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AsiaOne
18-05-2025
- Business
- AsiaOne
Gulf states use opulence and flattery to win Trump's heart, World News
ABU DHABI - Escorts of camels and Arabian horses. A luxury plane offered as a gift. Hundreds of men dancing with drums and scimitars before marble palaces. Extravagant displays of opulence and adulation greeted US President Donald Trump at every stage of his four-day swing through the Gulf, which wrapped up on Friday (May 16). His itineraries in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates appeared tailor-made for a real-estate-developer-turned-president, who can be susceptible to flattery, transactional in his foreign policy dealings and is attracted to extreme wealth. To the extent those displays were designed to curry favour with Trump, they very well might have worked. While the Gulf states announced trillions in potential investments in the US during his visit, they also got plenty in return. On Thursday, the US agreed to partner with the UAE to build a massive artificial intelligence campus in that Gulf state. In a surprise move on Tuesday, Trump agreed to lift sanctions on Syria at the request of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, even as some of Trump's own advisers recommended against rapprochement with Syria, whose new president was once an al-Qaeda commander. "Oh, what I do for the crown prince!" the president gushed to the crowd at the investment conference in Riyadh where he announced the decision. Trump's regional swing could serve as a template for other host nations looking for a way to the president's heart, analysts said. The treatment Trump received throughout the week seemed almost a global extension of what regularly plays out in Washington, where Cabinet members are quick to praise Trump's acumen and vision, and often outline the administration's accomplishments in superlative terms. "They played their hand well," Laura Blumenfield, Middle East analyst at John Hopkins University's School of International Studies in Washington said of the Gulf state leaders. "The choreography of Trump's royal tour was impressive." Trump left the Middle East without securing a ceasefire or renewal of humanitarian aid for Gaza, however. Democrats and good government watchdogs raised concerns about Trump's decision-making being swayed by the regal spectacle and whether his diplomatic efforts could be used to further his family's extensive business operations in the Arabian Peninsula. "It feels like Trump is being played by some of these leaders with the ostentatious, ceremonial pomp," said Brett Bruen, a former foreign policy adviser to Democratic President Barack Obama and president of the Global Situation Room consultancy. "A lot of this raises questions whether Trump is taking personal prizes or really advancing US interests in the region," he added. The Trump administration has repeatedly said it is committed to transparency and that it complies with all ethics laws to avoid conflicts of interests. "Countries in the Middle East are 'pulling out all the stops' because America is strong again," said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesman. "Foreign leaders know President Trump is the dealmaker-in-chief whose peace through strength policies have restored America's dominance." Royal treatment The pomp and pageantry began before Trump even touched down in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday for the first stop of his trip. As Air Force One descended toward Riyadh, Saudi F-15 fighter jets appeared close alongside to escort the presidential plane. After the president walked down a lavender carpet, his motorcade was escorted to the Royal Court on a road lined by mounted Arabian horses. Not to be outdone, Qatar gave Air Force One a fighter jet escort of its own as it descended into Doha on Wednesday. And instead of mere horses, the Qataris added camels into the mix, as well as Tesla Cybertrucks, which have become popular among some Trump supporters due to their affiliation with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a close Trump adviser. A traditional dhow sailboat with an American flag sail bobbed in the nearby bay. In Qatar's elaborate royal court, the Emiri Diwan, Trump gushed at the quality of the marble. Trump's own style tends heavily toward the white stone and gold leafing, elements that feature heavily at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and which he has added to the White House since taking office. The emir had previously offered Trump a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane to replace Air Force One, a gift that is raising constitutional questions and ethical concerns even from some fellow Republicans. And on Thursday, he offered Trump a series of personal compliments, albeit ones related to diplomacy rather than style. "We are very excited," the emir said. "I know that you are a man of peace. I know that you want to bring peace to this region." Trump, throughout the trip, was quick to offer compliments in return. "I like him a lot. I like him too much," Trump said of bin Salman, without mentioning the leader's alleged role in ordering the murder of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Bin Salman has denied involvement in the killing and former President Joe Biden's administration determined that he had immunity from a lawsuit filed against him in the US UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, Trump said later in the week, is a "magnificent man." Upon landing in Abu Dhabi on Thursday for the last stop of his trip, Trump toured the massive, ornate Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque with the emirate's crown prince. Trump marveled at its beauty and what he called "an incredible culture." At the Qasr al Watan royal palace that evening, Sheikh Mohamed presented Trump with a final gift on his trip: The Order of Zayed. The baroque pendant necklace, the country's highest civilian honour, is made of pure gold. [[nid:718118]]
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Spike in Saudi Mers cases sparks outbreak fears ahead of Hajj
A spike in Mers cases in Saudi Arabia has ignited fears of an outbreak during Hajj, the Muslim festival that sees over three million people congregate in Mecca in early June. Since March, at least nine people have been infected with the virus, a close but far more deadly cousin of Covid-19, the Saudi Arabian health ministry has said. Two have died. Six of the most recent cases were in healthcare workers, who were infected from a single symptomatic patient in a hospital in Riyadh. However, the source of infection remains unknown in two cases, sparking fears that the virus could be spreading in the wider Saudi community under the radar. Airfinity, the disease analytics firm, warned the cases 'raise the risk of outbreaks and potential international spread amidst the upcoming Hajj when millions will gather.' In several pictures of US President Donald Trump's visit to Riyadh earlier this week, waiters and other Saudi bystanders were seen wearing face masks. The Hajj – which takes place every year in the beginning of June – sees more than three million people confined to a 12-square kilometre area and is famously a breeding ground of respiratory diseases like influenza and bacterial meningitis. Since 2012, a total of 2613 laboratory-confirmed cases of Mers have been reported globally and more than 80 per cent of those occurred in Saudi Arabia. The case fatality rate is 36 per cent. Covid-19's case fatality rate, by comparison, ranges between 0.1 per cent to 5 per cent, depending on the country and time period, according to John Hopkins University. Mers is a zoonotic virus carried by camels and can be contracted via touching infected animals, consuming their meat or milk, or eating food that has been contaminated with camel faeces, urine, or spit. Human to human transmission, via respiratory droplets, is generally confined to enclosed hospital settings but there have been instances of household and community transmission. The main symptoms include a high temperature, cough, shortness of breath, muscle aches, diarrhoea, and being sick. Most people who die from Mers have at least one underlying medical condition like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or high blood pressure. There is currently no vaccine available to protect against Mers, although clinical trials are currently underway. Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
CNN
12-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
Falling asleep to your favorite show doesn't have to ruin your sleep, experts say
You've heard the rule: No TV before bed. But many people find that it helps them fall asleep if they listen to something –– audiobooks, music, podcasts or TV shows. A 2018 study found that more than half of people with sleep disturbances use music as a sleep aid. It is poor sleep hygiene to look at screens to scroll or watch a show before bedtime, but what if you aren't looking, just listening? 'It's like Goldilocks,' said sleep medicine specialist Dr. Rachel Salas, professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. 'It's a matter of what works for you … It's not only the practices of your bedtime routine, but your environment, all the things.' Everyone is different, and some people might get great sleep if they fall asleep listening to something, Salas said. However, there are some practices to keep in mind to make sure you are maximizing the benefits and avoiding potential pitfalls. The key to listening to audiobooks, podcasts, music or TV to fall asleep is making sure it is helping you wind down instead of waking you up, said Dr. Shalini Paruthi, sleep medicine attending physician at John J. Cochran Veterans Hospital in St. Louis and adjunct professor at St. Louis University School of Medicine. 'If listening to something actually keeps a person more engaged or awake and therefore replaces sleep time, this can be detrimental to health,' she said in an email. 'It is recommended that adults obtain at least 7 hours of sleep regularly for optimal performance.' On the other hand, a predictable kind of noise can help tell your body it's time to wind down, Salas added. 'If you find that that's part of your bedtime routine, and it's kind of comforting and relaxing … that's great,' she said. Try choosing content to listen to that will allow you to transition into sleep, added Dr. Lindsay Browning, a psychologist and sleep expert in Berkshire in the United Kingdom. 'Choose something not too engaging so that your brain isn't motivated to stay awake and fight sleep to pay attention to it,' she said in an email. A sleep story may be a better choice than audio of a book you want to read. Shows you have heard before and know how they end might be better than falling asleep to a nailbiter. A soundtrack for sleep might help you get to sleep, but it doesn't always keep you asleep if it keeps going all night, Browning said. 'It's important to set an auto timer to mute the sounds as soon after falling asleep as possible,' she said. If the show, podcast, or music you are playing has unexpected noises, frequencies or volumes, it might alert your brain to pay attention, Salas said. The startling noise doesn't always wake you up fully, but it can cause many little awakenings you aren't aware of. That will disturb your sleep nonetheless, she added. One steady sound, like white noise or ASMR, can help your sleep quality, especially if you live in a noisy area, Salas added. '(If) bars close at a certain time and people are outside, walking home and talking or yelling, that's going to disrupt your sleep,' she said. A consistent and non-alarming noise can stifle those kinds of ambient noise, she said. Sometimes listening to something to fall asleep isn't just a nice part of a bedtime routine –– it's a way to quiet racing thoughts at night. Some proactive steps during the day may help, Browning said. 'If you find that your brain is too active as you try to fall asleep, which keeps you awake, you could try to address those busy thoughts and worries earlier in the day,' she said. Methods include having a dedicated time earlier in the day to think about those worries or utilizing cognitive shuffling, a technique that involves thinking up random and non-emotionally charged words to take your mind off of your racing thoughts, Browning said. 'It's a much better idea to try to learn ways of quieting a busy mind at night that don't require you to mask those unwanted thoughts with an external sound,' Browning said. If you are using listening to something to help with insomnia and it doesn't seem to help after a two-to-four-week period, it might be time to see a board-certified sleep physician and get to the root of the problem, Paruthi said. 'There are several proven therapies that work well for insomnia treatment such as cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia, or when appropriate, medications can be considered,' she said.
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
AI still can't beat humans at reading social cues
AI models have progressed rapidly in recent years and can already outperform humans in various tasks, from generating basic code to dominating games like chess and Go. But despite massive computing power and billions of dollars in investor funding, these advanced models still can't hold up to humans when it comes to truly understanding how real people interact with one another in the world. In other words, AI still fundamentally struggles at 'reading the room.' That's the claim made in a new paper by researchers from Johns Hopkins University. In the study, researchers asked a group of human volunteers to watch three-second video clips and rate the various ways individuals in those videos were interacting with one another. They then tasked more than 350 AI models—including image, video, and language-based systems—with predicting how the humans had rated those interactions. While the humans completed the task with ease, the AI models, regardless of their training data, struggled to accurately interpret what was happening in the clips. The researchers say their findings suggest that AI models still have significant difficulty understanding human social cues in real-world environments. That insight could have major implications for the growing industry of AI-enabled driverless cars and robots, which inherently need to navigate the physical world alongside people. 'Anytime you want an AI system to interact with humans, you want to be able to know what those humans are doing and what groups of humans are doing with each other,' John Hopkins University assistant professor of cognitive science and paper lead author Leyla Isik told Popular Science. 'This really highlights how a lot of these models fall short on those tasks.' Isik will present the research findings today at the International Conference on Learning Representations. Though previous research has shown that AI models can accurately describe what's happening in still images at a level comparable to humans, this study aimed to see whether that still holds true for video. To do that, Isik says she and her fellow researchers selected hundreds of videos from a computer vision dataset and clipped them down to three seconds each. They then narrowed the sample to include only videos featuring two humans interacting. Human volunteers viewed these clips, and answered a series of questions about what was happening, rated on a scale from 1 to 5. The questions ranged from objective prompts like 'Do you think these bodies are facing each other?' to more subjective ones, such as whether the interaction appeared emotionally positive or negative. In general, the human respondents tended to give similar answers, as reflected in their ratings—suggesting that people share a basic observational understanding of social interactions. The researchers then posed similar types of questions to image, video, and language models. (The language models were given human-written captions to analyze instead of raw video.) Across the board, the AI models failed to demonstrate the same level of consensus as the human participants. The language models generally performed better than the image and video models, but Isik notes that may be partly due to the fact that they were analyzing captions that were already quite descriptive. The researchers primarily evaluated open-access models, some of which were several years old. The study did not include the latest models recently released by leading AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Still, the stark contrast between human and AI responses suggests there may be something fundamentally different about how models and humans process social and contextual information. 'It's not enough to just see an image and recognize objects and faces,' John Hopkins University doctoral student and paper co-author Kathy Garcia said in a statement. 'We need AI to understand the story that is unfolding in a scene. Understanding the relationships, context, and dynamics of social interactions is the next step, and this research suggests there might be a blind spot in AI model development.' The findings come as tech companies race to integrate AI into an increasing number of physical robots—a concept often referred to as 'embodied AI.' Cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin have become test beds of this new era thanks to the increasing presence of driverless Waymo robotaxis sharing the roads with human-driven vehicles. Limited understanding of complex environments has led some driverless cars to behave erratically or even get stuck in loops, driving in circles. While some recent studies suggest that driverless vehicles may currently be less prone to accidents than the average human driver, federal regulators have nonetheless opened up investigations into Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox for driving behavior that allegedly violated safety laws. Other companies—like Figure AI, Boston Dynamics, and Tesla —are taking things a step further by developing AI-enabled humanoid robots designed to work alongside humans in manufacturing environments. Figure has already signed a deal with BMW to deploy one of its bipedal models at a facility in South Carolina, though its exact purpose remains somewhat vague. In these settings, properly understanding human social cues and context is even more critical, as even small misjudgments in intention run the risk of injury. Going a step further, some experts have even suggested that advanced humanoid robots could one day assist with elder and child care. Isik suggested the results of the study mean there are still several steps that need to be taken before that vision becomes a reality. '[The research] really highlights the importance of bringing neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI into these more dynamic real world settings.' Isik said.
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
James Webb Space Telescope Captures Images of Individual Planets in Distant Star System
Astronomers using the mighty James Webb Space Telescope have captured direct images of four planets in a star system 130 light years from Earth — an astonishingly eagle-eyed feat of cosmic photography. The planets, all young gas giants, were spotted in HR 8799, a system that's only around 30 million years old. Though already extensively probed, these latest observations, as detailed in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, provide compelling evidence that the nascent worlds are rich in carbon dioxide — a promising sign that they formed in a similar way to the gas giants of our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn. "By spotting these strong carbon dioxide features, we have shown there is a sizable fraction of heavier elements, like carbon, oxygen, and iron, in these planets' atmospheres," lead author William Balmer, an astrophysicist at John Hopkins University, said in a NASA statement. It's rare that astronomers capture a direct glimpse of exoplanets. Generally, they produce little to no light of their own, and are vastly outshone by the light of their host star, plus the untold number of luminous objects in the night sky. As such, even detecting an exoplanet is rare; so far, only 6,000 worlds outside our solar system have been discovered, and they're usually spotted by searching for dips in the light of a star they cause when they pass in front of one from our perspective. In their work, Balmer and his team used a special instrument, known as a coronagraph, built into the James Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) specifically designed to blot out the light of stars while searching for exoplanets. "It's like putting your thumb up in front of the sun when you're looking up at the sky," Balmer told Agence France-Presse. That allowed the astronomers to see the "light that is emitted from the planet itself, as opposed to the fingerprint of that light from the host star," Balmer added. The incredible snapshots provided astronomers with a clear look at the presence of CO2 in the distant exoplanets, which could lead to key insights on gas giant formation throughout the cosmos. It's widely believed that Jupiter and Saturn were born by first forming heavy, solid cores that pulled in lighter elements nearby — like carbon dioxide — slowly accreting mass over time. But another theory known as disk instability — which is pretty controversial — holds that gas giants can also spawn in the massive protoplanetary disk that surrounds a star shortly after it's born. Clumps of matter in this circumstellar cloud, the theory holds, could rapidly collapse into protoplanets. Balmer and his team's findings suggest that the traditional "core accretion" is the one in evidence in the young star system. It's too early to declare that this is the prevailing way that gas giants form throughout the universe, but it's a valuable clue. "We have other lines of evidence that hint at these four HR 8799 planets forming using this bottom-up approach," said coauthor Laurent Pueyo, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in the NASA statement. "How common is this for planets we can directly image? We don't know yet, but we're proposing more Webb observations to answer that question." "We want to take pictures of other solar systems and see how they're similar or different when compared to ours," Balmer added. "From there, we can try to get a sense of how weird our solar system really is — or how normal." More on astronomical quartets: Scientists Discover Four Intriguing Planets Around Closest Single-Star Solar System to Earth
