that is simple. In contrast to running, say, where major footwear brands realized long ago that women and men required — and would buy — different types of shoes, the soccer versions sold to women are, largely, not actually designed for them. The abiding market principle has effectively been, as Youngson put it, “that women are just small men.” For a long time, like everyone else, Youngson just accepted that her soccer shoes never seemed to fit quite right. Then, after organizing a charity game on Mount Kilimanjaro in 2017, she realized that she was not alone. Even the professional players on the trip had the same complaint. She saw an opportunity — both a business one and a moral one — to put it right. Since then, the company she founded, Ida Sports, has conducted extensive research to produce the first custom-made women’s soccer cleats. They found that women tended to have narrower heels, wider toe areas and higher arches. (They are also more likely to change than men’s are, particularly during and after pregnancy.) That means they “interact differently with the ground,” something that Ida Sports has tried to remedy by redesigning the sole of the shoes she makes. There is also enough evidence to suggest that the shape and structure of women’s feet may make them more susceptible to injuries, both chronic and acute, including A.C.L. tears. Youngson does not claim to have a silver bullet for the knee injury epidemic, nor does she believe that wearing better-fitting shoes will end the problem on its own. “But there is definitely an opportunity for further research,” she said. “People are doing great work studying hormones and behavior and other things. We know boots and surfaces. There are definitely recommendations that we would make. The issue is, how do we keep more players on the pitch? Even if it is for a 1 percent gain, it is worth it.” Like Rapinoe, the former England international Claire Rafferty endured three A.C.L. injuries in her career. As with Rapinoe, her reaction changed over time. After her first, in her left knee, she felt “invincible,” as if she had gotten her bad luck out of the way early. She was only 16. It would, she assumed, be smooth sailing from there. She did not know then that the single greatest risk factor for sustaining an A.C.L. injury is having experienced one. Research suggests that 40 percent of players who have torn a cruciate ligament will do so again — in either knee — within five years. It is closer, in other words, to the flip of a coin than a roll of the dice. Rafferty learned that the hard way. In 2011, she tore the A.C.L. in her right knee. That time, she recalls being “in shock.” She did what she could to mitigate the risk. Despite her entreaties, her coach at Chelsea, Emma Hayes, regularly refused to allow her to play on artificial surfaces. Two years later, Rafferty tore the A.C.L. in her right knee again. “Nobody thought you could come back from three A.C.L.s then,” she said. Rafferty did. Physically, at least. Mentally, the scars did not heal. “I wasn’t calm,” she said. “I thought every game could be my last. I was playing with a lot of fear. I had quite a lot of anxiety. I couldn’t play like I did before. “I remember hearing people ask, ‘What’s happened to Claire Rafferty?’ I wanted to tell them that I couldn’t run properly because I was so afraid. I didn’t enjoy playing football. I started to resent it.” That fear, the one felt by the players missing this year’s World Cup, the one shared by all those who now feel unsafe on the field, had overwhelmed and inhibited her. She knew what she had to do. Long before her career should have ended, she walked away. She was 30. For women’s soccer, the real risk of its A.C.L. epidemic, the one rooted in lack of knowledge and a historical lack of care, is that she will not be the last. © 2023 The New York Times Company. Read the original article at The New York Times.

Jens Stoltenberg får fortsätta som Natos ordförande. The Atlantics Anne Applebaum profilerar en byråkrat som sätter skräck i Putin – men som helst av allt vill hem till Norge. Unelected bureaucrats get a bad rap. But some do an essential job. By Anne Applebaum 4 July, 2023 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced today that Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary-general for the past nine years, will stay on for an almost unprecedented tenth year. Last week, after that development had already been predicted by The Times of London, the Financial Times, Politico, and who knows how many defense-industry newsletters, I met Stoltenberg in his clean, functional, almost featureless office—white walls, gray carpet—deep inside NATO’s shiny Brussels headquarters. I asked him about it. “I have one plan, and that is to go back to Norway,” he replied, deadpan. I raised an eyebrow. Yes, he conceded, there are “some requests for me to stay on.” Beyond that, he would not comment. Not hypothetically. Not under embargo. When the inevitable announcement was finally made this morning, he said in a statement that he was “honored,” because “in a more dangerous world, our great Alliance is more important than ever.” It would be hard to find a better illustration of the qualities that make Stoltenberg so popular. NATO is a defensive alliance representing a wide variety of countries and regions—Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, Scandinavia and Turkey, Britain and France. It makes decisions by consensus. To achieve that consensus, the NATO secretary-general does not personally need to fight battles or win wars. That’s the job of the supreme allied commander, who is always an American, as well as the 31 NATO heads of state and their 31 armies. Instead, the secretary-general, who is always a European, succeeds if he talks to everybody, finds common ground, negotiates compromises, never leaks, and never puts himself at the center of the story, even when the story is about him. In recent years, this sort of person—call him Multilateral Man (though of course some of them are women)—has had a bad rap. Enemies of the European Union, NATO, and the alphabet soup of organizations run out of Washington, Geneva, and Brussels have taken to calling their employees “unelected bureaucrats.” Multilateral Man is said to be lazy, or wasteful, or powerless. In an age that celebrates “sovereignty,” “national interest,” and the achievements of his chief opponents (usually called “strongmen”), critics disparage Multilateral Man as parasitic or pointless. Sometimes the critics have a point. But Stoltenberg is where he is precisely because he actually believes in multilateral organizations, NATO in particular. More than that, he thinks they are force multipliers that function better than the autocracies run by strongmen. He has argued that point rather passionately with NATO’s critics, among them Donald Trump, whom he famously won over by showing him bar charts illustrating increases in allied military spending. (“I love graphs,” Stoltenberg told me.) He also thinks that endless rounds of negotiation over alliance policy are worthwhile, because ultimately the result is a stronger sense of commitment. To those who say NATO is less efficient, he asks: “Less efficient than what? Compared to what?” True, if you don’t have NATO, “you don’t have a slow-moving decision process.” But that’s because if you don’t have NATO, you don’t have any decision process at all, at least not a collective decision process. “I believe in collective defense; I believe in one for all and all for one, that attack on one ally will trigger a response from the others.” And this, he says, is not just “good for small nations”; it’s “good for big nations too.” Everybody needs friends, even Americans. Strictly speaking, Stoltenberg is not an unelected bureaucrat in any case, given that he has now been “elected” four times by NATO heads of state, twice for regular terms in office and twice for extensions. He also spent many years as an elected politician. As prime minister of Norway (from 2000 to 2001 and again from 2005 to 2013), he regularly ran coalition governments, and so he got used to forging compromises. As the son of another Norwegian politician (his father was both defense minister and foreign minister), he grew up eating breakfast with world leaders, among them Nelson Mandela, and thus learned the value of personal contacts. He once told a radio station that he hadn’t realized until many years later that it is not actually normal for foreign ministers to invite foreign leaders into their kitchen. Breakfast isn’t always practical, nowadays, and so, according to those around him, he makes up for it with flurries of text messages and a constant round of visits to NATO capitals. He attended the inauguration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last month, spent extra time in Istanbul, brought his wife and squeezed in some conversations about Swedish accession. In the 48 hours before I saw him, he had met with the prime ministers of Denmark and Bulgaria, as well as the president of France. He had attended a training exercise in Lithuania the previous weekend, and a meeting of the European Council, which includes all European Union heads of state, that morning. If he was tired of this endless carousel, he didn’t say so. But at this particular moment, what really qualifies Stoltenberg for this job is his clarity about the dangers posed by Russia and a special affinity for Ukraine. Here I am treading delicately, because we don’t yet know the full details of the package NATO will offer Ukraine at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next week. The Ukrainians are asking for full NATO membership, which is nothing new: This subject was first seriously discussed at a NATO summit back in 2008. The decision taken at the time, to deny Ukraine a path to admission but to imply that it might be granted in the future, was the worst one possible, because it left Ukraine in a gray zone, aspiring to join the West but without any Western security guarantees. The world has shifted since then, and many more countries are now open to the idea of Ukrainian membership. Although the U.S. government is reluctant to support that while the war continues, for fear that American soldiers would immediately be drawn into the conflict, the Biden administration might eventually consider it too. For the moment, NATO will offer a series of proposals for longer-term military integration and aid. Ukraine will shift from Soviet to Western weapons systems and will be offered new institutional arrangements, including the creation of a NATO-Ukraine council, which don’t sound like much outside the Brussels bubble but mean a lot to people inside. Plans for eventually speeding up the process—Ukraine, like Finland and Sweden, may eventually be allowed to join without an extensive “membership action plan”—are also under consideration. Some countries may ultimately offer bilateral assurances as well. Naturally, Stoltenberg didn’t tell me which countries hold which positions, even though these are widely reported. “My main task,” he said, “is not to give interesting answers, but it is to ensure that we make progress on the issue of membership for Ukraine.” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told me that Stoltenberg hasn’t been looking for “the least common denominator” in his negotiations, but is rather seeking to forge the best deal possible for Ukraine. Maybe this is American spin in advance of the summit, but if so, it has a broader point. Because Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that time is on his side, one of NATO’s central tasks is to convince him that time is not on his side, that the Western alliance will go on backing Ukraine, indefinitely. The expression long term comes up in a lot of transatlantic conversations about Ukraine. So does the word permanent. Stoltenberg’s durability is part of that message too. But why should a former leader of the Norwegian Labor Party (and youthful anti-war activist) be so dedicated to this task? I saw Stoltenberg speak with great emotion about Ukraine at a private event a few months ago, and last week I asked him about that too. He told me that this was the result of personal experience. He visited then-Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and saw stark contrasts between its inhabitants and their counterparts in the West. “I thought these were totally different people,” he recalled. “They have different clothing, everything smells different … and it was really dark, and it was so far away. But now I go to Riga or to Tallinn—I was just in Vilnius—and these are very trendy, modern cities; if anything, they are more trendy, more modern, and more creative than in Scandinavia.” The people were not different after all: “This was about politics, the rules that they lived under, and I am ashamed that I didn’t realize that earlier. And to some extent, I also made the same mistake about Ukraine.” For Stoltenberg, as for so many Europeans, the current war stirred some even older memories. Turning to his office wall, Stoltenberg pointed to a photograph (black and white, in keeping with the austere aesthetic) of his grandfather at age 100, a former Norwegian army captain who was at one point in German captivity. Both his parents and grandparents used to walk around Oslo and point out locations of wartime events—“There was an explosion there, a sabotage attack here; the resistance used to hide in that flat”—and he knows this tour so well that he can do it with his own children. The Ukrainians, he told me, “are fighting the same fight that we fought against Nazism.” This dual realization—that Ukrainians aren’t so different from Westerners, and that they are fighting a familiar kind of war—isn’t unique to Stoltenberg. On the contrary, quite a few European leaders, and for that matter ordinary Europeans, have traveled the same journey, which is why he and others in and around NATO seem so confident in their “long term” and “permanent” commitment to Ukraine. He insists that this transformation began not last year but at the start of his term in 2014, when NATO had just been surprised and confused by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas. After that, spending rose, and strategic plans shifted. In 2016, the alliance agreed to set up battle groups—led by Americans in Poland, Germans in Lithuania, Brits in Estonia, and Canadians in Latvia. By February 24, 2022, “NATO was prepared. We had all of the increased readiness, we had all of the increased defense spending, we had deployed forces to the eastern border, and we had agreed defense plans—new defense plans—that we activated that morning.” Not everybody had taken this shift seriously. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron described NATO as “brain dead.” The Russian president’s disregard for NATO and its leaders had far greater consequences. Putin claimed to be offended by NATO’s presence on his western border, but in practice he was not bothered by it, and certainly not deterred by it. Had he really believed in the transatlantic commitment to Ukraine, or had he really feared NATO aggression, he surely would not have invaded at all. But although historians will argue about whether NATO could have done more to deter Russia, it is already clear that NATO did much more to help Ukraine than Putin expected once the war began. Putin not only underestimated Ukraine; he also underestimated Multilateral Men—the officials who, like Jens Stoltenberg and his counterparts at the European Union, helped the White House put together the military, political, and diplomatic response. Putin believed his own propaganda, the same propaganda used by the transatlantic far right: Democracies are weak, autocrats are strong, and people who use polite, diplomatic language won’t defend themselves. This turned out to be wrong. “Democracies have proven much more resilient, much stronger than our adversaries believe,” Stoltenberg told me. And autocracies are more fragile: “As we’ve just seen, authoritarian systems can just, suddenly, break down.” Here is a prediction: Over the next year—and this one, everyone swears, really is his last—Stoltenberg won’t be making any charismatic speeches about Ukraine or NATO. He won’t join the fray, start arguments, or appear on television unless he has too. Instead, he will keep talking about a “multiyear program of moving Ukraine from Soviet standards and equipment doctrines to NATO standards and doctrines,” keep meeting with prime ministers and foreign ministers, keep working on the integration of Ukraine into Europe. And then, one day, it will have happened. © 2023 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Det var under onsdagen den 5 juli som Britney Spears, 41, och hennes make Sam Asghari, 29, gick ut på restaurangen Catch i Las Vegas. Restaurangen är belägen i hotellet ARIA. Britney Spears och Sam Asghari gick ut för att äta middag i Las Vegas. Bildkälla: Stella Pictures. Britney Spears ville ta bild med supertalangen Victor Wembanyama

På väg in på restaurangen fick Britney syn på en av sina idoler – nämligen NBA-stjärnan Victor Wembanyama, 19.  Victor Wembanyama är en av basketvärldens mest lovande talanger på många år. Vart han än går i USA så väcker han enorm uppståndelse. Här får han poliseskort i New York. Bildkälla: Stella Pictures.Victor har ett stort säkerhetsteam som vaktar honom. Bildkälla: Stella Pictures. Victor, som är en av basketvärldens just nu hetaste spelare, var även han på Catch för att äta middag. Britney och hennes sällskap bestämde sig för att knata över till Victor. Eftersom Britney är ett stort fan så ville hon ta en bild med Victor.

Britney knackade honom på hans rygg och högra axel – och då kom smällen. Britney Spears blev slagen i Las Vegas. Bildkälla: Stella Pictures. Polisen utreder händelsen: "Tar det lika allvarligt som en hjärtattack"

Enligt Tmz så var det Damian Smith – som är den säkerhetsansvariga för Victors lag San Antonio Spurs – som genom ett slag bakifrån fick Britney att falla till marken. Britneys glasögon ska ha flugit av i fallet.

Britney ska då ha samlat sig och sedan gått till sitt bord. Enligt Tmz så gick säkerhetsvakten Damian Smith fram till bordet och bad om ursäkt till Britney. Han ska ha sagt "Du vet hur det är att bli attackerad av fans". Victor Wembanyama. Bildkälla: Stella Pictures. Britneys säkerhetsteam har anmält Victors säkerhetsvakt för misshandel. De senaste uppgifterna från Tmz gör gällande att en utredning är påbörjad och att de tar ärendet "lika allvarligt som en hjärtattack".

Övervakningsfilm från restaurangen ska visa hur Damian Smith trycker bort Britneys hand. Sedan ska Britneys hand – inte Damian Smiths hand – ha slagit i hennes ansikte, skriver Tmz. Britney Spears. Bildkälla: Stella Pictures.