Alex Jones's flagship radio channel is now silent – but not for the same reason as everyone else took him offline. The Federal Communications Commission has taken down Jones's flagship radio station, Liberty Radio, according to reports. It was taken offline because it was operating as a pirate radio station, the Association Press said. The lawsuit filed against those behind the station claimed that Liberty Radio had been broadcasting since at least 2013. It was doing so without a license, apparently from an apartment in Austin, Texas.

Gen. Igor Konashenkov, says in just one month air defense assets have downed 45 drones targeting the Hemeimeem air base. The base in the province of Latakia serves as the main hub for Russian operations in Syria.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformative technology that holds promise for tremendous societal and economic benefit. AI has the potential to revolutionize how we live, work, learn, discover, and communicate. AI research can further our national priorities, including increased economic prosperity, improved educational opportunities and quality of life, and enhanced national and homeland security. Because of these potential benefits, the U.S. government has invested in AI research for many years. Yet, as with any significant technology in which the Federal government has interest, there are not only tremendous opportunities but also a number of considerations that must be taken into account in guiding the overall direction of Federally-funded R&D in AI.

Maria Pocovi slides her laptop over to me with the webcam switched on. My face stares back at me, overlaid with a grid of white lines that map the contours of my expression. Next to it is a shaded window that tracks six "core emotions": happiness, surprise, disgust, fear, anger, and sadness. Each time my expression shifts, a measurement bar next to each emotion fluctuates, as if my feelings were an audio signal. When I look back at Pocovi, I get the sense she knows exactly what I'm thinking with one glance. Petite with a welcoming smile, Pocovi, the founder of Emotion Research Lab in Valencia, Spain, is a global entrepreneur par excellence.

In a café on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a one-time videogame developer turned political theorist named Santiago Siri is trying to explain to me how his nonprofit startup, Democracy.Earth, aims to fix the world's broken politics with the help of the blockchain. The conversation has already covered a dizzying amount of ground. We've discussed the emergence of the Westphalian order of nation-states in the 17th century, Russia's interference in the 2016 US election, the total collapse of Venezuelan society, and Siri's own experience of political corruption in his native Argentina. But he finally boils it all down to one short sentence. "We want to tokenize the like," Siri says.

If I wanted to show my distaste for the direction the US is going by boycotting American PC hardware, software and services, could it be done? You could certainly eliminate a lot of American products, but you might be giving up features without getting any ethical benefits. For example, more than a billion people already manage without a lot of American technology because they live in China or Russia. While I share your distaste for the Trump regime, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are not exactly choirboys. And while Trump is scapegoating immigrants, more than half of America's top technology companies were co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.

As Uber and Tesla have learned, it doesn't take a lot of bad press to shatter public trust on autonomous vehicles. Ford has taken that lesson to heart, saying it would rather instill confidence in self-driving cars than be first to market. In a letter to the US Department of Transportation (DoT) and 44-page report called "A Matter of Trust," the automaker detailed how it plans to safely test its self-driving vehicles on public roads. The death of a pedestrian involving a Uber self-driving vehicle with a safety driver in particular seemed to affect the public's opinion of self driving cars. Prior to that, 44 percent of US adults said they'd be okay riding in autonomous cars.

Is Germany losing ground in the increasingly strategic field of Artificial Intelligence? Germany is still Europe's most powerful economy. However, many observers fear that in the on-going digital revolution, it is being left behind by its competitors. The increasingly crucial field of Artificial Intelligence is no exception. When chancellor Angela Merkel showed up at an event organised by the newspaper WirtschaftsWoche in late June in Berlin, the nation's public discourse was dominated by two topics: the unexpected and fully deserved demise of the German football team in the FIFA World Cup, and the looming government crisis initiated by one of Merkel's closest allies on the topic of immigration.

Maduro's critics say he is using the incident to stifle dissent and cement his power in the oil-rich nation amid the economic crisis that has brought with it hyperinflation and power cuts. He says his government is the victim of an "economic war" led by opposition activists with the help of Washington.

Machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, enjoys unprecedented success in commercial applications. However, the use of machine learning in high performance computing for science has been limited. Why? Advanced machine learning tools weren't designed for big data sets, like those used to study stars and planets. A team from Intel, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and Stanford changed that situation. They developed the first 15-petaflop deep-learning software.