boris johnson
Denmark says Russian warship fired flares at military helicopter
Denmark has accused a Russian warship of firing two emergency flares at one of its helicopters while it was tracking the vessel in the Baltic Sea. The Danish government has summoned the Russian ambassador over the incident, which it said happened during a routine monitoring operation on Monday. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen branded the Russian action reckless and said it was designed to intimidate and divide. Moscow has not commented on the incident. It came on the same day Nato forces shot down a drone over Lithuania in the latest security scare on the alliance's eastern flank, where tensions remain high during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Papers: 'Compulsory lentils' and 'Boris flees Vlad drone blitz'
Image caption, No ice cream and compulsory lentils in school meal shake-up says the Daily Telegraph, writing that the government will announce rules that will force schools to put pulses on the menu at least once a week in England. Elsewhere, the paper leads with a plea from 800 pub, restaurant and hotel leaders urging Prime Minister Andy Burnham to cut VAT from 20 to 10%. The appeal comes days after Mr Burnham blindsided the industry by handing local authorities the power to impose unlimited tourist taxes, the paper adds. Image caption, The Daily Express reports that Labour tourist tax will hammer seaside B&Bs, with the Conservative Party warning that family businesses and staycation parents pay cost of benefits bill. Céline Dion's triumphant return to concert stage also features on the front page.
Russia struck train near Poland border shortly after Boris Johnson and top European officials passed through
A Russian strike has hit a train near the Ukraine-Poland border shortly after former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other top European officials had passed through. No casualties were reported after the Russian strike, which hit the train's engine. Johnson and some of Europe's most senior security advisers, including the UK's Jonathan Powell, had passed along the same line on their way back from a conference in the capital, Kyiv. Russia said Sunday it struck railway infrastructure in western Ukraine, but the former PM said I don't know what warped logic drove Putin to blow up a stationary Ukrainian locomotive on the Polish border this morning and asked When are we going to give them the air defences they need? Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk said a Russian drone had struck 800m from Polish border.
'Catch Me If You Can'-style conman exposed after decades of bizarre lies, scams: report
Royal Mail has launched the United Kingdom's first-ever drone delivery service. The service was launched on Scotland's Orkney Islands -- operating for three months with the intent to extend in the future. A man in the U.K. who claimed to be friends with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a pilot with a multimillion-dollar trust fund, and a cruise ship captain was exposed as a decades-long conman who swindled millions of dollars from people, according to a report. Jody Francis Oliver, 45, is currently behind bars on fraud and theft charges after leading seven different lives and allegedly swindling roughly $5.6 million from people, The Times of London reported. For decades, the man reportedly took on different high-powered identities, despite being an unemployed married dad of three.
Can you tell the real photos from the fake AI ones in this celebrity lineup?
It's the fast-growing technology that continues to fool millions of social media users around the world - but how adept are YOU at spotting a fake AI photo? From the Pope posing in a puffer coat to Donald Trump being arrested on the streets of New York, images created by artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly convincing. While some of the snaps are clearly fake and designed to amuse or make a political statement, there are experts who fear the technology's potential as a weapon of mass disinformation. It comes as a German artist who won the Sony World Photography Award this week refused to accept his prize after revealing his black and white portrait of two women was in fact created by AI. Boris Eldagsen tricked competition organisers with his entry, Pseudomnesia: The Electrician - a haunting close-up of two women in a grainy sepia which won the creative open category.
Extracting a Knowledge Base of COVID-19 Events from Social Media
Zong, Shi, Baheti, Ashutosh, Xu, Wei, Ritter, Alan
In this paper, we present a manually annotated corpus of 10,000 tweets containing public reports of five COVID-19 events, including positive and negative tests, deaths, denied access to testing, claimed cures and preventions. We designed slot-filling questions for each event type and annotated a total of 31 fine-grained slots, such as the location of events, recent travel, and close contacts. We show that our corpus can support fine-tuning BERT-based classifiers to automatically extract publicly reported events and help track the spread of a new disease. We also demonstrate that, by aggregating events extracted from millions of tweets, we achieve surprisingly high precision when answering complex queries, such as "Which organizations have employees that tested positive in Philadelphia?" We will release our corpus (with user-information removed), automatic extraction models, and the corresponding knowledge base to the research community.
Open AI: is artificial intelligence the future of creativity?
Is it going to take over the world? All questions a novice like myself is thinking whenever someone far more clued-up on the ever changing advancement of technology turns the conversation onto the dreaded topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Usually I let them dribble on and myself stay silent in the hope that our chat comes to an end, however, you illustrators and writers out there may want to be paying close attention to the recent craze sweeping through twitter boards and reddit threads. Open AI (based in San Francisco) has been growing in popularity recently on account of its new Playground and Dall-E 2 systems. The Playground system is a new predictive language tool in which you input a question or a command and in a matter of seconds an AI responds with cohesive and calculated language.
Artificial Intelligence sleep app may mean an end to sleeping pills for insomniacs
A new artificial intelligence sleep app has been developed that might be able to replace sleeping pills for insomnia sufferers. Sleepio uses an AI algorithm to provide individuals with tailored cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I). The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) said it would save the NHS money as well as reduce prescriptions of medicines such as zolpidem and zopiclone, which can be dependency forming. Its economic analysis found healthcare costs were lower after one year of using Sleepio, mostly because of fewer GP appointments and sleeping pills prescribed. The app provides a digital six-week self-help programme involving a sleep test, weekly interactive CBT-I sessions and keeping a diary about sleeping patterns.
What tasks lie ahead on the return to Westminster?
The summer recess is over and MPs are returning to Westminster with very full inboxes. As Parliament throws its doors open for the new term, what challenges lie ahead for the government in the coming months? The challenges of posed by the coronavirus pandemic will be forefront of ministers' minds: how to encourage a return to something approaching normal while keeping the virus under control. As the holiday season winds up, many in the Conservative party want to see more done to encourage people back to offices in England - and ministers are urging people working from home to speak to their employers about returning to workplaces where it's safe to do so. Health Committee chair Jeremy Hunt has warned that the situation coming into winter is "potentially very perilous".
Covid-19 news: UK begins using dexamethasone to treat patients
Covid-19 patients in the UK are being treated with dexamethasone today after a UK trial of the drug found it could save lives. "The treatment is immediately available and already in use on the NHS," said health minister Matt Hancock. "It is not by any means a cure but it is the best news we have had," Hancock told parliament today. The UK's chief medical officers say it should be used immediately, according to the BBC. A preliminary study found that the steroid, which is already widely prescribed for treating allergies and asthma, reduces the risk of dying from covid-19 by a third for patients on ventilators, and by a fifth for those receiving oxygen. Dexamethasone should only be taken if prescribed by a doctor. Officials in Beijing, China confirmed 31 new coronavirus cases today, bringing the total to 137 in the last six days. The city is again restricting all non-essential travel. Schools, swimming pools and gyms are all closed from today.