World

Vladimir Putin is due to be sworn in for a fourth term as president of Russia on Monday after winning the election in March.

He has been in power for 18 years, whether as president or prime minister, and opponents have likened his tenure to the reign of a tsar, or emperor.

Riot police confronted protesters against his rule in Moscow and other Russian cities on Saturday. There have been fears of new unrest on Monday as he takes office. 

The inauguration at the Kremlin in Moscow is likely to be lower-key than in 2012, AFP news agency reports.

Source : BBC

A BBC reporter has been killed in an attack in the eastern Afghan province of Khost. Ahmad Shah, 29, had been working for the BBC Afghan service for more than a year.

In a statement, BBC World Service Director Jamie Angus said Shah was a "respected and popular" journalist.

"This is a devastating loss and I send my sincere condolences to Ahmad Shah's friends and family and the whole BBC News Afghan team," he said.
"We are doing all we can to support his family at this very difficult time."

Khost police chief Abdul Hanan told BBC Afghan that Shah had been shot by unidentified armed men. He said police were investigating the motive.

Locals told the BBC that Shah had been on his bicycle when the attack happened. He was taken by locals to hospital, where he died of his injuries.
Monday saw at least two other deadly attacks in Afghanistan.

At least 25 people were killed in two bombings in the capital, Kabul, including eight journalists and four police officers, interior minister spokesperson Najib Danish told the BBC. Some 45 people were reported injured in the attacks.

A suicide bomb attack in the Kandahar region killed 11 schoolchildren and injured many more.

Last year, Afghanistan was ranked the third most dangerous country in the world for journalists by Reporters without Borders. It said nine journalists had been killed in three separate attacks.

In June, BBC driver Mohammed Nazir was killed in a bomb attack in Kabul's central secure zone.

Some 400 people were injured by the blast and more than 150 people were killed.

Source : BBC

Afghanistan’s first-ever female airline pilot, who was lauded as a mark of progress in the battle for progress on women’s rights there, has been accepted for asylum in the United States.

Niloofar Rahmani travelled to the US in 2015 to receive training. She said she and her family were facing threats from the Taliban, the militant group that has waged a decades-long war against the Afghan government.

The US paid for her travel and her training. Now, Washington says it remains too dangerous for her to return to her home country.

She applied for asylum in 2016, but only received the news on Monday. Her family remain in Afghanistan.
 
Source : The National

North Korea's nuclear test site will close in May, the South Korean president's office has said.

A spokesman said the closure of the Punggye-ri site would be done in public and foreign experts from South Korea and the US would be invited to watch.

On Friday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korea's President Moon Jae-in agreed to work to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons.

Their summit came after months of warlike rhetoric from the North.

On Saturday, US President Donald Trump he would likely hold talks with the North Korean leadership "over the next three or four weeks" about the denuclearisation of the peninsula.

Presidential spokesman Yoon Young-chan said that Kim had stated he "would carry out the closing of the nuclear test site in May".

Yoon added that the North Korean leader had also said he "would soon invite experts of South Korea and the US to disclose the process to the international community with transparency".

The office also said North Korea would change its time zone - currently half an hour different - to match that of the South.

North Korea has so far made no public comments on the issue.

Source : BBC

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Chairman Imran Khan has alleged that the military had helped the deposed prime minister rig the 2013 general elections.

In an interview with Pakistan’s Geo TV on Thursday, the cricketer-turned-politician alleged that in Punjab, the returning officers (ROs) were not allowed entry into the polling stations during the consolidation of votes, saying that military men had made it possible.

“Be it the elections of 1990, 1996 or 2013, Nawaz Sharif had always played with his umpires. The military, the judiciary and the masses all had helped him,” Khan claimed.

Criticising Sharif’s ongoing rants against the security establishment, the PTI chief said: “Sharif is not complaining about the military’s dissent, rather he is complaining about the military’s lack of support for him.”

“Nawaz Sharif’s problem lies in the recent neutral stance adopted by the military and the judiciary.”

Responding to the former prime minister’s recent remarks on freedom of press, the PTI chief claimed that Sharif had vowed to conclude the mission of dictator Gen Ziaul Haq. “Nawaz Sharif never believed in freedom of press, not until recently.”

The PTI chief parried a question regarding the possibility of Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan joining the PTI. “Given the current circumstances, timely elections appears to be a distant dream,” he added.

Earlier this week, Sharif said at a public rally that neither the PTI nor the PPP was his main political opponent, rather his fight is against the “unseen forces”.

Though Sharif did not mention who these “unseen forces” were, he was believed to be referring to the security establishment.

Source : The Tribune

Kim Jong Un has declared "a new history begins now" after shaking hands with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the start of a landmark peace summit.

Kim became the first North Korean leader to step into South Korean territory since 1953 on Friday morning, crossing the line that separates the two Koreas at the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in a highly choreographed moment that was beamed live to the world.

He was greeted by President Moon before walking along a red carpet to the Peace House for the first meeting between the leaders of the divided Koreas since 2007.

The two leaders appeared at ease, smiling and talking, and on entering the Peace House Kim signed a guest book, where he wrote "a new history begins now" and "an age of peace, at the starting point of history."

Kim and Moon have a full day of talks that are expected to focus on three subjects with worldwide implications -- the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, a peace settlement and the improvement of bilateral relations.

Source : CNN

Social media network Facebook has betrayed its users once again, this time by harvesting 3.5 billion Instagram photos for its research. 
Facebook has admitted to stealing billions of Instagram images (Source:AAP) 

Even your selfies and brunch photos aren’t safe from the long arm of Facebook, it was revealed overnight, as the tech giant admitted it had taken billions of photos from Instagram accounts around the world to boost its own research.

More than 3.5 billion photographs were harvested from the photo-sharing platform without users’ knowledge, chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer told the audience at the company's annual developers' conference F8, revealing they had been used to enhance the company’s artificial intelligence technology.

Schroepfer said Facebook had become overwhelmed with so much dangerous material “like offensive content, spam, hate speech, fake accounts, fake news, clickbait and more”, it had become too much for human moderators to regulate.

Instead, the company was creating an artificially intelligent moderation system, he said, to detect inappropriate images on its website.

To speed up its development — by “100 times”, he said — Facebook harvested any images shared on Instagram with hashtags, and fed the photographs into its own system over 22 days.

“We built some breakthrough technology that takes publicly available, hashtagged images at an unprecedented scale,” Schroepfer told the crowd.

“We require new breakthroughs, and we require new technologies to solve problems all of us want to solve.”

The images taken from Instagram, which Facebook bought for $US1 billion in 2012, not only included photographs of food, as it showed to the crowd, but more personal images such as family portraits.

Neither Instagram nor Facebook users were warned of the practice before the company mined their photos.

Facebook artificial intelligence and machine-learning director Srinivas Narayanan called its new approach “incredibly cool”, and revealed using people’s personal images delivered Facebook an advantage over fierce rival Google, with a 13.6 per cent improvement in recognising images.

Facebook yesterday revealed plans for a dating service at its F8 conference in San Jose. Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/AFP 

Narayanan said Facebook technology could now recognise the content of images with 85.4 per cent accuracy, compared to Google’s 79.2 per cent.

But he said it was still not good enough to recognise all “clickbait, engagement-bait, pornography, violence, and other inappropriate content” that flooded the social network.

“Some content is still more difficult for AI to understand,” Narayanan said.

“For example, it’s helping to detect hate speech but humans need to review it to understand the intent, the subtleties of language, and context.”

Facebook’s unexpected Instagram photo raid comes just weeks after the company’s biggest data scandal in its history, when it was revealed the social network shared the private details of 87 million users with a researcher, who sold them to political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

The firm, which allegedly used the personal information to influence the 2016 US election, revealed it was shutting down today after it “determined that is no longer viable to continue operating as a business” in the wake of the scandal.

In a statement, the company said it had “been vilified for activities that are not only legal but also widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising”, but would continue to co-operate with investigators looking into its operations.

Thirteen children have died after their school bus collided with a train in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Indian police said today.

The bus had been travelling across an unmanned railway crossing when the accident took place. The incident comes weeks after 24 children died when their bus fell into a gorge in Himachal Pradesh state.

Road accidents are common in India, often due to poor driving or badly maintained roads and vehicles. The latest incident took place in the Kushinagar region of Uttar Pradesh state. It is not yet known how many children were travelling in the bus. 

The state government has ordered an investigation into the incident and announced compensation to the families of those killed in the accident. 

(BBC)

Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy at the centre of the Facebook data-sharing scandal, is shutting down.

The firm was accused of improperly obtaining personal information on behalf of political clients.

According to Facebook, data about up to 87 million of its members was harvested by a quiz app and then passed on to the political consultancy.

The social network said its own probe into the matter would continue.

"This doesn't change our commitment and determination to understand exactly what happened and make sure it doesn't happen again," said a spokesman.

"We are continuing with our investigation in cooperation with the relevant authorities."

Source : BBC

WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook Inc. is raising its minimum age from 13 to 16 in Europe to help it comply with new data privacy rules coming into force next month.WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook Inc. is raising its minimum age from 13 to 16 in Europe to help it comply with new data privacy rules coming into force next month.

WhatsApp will ask European users to confirm they are at least 16 years old when they are prompted to agree new terms of service and a privacy policy provided by a new WhatsApp Ireland Ltd entity in the next few weeks.

It is not clear how or if the age limit will be checked given the limited data requested and held by the service.

Facebook, which has a separate data policy, is taking a different approach to teens aged between 13 and 15 in order to comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law.

It is asking them to nominate a parent or guardian to give permission for them to share information on the platform, otherwise they will not see a fully personalized version of the social media platform.

But WhatsApp, which had more than 1.5 billion users in January according to Facebook, said in a blog post it was not asking for any new rights to collect personal information in the agreement it has created for the European Union.

“Our goal is simply to explain how we use and protect the limited information we have about you,” it said.

WhatsApp, founded in 2009, has come under pressure from some European governments in recent years because of its end-to-end encrypted messaging system and its plan to share more data with its parent, Facebook.

Facebook itself is under scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers around the world since disclosing last month that the personal information of millions of users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, setting off wider concerns about how it handles user data.

WhatsApp’s minimum age of use will remain 13 years in the rest of the world, in line with its parent.

Source : Reuters

Ever been delayed on a flight because of straggling fellow passengers? 

A passenger passes through an automated immigration control gate at Changi airport's Terminal 4 in Singapore April 30, 2018. Picture taken April 30, 2018. REUTERS/Thomas White.

That might be an annoyance of the past at Singapore’s Changi airport which is testing facial recognition systems that could, in future, help locate lost travelers or those spending a little too much time in the duty-free shops.

Changi Airport, ranked the world’s best for six years straight in a survey by air travel consultancy Skytrax, is looking at how it can use the latest technologies to solve many problems - from cutting taxiing times on the runway to quicker predictions of flight arrivals.

It comes as the island state embarks on a ‘smart nation’ initiative to utilize technology to improve lives, create economic opportunity and build community ties. However the proposed use of cameras mounted on lampposts that are linked to facial recognition software has raised privacy concerns.

Steve Lee, Changi Airport Group’s chief information officer, told Reuters that the airport’s experiments are not from a “big brother” perspective but solve real problems.
“We have lots of reports of lost passengers...so one possible use case we can think of is, we need to detect and find people who are on the flight. Of course, with permission from the airlines,” said Lee.

A passenger has his photograph taken by an automated luggage drop station at Changi airport's Terminal 4 in Singapore April 30, 2018. Picture taken April 30, 2018. REUTERS/Thomas White.

Facial recognition technology typically allows users to match the faces of people picked up on cameras with those in databases.
Lee said they have tested technology that could allow for this, and are working with various businesses, adding that they should have some capability to do this in a year’s time.

While he declined to provide names of the firms involved, France’s Idemia, previously known as OT-Morpho, has previously provided some facial recognition technology to Changi.  

Chinese firm Yitu, which recently opened its first international office in Singapore, told Reuters it was in discussions with Changi Airport Group. Yitu says its facial recognition platform is capable of identifying more than 1.8 billion faces in less than 3 seconds.

PASSPORT FREEChangi’s newest terminal, T4, already uses facial recognition technology to offer self-service options at check-in, bag drop, immigration and boarding.

The technology means there are fewer queues and fewer visible airport or security staff.

Luggage is dropped at unmanned booths that take your photo and match it against your passport. You are snapped again at an automated security gate at immigration - a picture that is used to verify your identity at the boarding gate.

Changi is exploring how facial recognition can be implemented in its three older terminals for automated bag drop and immigration.

The airport sees T4 as a test bed for its fifth terminal, which will be up and running in about a decade.

“Today you take passport, you show your face and you show your boarding pass,” said Lee, adding it may, however, be possible to use biometrics instead.

“Then actually in future, you just take your face. You don’t need your passport,” he said.

Other technology trials underway at the airport use sensors to measure when an aircraft pushes back from the gate and when it takes off, data that has improved decision-making and shaved about 90 seconds off of aircraft taxiing time per flight during peak hours, said Lee.

Another program uses artificial intelligence that gathers wind, weather and landing direction to learn to better predict flight arrival times.

With such technology, the airport is now able to estimate a flight’s landing time when it’s two hours away having previously only been able to make an accurate estimate 30 minutes to an hour ahead.

Lee said this helps create efficiencies in everything from gate planning to arrival queues. 

He said a smart nation strategy begins at a country’s airport. “You can’t say you are a smart nation when you come to the airport and it’s not so smart.” 

(Reuters)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has questioned the legitimacy of efforts by the US and its European allies to change a nuclear deal with his country.Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has questioned the legitimacy of efforts by the US and its European allies to change a nuclear deal with his country.

The US and French leaders announced on Tuesday that they were working on a "new deal" that would expand and extend the terms of the 2015 accord.

But Rouhani said they had no "right" to renegotiate a seven-party agreement.

He also dismissed US President Donald Trump as a "tradesman" not qualified to comment on global treaties.

"You don't have any background in politics," he said. "You don't have any background in law. You don't have any background on international treaties."