Top Asian News 5:42 a.m. GMT
The US and China say they have agreed on a framework to resolve their trade disputes
LONDON (AP) — Senior U.S. and Chinese negotiators have agreed on a framework to get their trade negotiations back on track after a series of disputes that threatened to derail them, both sides have said. The announcement came at the end of two days of talks in the British capital that wrapped up late Tuesday. The meetings appeared to focus on finding a way to resolve disputes over mineral and technology exports that had shaken a fragile truce on trade reached in Geneva last month. It's not clear whether any progress was made on the more fundamental differences over China's sizeable trade surplus with the United States.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
27 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
AI chatbots need more books to learn from. These libraries are opening their stacks
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Everything ever said on the internet was just the start of teaching artificial intelligence about humanity. Tech companies are now tapping into an older repository of knowledge: the library stacks. Nearly one million books published as early as the 15th century — and in 254 languages — are part of a Harvard University collection being released to AI researchers Thursday. Also coming soon are troves of old newspapers and government documents held by Boston's public library. Cracking open the vaults to centuries-old tomes could be a data bonanza for tech companies battling lawsuits from living novelists, visual artistsand others whose creative works have been scooped up without their consent to train AI chatbots. 'It is a prudent decision to start with public domain data because that's less controversial right now than content that's still under copyright,' said Burton Davis, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft. Davis said libraries also hold 'significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data' that's missing from the past few decades of online commentary that AI chatbots have mostly learned from. Supported by 'unrestricted gifts' from Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the Harvard-based Institutional Data Initiative is working with libraries around the world on how to make their historic collections AI-ready in a way that also benefits libraries and the communities they serve. 'We're trying to move some of the power from this current AI moment back to these institutions,' said Aristana Scourtas, who manages research at Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab. 'Librarians have always been the stewards of data and the stewards of information.' Harvard's newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter's handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees. The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law and agriculture, all of it meticulously preserved and organized by generations of librarians. It promises to be a boon for AI developers trying to improve the accuracy and reliability of their systems. 'A lot of the data that's been used in AI training has not come from original sources,' said the data initiative's executive director, Greg Leppert, who is also chief technologist at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. This book collection goes "all the way back to the physical copy that was scanned by the institutions that actually collected those items,' he said. Before ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI frenzy, most AI researchers didn't think much about the provenance of the passages of text they pulled from Wikipedia, from social media forums like Reddit and sometimes from deep repositories of pirated books. They just needed lots of what computer scientists call tokens — units of data, each of which can represent a piece of a word. Harvard's new AI training collection has an estimated 242 billion tokens, an amount that's hard for humans to fathom but it's still just a drop of what's being fed into the most advanced AI systems. Facebook parent company Meta, for instance, has said the latest version of its AI large language model was trained on more than 30 trillion tokens pulled from text, images and videos. Meta is also battling a lawsuit from comedian Sarah Silverman and other published authors who accuse the company of stealing their books from 'shadow libraries' of pirated works. Now, with some reservations, the real libraries are standing up. OpenAI, which is also fighting a string of copyright lawsuits, donated $50 million this year to a group of research institutions including Oxford University's 400-year-old Bodleian Library, which is digitizing rare texts and using AI to help transcribe them. When the company first reached out to the Boston Public Library, one of the biggest in the U.S., the library made clear that any information it digitized would be for everyone, said Jessica Chapel, its chief of digital and online services. 'OpenAI had this interest in massive amounts of training data. We have an interest in massive amounts of digital objects. So this is kind of just a case that things are aligning,' Chapel said. Digitization is expensive. It's been painstaking work, for instance, for Boston's library to scan and curate dozens of New England's French-language newspapers that were widely read in the late 19th and early 20th century by Canadian immigrant communities from Quebec. Now that such text is of use as training data, it helps bankroll projects that librarians want to do anyway. 'We've been very clear that, 'Hey, we're a public library,'" Chapel said. 'Our collections are held for public use, and anything we digitized as part of this project will be made public.' Harvard's collection was already digitized starting in 2006 for another tech giant, Google, in its controversial project to create a searchable online library of more than 20 million books. Google spent years beating back legal challenges from authors to its online book library, which included many newer and copyrighted works. It was finally settled in 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. Now, for the first time, Google has worked with Harvard to retrieve public domain volumes from Google Books and clear the way for their release to AI developers. Copyright protections in the U.S. typically last for 95 years, and longer for sound recordings. How useful all of this will be for the next generation of AI tools remains to be seen as the data gets shared Thursday on the Hugging Face platform, which hosts datasets and open-source AI models that anyone can download. The book collection is more linguistically diverse than typical AI data sources. Fewer than half the volumes are in English, though European languages still dominate, particularly German, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin. A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be 'immensely critical' for the tech industry's efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said. 'At a university, you have a lot of pedagogy around what it means to reason,' Leppert said. 'You have a lot of scientific information about how to run processes and how to run analyses.' At the same time, there's also plenty of outdated data, from debunked scientific and medical theories to racist narratives. 'When you're dealing with such a large data set, there are some tricky issues around harmful content and language," said Kristi Mukk, a coordinator at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab who said the initiative is trying to provide guidance about mitigating the risks of using the data, to 'help them make their own informed decisions and use AI responsibly.'
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
More arrests after third night of unrest in N. Ireland town
Riot police were pelted with petrol bombs, masonry and fireworks and nine officers were wounded in the third night of unrest in Northern Ireland, police said on Thursday amid simmering anti-immigrant anger. The three days of clashes in Ballymena erupted on Monday night after two teenagers were arrested for an alleged attempted rape of a young girl at the weekend. Police have not confirmed the ethnicity of the teenagers, who remain in custody and had asked for a Romanian interpreter in court. The crowds eventually dispersed late Wednesday without a repeat of the chaotic scenes seen on Monday and Tuesday when houses and businesses were torched and 32 police officers were injured. But in Larne, around 20 miles (32 kilometres) away, local media reported that masked men on Wednesday torched a leisure centre that was temporarily sheltering people from Ballymena who had been evacuated from their homes. Police condemned Wednesday night's violence, which included a hatchet being thrown at officers, calling it "completely unacceptable disorder". Six more people were arrested, the Police Service of Northern Ireland said. "As a result of a significant policing operation calm was restored to all areas at around 1:00 am (0000 GMT) this morning," the force added. Three teenage boys aged 15, 17 and 18 were due to appear in court on Thursday having been charged with rioting, according to police. A total of 41 officers have now been hurt in the three nights of unrest, the PSNI said, though most of the injuries were not severe. Ministers from every party in the province's power-sharing executive strongly condemned "the racially motivated violence witnessed in recent days", while UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer denounced the "mindless violence". The UK's Northern Ireland minister Hilary Benn, who visited Ballymena on Thursday, said he "utterly condemned the terrible scenes of civil disorder". - 'Terrifying' - Police called the violence "racist thuggery", deployed riot officers with dogs and asked forces in England and Wales for help quelling the unrest. Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson said Thursday that "this criminal behaviour has no place on the streets of Northern Ireland and is completely unacceptable". On the fire in Larne, police said: "Shockingly, people were inside the building at the time of this fire -– thankfully no injuries were reported." Ballymena residents have described "terrifying" scenes in which attackers had targeted "foreigners" over the previous days. Some people fixed signs to their houses indicating they were Filipino residents, or hung up British flags. Political commentator Alex Kane, a former Ulster Unionist Party communications chief, told AFP "most of those involved in the rioting... were from the working-class loyalist community" who support Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK. "This is a demographic which feels left behind" by various political and social forces, he added. "An unsettled community, particularly when it is mostly composed of the young, is often quick to anger and easy to mobilise on the street. It's a problem which won't disappear any time soon," he warned. While acknowledging the protests were a "bit extreme", college student Lee Stewart described them as necessary "to defend our own people". "We view it as the police aren't doing anything to stop what is going on to those poor wee girls," Stewart, 18, said. bur-pmu-jwp/jkb/phz/giv
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Plane crashes near Indian airport and judge rules on Mahmoud Khalil detainment: Morning Rundown
Donald Trump's rhetoric about L.A. protestors stands in contrast to his reaction on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters attacked the Capitol. Israel is considering a unilateral strike on Iran, sources say. And renters are on the rise in America's suburbs. Here's what to know today. An Air India plane with 242 people on board has crashed near a major international airport in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. Air India, the country's flagship carrier, confirmed that Flight 171 from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick was 'involved in an accident today after take-off' and offered 'full cooperation to the authorities investigating this incident.' This is Morning Rundown, a weekday newsletter to start your day. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. The airline said 12 crew members and 230 passengers were onboard, including 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, 1 Canadian national, and 7 Portuguese nationals. The number of casualties is not yet known. Ahmedabad Airport temporarily suspended all flight operations after the crash, which happened in a residential area near the airport just before 5 a.m. ET on Thursday. Hospitals were put on high alert. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: 'The tragedy in Ahmedabad has stunned and saddened us. It is heartbreaking beyond words. In this sad hour, my thoughts are with everyone affected by it. Have been in touch with Ministers and authorities who are working to assist those affected.' Britain's Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer called 'the scenes emerging of a London-bound plane carrying many British nationals crashing in the Indian city of Ahmedabad are devastating.' Read the full story here and follow live updates. Protests against ICE immigration raids have popped up across the nation while protests persisted in Los Angeles. In California, 700 Marines were mobilized in the L.A. area, and a curfew was enforced for a second night in a row in downtown. Meanwhile, a court hearing is set today in San Francisco over the state's lawsuit seeking to block the military from involving itself in immigration enforcement. In San Antonio, protesters gathered at a peaceful rally outside the Alamo to speak out against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's deployment of the Texas National Guard. In Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump spent yesterday evening attending the opening night of 'Les Misérables' at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This is Morning Rundown, a weekday newsletter to start your day. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. The president promised this week a swift response to any violence against law enforcement by protesters in L.A., writing on social media, 'If they spit, we will hit.' His low tolerance for such violence is a turnaround from Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters attacked the Capitol in an attempt to block the certification of Joe Biden's 2020 election win. No National Guard help arrived for hours, despite pleas from those inside the building. And on the first day of his second term, Trump pardoned most of the rioters. The White House said Trump is fulfilling his mandate in L.A. to secure the border, make sure federal officials can execute his plan and restore law and order. Attorney General Pam Bondi, when asked about how Trump is handling California versus Jan. 6, 2021, said the situations are 'very different.' Some critics were quick to point out the change in attitude, including Michael Fanone, a former D.C. police officer who was attacked on Jan. 6. He called Trump a 'hypocrite' and said, 'Had those people storming the Capitol been illegal immigrants or Black people' or another group Trump's base took issue with, 'then they would have said 'open fire.'' Read the full story here. Republicans are barreling toward a critical deadline to lift the debt ceiling — and say there's no 'Plan B' if they don't pass the massive Trump agenda bill in time. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tapped eight new members to join the CDC's independent vaccine advisory panel, two days after firing the previous group. Here's who he selected. Trump's political statements at a rally this week at Fort Bragg raises questions about whether military regulations were violated. Progressive activist David Hogg said he won't run again for vice chair of the Democratic National Committee after the DNC called for a redo of the February election that elevated him to the post. Despite touting Trump's endorsement in the New Jersey primary, GOP candidate Jack Ciattarelli is looking to focus his campaign against Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill on a different political leader. Israel is considering taking military action against Iran, most likely without U.S. support, in the coming days, according to five people with knowledge of the situation. The potential move would mark a dramatic break with the Trump administration. It would also happen in spite of Trump being in advanced discussions with Tehran about a deal to to curtail its nuclear program and include provisions about uranium enrichment that Israel views as unacceptable. U.S. and other officials are on alert awaiting the possibility of Israel's striking Iran, the officials said. The notion of a new front in a simmering conflict has prompted the administration to order all embassies within striking distance of Iranian missiles, aircraft and other assets to send cables with assessments about danger and about measures to mitigate risks to Americans and U.S. infrastructure, two sources said. Read the full story here. The Trump administration, for now, cannot deport or detain pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil based on a determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a federal judge ruled. U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz's preliminary injunction will not take effect until Friday morning, which gives the government time to appeal. Khalil, a Columbia University student who played an active role in campus protests last year, was one of the first protesters targeted by the Trump administration when he was arrested in March. Rubio cited an obscure provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to justify Khalil's removal from the U.S. and said he posed a national security risk. Fairbairz said in his ruling yesterday that Khalil's 'career and reputation are being damaged and his speech is being chilled — and this adds up to irreparable harm.' Read the full story here. And last week, ICE denied Khalil's request to move to a detention center in New Jersey to be closer to his wife and newborn son despite an agency policy that requires parents and legal guardians to be transferred to facilities closer to their children if they are primary caretakers or have custody of minor children. Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys frontman who is widely considered one of the most gifted singers, songwriters and producers in the history of American pop music, has died at the age of 82. Jurors in disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's retrial found him guilty of sexually assaulting one woman and not guilty of assaulting another. They couldn't reach a verdict on a third woman's allegations. The Indiana Pacers took Game 3 of the NBA Finals in a 116-107 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder after unleashing their best defense and hustle on offense in the fourth quarter. In slashing billions in research funding, the Trump administration seems to have banked on the idea that the public will see much of scientific research as wasteful or arcane. So a number of researchers are finding new ways to appeal directly to everyday Americans. The first-ever images of the sun's south pole were released, offering fresh insights into its magnetic field and how it produces space weather. America's housing affordability problem has seeped into suburbs — so much so that it has become easier to rent than buy in several areas near major cities, according to recent analysis looking at rentership from 2018 to 2023. Among the metros where nearby suburbs have become majority-renter communities are Dallas, Houston, Miami, Boston and Philadelphia. From my perch in Los Angeles, where renting feels more like the norm than the exception, I find the shift in who has a stake in America's suburbs to be eye-opening. As experts told intern Evie Steele for this story, renting is a way for families to get the space and lifestyle of suburbia without the cost of a mortgage, which has risen sharply since the pandemic. And the appeal of suburbs doesn't seem like it'll fade anytime soon. — Elizabeth Robinson, newsletter editor When spending a lot of time outdoors, experts recommend wearing clothing with built-in sun protection. The NBC Select team consulted dermatologists on the best UPF hats to consider this summer. Plus, dermatologists lay out the major differences between American and Korean sunscreen. Sign up to The Selection newsletter for hands-on product reviews, expert shopping tips and a look at the best deals and sales each week. Thanks for reading today's Morning Rundown. Today's newsletter was curated for you by Elizabeth Robinson. If you're a fan, please send a link to your family and friends. They can sign up here. This article was originally published on
