Ashley Cornell, email: [email protected]

Ashley is best described by the two C’s: calm and compassionate. She was adamant about becoming a doctor when she was younger. That is, until she was accepted into medical school. She realized after two years of university that she wasn’t quite cut out for the job. She abruptly discontinued her studies and decided to pursue a career as a writer instead. She is still interested in medicine, but prefers to remain a distant observer and recorder of medical advances and innovations. She currently works as Senior editor with S Chronicles, where she primarily writes about health and science, as well as co-authoring books on the side.Contact email: [email protected]

Ashley Cornell, email: ashley.cornell@spamchronicles.com
Former Google AI engineer charged with stealing trade secrets for.JPGw1440

Former Google AI engineer charged with stealing trade secrets for Chinese company

The Justice Department announced Wednesday the arrest of a former Google AI engineer who accused him of stealing information about the company's advanced technologies while planning to start his own company in China.

Leon Ding, or Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national, was arrested in Newark, California and charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets.

Justice Department officials called the case a signal that the U.S. government will remain vigilant against attempts to illegally transfer advanced U.S. technologies to China amid a Cold War-style technological arms race between Washington and Beijing.

“The Department of Justice will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could threaten our national security,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

If convicted, Ding faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million.

According to an indictment filed Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco, Ding was hired by Google in 2019 as a software engineer and worked on the company's supercomputing data centers. He worked to develop software that helped run machine learning and AI applications for Google customers, the indictment says.

Prosecutors said Ding began uploading sensitive Google information to a personal Google Cloud account in May 2022 and uploaded more than 500 files by May 2023.

The trade secret theft numbers involve chip architecture and software design specifications for “tensor processing units” and “graphics processing units,” chips that are the building blocks of supercomputing centers.

While still at Google, Ding became chief technology officer of a China-based AI company, Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology, and founded a second China-based company, Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, without informing Google, the indictment says.

The FBI searched Ding's home on January 6 and seized his electronic devices and other evidence.

“Today's announcement should serve as a further warning: Those who transfer sensitive U.S. technology to China risk ending up on the wrong end of criminal charges,” Assistant Secretary Matthew Axelrod of the Commerce Department's Office for Export Enforcement said in a statement.

The Justice Department said the investigation into Ding was conducted by the Justice and Commerce Department's Disruptive Technology Strike Force, a year-old group aimed at protecting U.S. technologies from acquisition by “authoritarian regimes and hostile nation-states.”

Both the U.S. and Chinese governments view artificial intelligence as a strategic new technology with great potential to increase economic performance in the civilian sector while providing key capabilities for the military and intelligence agencies. President Biden issued an AI executive order last year aimed at keeping the United States ahead of countries like China in AI development.

Ding, Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology and Shanghai Zhisuan Technology could not immediately be reached for comment.

Google spokesman José Castañeda said the company had referred the case to federal officials. “We have strict security measures in place to prevent theft of our confidential business information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we discovered that this employee had stolen numerous documents and immediately referred the case to law enforcement,” he said.

Gerrit De Vynck contributed to this report.

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez wanted to destroy his last novel It39s

Gabriel García Márquez wanted to destroy his last novel. It's about to be released.

Towards the end of his life, with his memory destroyed, Gabriel García Márquez struggled to complete a novel about the secret sex life of a middle-aged married woman. He tried at least five versions and tinkered with the text for years, shortening sentences, scribbling in the margins, changing adjectives and dictating notes to his assistant. Finally he gave up and issued a final, damning verdict.

“He told me directly that the novel had to be destroyed,” said Gonzalo García Barcha, the author’s younger son.

When García Márquez died in 2014, several drafts, notes, and chapter fragments of the novel were preserved in his archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The story remained there, spread across 769 pages, largely unread and forgotten – until García Márquez's sons decided to defy their father's wishes.

Now, a decade after his death, his final novel, Until August, will be released this month and will be published in nearly 30 countries worldwide. The story focuses on a woman named Ana Magdalena Bach, who travels to a Caribbean island every August to visit her mother's grave. On these dark pilgrimages, briefly freed from her husband and family, she always finds a new lover.

The novel adds an unexpected coda to the life and work of García Márquez, a literary giant and Nobel Prize winner, and is likely to raise questions about how estates and publishers should handle posthumous publications that contradict a writer's instructions.

Literary history is littered with examples of famous works that would not have existed if executors and heirs had not ignored the authors' wishes.

According to classical tradition, on his deathbed the poet Virgil demanded that the manuscript of his epic poem “The Aeneid” be destroyed. When Franz Kafka became seriously ill with tuberculosis, he instructed his friend and executor Max Brod to burn his entire work. Brod betrayed him and delivered surrealist masterpieces such as The Trial, The Castle and America. Vladimir Nabokov ordered his family to destroy his last novel, The Original Laura, but more than 30 years after the author's death, his son published the unfinished text that Nabokov had sketched on index cards.

In some posthumous works, the author's intentions for the text were unclear, leading scholars and readers to question how complete it was and how much leeway the editors gave themselves with the manuscript. Occasionally, estates and heirs are criticized for damaging an author's legacy by publishing inferior or unfinished works in order to squeeze every last bit of intellectual property out of a literary brand name.

For García Márquez's sons, the question of what to do with “Until August” was complicated by their father's conflicting assessments. He worked intensively on the manuscript for a while and eventually sent a draft to his literary agent. It wasn't until he suffered severe memory loss due to dementia that he decided it wasn't good enough.

By 2012, he could no longer recognize even close friends and family – one of the few exceptions was his wife, Mercedes Barcha, his sons said. He found it difficult to continue a conversation. Occasionally he would pick up one of his books and read it without recognizing the prose as his own.

He confessed to his family that he felt helpless as an artist without his memory, which was his primary source material. Without memory, “there is nothing,” he told them. In this broken state, he began to doubt the quality of his novel.

“Gabo lost the ability to judge the book,” said Rodrigo García, the eldest of his two sons. “He probably wasn’t even able to follow the plot anymore.”

When his sons reread “Until August” years after his death, they felt that García Márquez may have judged himself too harshly. “It was a lot better than we remembered,” García said.

His sons admit that the book is not one of García Márquez's masterpieces and fear that some might dismiss its publication as a cynical attempt to make more money from their father's inheritance.

“We were obviously afraid of being seen as just greedy,” García said.

In contrast to his sprawling, lush works of magical realism — epics like “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which sold some 50 million copies — “Until August” is modest in scope. The English language edition, published March 12th and translated by Anne McLean, is only 107 pages long.

The brothers argue that it is a valuable addition to García Márquez's oeuvre, also because it reveals a new side of him. For the first time, he focused a narrative on a female protagonist and told an intimate story about a woman in her late 40s who, after almost 30 years of marriage, begins to seek freedom and self-realization through illicit romantic relationships.

Still, some readers and critics may question her decision to publish a work that García Márquez himself considered incomplete, perhaps adding a disappointing footnote to a tremendous legacy.

In his native Colombia, where García Márquez's face appears on the currency and anticipation for the book is high, many in literary circles are excited about anything new from García Márquez, no matter how unpolished it may be. Still, some are concerned about the way the novel is being sold.

“They are not offering it to you as a manuscript, as an unfinished work, they are offering you the last novel by García Márquez,” said Colombian writer and journalist Juan Mosquera. “I don’t believe in the greatness we give him. I think it is what it is – a great commercial moment for the García Márquez signature and brand.”

Colombian writer Héctor Abad said he was initially skeptical about the publication but changed his mind when he read an advance copy.

“I was afraid that it might be an act of commercial opportunism, and no, the opposite is true,” Abad, who will appear at an event celebrating the novel in Barcelona, ​​said in an email. “All the virtues that made the best García Márquez great are also present here.”

There is no doubt that at some point García Márquez felt that the novel was worth publishing. In 1999 he read passages at a public appearance with the writer José Saramago in Madrid. Excerpts from the story were later published in Spain's leading newspaper, El País, and the New Yorker. He put the project aside to finish his memoirs and published another novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which received mixed reviews. In 2003 he began working intensively on it again and a year later he sent the manuscript to his agent, the late Carmen Balcells.

In the summer of 2010, Balcells called Cristóbal Pera, an editor who had worked with García Márquez on his memoirs. She said that García Márquez, who was then in his 80s, was trying to finish a novel and asked Pera to help him. García Márquez was very reserved about his work in progress, but a few months later he allowed Pera to read a few chapters of the novel and seemed enthusiastic about it, Pera recalled. About a year later, as his memory failed, the author struggled to understand the narrative but continued to make notes in the margins of the manuscript.

“It was therapeutic for him because he was still able to do something with pen and paper,” Pera said. “But he didn’t want to finish.”

When Pera gently urged García Márquez to publish the book, the author was strongly against it. “He said, at this point in my life, I don’t need to publish anything anymore,” Pera recalls.

After his death at age 87, various versions of “Until August” were preserved in the Ransom Center archives.

Two years ago, García Márquez's sons decided to revisit the text. The novel is messy in places, with some contradictions and repetitions, they said, but it feels complete, if unpolished. There were flashes of his lyricism, like a scene in which Ana, about to confess her infidelity at her mother's grave, “balls her heart into a fist.”

When the brothers decided to publish the novel, they were faced with a conundrum. García Márquez had left at least five versions in various stages of completion. But he gave a hint as to which one he preferred.

“One of the folders he kept had 'Gran OK final' written on the front,” García Barcha said.

“That was before he decided it wasn’t okay at all,” his brother added.

When they asked Pera to edit the novel last year, he began work on the July 2004 fifth version – the version labeled “Gran OK final.” He also relied on other versions and on a digital document compiled by García Márquez's assistant, Mónica Alonso, with various annotations and changes that the author wanted to make. Pera was often confronted with competing versions of a sentence or phrase—one typed, one handwritten in the margins.

Pera attempted to correct inconsistencies and contradictions, such as the protagonist's age – García Márquez varied as to whether she was middle-aged or elderly – and the presence or absence of a mustache on one of her lovers.

To create the most coherent version possible, Pera and the brothers established a rule: They would not add a single word that did not come from García Márquez's notes or other versions, they said.

As for the fate of all of García Márquez's other unpublished works, his sons say it is not a problem: there is nothing else. Throughout his life, García Márquez regularly destroyed older versions of published books and unfinished manuscripts because he did not want them to be subject to later scrutiny.

That was one of the reasons they decided to release “Until August,” they said.

“When this book comes out, we will publish all of Gabo’s works,” García Barcha said. “There’s nothing else in the drawer.”

Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogota.

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After weeks of crisis the presidential election will take place

After weeks of crisis, the presidential election will take place at the end of March

The Senegalese will vote for their president at the end of March, but the exact date is still unclear. The government announced on Wednesday that the first round would take place on March 24, while the Constitutional Council had scheduled it for March 31. For its part, after a lively debate, Parliament passed an amnesty law for acts related to political violence in recent years.

Published on: 03/06/2024 – 10:11 p.m. Modified on: 03/06/2024 – 11:05 p.m

5 minutes

The Senegalese were finally due to elect their fifth president at the end of March, following a sudden acceleration of events on Wednesday March 6 in the severe political crisis caused by the last-minute postponement of the vote.

However, there remains some uncertainty about the exact date: the presidency announced that the first round would take place on March 24th, and the Constitutional Council set it for March 31st.

The election would in any case take place before the expiry of President Macky Sall's mandate on April 2, one of the key elements of the crisis, as a broad front of opposition and civil society suspects Macky Sall of wanting to cling to power.

A second round, which is likely based on the current status of candidatures but for which no date has been announced, would take place before or after the 2nd round. However, a Constitutional Council decision published on Wednesday says that compared to the first round, if the turnaround were to take place before the end of the mandate, President Sall would remain in his post until his successor is appointed.

Another reason for tension is that the competition must compete against the 19 participants whose list the Constitutional Council has already confirmed, the Constitutional Council said in a separate decision. The seven “wise men” refused to re-examine this list, which was recommended to the head of state at the end of a “national dialogue”.

The anti-system candidate Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who has been imprisoned since April 2023, is on this list. For him, however, the question of a possible amnesty arises, which was approved by the National Assembly on the same day.

“Setting the date of the election beyond the term of office of the incumbent President of the Republic violates the constitution,” wrote the Sages. The wise men said they would replace the executive branch because it was “sluggish” in setting the date.

The Senegalese presidency took note of this sudden change in the calendar by announcing in the evening that Prime Minister Amadou Ba had been “relieved” of his post as head of the election campaign. He will be replaced by Interior Minister Sidiki Kaba, a spokesman said.

Since Monday, President Sall himself has referred the matter to the Constitutional Council for an opinion. The head of state presented recommendations resulting from a “national dialogue” that he convened last week to try to emerge from the crisis caused by the postponement of presidential elections, one of the most serious in recent decades.

President Sall shocked a country considered one of the most stable in West Africa and rocked by power grabs by ordering on February 3 the postponement of elections scheduled for February 25.

“National dialogue” was one of President Macky Sall’s responses to the crisis. The other was a bill seeking amnesty for acts of political violence in recent years, a text that has been widely criticized despite being intended to ease tensions.

After debating all day and observing a break visibly lengthened by the unexpected turn of events, the deputies approved, with 94 votes in favor and 49 against, this text, which is seen by its critics as protecting the perpetrators of serious acts, including homicides, was insulted.

Read alsoSenegal: Clashes and slogans against Macky Sall in Dakar

The project amnesties all offenses or crimes, whether tried or not, committed between February 1, 2021 and February 25, 2024 and “related to demonstrations or having political motives.”

Between 2021 and 2023, Senegal experienced several episodes of unrest, clashes, looting and looting, triggered in particular by the standoff between opponent Ousmane Sonko and the government. In February, Senegal was plagued by further unrest following the announcement of the postponement of elections. Since 2021, dozens of people have been killed, hundreds injured, and hundreds more arrested.

The issue of the application of amnesty to Ousmane Sonko and his possible return to the saddle during the election campaign excited the political class. The Constitutional Council's decisions appear to rule out Ousmane Sonko's return to the competition. Ousmane Sonko, third in the 2019 presidential election and declared candidate in 2024, has been detained since July 2023 and was excluded from the presidential election in which he was one of the favorites.

However, the amnesty could pave the way for his release from prison, as well as that of his number two, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who was chosen by her party as his successor and who could run a campaign as his supporters are loudly demanding in the name of equality of the candidates.

The latest in a series of amnesties passed since independence could, without elaborating, mean the release of dozens of opponents.

The presidency justified the amnesty with the need to “appease the political and social climate.” The law “has the sole aim of reconciliation (…) President Macky Sall does not hide any evil intentions,” assured Farba Ngom, deputy of the presidential camp, during the debate.

But many political and social actors opposed the project and expressed outrage that neither a member of the security forces nor a government official would be held accountable. “This law is a license to continue murdering Senegalese. Amnesty law, amnesia law: not in my name. Justice for the murdered and tortured,” exclaimed MP Guy Marius Sagna.

With AFP

Also read: The postponement of the presidential elections in Senegal is a “huge waste of money” for entrepreneurs

In Burkina Faso former President Thomas Sankara was appointed to

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Haley leaves the scene Biden Trump returns in November

Haley leaves the scene, Biden Trump returns in November

The exit of Nikki Haley, who announced the suspension of her campaign for the Republican nomination, finally paves the way for a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is the inevitable consequence of Super Tuesday, which gave the US president and his predecessor a long winning streak and a large number of candidates for their respective summer congresses. Haley did not support the former president in his speech in Charleston, South Carolina. Instead, she urged him to win the support of moderate Republicans and independent voters who supported her. “It is now up to Donald Trump to win the votes of those inside and outside our party who did not support him.” And I hope that he does,” he said.

“In the best case, politics is about getting people involved in your own cause and not driving them away. And our conservative cause desperately needs more people,” Haley emphasized. Both Trump and Biden were quick to court Haley voters. The president congratulated her on the critical tone she took against Trump in her campaign. He told “the truth” about the tycoon, he said in a statement. Then, referring to Trump's previous claims that he had threatened to “permanently expel” Haley's supporters from his movement, Biden said: “Donald Trump has made it clear that he does not want Nikki Haley's supporters.” I want to be clear: In my campaign There is a place for them.” The tycoon, for his part, did not hesitate to withdraw the fatwà issued some time ago: “It was the most successful Super Tuesday in history and I would also like to invite all Haley supporters to join the largest movement in history. “ Biden “is the enemy” and “is destroying our country,” he wrote in Truth. The former president also received the support of his most powerful domestic enemy, Senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell. “It is clear that former President Trump has gained the necessary support from Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States. “It should come as no surprise that he will have my support as a candidate,” McConnell said after Haley got out. According to calculations, Trump is expected to reach the number of delegates required to officially win the nomination on March 12th. Biden has to wait until March 19th. Then it will be a long road to the vote on November 5th. A preview of what will happen in the coming months will come Thursday evening with the State of the Union address that President Biden will deliver to Congress.

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Hannah Gutierrez Reed the gunsmith from the film Rust is.webp

Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the gunsmith from the film “Rust,” is found guilty of involuntary manslaughter

(CNN) – Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the gunsmith from the film “Rust,” was found guilty Wednesday of involuntary manslaughter and evidence tampering in a New Mexico trial related to the fatal 2021 on-set shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins acquitted that she was killed by a live round of ammunition fired from a prop gun owned by actor Alec Baldwin.

Gutierrez Reed, who was responsible for security and firearms storage on the film's set, was acquitted of a separate charge of tampering with evidence that was brought after prosecutors alleged she was following a police interview with another person that day a “small bag of cocaine” handed over to the shootout.

The involuntary manslaughter charge carries a prison sentence of up to 18 months and a $5,000 fine.

News in development…

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ALBA TCP expresses concern about the Haiti crisis|News|teleSUR

The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America and the People's Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP) expressed this Wednesday “its concern about the serious and ongoing situation” in Haiti.

ALSO READ:

The Security Council meets due to the violent crisis in Haiti

A statement from ALBA-TCP denounces that “the recent violence deepens the crisis and makes a Haiti-led solution, including a broad dialogue between civil society and political actors, more urgent.”

It refers to the fact that violence in Haiti in recent days has led to the displacement of 15,000 people, according to UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric.

Indeed, heavy shootings, looting, clashes with police, kidnappings and arson on Tuesday marked a day in which hundreds of people had to leave refugee camps and their homes to avoid falling victim to armed gangs spreading terror across the country.

In this sense, the ALBA-TCP note states that “it is imperative that peace, democracy and the necessary security conditions be restored in the country.”

Faced with the proposal of a new international intervention, the ALBA-TCP reiterates “the need to coordinate efforts so that Sister Haiti can find the final path to peace and resolve the humanitarian needs of its people through effective cooperation mechanisms without interference.”

The Haitian government on Sunday imposed a state of emergency and a 72-hour curfew that could be extended in the Western department, where the capital Port-au-Prince is located, after the two largest prisons were taken over by criminal gangs, causing the escape of more than 3,000 prisoners.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Ariel Henry is in Puerto Rico.

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The European Commission wants to weaken the environmental laws that

The European Commission wants to weaken the environmental laws that have been approved

Trade Commissioner Dombrovskis is pushing for new regulations on waste and forest protection to be weakened due to resistance at the WTO.

Brussels. The result could hardly have been much clearer: with 587 votes in favor and eight against, on 27 February in Strasbourg, the European Parliament voted in favor of amending the waste shipment regulation, previously agreed with the Council (33 representatives abstained). “The EU will finally take responsibility for its plastic waste, banning its export to non-OECD countries”, rejoiced the parliamentary negotiator, Danish Christian Democrat Pernille Weiss. But at the same time, Valdis Dombrovskis, vice-president of the European Commission responsible for trade policy, had to hear harsh criticism of this export ban in Abu Dhabi. Several developing countries complained to him during the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference that the EU was indirectly imposing environmental standards on them.

Read more about these topics:

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The oldest evidence of human presence in Europe may have

The oldest evidence of human presence in Europe may have been found in Ukraine

WASHINGTON — Ancient stone tools discovered in western Ukraine may be the oldest known evidence of early humans in Europe, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The chipped stones, intentionally formed from volcanic rock, were taken from a quarry in Korolevo in the 1970s. Archaeologists used new methods to date the layers of sedimentary rock surrounding the tools to more than a million years ago.

“This is the oldest dated evidence of the existence of a type of human in Europe,” said Mads Faurschou Knudsen, a geophysicist at Aarhus University, Denmark, and co-author of the new study.

He said it's not clear which human ancestors made the tools, but it could be Homo erectus, the first species to walk upright and master the use of fire.

“We don’t have any fossil remains, so we can’t be sure,” said Roman Garba, an archaeologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences and co-author of the study.

The shattered stone tools were likely used for cutting meat and perhaps scraping animal hides, he added.

Researchers believe the tools could be 1.4 million years old. But other experts say the study's methodology suggests they could be just over a million years old, putting them in roughly the same time period as other ancient tools unearthed in Spain.

The oldest such stone tools were found in East Africa and are 2.8 million years old, said Rick Potts, who directs the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program.

The Ukrainian site is important because “it is the oldest site this far north,” suggesting that early humans who spread from Africa with these tools were able to survive in a variety of environments.

“The first humans, using this stone tool technology, were able to settle every place from hot Iberia (Spain) to Ukraine, where the seasons were at least very cold – that is an amazing level of adaptability,” Mr Potts emphasized.

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