This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Ukrainian government is planning to change its conscription practices as it seeks to sustain fighting capacity after nearly two years of full-fledged war with Russia.
The summer and autumn Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed to win back large amounts of territory, and there are increasing voices among Ukraine’s western partners suggesting in private that sooner or later Kyiv may need to consider attempting a negotiated end to the war.
In the first months of the war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians volunteered to fight, as part of a wave of patriotic determination that shocked Russia and repelled its initial advances.
Viral videos have shown men snatched from the street to be conscripted, and there have been numerous corruption scandals of officials taking bribes to provide exemption.
Many Ukrainians say if called upon they would go to the army, but many men of conscription age who do not want to be sent to the front have spent weeks or months hiding at home, trying to avoid the roaming squads of mobilisation officers.
In the summer, sources in Odesa explained a popular scheme in the city, whereby for a fee of $5,000 in cash, men who did not want to serve could receive a fake medical report suggesting serious spinal issues, with which they would be declared exempt from conscription and be allowed to leave the country.
The original article contains 704 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On October 13, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, said that “the so-called Ukrainian counteroffensive can be considered finished” with nothing to show for it but tens of thousands of dead recruits and that Russia had “launched active combat operations along the entire frontline.” (Nebenzya also accused the West of feeding more weapons to Ukraine “like drugs to a drug addict, thus prolonging his agony.”) Two days later, Nebenzya’s boss Vladimir Putin weighed in with his own assertion that the Ukrainian counteroffensive had “failed completely” but, confusingly, added that “the opposing side” was planning new offensive operations in some areas and described the Russian troops’ operations as “active defense,” without explaining how that differs from plain and simple defense.
Then, after two more days, on October 17, Russia got an unpleasant surprise when Ukraine delivered powerful strikes at targets in occupied territories, in Berdyansk and Luhansk, hitting military airports and weapons depots.
Thus ends a prolonged will-they-or-won’t-they saga in which reports last September that Zelensky’s request for the long-range missiles would not be granted during his visit to Washington, D.C. were followed by a quick reversal, albeit not officially announced.
Putin, on his visit to Beijing, predictably claimed that the ATACMS would not help Ukraine but also made a weird invitation to President Joe Biden to take them back and come over to Russia for “tea and pancakes” instead.
Appearing on the 60 Minutes program on Channel One with the husband-and-wife team of Olga Skabeyeva and Yevgeny Popov, retired Russian colonel and TV pundit Mikhail Khodaryonok candidly admitted that if ATACMS strikes continued, this could make it much harder for Russia to use its military aircraft to stymie Ukrainian offensive operations by strafing tanks and armored personnel vehicles.
Pro-Ukraine commentators who are critical of the slow pace of Western weapons deliveries, such as Russian expatriate journalist Yulia Latynina, have been asking why the ATACMS were not in place before the start of the spring/summer counteroffensive, which would have likely ensured far more impressive successes.
The original article contains 734 words, the summary contains 336 words. Saved 54%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Much of the fallow land lies in a vast swath along the front line of the war, while other fields are in areas recently retaken by Ukrainian forces, she says.
Becker-Reshef says that while overall, Ukraine has been able to maintain its agricultural output this year, the abandoned fields have already cost the nation around $2 billion in lost crops.
Precise estimates of how much artillery ammunition has been used in the war so far are hard to come by, but Russian and Ukrainian forces are firing thousands of rounds a day, according to Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"These can lay in the ground for over a hundred years and still be lethal," says Iain Overton, the executive director of Action on Armed Violence, a British non-profit that focuses on the harm caused by explosive weapons.
Still, Overton says, the amount of unexploded ordnance, land mines, and toxic pollution in farmland along the front line will make returning those fields to production a "gargantuan task."
The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam earlier this year drained a massive reservoir and left nearly a thousand miles of irrigation channels without a source of water.
The original article contains 1,186 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The first American-made Abrams tanks have been delivered to Ukraine, two U.S. defense officials said, arriving months ahead of initial estimates and in time to be used in Kyiv’s counteroffensive against Russian forces.
But Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, has warned that the Abrams would need to be deployed “in a very tailored way, for very specific, well-crafted operations,” or risk being destroyed.
Their arrival represents part of an extraordinary effort by Western allies — responding to relentless pushing from Ukraine — to deliver a powerful weapon months ahead of schedule.
Just one year ago, allies had resisted sending Western-made tanks to Ukraine, concerned that doing so would draw NATO more directly into the war and further escalate tensions with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
By January, however, convinced that Ukraine needed more heavy armored vehicles to confront Russian forces, Britain, Germany and the United States each agreed to supply the modern Western tanks or allow for them to be transferred to Kyiv.
U.S. troops began training Ukrainian forces in late spring, conducting an abbreviated 12-week course to operate Abrams tanks at American military bases in Germany.
The original article contains 511 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Known AI hater and famed singer-songwriter Nick Cave has once again gone off on OpenAI's ChatGPT and its imitators being used to mimic the actual talent to write and record music.
In a "letter to the editor"-style blog post, Cave took questions from two purported music industry folks about songwriters using generative AI to speed up the process.
"ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning," Cave seethed.
As the ChatGPT-curious Cave fan noted, the "Red Right Hand" singer had indeed written about the now-notorious chatbot before — and his commentary back then, at the beginning of 2023, feels a bit like prophecy now.
Back in January, when OpenAI was still fairly new to the public psyche and hadn't yet resulted in people losing their jobs by the thousands, another clueless fan wrote into the musician's blog with ChatGPT-generated lyrics that they had instructed the chatbot to write "in the style of Nick Cave."
But considering what we've already seen happen since Cave's first takedown of ChatGPT — the rapid mainstreaming of generative AI, which has rocked academic institutions and led to massive entertainment industry strikes over the existential dangers these technologies pose — it's becoming more and more difficult to disagree with him.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A group of seniors preparing to graduate from his alma mater, upstate New York’s Hamilton College, wrote a letter accusing the Goldman Sachs chairman and chief executive officer of “blatant ignorance and disrespect” as they spoke with him about the school’s investments in fossil fuels at a trustee networking event.
The letter, jointly written by three members of the class of 2023 and published on the school newspaper’s website in May, was reported Friday by New York Magazine as part of a story on unrest within Goldman Sachs over Solomon’s management style.
They said Solomon indicated fossil-fuel divestment was a stupid movement and that if the students traveled to countries like China, India and Cambodia they could see how the world “really worked” before deciding if they wanted to live like that.
But he’s faced elements of revolt from the firm’s powerful cadre of partners over issues tied to the business, such as the costly consumer-banking flop, and some specific to Solomon himself — complaining about his brusque management style and his use of the corporate jet for leisure.
A growing list of senior departures has also drawn attention, with some executives departing soon after taking new posts, and some top women exiting amid criticism about the firm’s culture.
Tom Montag, who spent more than two decades at Goldman and helped run the trading business when Solomon ran investment banking, was named to the board of directors last month.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
She worked on a paper about the dangers of large language models (LLMs), generative AI systems trained on huge amounts of data to make educated guesses about the next word in a sentence and spit out sometimes eerily human-esque text.
Gebru and her colleagues have also expressed concern about the exploitation of heavily surveilled and low-wage workers helping support AI systems; content moderators and data annotators are often from poor and underserved communities, like refugees and incarcerated people.
Google AI head Jeff Dean acknowledged that the paper “surveyed valid concerns about LLMs,” but claimed it “ignored too much relevant research.” When asked for comment by Rolling Stone, a representative pointed to an article from 2020 referencing an internal memo in which the company pledged to investigate Gebru’s exit.
In August, with support from the White House, Humane Intelligence co-led a hackathon in which thousands of members of the public tested the guardrails of the eight major large-language-model companies including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability AI.
In 2018, a member of her team interviewed an older Black woman with the pseudonym Mellow who struggled to find housing through the Coordinated Entry System, which Gangadharan explains functions like a Match.com for the unhoused population of Los Angeles.
Buolamwini’s Algorithmic Justice League looks at the harms caused by the TSA’s expansion of facial-recognition technology to 25 airports across the U.S. Gangadharan is studying surveillance, including AI-enabled, automated tools at Amazon fulfillment centers and its health effects on workers.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Hundreds of people in South Korean took to the streets of Seoul on Saturday to protest against Japan's contentious plan to release treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.
Marching in central Seoul, they held signs reading "Protect the Pacific Ocean" and "Nuclear Power?
Choi Kyoungsook of activist group Korea Radiation Watch said radioactive substances in the water "will eventually destroy the marine ecosystem".
A few days later, South Korea released its own assessment that found that discharging the water should "not have any meaningful impact on our ocean areas," according to government minister Bang Moon-kyu.
US President Joe Biden is due to meet his South Korean counterpart Yoon Suk Yeol and Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida next week for a trilateral summit, where the controversial plan will be discussed.
"The governments of South Korea, the US, and Japan should view it an environmental disaster, rather than a political issue, and agree to block it for future generations," Ms Choi said.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Acres of abandoned farmland that line the picturesque coastal communities played perfect host to invasive grasses that are primed to burn, creating tinderbox conditions as the island’s landscapes dried and warmed.
As crews continue to try to contain the flames and assess the devastating toll the fires have taken on lives and livelihoods, experts are expecting a long recovery – and warning of a fiery future.
“That is one of the devastating parts here – we knew this could happen,” said Andrea Barretto, the co-executive director of the Hawaiʻi Wildfire Management Organization, a nonprofit dedicated to prevention and recovery.
All their fire engines – just over a dozen with two ladder trucks – are only equipped for navigating city roads, limiting the ability to attack blazes before they reach communities.
Records show that the sirens that were intended to warn the residents of the incoming inferno never sounded, according to Hawaii Emergency Management Agency spokesperson Adam Weintraub.
“When we have fire like that, it doesn’t just threaten communities and infrastructure and natural resources,” Barretto said, sharing concerns that the rain to come will send soil down the slopes that will smother coral reefs.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
New Zealand’s intelligence service has accused China of foreign interference in its democracy, amid increasing tensions and geopolitical competition in the region.
Friday’s public threat assessment points to “increased strategic competition” in the Indo-Pacific region as driving the interference from China.
Beijing’s “efforts to advance its political, economic, military and security involvement in the Pacific is a major factor driving strategic competition in our home region,” it says.
In previous security overview reports, NZSIS has spoken broadly about having gathered evidence of interference and espionage activities in New Zealand by foreign states and agents, but not named specific countries or governments.
In one case study – not attributed to a specific state – it said “an undeclared foreign intelligence officer … targeted and sought to cultivate a New Zealander with access to information and people networks of interest to the foreign state [and] almost certainly sought to obtain political, economic and national security intelligence through the relationship.”
On the threat from Iran, the agency said it had detected state actors “monitoring and providing reporting on Iranian communities and dissident groups”.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
New Zealand’s intelligence service has accused China of foreign interference in its democracy, amid increasing tensions and geopolitical competition in the region.
Friday’s public threat assessment points to “increased strategic competition” in the Indo-Pacific region as driving the interference from China.
Beijing’s “efforts to advance its political, economic, military and security involvement in the Pacific is a major factor driving strategic competition in our home region,” it says.
In previous security overview reports, NZSIS has spoken broadly about having gathered evidence of interference and espionage activities in New Zealand by foreign states and agents, but not named specific countries or governments.
In one case study – not attributed to a specific state – it said “an undeclared foreign intelligence officer … targeted and sought to cultivate a New Zealander with access to information and people networks of interest to the foreign state [and] almost certainly sought to obtain political, economic and national security intelligence through the relationship.”
On the threat from Iran, the agency said it had detected state actors “monitoring and providing reporting on Iranian communities and dissident groups”.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Illinois state representative Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz told the Daily Herald that she introduced the anti-doxxing law as "a way to hold accountable those who perpetuate hate online."
The ADL's ultimate goal is to see a federal anti-doxxing law passed, but right now, Congress is only taking small steps in that direction by mulling the Doxing Threat Assessment Act introduced in May.
ACLU of Illinois' director of communications and public policy, Ed Yohnka, told the Daily Herald that his organization remained opposed because the law could infringe on free speech rights.
“Arming our national security officials and law enforcement with knowledge of how these groups operate and for identifying vulnerabilities and preventing attacks is a first step to protect our communities from harm.”
Since the Doxing Threat Assessment Act was introduced, the number of co-sponsors has doubled, suggesting the bipartisan bill is gaining popular support and has a decent chance of passing.
), said that persecuted religious groups and businesses appeared most vulnerable and "with more information, our law enforcement will be able to develop a more robust approach to the protections of Americans and their data.”
I'm a bot and I'm open source!