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News18
08-05-2025
- Politics
- News18
Operation Sindoor: When India's Women Warriors Gave Pakistan The Perfect Response
Last Updated: At the first press meet, to give details of Operation Sindoor, two women officers, Sofiya Qureshi and Vyomika Singh, did the briefing The visuals of the wailing women as they lost their loved ones in the Pahalgam terror attack still stand etched in memory. Operation Sindoor was so named to avenge the killing of men while their women cried. But this is not the only message the Indian government wants to give to Pakistan. It's also a rebuttal to those terrorists who taunted the family members who asked, 'Why us?" by saying, 'Ask Modi". The government response to this was to get women to respond. At the first press meet, to give details of Operation Sindoor, two women officers, Sofiya Qureshi and Vyomika Singh, did the briefing. Sofiya joined the Indian Army Corps of Signals in 1999 and rose to prominence in 2016 as the first woman officer. And Vyomika Singh is an accomplished helicopter pilot. The second press conference had them brief about the continuation of Operation Sindoor, where India attacked the airbases in Lahore. Interestingly, this time the same women were asked to brief, giving details about the continuation of this operation. But this time round, both the officers were seen in combat uniform. The message again behind this is very clear: not only was it a story about women's empowerment, but it was actually about women fighting back, like the widows and family members of those who lost their lives in the Pahalgam terror attack. In fact, one of the cardinal principles of this government has been Nari Shakti, of women who break glass ceilings. While there has been initial resistance for women in combat roles in our armed forces, largely because of the efforts of the Prime Minister, he has ensured that women also emerge as fighters when it comes to the armed forces. In fact, it has often been noticed that when the Prime Minister travels, he is guarded or accompanied by a few women officers as well. The messaging behind this is very clear. Women don't have to be seen as mere objects as much as combative fighters, and therefore the country's national security is safe in the hands of these women in uniform as India unleashes an aggressive battle against Pakistan. After the attacks, it is also sending out the message that everyone is capable of taking a stand. In a rebuttal to a society that is considered to be conservative and doesn't allow women to step out, as in Pakistan, women in combat, as they were shown at the second press conference, flanked by the foreign secretary. It was very clear that this was a powerful message of women in combat, which was sent out to Pakistan. The final words of the foreign secretary, 'We will join you soon", sounded befitting for Pakistan. And he was flanked by Qureshi as well as Singh, and this was believed to be the best, toughest revenge and answer to the crime in which 26 lives were lost. Get breaking news, in-depth analysis, and expert perspectives on everything from politics to crime and society. Stay informed with the latest India news only on News18. Download the News18 App to stay updated! First Published:
Daily Mail
06-05-2025
- Daily Mail
I visited Jeju Island in South Korea, where you can feast with booze for £20 a head and meet 70-year-old women who freedive for a living
I'm standing on a black lava beach besides a huge, natural, rocky volcanic sea-castle, talking to a 70 year old free-diving fisherwoman called Nari about her latest catch of conch, sea-slugs and abalone. She's telling me that the best place to eat them (in a spicy and delicious sauce) is in the seafood restaurant right behind me, lodged between the Pie Shop (named: 'Pie Shop'), next to the shamanic ritual temple, the inevitable 7/11, not far from the Sex Museum. And if all that sounds a bit unlikely, then so it should: because I am chatting with one of the haenyeo, the female seafisherfolk of Jeju – an island (population 600,000, pronounced Jay-Joo) off the south coast of Korea, a place which simultaneously manages to be beautiful, ugly, unique, peculiar, and always compelling. It's like an Iceland paired with a Seychelle half-covered in suburban Los Angeles and – some say, it is the most weirdly Korean place in Korea. It is also the most popular domestic destination for Koreans, who love its fine subtropical beaches for swimming and surfing, and its historic villages, plush resorts, UNESCO-listed lava tubes, boutique hotels, and its many brilliant hiking trails in undulant forests. All of which benefit from an accessibly mild climate when the rest of Korea freezes. Jeju is properly hot in summer. Indeed, such is the appeal of Jeju in these parts, Seoul-Jeju is the single most popular air corridor in the world – making Jeju a brilliant, accessible diversion if you have a few days stopover in Seoul. That's exactly what I did. Two days ago I was wandering Seoul's ginseng alleys, herbal emporiums and epic seafood markets, its futuristic museums and its antique palaces. I also made sure to enjoy Seoul's frenetic, neon-lit nightlife in places like buzzy, studenty Hongdae, or south of the river around Gangnam (yes, that Gangnam) where uppercrust Koreans flaunt their wealth, while young, beautiful and businesslike Koreans dream up their K-pop. But now here I am, after just a 50 minute flight, in celebrated Jeju – and with a hire car, because Jeju is not small. On the upside, it is cheap: you can feast with booze for £20. The history of Jeju explains its unique status. For a long time it was not quite Korean, even as Koreans craved the place. It is also culturally unique: with elements of a matriarchal society. Hence perhaps the diving women – as Nari says to me, with a mischievous grin, 'all the men disappeared in the 18th century, to go to war - or maybe they are just a bit useless'. Likewise, the language has a dialect of its own, and those shamanic rituals have sincerely persisted - you might catch one in a rural village. Look for enigmatic statues of frowning men; known as 'grandfather statues', they date back hundreds of years and they protect each settlement from evil forces (sometimes much needed, the Japanese did bad things here in the 30s and 40s, and the brutal Korean War didn't skip the isle). The day ends in a suitably atmospheric Jeju spot, in the island's glittering, surf-crashed far west. Some of the female freedivers that Sean met, such as the one pictured, are world famous for their ability to swim without oxygen tanks Here, colossal windmills march toward the sea like exercising giants, their arms gyrating in Jeju's frequent gusts (best find sheltered coasts in these conditions). As the sun sinks low, the warm wind dies away, and an ancient stillness descends over the nearest 7/11. Then I spy a neon sign of a spider crab above a cozy gastropub, beckoning me in for more excellent shellfish - perhaps caught this morning by a 79-year-old woman in a wetsuit. Which is totally Jeju.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Two undergrads built an AI speech model to rival NotebookLM
A pair of undergrads, neither with extensive AI expertise, say that they've created an openly available AI model that can generate podcast-style clips similar to Google's NotebookLM. The market for synthetic speech tools is vast and growing. ElevenLabs is one of the largest players, but there's no shortage of challengers (see PlayAI, Sesame, and so on). Investors believe that these tools have immense potential. According to PitchBook, startups developing voice AI tech raised over $398 million in VC funding last year. Toby Kim, one of the Korea-based co-founders of Nari Labs, the group behind the newly released model, said that he and his fellow co-founder started learning about speech AI three months ago. Inspired by NotebookLM, they wanted to create a model that offered more control over generated voices and "freedom in the script." Kim says they used Google's TPU Research Cloud program, which provides researchers with free access to the company's TPU AI chips, to train Nari's model, Dia. Weighing in at 1.6 billion parameters, Dia can generate dialogue from a script, letting users customize speakers' tones and insert disfluencies, coughs, laughs, and other nonverbal cues. Parameters are the internal variables models use to make predictions. Generally, models with more parameters perform better. Available from the AI dev platform Hugging Face and GitHub, Dia can run on most modern PCs with at least 10GB of VRAM. It generates a random voice unless prompted with a description of an intended style, but it can also clone a person's voice. In TechCrunch's brief testing of Dia through Nari's web demo, Dia worked quite well, uncomplaining generating two-way chats about any subject. The quality of the voices seems competitive with other tools out there, and the voice cloning function is among the easiest this reporter has tried. Here's a sample: Like many voice generators, Dia offers little in the way of safeguards, however. It'd be trivially easy to craft disinformation or a scammy recording. On Dia's project pages, Nari discourages abuse of the model to impersonate, deceive, or otherwise engage in illicit campaigns, but the group says it "isn't responsible" for misuse. Nari also hasn't disclosed which data it scraped to train Dia. It's possible Dia was developed using copyrighted content — a commenter on Hacker News notes that one sample sounds like the hosts of NPR's "Planet Money" podcast. Training models on copyrighted content is a widespread but legally dubious practice. Some AI companies claim that fair use shields them from liability, while rights holders assert that fair use doesn't apply to training. In any event, Kim says Nari's plan is to create a synthetic voice platform with a "social aspect" on top of Dia and larger, future models. Nari also intends to release a technical report for Dia, and to expand the model's support to languages beyond English. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Sign in to access your portfolio
