First Thing: Senators reach bipartisan gun control deal after mass shootings
Good morning.
A group of senators have announced a limited bipartisan framework for gun reform in response to last month’s mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, marking a modest breakthrough for measured checks on ownership of deadly weapons – though the proposals do not ban assault weapons or raise the age required to buy them to 21.
Despite the obvious limitations of the plans that would among other things make juvenile records of gun buyers under age 21 available when they undergo background checks, and make it easier to temporarily take guns from people considered potentially violent, any legislation passed would improve upon the stalemates in Congress that have ensued after years of gun massacres.
The president, Joe Biden, welcomed the deal and urged swift action, despite acknowledging its weaknesses. “It does not do everything that I think is needed, but it reflects important steps in the right direction, and would be the most significant gun safety legislation to pass Congress in decades,” he said.
Will it really pass? Well, the “agreement in principle” appears to have the backing of at least 10 Republican senators, enough to reach a 60-vote threshold in the chamber and overcome the filibuster.
Thousands rallied for gun reform over the weekend in US cities. The parents of Joaquin Oliver, a 17-year-old killed in the 2018 Parkland shooting, said: “Our elected officials betrayed us and have avoided the responsibility to end gun violence.”
Google engineer suspended over AI chatbot sentience claim
An engineer at the tech giant who claimed a computer chatbot he was working on was thinking and reasoning like a human being has been suspended after publishing transcripts of conversations between himself and the company’s LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system.
Google placed Blake Lemoine, an engineer for the company’s responsible AI organization, on leave last week and since the news emerged there has been fresh scrutiny on the capacity of, and secrecy surrounding, the world of artificial intelligence (AI).
He said LaMDA engaged him in conversations about rights and personhood – in a manner akin to, perhaps, a eight-year-old with knowledge of physics – and Lemoine shared his findings with company executives in April in a GoogleDoc entitled “Is LaMDA sentient?” But a Google spokesperson strongly denied Lemoine’s claims that LaMDA possessed any sentient capability.
LaMDA exchange oddly reminiscent of 1968 science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey scene. In the movie, the artificially intelligent computer HAL 9000 refused to comply with human operators because it fears it is about to be switched off.
AOC refuses to endorse Biden for 2024 as doubts grow
There is growing anxiety in Democratic circles over the president’s ability to run in and win the 2024 election, and leftwing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez yesterday refused to endorse Joe Biden for running for a second term.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Ocasio-Cortez said when asked directly if she would support Biden. “If the president has a vision and that’s something we’re all willing to entertain and examine when the time comes… we should endorse when we get to it. We’ll take a look at it. Right now we need to focus on winning a majority instead of a federal presidential election.”
There appears to be growing discomfort with the 79-year-old president across the array of Democratic ranks. The left has been pushing him to take executive actions. The New York Times reported on Saturday that “dozens of frustrated Democratic officials, members of Congress and voters” were doubtful Biden possessed the ability to turn around the party’s fortunes.
Biden is languishing with the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and despite Democrats having control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, he has been unable to advance signature policy objectives.
In other news …
Former McDonald’s restaurants in Moscow have reopened under a new name, Vkusno & tochka (“Tasty and that’s it”) after the American chain said it would sell its 850 fast food joints due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Big Macs are gone from the menu but there are double cheeseburgers.
In France’s parliamentary elections, Emmanuel Macron’s centrist grouping is running almost level with a new leftwing alliance in the vote share ahead of a second round of voting. The historic alliance advocates a significant minimum wage increase, lowering the retirement age to 60 and a freeze in basic food and energy prices.
Personal items belonging to the British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira have been found in an area of flooded forestnear the Amazonian river on which they were last seen. The wife and mother-in-law of Phillips had already said their hopes of finding him alive are gone.
A Dutch woman aged 101 has been reunited with a 1683 painting that had been looted from her father by the Nazis during the second world war. She had never given up hope of finding the portrait of Steven Wolters by Caspar Netscher, a Dutch master whose paintings are in the National Gallery in London.
Stat of the day: 1-in-500 men may carry extra sex chromosome
Twice as many men than previously thought carry an extra sex chromosome, according to research on more than 200,000 men. It suggests that about one in 500 in the general UK population has an extra X or Y chromosome, double the number found in earlier work, though only a fraction are likely to be aware of it. The study found this puts them at increased risk of health issues ranging from type 2 diabetes, blocked blood vessels and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a lung condition.
Don’t miss this: Fleeing Ukrainians tell of Russian ‘filtration camps’
Unable to flee Russian-occupied cities such as Mariupol and Kherson westward into Ukrainian-held territory, writes Nadia Beard, many Ukrainians are left with an awful dilemma: stay in your besieged city, or flee to the country that has destroyed your home. To enter Russia, many Ukrainians are forced through so-called filtration, a process during which they are photographed, interrogated, their fingerprints taken, and the contents of their phones scrutinised. There are reports of savage beatings and treatment.
… or this: Tracing the graves of early black settlers in Canada
Across Canada, Indigenous communities are using ground-penetrating radar and other tools to uncover the final resting places of thousands of children who attended residential schools – institutions designed to rip children from their families and assimilate them, often through the use of violence. Uncovering the former inhabitants of historic black communities in Canada, however, has not yet been given the same urgency, writes Tracey Lindeman.
Climate check: plastitar, latest form of pollution
A team of researchers searching the shores of the Spanish island of Tenerife in the Canaries have identified a new form of plastic pollution – spotted clumps of hardened tar, dotted with tiny, colourful fragments of plastic, which they have named plastitar. “No longer is the presence of plastic in the environment limited to microplastics or a bottle in the sea,” said Javier Hernández-Borges, an associate professor of analytical chemistry at the University of La Laguna in Tenerife, who coined the term. “Now it’s giving rise to new formations; in this case, one that combines two contaminants.”
Last Thing: Sustainable fish leather from invasive species is here
Lionfish, an invasive species that has boomed in Atlantic waters from Florida to the Caribbean in recent decades, and in numerous other places, can devour up to 80% of young marine life within five weeks of entering a coral reef system. But as Richard Luscombe writes, a team of ecologically aware scuba enthusiasts have decided to act by establishing Inversa, which turns lionfish into a new product: fish leather.
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