Rookie
AP launches local news AI project with Knight Foundation
With support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, AP will launch a two-year project to expand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in local newsrooms.
The goal is to expand local news organizations’ adoption of AI tools and automation technologies in ways that support their business.
AP will create an educational program to help news outlets understand how they might apply AI. Working with the Knight Lab at Northwestern University Medill, AP will also provide strategic consulting and help with prototype development in select newsrooms.
“AP has been a leader in automation and AI technologies since 2014, when we rolled out automated corporate earnings reports,” said Jim Kennedy, AP senior vice president for strategy and enterprise development. “We’ve learned many lessons since then about how AI can support the future of the news business, and this program will enable us to share that learning with local news outlets across the country.”
AP’s program will establish a scorecard for AI readiness and a curriculum for exploring a full range of applications for journalism, product development and audience engagement. In the latter stages of the two-year initiative, the program aims to help a select number of outlets implement their own innovative AI solutions. . . .
Exclusive: Biden looks abroad for electric vehicle metals, in blow to U.S. miners
The plans will be a blow to U.S. miners who had hoped Biden would rely primarily on domestically sourced metals, as his campaign had signalled last autumn, to help fulfill his ambitions for a less carbon-intensive economy.
Rather than focus on permitting more U.S. mines, Biden’s team is more focused on creating jobs that process minerals domestically into electric vehicle (EV) battery parts, according to the people.
Myanmar: Cease persecution of journalists
The Real Curse To All Americans Is The Establishment Left & Right | Defund The Police Maxine Waters Even Used Federal Marshals To Protect Her | “Congress’s VIP Air Marshal Program Canceled after Maxine Waters Debacle”
A scandal-plagued “VIP” program that provided members of Congress with Federal Air Marshals (FAM) often yanked from high-risk fights has been canceled after Judicial Watch exposed it earlier this month. . . . In many instances FAM were plucked from high-risk flights to accompany an elected official, leaving the high-risk plane with no coverage.
That was the case during Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ recent trip to Minnesota. Two FAM were pulled from a high-risk fight to accompany the California Democrat on the mid-April jaunt, though she was already covered by a four-man detail, according to multiple law enforcement sources interviewed by Judicial Watch. The veteran FAM sources say the politician had two air marshals reassigned to a plane that would otherwise not qualify because it was not considered high-risk. The transfer forced the high-risk flight to complete its trip without the two air marshals originally assigned to it. Waters received the extra security while traveling to Brooklyn Center, a Minneapolis suburb, after police shot and killed a black man with an open warrant related to an aggravated armed robbery. The Derek Chauvin trial was wrapping up around 10 miles away and the 82-year-old lawmaker incited the crowd, encouraging protestors to “get more confrontational” if the former Minneapolis cop was not convicted of murder for George Floyd’s death. “We gotta stay on the street, we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational, we’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business,” Waters said ahead of closing arguments in Chauvin’s trial. The former officer was convicted and the judge presiding over the trial called the congresswoman’s comments “abhorrent.” Last month Judicial Watch filed a complaint with the chairman of the House Office of Congressional Ethics against Waters for violating House ethics rules by encouraging violence and attempting to intimidate the jury in the Chauvin trial.
Coverage of Waters’ abuse of the VIP air marshal service apparently led to the program’s cancelation, according to numerous government officials interviewed by Judicial Watch. “They were not scheduling us to make sure we were available for the VIPs,” said a longtime air marshal, who is celebrating that the program is finally “done.” FAM are federal law enforcement officers whose primary function is to protect commercial passenger flights by deterring and countering the risk of terrorist activity, aircraft piracy and other crimes to protect the nation’s transportation infrastructure. The VIP service for Congress “left a glaring hole in America’s aviation security,” according to a whistleblower complaint filed this year by the Air Marshal National Council with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General. The group represents around 2,000 air marshals nationwide. In an interview with Judicial Watch, the group’s president, David Londo, called the VIP program “scandalous.” A veteran air marshal said he and many colleagues on the force often asked: “Why are we really here? To protect against terrorism or babysitting?”
Bannon’s War Room | Saturday Edition Hour 2 | Recorded May 29, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 18 Seconds
Episode 986–The American Generals Speak Part III (w/ MG Arbuckle, BG Bolduc, BG Welch, RADM Bayless). “We’re in an age of the death of reason and the death of common sense,” he said. “We’re in a fight for our nation. We’re the modern minute men today.” Guests are: Frank Gaffney, MG Joseph Arbuckle, BG Don Bolduc, BG Bill Welch, RADM Jon Bayless.
U.S. Announces Sanctions on Belarus Over Journalist’s Detention
The Biden administration announced it would re-impose sanctions against nine Belarusian state-owned enterprises and is developing additional penalties to target officials in the administration of President Alexander Lukashenko over the forced landing of a Ryanair Holdings Plc jetliner and the arrest of a dissident journalist.
Punished in Hong Kong for Texting the Press
China wants to silence Hong Kongers even as it persecutes them. A court judgment released Friday shows that a judge penalized former pro-democracy lawmaker and journalist Claudia Mo for speaking to Western journalists, including our own Jillian Melchior.
Police arrested Ms. Mo, along with nearly the entire opposition movement, in January. She and 46 others are charged with conspiracy to commit subversion under the national security law for organizing or participating in an informal pro-democracy primary election last July. Judge Esther Toh denied Ms. Mo bail in April, and the world learned why on Friday.
The national security law prohibits “collusion” with vaguely defined foreign forces and states that defendants may not receive bail “unless the judge has sufficient grounds” to believe that they “will not continue to commit acts endangering national security.” As a reason to keep Ms. Mo behind bars, prosecutor Maggie Yang described Ms. Mo’s WhatsApp correspondence with these pages, the New York Times, Bloomberg and the BBC. . .
Investigative Journalist and Author Sharri Markson Reveals How Dr. Fauci Restarted Gain of Function Research After Obama Administration Stopped it
Perhaps the last half of this interview explains why the mainstream media are now willing to let Anthony Fauci take the heat for the Wuhan Bio-Lab leak. The entire interview with Australian investigative journalist Sharri Markson is well worth watching. The first major point was how Anthony Fauci was arguing against scientific consensus to keep allowing “gain of function” biological experimentation with deadly viruses. Fauci advocated for weaponization research in 2012, the scientific community was against it because of the inherent risks.
The second major point was President Obama stopping gain of function research in 2014 due to the global risk of a leak from a lab. Then in 2017, in the first year of the Trump administration, unbeknownst to senior officials in the administration, NIH Director Anthony Fauci pushed through a restart of the dangerous research.
Obama stopping and Fauci unilaterally starting would explain why the media are willing to step aside and let Fauci take the fall. Defending and protecting President Obama are the primary objectives of the MSM and operatives embedded in the administrative state. Now the sudden shift makes sense. Those in the umbrella intelligence apparatus knew this type of investigative evidence was going to surface.
Rutgers leaders forced to apologize for statement condemning anti-Semitism
The chancellor and provost of Rutgers University apologized Thursday for issuing a statement that denounced the recent surge in anti-Semitic attacks because he said it “failed to communicate support for our Palestinian community members.”
The initial statement from Chancellor Christopher Molloy and Provost Francine Conway Wednesday said they were “saddened by and greatly concerned about the sharp rise in hostile sentiments and anti-Semitic violence in the United States.”
The Thursday statement, titled “An Apology,” included the message that “our diversity must be supported by equity, inclusion, antiracism, and the condemnation of all forms of bigotry and hatred, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
“As we grow in our personal and institutional understanding, we will take the lesson learned here to heart, and pledge our commitment to doing better,” Molloy and Conway continued. “We will work to regain your trust, and make sure that our communications going forward are much more sensitive and balanced.”
Earlier Thursday, the Rutgers chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine issued a lengthy denunciation of Molloy and Conway’s initial statement.
ARIZONA: State Senator Wendy Rogers Reports From Maricopa Audit Floor, Says Results Could Be ‘Legally Actionable’
Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers toured the floor of the Maricopa County forensic audit on Thursday, confirming that the results will probably be “legally actionable.”
Rogers, one of the most pro-America First members of the Arizona legislature, toured the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the forensic audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results is currently taking place, and was able to report back to her constitutents, and the rest of America, the current state of the audit on the ground.
I am on the audit floor at https://t.co/cBR8fVXGtY camera 6, 7 or 8. Do you see me? pic.twitter.com/xBtoNGZS8Y
— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) May 28, 2021
In a series of posts on social media, Rogers revealed in detail exactly what she had seen, and was able to dispel some myths about the Maricopa audit that had been put forward by the mainstream media and Arizona Democrats.
From the start of the audit, Rogers noted that the capabilities of the audit had about doubled in the capacity, with a much increased number of paper inspection tables and counting tables, allowing far more votes to be audited in a shorter amount of time. The CEO of CyberNinjas, the company hired to conduct the audit, had informed the audience that the physical data collection would now be completed by the end of June, with the full report to follow “sometime later.”
Rogers was able to describe the procedures on the floor of the audit, confirming that security was taken incredibly seriously by the volunteers and organisers. Tally sheets and ballots were only allowed to be moved if there were three things present, that being people, papers, and cameras. Contrary to the claims of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the data collection system used by CyFIR was “read only,” and couldn’t change any votes, with everything at the site also being videoed, Rogers said.
A retired USAF pilot who is serving as a volunteer for the audit also informed her that the chain of custody procedures for the ballots “are as precise and flawless as Strategic Air Command’s.” He further slammed Hobbs, saying it was “laughable” that she claimed the machines were compromised, when she initally claimed that they were unhackable.
In further contrast to the claims of the media, the Maricopa audit does have the databases folder that was really deleted. As National File previously reported, former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett tweeted that the directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle was deleted by Maricopa County officials only “days before the election equipment was delivered to the audit,” despite being under a subpoena at the time. According to Bennett, this constitutes “spoliation of evidence.”
Breaking Update: Maricopa County deleted a directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle days before the election equipment was delivered to the audit. This is spoliation of evidence! pic.twitter.com/mY0fmmFXAm
— Maricopa Arizona Audit (@ArizonaAudit) May 13, 2021
With some questioning whether the audit would be “enough,” Rogers said that the results from the audit could potentially be “legally actionable,” as it would be able to determine whether errors were down to “accidental sloppiness” or deliberate intent. At the absolute minimum, the audit would be able to “inform legislation necessary to plug the gaps to restore the public’s confidence in Arizona’s elections.
“The left redefines ‘evidence’ to be proof,” Rogers said. “The way it really goes is you have enough evidence to proceed with investigation and discovery. Then you determine the conclusion based upon proof. Example: You go outside and the ground is wet. Was it due to rain? Was it your neighbor’s sprinklers? Was it morning dew? One needs more information for proof. If the courts and media stop you, then you will never discover the proof to know the truth.”
In a later tweet, Rogers described the audit in Maricopa as the “gold standard that can be used in other states where there are questions about election integrity,” adding that audits “should be more mainstream, and used more often as a check and balance,” saying that the Founding Fathers would have supported such moves.
What we are doing in Maricopa is the gold standard that can be used in other states where there are questions about election integrity. Audits should be more mainstream and used more often as a check and balance! Our Founders would want it to be so.
— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) May 28, 2021