US poised to exit from UN human rights council
WASHINGTON: The Trump administration is poised to announce its departure from the United Nations’ main human rights body in its latest withdrawal from an international institution.
Officials said secretary of state Mike Pompeo and US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley will deliver the verdict on the UN Human Rights Council in a joint appearance at the state department on Tuesday.
Haley threatened the pull-out last year, citing longstanding US complaints that the 47-member council is biased against Israel. But Tuesday’s announcement also comes just a day after the UN human rights chief denounced the Trump administration for separating migrant children from their parents.
It also extends a broader Trump administration pattern of stepping back from international agreements and forums under the president’s “America First” policy.
Since taking office, the administration has announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the UN educational and cultural organization and the Iran nuclear deal.
Haley has been the driving force behind the move, which would be unprecedented in the 12-year history of the council. No country has ever dropped out voluntarily. Libya was kicked out seven years ago. SAN FRANCISCO: IBM pitted a computer against two human debaters in the first public demonstration of artificial intelligence technology it’s been working on for more than five years.
The company unveiled its Project Debater in San Francisco on Monday, asking it to make a case for government-subsidized space research — a topic it hadn’t studied in advance but championed fiercely with just a few awkward gaps in reasoning.
“Subsidising space exploration is like investing in really good tires,” argued the computer system, its female voice embodied in a 5-foot-tall machine. Such research would enrich the human mind, inspire young people and be a “very sound investment,” it said, making it more important even than good roads, schools or health care.
The computer delivered its opening argument by pulling in evidence from its huge internal repository of newspapers, journals and other sources. It then listened to a professional human debater’s counter-argument and spent four minutes rebutting it.
After closing arguments it moved on to a second debate about telemedicine.
An IBM research team based in Israel began working on the project not long after IBM’S Watson computer beat two human quizmasters on a “Jeopardy” challenge in 2011. But rather than just scanning a giant trove of data in search of factoids, IBM’S latest project taps into several more complex branches of AI.