The promotion of LGBT relations could be permanently banned in Russia under a bill introduced to the State Duma on Monday, which likens such messaging to war propaganda and incitement of hatred. Currently, LGBT ‘propaganda’ in Russia is only banned when directed at children, but some politicians have been calling for harsher restrictions and punishments for the “denial of family values” and “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations.” In an explanatory note attached to the bill, the authors argue that LGBT ‘propaganda’ has become widespread in Russia and is being promoted through the media, public events, streaming services and through the depiction of such relationships in films.
“In Russia, at the legislative level, it is not allowed to promote suicide, drugs, extremism, criminal behavior, as they are considered negative and socially dangerous phenomena. At the same time, formally, until now, there is no ban on propaganda of the denial of family values and non-traditional sexual relations, including with the use of film distribution,” the note reads. The authors of the bill – who do not include members of the ruling United Russia party – claim the denial of family as a social value, promotion of so-called “childfree” lifestyles, and the approval and recognition of non-traditional sexual relations, is dangerous not only for children and young people, but for society as a whole, since it “puts the issues of demography and future economic growth at risk.” The bill seeks to supplement current legislation by introducing administrative and criminal responsibility for spreading LGBT messaging across any demographic in the Russian Federation and to deny distribution rights to films that promote such relations. Family, motherhood and childhood in their traditional understanding, taken from the ancestors, are the values that ensure the continuous change of generations,” urge the authors of the bill, adding that they are a “condition for the preservation and development of the multinational people of the Russian Federation, and therefore need special protection from the state.” The lawmakers note that the prohibition of LGBT propaganda does not deprive Russian citizens of the opportunity and right to determine their sexual preference and orientation, nor does it allow for their discrimination in any way. However, they insist that these privileges “do not give them the right to seek public approval of such relations” or “disseminate ‘new’ values that carry hidden threats to society.” Last month, a similar bill was also introduced to the State Duma, seeking to introduce fines of over $160,000 for promoting non-traditional sexual relations. However, it failed to pass its first reading. Verdi union said workers walked out in all major German North Sea ports, with the action set to last until Saturday. At 6am on Thursday employees on the early shift in Bremen and Bremerhaven stopped work, Verdi district manager of Bremen-Nordniedersachsen, Markus Westermann, said. The work stoppages are planned until 6am on Saturday. A strike has also begun at the port of Hamburg, said Stephan Gastmeier, trade union secretary in the transport and maritime department at Verdi Hamburg. The industrial action is because no agreement over pay has been reached with the Central Association of German Seaport Operators (ZDS) following the latest meeting on Wednesday, union bosses said. Negotiations are currently suspended. The union is negotiating for about 12,000 workers in 58 companies in Hamburg, Lower Saxony and Bremen who are covered by collective agreements. Dockworkers have already left ship and cargo handling at a standstill twice in June, most recently for 24 hours on June 23rd. According to Verdi negotiator Maya Schwiegershausen-Güth, the latest 48-hour ‘warning strikes’ will affect Emden, Wilhelmshaven and Brake, as well as Hamburg, which is the largest seaport in Germany and third largest in Europe. Like many unions across Europe, they are fighting for wage increases amid extreme inflation rises. Verdi is demanding an increase in wages of €1.20 per hour for employees as well as compensation for inflation amounting to 7.4 percent for the duration of the collective agreement which is 12 months. The union also wants to push through an increase in the annual allowance for container operations by €1,200.
Container congestion likely to worsen The impact of the strike on the handling of container and cargo ships is likely to be considerable and bring the loading and unloading of ships largely to a standstill. This will further aggravate the already tense situation with ship congestion on the North Sea, and the processes at the quaysides are likely to get even more out of step. Container ships have been piling up in the North Sea, while ports are becoming storage areas. ZDS negotiator Ulrike Riedel called the strike “irresponsible” in view of the disrupted supply chains and said it was to the detriment of consumers and businesses. Due to the Covid pandemic, the global traffic of container and cargo ships has been in chaos for several months. According to recent calculations by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, more than two percent of global freight capacity is stuck in the North Sea. There are currently around 20 cargo shops waiting in the German bay area for clearance, most of them bound for Hamburg. Scientists at Japan’s RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) say they have developed a way to create artificial neural networks that learn to recognize objects faster and more accurately. Andrea Benucci, team leader at RIKEN CBS’s Laboratory for Neural Circuits and Behavior, has published a study in the scientific journal PLOS Computational Biology, which focuses on all the unnoticed eye movements that we make, and shows that they serve a vital purpose in allowing us to stably recognize objects. These findings can be applied to machine vision, for example, making it easier for self-driving cars to learn how to recognize important features on the road.
Despite making constant head and eye movements throughout the day, objects in the world do not blur or become unrecognizable, even though the physical information hitting our retinas changes constantly. What likely makes this perceptual stability possible are neural copies of the movement commands. These copies are sent throughout the brain each time we move and are thought to allow the brain to account for our own movements and keep our perception stable. In addition to stable perception, evidence suggests that eye movements, and their motor copies, might also help us to stably recognize objects in the world, but how this happens remains a mystery. Benucci developed a convolutional neural network (CNN) that offers a solution to this problem. The CNN was designed to optimize the classification of objects in a visual scene while the eyes are moving. First, the network was trained to classify 60,000 black-and-white images into 10 categories. Although it performed well on these images, when tested with shifted images that mimicked naturally altered visual input that would occur when the eyes move, performance dropped drastically to chance level. However, classification improved significantly after training the network with shifted images, as long as the direction and size of the eye movements that resulted in the shift were also included. In particular, adding the eye movements and their motor copies to the network model allowed the system to better cope with visual noise in the images. “This advancement will help avoid dangerous mistakes in machine vision,” says Benucci. “With more efficient and robust machine vision, it is less likely that pixel alterations—also known as ‘adversarial attacks’—will cause, for example, self-driving cars to label a stop sign as a light pole, or military drones to misclassify a hospital building as an enemy target.” Bringing these results to real world machine vision is not as difficult as it seems. Benucci explains, “The benefits of mimicking eye movements and their efferent copies implies that ‘forcing’ a machine-vision sensor to have controlled types of movements, while informing the vision network in charge of processing the associated images about the self-generated movements, would make machine vision more robust, and akin to what is experienced in human vision.” The next step in this research will involve collaboration with colleagues working with neuromorphic technologies. The idea is to implement actual silicon-based circuits based on the principles highlighted in this study and test whether they improve machine-vision capabilities in real-world applications. The euro inched higher on Tuesday, reversing earlier falls that had taken it to the brink of parity with the dollar, but it stayed under heavy pressure from a potential energy supply crunch and uncertainty over the ECB's rate rise campaign. The euro fell as low as $1.00005, before edging off that level . By 1315 GMT it was up 0.15%, at $1.00540.
Neil Jones, head of currency sales at Mizuho, said markets had been 'short' the euro in anticipation of a break below parity, but "we didn't get it and now these shorts are buying back into the early New York market". One-month implied euro-dollar volatility, a gauge of expected swings, around 12.5% , the highest since March 2020. The biggest pipeline carrying Russian gas to Germany, the Nord Stream 1, began annual maintenance on Monday, with flows expected to stop for 10 days. But governments and markets are worried Russia might extend the shutdown, exacerbating the euro bloc's energy crunch and tipping its economy into recession. A dire reading from the ZEW economic research institute, reinforced the economic gloom, showing German investor sentiment nosedived in July to -53.8 points from -28.0 in June. "The market is playing cat and mouse with euro parity at the moment in the absence of any major macro drivers," said Simon Harvey, head of FX at Monex Europe, adding that Wednesday's U.S. inflation data -- expected at 8.8% for June -- could prove the catalyst. "We may have to wait for U.S. CPI...or a clearer picture for European energy markets once planned maintenance in Nord Stream comes close to finalising for euro-dollar to break the threshold," Harvey added. Euro weakness was most pronounced against the dollar. The dollar index , which tracks the unit against a basket of six counterparts with the euro most heavily weighted, earlier climbed to 108.56, its highest since October 2002, but then eased to $108.10. Analysts also cited growing uncertainty over the European Central Bank's plans to raise interest rates, initially by 25 basis points in July, then by 50 bps in September. Fed funds futures, meanwhile, price U.S. rates reaching 3.50% by March, rising from 1.58% currently. "The expectation is for the (U.S. Federal Reserve) to do 75 bps this month and its aim seems to be to get to neutral (rates) as soon as possible, while with ECB, it's more of a mixed message given the backdrop over gas," said Sarah Hewin, senior economist at Standard Chartered. Euro weakness has been a big part of the dollar index's push higher, but the greenback has been also supported by worries about growth elsewhere, with China in particular implementing strict zero-COVID policies to contain fresh outbreaks. The offshore-traded yuan approached one-month lowsat 6.753 . The dollar slipped however to 136.72 yen , down 0.5%, following Monday's jump to new 24-year highs at 137.75. The stuttering global economyis undermining commodity-focused currencies. Canada is expected to raise interest rates by 75 bps respectively on Wednesday but the Canadian dollar eased 0.2% versus U.S. dollar. For years, there's been a cardinal rule for flying civilian drones: Keep them within your line of sight. Not just because it's a good idea — it's also the law. But some drones have recently gotten permission to soar out of their pilots' sight. They can now inspect high-voltage power lines across the forested Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. They're tracking endangered sea turtles off Florida's coast and monitoring seaports in the Netherlands and railroads from New Jersey to the rural West.
Aviation authorities in the U.S. and elsewhere are preparing to relax some of the safeguards they imposed to regulate a boom in off-the-shelf consumer drones over the past decade. Businesses want simpler rules that could open your neighborhood's skies to new commercial applications of these low-flying machines, although privacy advocates and some airplane and balloon pilots remain wary. For now, a small but growing group of power companies, railways and delivery services like Amazon are leading the way with special permission to fly drones “beyond visual line of sight.” As of early July, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration had approved 230 such waivers — one of them to Virginia-based Dominion Energy for inspecting its network of power plants and transmission lines. “This is the first step of what everybody’s expecting with drones," said Adam Lee, Dominion's chief security officer. "The first time in our nation’s history where we’ve now moved out into what I think everyone’s expecting is coming.” That expectation — of small drones with little human oversight delivering packages, assessing home insurance claims or buzzing around on nighttime security patrols — has driven the FAA's work this year to craft new safety guidelines meant to further integrate drones into the national airspace. The FAA said it is still reviewing how it will roll out routine operations enabling some drones to fly beyond visual line of sight, although it it has signaled that the permissions will be reserved for commercial applications, not hobbyists. “Our ultimate goal is you shouldn’t need a waiver for this process at all. It becomes an accepted practice,” said Adam Bry, CEO of California drone-maker Skydio, which is supplying its drones to Dominion, railroad company BNSF and other customers with permission to fly beyond line of sight. “The more autonomous the drones become, the more they can just be instantly available anywhere they could possibly be useful,” Bry said. Part of that involves deciding how much to trust that drones won't crash into people or other aircraft when their operators aren't looking. Other new rules will require drones to carry remote identification — like an electronic license plate — to track their whereabouts. And in the aftermath of Russia's war in Ukraine — where both sides have used small consumer drones to target attacks — the White House has been pushing a parallel effort to counter the potential malicious use of drones in the U.S. At a gas-fired plant in Remington, Virginia, which helps power some of Washington's suburbs, a reporter with The Associated Press watched in June as Dominion Energy drone pilots briefly lost visual line of sight of their inspection drone as it flew around the backside of a large fuel tank and the top of a smoke stack. That wouldn't have been legally possible without Dominion's recently approved FAA waiver. And it wouldn't have been technically possible without advancements in collision-avoidance technology that are enabling drones to fly closer to buildings. Previously, “you would have to erect scaffolding or have people go in with a bucket truck,” said Nate Robie, who directs the drone program at Dominion. “Now you can go in on a 20-minute flight.” Not everyone is enthused about the pending rules. Pilots of hot air balloons and other lightweight aircraft warn that crashes will follow if the FAA allows largely autonomous delivery drones the right of way at low altitudes. "These drones cannot see where they are flying and are blind to us," said a June call to action from the Balloon Federation of America. Broader concerns come from civil liberties groups that say protecting people’s privacy should be a bigger priority. “There is a greater chance that you’ll have drones flying over your house or your backyard as these beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone operations increase,” said Jeramie Scott, a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center who sat on the FAA's advisory group working to craft new drone rules. “It’ll be much harder to know who to complain to.” EPIC and other groups dissented from the advisory group's early recommendations and are calling for stronger privacy and transparency requirements — such as an app that could help people identify the drones above them and what data they are collecting. “If you want to fly beyond visual line of sight, especially if you are commercial, the public has a right to know what you’re flying, what data you are collecting,” said Andrés Arrieta, director of consumer privacy engineering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It seems like such a low bar.”
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FORMULA 1 ROLEX GROSSER PREIS VON ÖSTERREICH 2022 - Sprint Race Results
These are fraught times for the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector, so it isn’t surprising that industry proponents might seize upon any promising news to help charge flagging markets. A Reuters report out of Uganda last week about a massive gold ore discovery supplied just this kind of fuel. What does the state of gold mining in Africa have to do with the price of global Bitcoin (BTC)? Quite a bit, potentially. Bitcoin has periodically laid claim to being digital gold largely on the strength of its strict 21 million supply limit, which makes it non-inflationary and a good store of value — in theory. Gold, of course, is the store of value par excellence, with a limited supply and a solid track record that goes back millennia. But, if Uganda is sitting on 31 million metric tons of gold ore, as the government declared, might not that substantially boost the world’s gold supply? That in turn could lower the price of gold — and make it a less secure “store of value” generally. Gold’s loss could be the cryptocurrency’s gain. Some drew encouragement from this notion. MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, for instance, posted a video on Twitter about the Ugandan discovery of “huge gold deposits” which might net 320,158 metric tons of refined gold “valued at $12.8 trillion.” As Saylor noted on June 17: “#Gold is plentiful. #Bitcoin is scarce," further telling CNBC: “Every commodity in the world has looked good in a hyperinflationary environment, but the dirty secret is you can make more oil, you can make more silver, you can make more gold. […] Bitcoin’s the only thing that looks like a commodity that is scarce and capped.” But, perhaps there is less here than meets the eye. The 320,158 metric tons of refined gold that the Ugandan mining ministry spokesman said could be produced from the new deposits in the country’s north-eastern corner would far exceed the 200,000 metric tons in above-ground gold that exist in the entire world today. One gold mining trade publication went so far as to suggest the Ugandan government may have been confusing metric tons with ounces in its projections.
FORMULA 1 ROLEX GROSSER PREIS VON ÖSTERREICH 2022 - Sprint Race Results
Famous watch manufacturer Richard Mille has just unveiled a timepiece unlike any other to come before it. Dubbed the RM UP-01 and developed alongside Ferrari, it is the world’s thinnest mechanical watch. The RM UP-01 is just 1.75 mm thick from dial to caseback, beating out the Bulgari Octo Finissimo Ultra by 0.05 mm as the world’s thinnest timepiece of its kind. The baseplate and bridges of the RM UP-01 are crafted from grade 5 titanium that also includes 6 per cent aluminum and 4 per cent vanadium. What’s more, the movement is just 1.18 mm thick, also a new record. Richard Mille says it took over 6,000 man-hours to develop the RM UP-01. As part of this development, engineers created a titanium balance wheel and a unique escapement and safety roller to transfer energy to the balance wheel that ensures the timepiece can endure assembly, disassembly, and exposure to shock or strong vibrations. The watch has a power reserve of 45 hours and while it may look quite delicate in photos, it is actually made to be worn and can withstand accelerations of over 5,000 Gs. It also offers 10 m of water resistance.
“The RM UP-01 Ferrari is an allusive piece to Ferrari’s values, developing sporting mechanisms that are as elegant as they are immediately recognizable,” Richard Mille described. “Their models make no concessions and frequently contradict current trends to create new aesthetical codes. The RM UP-01 Ferrari bears witness to this partnership of the best know-how these two iconic brands have to offer in the combination of their ideas, understanding, respective developments and shared values.” Just 150 examples of the RM UP-01 Ferrari will be manufactured and as you may expect, it’s very expensive. Or rather obscenely expensive, as each carries a price tag of $1.888 million.
FORMULA 1 ROLEX GROSSER PREIS VON ÖSTERREICH 2022 - Qualifying Results
An article published by the United Nations hailing the benefits of hunger has gone viral on social media today, with netizens expressing shock over the claims made in the article titled “The Benefits of World Hunger”. Written by retired Hawaiian professor George Kent, the article explains how hunger is needed to get workers for low-level manual jobs. It was published on UN Chronicle, the flagship magazine of the UN. The article argues that people work to fight hunger, and if there is no hunger, there will be nobody to do the manual jobs. Kenk shockingly says, “For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets.”
George Kent also claims that only hungry people work hard, while well-nourished people are far less willing to do such work. He termed the notion that people should be fed well to make them more productive ‘nosense’, saying that “No one works harder than hungry people.” The article caused great outrage on social media across the world, with common netizens and well-known people slamming it for glorifying hunger for the benefits of the rich. While the article has gone viral today (6th June 2022) for some reason, actually it was published more than a decade ago. The article was originally published on the UN Chronicle, the flagship magazine of the United Nations, way back in 2008 in printed form. Later the article was republished on the UN website in 2019, which has gone viral now. The same article is also available on researchgate, the repository of research papers, which says that it was written in June 2008. While the premise of the article is indeed absurd, it actually seems to be a work of satire. George Kent, who was a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii and now a Professor Emeritus at the university, had actually written the article to claim that the rich keep the poor people hungry so that they work for the comfort of the rich. In fact, he has added in the article, “people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.” In the article, George Kent also claimed that people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem due to this reason. Although subtle, this suggests that the article was satirical in nature. While most people were outraged by the article, some people said that it was a satire. George Kent has written extensively on the issue of global hunger, including a book titled “Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food”. Therefore it is unlikely that he will write something positive about the issue, and hence it can be said that the article is satirical. Elon Musk has said he is terminating a $44bn deal to buy Twitter, saying the social media company did not provide information about fake or spam accounts on the platform. In a filing to the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday, Musk’s lawyers said Twitter had failed or refused to respond to multiple requests for information on those accounts, which is fundamental to the company’s business performance.
“Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information,” the filing reads. “Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions of that Agreement, appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied when entering into the Merger Agreement,” it also said. Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies. The company’s chairman, Bret Taylor, tweeted on Friday evening that, “the Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement”. The terms of the deal require Musk, the CEO of Tesla, to pay a $1bn break-up fee if he does not complete the transaction. |
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