Day: June 27, 2024

By William Gallo

North Korea claimed progress Thursday on testing a missile meant to contain multiple warheads, an advanced weapon aimed at penetrating U.S. missile defenses.

According to the state-run Korean Central News Agency, North Korea “successfully conducted the separation and guidance control test of individual mobile warheads” during a Wednesday launch.

KCNA said the first stage engine of an intermediate-range solid-fuel ballistic missile carried the warheads, which “were guided correctly to the three coordinate targets.”

The test, which also included decoy warheads, was aimed at securing the capability for multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs, KCNA added.

If confirmed, analysts say the development would mark significant progress toward North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s goal of developing a long-range missile with multiple warheads that could overwhelm U.S. missile defenses, which have limited interceptors.

An ‘exaggeration,’ says South

South Korea’s military initially reported the launch as a failure, noting it ended in a mid-air explosion during the early stages of its flight.

On Thursday, a spokesperson for South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff stuck by that assessment, dismissing the North Korean claim as a “deception and exaggeration.”

Whereas the warheads on such a missile typically separate in the descent stage, the JCS spokesperson said the North Korean missile exploded mid-air during an early stage of flight.

“A number of videos and photos taken by the private sector yesterday show that the missile’s flight was not normal,” he said.

South Korean broadcasters on Wednesday aired multiple videos showing an object that appeared to spin out of control before exploding and plunging toward earth. The videos were taken by residents in South Korea’s far northwestern islands.

Decker Eveleth, who studies North Korea’s strategic forces for the Center for Naval Analyses, said it is hard to determine the success of the launch with certainty, given the available public evidence.

“The stage was spinning at the end. Sometimes that’s an intentional maneuver and sometimes it’s not,” Eveleth told VOA.

Missile defense woes

North Korea has previously conducted tests of various MIRV components, including systems meant to aim multiple warheads. But the latest launch appears to have gone further, using multiple warheads as well as decoys, which aim to confuse missile defense shields.

The United States is currently protected, in theory, by a missile defense shield with 44 interceptors designed for ICBM missiles. That figure is set to expand to 64. Those numbers allow little room for error, even before factoring in missiles with multiple warheads, according to analysts.

With MIRVs, North Korea has a “much, much higher chance of overwhelming American missile defense,” Eveleth said.

“Many nuclear experts spent about a decade arguing that missile defense was not cost effective and the DPRK would simply outbuild the shield when they got a program rolling. These concerns were dismissed, largely because people did not think the DPRK was capable of a program of that scale. And here we are,” Eveleth told VOA.

By placing multiple warheads on a single missile, North Korea can also reduce the need for mobile missile launchers, or TELs, which it has had difficulty producing.

What’s next

North Korea’s launch represents the latest effort to work through a wish-list of strategic weapons laid out by Kim in 2021. The list also included hypersonic missiles, spy satellites, solid-fuel ICBMs, and submarine-launched missiles — all areas where North Korea has since made advances.

Kim says his nuclear weapons program is necessary to deter attacks from the United States, which has tens of thousands of troops in the region. He has also warned he could preemptively use nuclear weapons to counter what he says are hostile forces in the region.

Analysts are especially looking for any signs of Russian help with North Korean weapons. Earlier this month, Russia and North Korea signed a mutual defense treaty. After the signing, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested the arrangement could help facilitate arms transfers.

On Thursday, a South Korean military spokesperson said it was difficult to determine whether the latest launch included any help from Russia.

Given that North Korea claimed only “fairly modest and technical” successes with its latest MIRV launch, more tests using such technology are likely, said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“If their claims are true, I’d expect to see further iteration,” Panda said. “Even if this wasn’t a total success, I suspect the Missile Administration received useful data that’ll contribute to advancing their missile capabilities, including a MIRV capability.”

Lee Juhyun contributed to this report.

By Pelbar 

Chinese government authorities in a Tibetan-populated county of Sichuan province have shortened the duration of a key weeklong debate on Buddhist philosophy and reduced the number of monks who could attend the event, Tibetans with knowledge of the situation said.;

The annual Dhokham Jang Gunchoe, or Great Winter Debate Session, is a longstanding tradition of Tibet’s three monastic universities — Drepung, Gaden and Sera — and traditionally occurs in the eleventh month of the Tibetan calendar. It draws thousands of monks fromother Buddhist monasteries and colleges.

The event began on June 19 at Za Bhum Nyingma Monastery under tight restrictions in Sershul county in Kardze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in the province’s northwest.

Authorities shortened the two-week event, which enjoys popularity across Tibetan-populated regions, to one week and cut the number of monastic attendees to 3,200 from about 7,000, said one Tibetan source, who like others in the report declined to be named.

The restrictions are yet another example of how China has sought to control and limit religious activities in Tibet because authorities see Tibetan Buddhism as a threat to the sovereignty of the Chinese political state.

They also have set up police stations in or near monasteries, subjected monks and nuns to “patriotic re-education,” and kicked Buddhist clergy members out of Buddhist institutes.;

During the session, armed police were stationed at the Zabum Nyingma Monastery and patrolled the surrounding;mountains, while lay people visiting the monastery were held up at checkpoints, said the sources from inside and outside Tibet.;

Authorities also scrutinized monks and nuns attending the event to ensure they were free of political affiliations, they said.;

Because local authorities suddenly halted arrangements for Dhokham Jang Gunchoe in 2023, the monastery and its supporters petitioned provincial authorities;for permission to hold the session this year, said one of the sources.

They received permission, but authorities reduced the duration and the number of participants, citing security concerns, he said.;

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The German chemical giant BASF has pulled out of a $2.6bn project to refine nickel on the Indonesian island of Halmahera, after campaigners highlighted the plight of uncontacted people in the area.

The ‘Sonic Bay’ project, in partnership with France’s Eramet, was intended to refine nickel and cobalt mined by Weda Bay Nickel (WBN), whose operations have been held responsible by NGOs like Survival International for destroying the rainforest home to the uncontacted indigenous Hongana Manyawa tribe.

Weda Bay Nickel is part owned by Eramet.;

Survival International supporters had sent the companies more than 20,000 emails protesting at the plan, and Survival had repeatedly lobbied both BASF and the German authorities.

Survival’s campaign has revealed that much of the area being mined by WBN is the territory of uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people. A recent video showing an uncontacted Hongana Manyawa family coming to a mining camp to ask for food after their rainforest was destroyed went viral, and prompted senior Indonesian politicians to call for their land to be spared.

The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa are becoming effectively forced to beg for food from the same companies destroying their rainforest home.

Despite the scrapping of the refinery project, Weda Bay Nickel – which is the world’s biggest nickel mine – is currently set to continue. The nickel is destined for electric car batteries. Tesla, which has signed agreements worth billions of dollars with Indonesian nickel and cobalt suppliers, recently announced that it was ‘exploring the need for a no-go zone’ to protect uncontacted Indigenous peoples. The statement has been widely interpreted as signaling its concerns about nickel from Halmahera because of the mine’s impact on the Hongana Manyawa.

;”This major announcement by BASF comes after sustained pressure from Survival and tens of thousands of our supporters, who have consistently said that the ‘Sonic Bay’ project would turbo-charge nickel mining on Halmahera – and accelerate the destruction of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa,” said Caroline Pearce, Director of Survival International.;

“BASF’s withdrawal means that they, at least, will not be complicit in the Hongana Manyawa’s destruction.

“But Eramet, and other companies, are still ripping up the rainforest and the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa simply won’t survive without it. They must stop now, for good, before it’s too late,” said Pearce.

When most people think of artificial intelligence, they’re probably thinking of — and worrying about — ChatGPT and deepfakes. AI-generated text and images dominate our social media feeds and the other websites we visit, sometimes without us knowing it, and are often used to spread unreliable and misleading information.

But what if text-generating models like ChatGPT could actually spot deepfake images?

 A University at Buffalo-led research team has applied large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, toward spotting deepfakes of human faces. Their study, presented last week at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition, found that LLMs’ performance lagged behind that of state-of-the-art deepfake detection algorithms, but their natural language processing may actually make them the more practical detection tool in the future. 

“What sets LLMs apart from existing detection methods is the ability to explain their findings in a way that’s comprehensible to humans, like identifying an incorrect shadow or a mismatched pair of earrings,” says the study’s lead author, Siwei Lyu, PhD, SUNY Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, within the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “LLMs were not designed or trained for deepfake detection, but their semantic knowledge makes them well suited for it, so we expect to see more efforts toward this application.”

Collaborators on the study include the University at Albany and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

How language models understand images

Trained on much of the available text on the internet — amounting to some 300 billion words — ChatGPT finds statistical patterns and relationships between words in order to generate responses.

The latest versions of ChatGPT and other LLMs can also analyze images. These multimodal LLMs use large databases of captioned photos to find the relationships between words and images.;

“Humans do this as well. Whether it be a stop sign or a viral meme, we constantly assign a semantic description to images,” says the study’s first author, Shan Jai, assistant lab director in the UB Media Forensic Lab. “In this way, images become their own language.”

The Media Forensics Lab team decided to test if GPT-4 with vision (GPT-4V) and Gemini 1.0 could tell the difference between real faces and faces generated by AI. They gave it thousands of images of both real and deepfake faces and asked it to identify any potential signs of manipulation, or synthetic artifacts.;

ChatGPT advantages

ChatGPT was accurate 79.5% of the time on detecting synthetic artifacts in images generated by latent diffusion, and 77.2% of the time on StyleGAN-generated images.;

“This is comparable to earlier deepfake detection methods, so with proper prompt guidance, ChatGPT can do a fairly decent job at detecting AI-generated images,” says Lyu, who is also co-director of UB’s Center for Information Integrity.

More crucially, ChatGPT could explain its decision making in plain language. When provided an AI-generated photo of a man with glasses, the model correctly pointed out that “the hair on the left side of the image slightly blurs” and “the transition between the person and the background is a bit abrupt and lacks depth.”

“Existing deepfake detection models will tell us the probability of an image being real or fake, but they will very rarely tell us why they came to this conclusion. And even if we look into the model’s underlying mechanisms, there will be features that we simply can’t understand,” Lyu says. “Meanwhile, everything ChatGPT outputs is understandable to humans.”

That’s because ChatGPT bases its analysis on semantic knowledge alone. Whereas traditional deepfake detection algorithms distinguish real from fake by training on large datasets of images labeled real or fake, LLMs’ natural language abilities give them something of a common sense understanding of reality — at least when they’re not hallucinating — including the typical symmetry of human faces and the look of real photographs.

“Once the vision component of ChatGPT understands an image as a human face, the language component can make the inference that a face will typically have two eyes, and so on,” Lyu says. “The language component provides a deeper connection between visual and verbal concepts.”

ChatGPT’s semantic knowledge and natural language processing make it a more user-friendly deepfake tool for both users and developers, the study concluded.

“Typically, we take insights about detecting deepfakes and convert them into programming language. Now, all this knowledge is present within a single model and we need only use natural language to bring out that knowledge,” Lyu says.

ChatGPT drawbacks

ChatGPT’s performance was well below the latest deepfake detection algorithms, which have accuracy rates in the mid- to high-90s.

This was partly because LLMs can’t catch signal-level statistical differences that are invisible to the human eye but often used by detection algorithms to spot AI-generated images.;

“ChatGPT focused only on semantic-level abnormalities,” Lyu says. “In this way, the semantic intuitiveness of the ChatGPT’s results may actually be a double-edged sword for deepfake detection.”

And other LLMs may not be as effective at explaining their analysis. Despite performing comparatively to ChatGPT at guessing the presence of synthetic artifacts, Gemini’s supporting evidence was often nonsensical, like pointing out nonexistent moles.

Another drawback is that LLMs often refused to analyze images. When asked directly whether a photo was generated by AI, ChatGPT typically replied with, “Sorry, I can’t assist with that request.”

“The model is programmed not to answer when it doesn’t reach a certain confidence level,” Lyu says. “We know that ChatGPT has information relevant to deepfake detection, but, again, a human operator is needed to excite that part of its knowledge base. Prompt engineering is effective, but not very efficient, so the next step is going one level down and actually fine tuning LLMs for this task specifically.”

In a significant display of unity and solidarity, Mr. Nizar Baraka, the Secretary-General of the Istiqlal Party, recently welcomed a delegation of senior Palestinian figures from Jerusalem and Gaza at the Allal El Fassi Foundation. This delegation, led by Mr. Ashraf Hassan Abbas Al-A’war, the Palestinian Minister of Jerusalem Affairs, underscored a profound moment of camaraderie and mutual respect between Morocco and Palestine.

The visit was not merely a formal diplomatic engagement; it was a testament to the deep-rooted humanitarian and political bonds that tie the two nations. The Palestinian delegation’s commendation of the medical aid initiative to Gaza, directed by the noble instructions of His Majesty King Mohammed VI, epitomizes Morocco’s unwavering dedication to the Palestinian cause. This act of compassion and assistance highlights Morocco’s commitment to alleviating the suffering of the Palestinian people, a cause that resonates deeply within the Moroccan consciousness.

Mr. Baraka’s remarks during the meeting were a poignant reminder of where the Palestinian issue stands in Morocco’s national priorities. He emphasized that after the issue of the Moroccan territorial integrity, the Palestinian cause is paramount. This sentiment is not confined to political rhetoric; it is a reflection of the genuine concern and empathy that permeates the hearts of Moroccans, from ;the sovereign to the citizens.

The unity between Morocco and Palestine is not a recent development; it is a historical bond that has been fortified through shared struggles and aspirations. The Kingdom of Morocco has consistently stood by the Palestinian people, advocating for their rights on international platforms and providing tangible support in times of need. The Moroccan solidarity is rooted in a shared belief in justice, dignity, and the right of all peoples to self-determination.

As Mr. Baraka reiterated, Morocco’s support for the Palestinian quest for their legitimate rights is unwavering. The vision of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital is not just a political stance; it is a moral imperative that reflects Morocco’s commitment to justice and peace. This support is a constant in the Moroccan national policy, transcending political changes and remaining steadfast through time.

In these times of global uncertainty, the hope for a better future for the Palestinian people remains a guiding principle for Morocco. ;The dedication to their cause is a reflection of Morocco’s broader commitment to human rights and international solidarity. ‘It is our sincere belief that through collective efforts, justice will prevail, and the Palestinian people will achieve their rightful place among the nations of the world.”;

The meeting at the Allal El Fassi Foundation is a reminder of the enduring bonds between the two peoples. It is a call to the international community to recognize and support the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Morocco’s commitment, as articulated by Mr. Baraka, is a beacon of hope and a model of steadfast solidarity that we hope will inspire others to join in the pursuit of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.

In conclusion, Morocco’s stance on the Palestinian issue is clear and resolute. Morocco’s support is not a mere diplomatic gesture but a deeply held conviction. Mr Baraka stated:”We stand with the Palestinian people in their quest for justice, dignity, and independence. And we remain hopeful that, through perseverance and solidarity, a brighter and more equitable future awaits our Palestinian brothers and sisters.”

During recent periods of unusually warm water in the Gulf of Alaska, young Pacific cod in near shore safe havens where they typically spend their adolescence did not experience the protective effects those areas typically provide, a new Oregon State University study found.

Instead, during marine heat waves in 2014-16 and 2019, young cod in these near shore “nurseries” around Kodiak Island in Alaska experienced significant changes in their abundance, growth rates and diet, with researchers estimating that only the largest 15-25% of the island’s cod population survived the summer. Even after the high temperatures subsided, the cod have yet to return to pre-heat wave size and diet.

The findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, may have broader implications for marine fish populations worldwide, as marine heat waves become longer and more frequent with climate change, the researchers said.

“These coastal habitats aren’t supporting fish in the same way that they used to as a result of marine heat waves,” said lead author Hillary Thalmann, a graduate student in OSU’s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Sciences. “That’s a novel finding, because we don’t always look at the nurseries as a place where size-selective mortality could be occurring rapidly.”

Pacific cod, a popular choice for fish and chips, is the second-largest commercial groundfish fishery off the coast of Alaska. The 2022 commercial harvest totaled 403 million pounds and was valued at $225 million, according to NOAA Fisheries. Cod also has a long history in Alaskan culture and is important to Indigenous communities in the region.

The nurseries are shallow areas along shorelines with lots of aquatic vegetation, including eelgrass, algae and kelp, which attract lots of food for the fish and provide hiding places where they can avoid predators. Typically, they are considered safe havens for small Pacific cod — areas where the fish go at around 3 months old to eat and grow as much as they can during their first summer and fall.

But during the two recent marine heat waves in the Gulf of Alaska, water temperatures were recorded at 58 degrees Fahrenheit, almost 6 degrees above normal. Together, the two heat waves are considered the most extreme warming events on record in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, and the effects on the cod population were so severe that the fishery was closed in 2020 and a federal disaster was declared in 2022.

Previous OSU research has found that the higher temperatures triggered earlier reproduction and high mortality among young Pacific cod. The new study focuses on the physiological disruptions the young cod experienced while occupying the coastal nurseries.

Researchers used juvenile Pacific cod collected by the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center Fisheries Behavioral Ecology program from 16 sites around Kodiak Island in mid-July and late August for the years 2006-2019. This sampling was part of routine population monitoring for the cod fishery.

For the July sample, researchers looked at the fishes’ otoliths, tiny bony structures that chronicle a fish’s growth similar to the rings of trees. Measuring the otoliths allowed researchers to calculate the fishes’ precise rate of growth up to the July sampling date, and then calculate their projected size based on maintaining that same growth rate into August.

However, when they looked at the August sample, the fish were 30% bigger than the size predicted by the established growth rate, and there were almost no small fish present in the sample. The only way researchers were able to account for the size of the fish in August was to remove all the small fish from the July sample and leave just the largest 15-25% of fish following the projected growth rate trajectory.

“If we removed the little guys and grew the big guys — the top 15-25% — through to August based on the growth rates we saw earlier in the summer, then we got the size range that we see in those heat wave years,” Thalmann said. “It’s important to show that with heat events like this, size-selective mortality can continue in the cod population beyond just their early life in the open water,” where the larvae spend their first three months.

Size-selective mortality is the phenomenon of survival being determined by an organism’s size; here, only the biggest fish appear to have survived.;

“We saw these differences in size in the nursery, and we tried to explain them with growth rates and tried to explain them with diet, but we couldn’t explain it all,” Thalmann said. “There was something out there, probably size-selective mortality, that was the major driver for what we were seeing.”

Moving forward, researchers say changing ocean conditions may mean that Pacific cod have to move further north to find optimal growth environments, or there may be a shift toward bigger cod being the only ones to survive and contribute genetic information to subsequent generations.

“If the marine heat waves continue, there will probably be some changes in both the distribution and the quality of these populations,” Thalmann said. “I don’t think it’s the end of fish and chips, but I do think it’s a cautionary tale for climate change and the shifting dynamics of fisheries in warm temperatures.”

NPR News: 06-27-2024 6PM EDT

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