For Belinda Mosby, the nightmares started in March.

Mosby had been working at Carelon Behavioral Health, one of the new 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline hotline centers in New Hampshire, for two months. When Mosby started the job in January 2023, she said she was enthusiastic. After 25 years working in the mental health industry as a prison behavioral health specialist, substance abuse counselor and mobile crisis responder, she knew how dire the crisis was. She also said she knew she could help.

“I’m 25 years of preparing for this,” Mosby told ABC News of her thinking at the time.

But quickly, she said she felt overwhelmed. Callers were in such severe distress, she told ABC News. Call after call, Mosby said she began to feel a discomfort set in that she couldn’t shake.

Read it all.

As 988 centers struggle to hire, burnout plagues some crisis staff.

Data obtained by @ABC News found that, in some states such as Oklahoma and Colorado, more than one-third of employees left within months of taking their first call. https://t.co/9wAjHSUZxB

— ABC News (@ABC) February 1, 2024

TP: What about in the decade ahead, what is a best- and worse-case scenario for how the world might look with gen AI?

EB: The pessimistic scenario is not so much about stagnation. It’s more that the nefarious uses of it will catch us off guard, whether that is weaponising them or through information warfare and abuse. The unknown unknowns. We are into uncharted territory where we have technologies that are much more powerful than before, and history suggests that often the biggest effects are ones that no one anticipated. On the optimistic side, we could start seeing significant productivity growth in the 2020s. We will see new kinds of creative work, scientific progress, industrial designs and new products and services being invented.

TP: A key determinant of which of those two paths we will be closer to are the laws, norms and institutions we develop around gen AI. How optimistic are you that we can get that right?

EB: I would not assume that everything is automatically going to work out fine. I think these are super-powerful technologies and we should have our eyes open, and be quite careful about how we use them. If they’re used right, this could be the best decade in human history. If they’re used badly, it could be one of the worst. So there’s a real premium on smart governance, managers and policymakers really paying attention to this technology. We should not fly blind. 

Read it all.

Excellent stimulating exchange on gen-AI's potential, between @erikbryn and @tejparikh90: ‘On the productivity side, I think 2024 is going to be a year of harvesting a lot of the capabilities’ https://t.co/UJlksthtFo via @ft

— Andrew Hill (@andrewtghill) January 31, 2024

For decades, Liliana Segre visited Italian classrooms to recount her expulsion from school under Benito Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws, her doomed attempt to flee Nazi-controlled Italy, her deportation from Milan’s train station to the death camps of Auschwitz. Her plain-spoken testimony about gas chambers, tattooed arms, casual atrocities and the murders of her father, grandparents and thousands of other Italian Jews made her the conscience and living memory of a country that often prefers not to remember.

Now she is wondering if it was all wasted breath.

“Why did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation? For whom? Why?” Ms. Segre, 93, with cotton-white hair, a steel-cage memory and an official status as a Senator for Life said last week in her handsome Milan apartment, where she sat next to a police escort. She wondered, not for the first time these days, if “I’ve lived in vain.”

Even as Ms. Segre accepted another honorary degree on Saturday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, rising anti-Semitism and what she considers a general climate of hate have put her in a pessimistic mood.

Read it all.

“Why did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation?” Liliana Segre, 93, an Italian Holocaust survivor, says the rise in antisemitism has made her wonder these days if “I’ve lived in vain.” https://t.co/u9hfj0292B

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) January 31, 2024

Less than a third of Americans say they would be willing to vote for someone nominated by their party who is over the age of 80 or has been charged with a felony or convicted of a felony by a jury. Somewhat more, but still less than half of Americans, say they would consider backing someone nominated by their party who is a socialist….

Should Biden and Trump emerge as their parties’ presidential nominees this year (as they are on track to do, by virtue of their dominance in their respective primary fields), voters would face a choice between two of the most objectionable characteristics to Americans of those measured — someone who has been charged with a felony (Trump) and someone who is older than 80 (Biden).

An analysis of the responses of those answering both of these questions suggests that a slight majority of Americans (52%) would be unperturbed by the choice between Biden and Trump. These individuals indicate they would be comfortable voting for either someone who is over 80 (23%) or who has been charged with a felony (21%), or would feel comfortable with both types of candidates (8%).

On the other hand, 43% of respondents asked about voting for someone over 80 and someone charged with a felony say they would not vote for either type of candidate, while the remaining 5% are unsure about both.

Read it all.

Americans express broad willingness to vote for candidates from several gender, racial and religious backgrounds that largely haven’t been represented in the White House.https://t.co/W6JC0DaFFo

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) January 27, 2024

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

It looked like a military campaign. The farmers called it “Operation Paris Siege,” while the French interior minister ordered an “important defensive system” to protect the capital and its airports.

On Monday, angry agriculturalists and their allies deployed their tractors in an attempt to surround Paris, choking major roadways and disrupting not only traffic and trade, but also politics and normal life.

Farmers are emerging as the protest movement of the moment. In multiple countries across Europe, they have been driving their combines and harvesters into the streets to oppose cuts to subsidies and new regulations, some of them designed to reduce climate-changing emissions.

France, of course, is deeply familiar with protests. But as Paris prepares to host the Olympics this summer, and as the country’s ruling political centrists gird for a challenge from the far right in European Parliament elections, the farmer protests have the potential to be particularly destabilizing.

Read it all.

French farmers deployed their tractors to choke major highways, disrupting not only trade and traffic, but also politics and normal life, to protest subsidy cuts and new regulations. https://t.co/I0TVeKa6aq

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 30, 2024

Later on Sunday, Turkey’s interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, wrote on social media that the two murder suspects had been captured.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement on Telegram, “saying it was in response to a call by the group’s leaders to target Jews and Christians”, Reuters reports.

On Monday, the Anglican Chaplain in Istanbul, Canon Ian Sherwood, praised the response of the authorities.

“Christians in Istanbul enjoy a perfectly peaceable life with their Turkish friends and neighbours of other spiritual persuasions,” he said. “There is great sorrow on hearing the news of the murder at a celebration of the mass at the very moment that we, too, were celebrating the eucharist in our own church.

“The English Chaplaincy was impressed and grateful to see how quickly the Turkish authorities acted. As far as I know, within less than one hour, every open church in the city had a police presence assigned to it for protection and security.”

Read it all.

“We ask for greater security and for the safety of the faithful, of the Christian community, which perseveres in the faith and courageously face very long journeys at times to attend the eucharistic celebration.”https://t.co/SwOv4RI130

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 29, 2024

The post-Cold War era began, in the early 1990s, with soaring visions of global peace. It is ending, three decades later, with surging risks of global war. Today, Europe is experiencing its most devastating military conflict in generations. A brutal fight between Israel and Hamas is sowing violence and instability across the Middle East. East Asia, fortunately, is not at war. But it isn’t exactly peaceful, either, as China coerces its neighbors and amasses military power at a historic rate. If many Americans don’t realize how close the world is to being ravaged by fierce, interlocking conflicts, perhaps that’s because they’ve forgotten how the last global war came about.

When Americans think of global war, they typically think of World War II—or the part of the war that began with Japan’s strike on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. After that attack, and Adolf Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war against the United States, the conflict was a single, all-encompassing struggle between rival alliances on a global battlefield. But World War II began as a trio of loosely connected contests for primacy in key regions stretching from Europe to the Asia-Pacific—contests that eventually climaxed and coalesced in globally consuming ways. The history of this period reveals the darker aspects of strategic interdependence in a war-torn world. It also illustrates uncomfortable parallels to the situation Washington currently confronts.

The United States isn’t facing a formalized alliance of adversaries, as it once did during World War II. It probably won’t see a replay of a scenario in which autocratic powers conquer giant swaths of Eurasia and its littoral regions. Yet with wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East already raging, and ties between revisionist states becoming more pronounced, all it would take is a clash in the contested western Pacific to bring about another awful scenario—one in which intense, interrelated regional struggles overwhelm the international system and create a crisis of global security unlike anything since 1945. A world at risk could become a world at war. And the United States isn’t remotely ready for the challenge.

Read it all.

“If many Americans don’t realize how close the world is to being ravaged by fierce, interlocking conflicts, perhaps that’s because they’ve forgotten how the last global war came about.” https://t.co/pRqf2quAes

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) January 27, 2024

Part Two consists of two short essays, “To Stand where Christ stands” and “Early Christian Writing”. The first discusses the meaning of “spirituality” in a Christian context, pointing out that, in contrast to the way in which the word is so often used nowadays, spirituality has to do with “a whole human life to be lived in the ‘place’ defined by Jesus”. The second situates early Christian writings in the general context in which the Church lived in the early centuries.

Underlying the book are the presuppositions that “we are because God is,” and that “we are the way we are because of the way God is,” and so to be fully ourselves is to grow into an awareness of God. The book relates the wisdom of the early Eastern monastic tradition to the present situation of Christians, living in a world very different from the one in which that tradition developed. It affirms the continuing relevance of that tradition to the goal of all Christian ascetic endeavour, which is mature humanity, attained by acquiring the “capacity of seeing and sharing the divine glory and joy”.

Like all good retreat addresses, this book informs and enlightens, guiding readers to deeper self-knowledge and discernment, and so to the control of those “passions” that, in the form of emotions and instincts, are the source of so many of the world’s ills, both past and present.

Read it all.

"Eastern monastic writers identified eight passions of the soul. . . These are not necessarily wrong in themselves, but they are 'ways in which natural impulses can be distorted and can cloud our perception'." https://t.co/DGTJXqvtWs

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 26, 2024

Israel’s conflict with Hamas is set to be a long one—with both sides struggling to accomplish their fundamental aims and no clear path to any kind of enduring peace.

Israel has sworn to destroy Hamas as a significant military and political force. Hamas is committed to the long-term goal of erasing the Israeli state.

Read it all.

Israel’s conflict with Hamas is set to be a long one—with both sides struggling to accomplish their fundamental aims and no clear path to any kind of enduring peace https://t.co/M1gfz7mFDw https://t.co/M1gfz7mFDw

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) January 26, 2024

While the public’s attention has been captured by AI chatbots, a quiet revolution has been brewing in the sciences. One of the most promising fields AI is impacting is biology—long dominated by the tradition of the “wet lab,” which favors pure experimental data over computer simulation. Deep learning is changing that. It enables computers to understand complex patterns in data and generate ideas based on those patterns, and that’s making AI more and more central to experimental biology. There is no field more complex in its patterns than biology, so AI is the perfect tool for understanding it. And—as a host of new companies are showing—engineering it.

Oddly enough, even the success of large-language models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT could be seen as evidence of AI’s ability to understand biological complexity. After all, language is a product of a particular biology—ours. The text on which ChatGPT is trained is just one of many complex forms of data produced by biological systems. In nature, this complexity reaches up from the smallest working parts—our proteins, our DNA—but also extends up through cells, organs, to physiology, disease, and behavior.

AI, with the right data, can span all of these scales and make sense of the data we collect on all of them. It’s poised to accelerate basic science, the business of biotechs, the behemoth pharmaceutical companies, and the broader bioeconomy.

Read it all.

The most exciting aspect of wet AI is that it promises to turn the molecular world into a programmable medium. That could have far reaching impacts, giving us the ability to imagine new categories of products based on engineered biology.https://t.co/Cb5mziIFaF

— proto.life (@protolifemedia) January 20, 2024

In a 30-square-mile patch of northern Virginia that’s been dubbed “data center alley,” the boom in artificial intelligence is turbocharging electricity use. Struggling to keep up, the power company that serves the area temporarily paused new data center connections at one point in 2022. Virginia’s environmental regulators considered a plan to allow data centers to run diesel generators during power shortages, but backed off after it drew strong community opposition.

In the Kansas City area, a data center along with a factory for electric-vehicle batteries that are under construction will need so much energy the local provider put off plans to close a coal-fired power plant.

This is how it is in much of the US, where electric utilities and regulators have been caught off guard by the biggest jump in demand in a generation. One of the things they didn’t properly plan for is AI, an immensely power-hungry technology that uses specialized microchips to process mountains of data. Electricity consumption at US data centers alone is poised to triple from 2022 levels, to as much as 390 terawatt hours by the end of the decade, according to Boston Consulting Group. That’s equal to about 7.5% of the nation’s projected electricity demand. “We do need way more energy in the world than we thought we needed before,” Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool has become a global phenomenon, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.”

Read it all.

AI needs so much power that old coal plants are sticking around https://t.co/VBOC34Uz8j

— Businessweek (@BW) January 25, 2024

Sir Stephen has been Labour MP for East Ham in London since 1994, having first come to the area as part of a Christian mission to the East End while a university student…

He is on record as opposing legislation to introduce assisted dying, saying in a Westminster Hall debate in July 2022: “If we were to legalise assisted dying, we would impose an awful moral dilemma on every conscientious frail person nearing the end of their life. . . If ending their life early were legally permissible, many who do not want to end their life would feel under great, probably irresistible, pressure to do so. There is no way to stop that happening.”

On the Labour List site, he writes that “the radical individualism of some Conservatives” can prompt support for the legalisation of assisted suicide, “even at the risk of dire societal outcomes for the vulnerable. But in my view that should not be the position of those of us on the left.”

Read it all.

The Labour MP Sir Stephen Timms @stephenctimms has urged members of his party to give “careful thought” to the issue of assisted dying, arguing against that idea that it might be a party-political matterhttps://t.co/nXXt4xalNi

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 25, 2024

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it’s now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it … Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was … Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

Read it all.

Alana Newhouse in Tablet "Everything Is Broken: And how to fix it". https://t.co/TF0xr1olos Will be interested to see if anyone does not agree that it is very significant

— Edward N Luttwak (@ELuttwak) January 15, 2021

At Pew Research Center, we get lots of questions about this group, often called the “nones.” What do “nones” believe? Are they opposed to religion? What are their views about science? Is their growth good or bad for society, and why?

Our survey data shows:

Most “nones” believe in God or another higher power. But very few go to religious services regularly.
Most say religion does some harm, but many also think it does some good. They are not uniformly anti-religious.
Most “nones” reject the idea that science can explain everything. But they express more positive views of science than religiously affiliated Americans do.

Read it all.

NEW: A closer look at how atheists, agnostics and those who describe their religion as ‘nothing in particular’ see God, religion, morality, science and more. https://t.co/KU2MuCLJbG

— Pew Research Religion (@PewReligion) January 24, 2024

Americans’ ratings of nearly all 23 professions measured in Gallup’s 2023 Honesty and Ethics poll are lower than they have been in recent years. Only one profession — labor union leaders — has not declined since 2019, yet a relatively low 25% rate their honesty and ethics as “very high” or “high.”

Nurses remain the most trusted profession, with 78% of U.S. adults currently believing nurses have high honesty and ethical standards. However, that is down seven percentage points from 2019 and 11 points from its peak in 2020.

At the other end of the spectrum, members of Congress, senators, car salespeople and advertising practitioners are viewed as the least ethical, with ratings in the single digits that have worsened or remained flat.

Read it all.

Ethics Ratings of Nearly All Professions Down in U.S.: Nurses remain the most trusted profession.
(Megan Brenan & Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup)
More, via Opinion Today:https://t.co/wHYJF1nkIV pic.twitter.com/ruCnvYuBTR

— Opinion Today (@OpinionToday) January 22, 2024

O everlasting God, who didst reveal truth to thy servant Phillips Brooks, and didst so form and mold his mind and heart that he was able to mediate that truth with grace and power: Grant, we pray, that all whom thou dost call to preach the Gospel may steep themselves in thy word, and conform their lives to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Today the Episcopal Church commemorates Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, 1893

Long the Rector of Trinity Church Boston & briefly Bishop of Massachusetts, he is also remembered for writing "O Little Town of Bethlehem"

Memorial in Boston (Photo by Daderot, via Wikimedia) pic.twitter.com/a2D3P9eZyd

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) January 23, 2024

Further, they run a programme for local schools, Birmingham Choral Education Partnership, which means that their music team goes into schools to run weekly choral workshops, learning music from the pupils’ own heritage as well as traditional Western classical composers. They also put on instrument workshops: paid work that helps to bring further capacity, resource, and capability to the overall department.

“Once you give children the opportunity of engaging with choral music, and show them the power of it, they simply love it. The notion that children from my community aren’t interested in, or don’t enjoy, choral music, is nonsense, absolute nonsense; and the parents just can’t do enough to help, too,” Mr Duncan-Banerjee says.

He is exultant that, having sung William Mathias’s “Sir Christèmas”, the choristers just can’t help bursting into “Nowell, nowell” at the slightest opportunity. “That’s when it gets really exciting.”

Read it all.

Children’s choirs are being revitalised by enthusiastic new leaders. Pat Ashworth meets three of themhttps://t.co/i0Eq2MUtMa

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 19, 2024

There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes — even skeptics will pray when facing death. But Hancock, in the time leading up to his execution, only became more insistent about his nonbelief. He and his chaplain were both confident that there was no God who might grant last-minute salvation, if only they produced a desperate prayer. They had only one another.

The two spoke at least once a week, and sometimes multiple times a day. Mostly, they talked over the phone, and provided recordings of these conversations to The Times. Sometimes it was in person, in the prison’s fluorescently lit visitor room, over bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

During their visit the day before his execution, Hancock had seemed mostly fixated on his final meal, that one bucket of dark meat chicken.

Moss stopped his car in front of the three-story building on the prison grounds where he would spend the next hours waiting. He got out and stood still for a moment. He considered the possibility that Hancock had hope for survival, not through divine intervention but through the state’s. Gov. Kevin Stitt — who two years ago said he claimed “every square inch” of Oklahoma for Jesus Christ — could still grant clemency. He had just under three hours.

Read it all.

One year ago I began talking to an atheist chaplain, Devin Moss, who was giving spiritual care to an atheist man on death row in Oklahoma, named Phillip Hancock. I followed along as they wrestled with the question: How do you face death without God? https://t.co/kpiD9rqe4c

— Emma Goldberg (@emmabgo) January 21, 2024

Americans are rapidly becoming much more upbeat about the economy.

Consumer sentiment surged 29% since November, the biggest two-month increase since 1991, the University of Michigan said Friday, adding to gauges showing improving moods.

It’s a sharp turn after persistently high inflation, the lingering shock from the pandemic’s destruction and fears that a recession was around the corner had put a damper on feelings about the economy in recent years, despite solid growth and consistent hiring.

Now Americans are bucking up as inflation cools and the Federal Reserve signals that interest-rate increases are likely behind us. And with the solid labor market putting money in the bank accounts of freely spending consumers, recession fears for 2024 are fading.

Read it all.

"Consumer sentiment surged 29% since November, the biggest two-month increase since 1991, the University of Michigan said Friday, adding to gauges showing improving moods."@WSJ @carlquintanilla @HammerstoneMar3 https://t.co/UG9P68j1NK

— Nicholas Brown (@News_By_Nick) January 19, 2024

China’s population has shrunk for the second year in a row.

The National Bureau of Statistics reports just 9.02 million births in 2023 – only half as many as in 2017. Set alongside China’s 11.1 million deaths in 2023, up 500,000 on 2022, it means China’s population shrank 2.08 million in 2023 after falling 850,000 in 2022. That’s a loss of about 3 million in two years.

The two consecutive declines are the first since the great famine of 1959-1961, and the trend is accelerating.

Read it all.

China’s falling population could halve by 2100 https://t.co/g1w7uNSZZx

— Asia Times (@asiatimesonline) January 20, 2024

Disestablishment has a long intellectual history, dating back at least to the early 19th century; Jeremy Bentham put forward a coruscating manifesto in 1817. But it has never come to pass, partly because of the Church’s by-its-fingernails resilience and partly because of the removal of legal disabilities (restrictions in laymen’s terms) on dissenters.

If the Prince of Wales were to desacralise his coronation, do away with the coronation oath by which he would swear to “Maintaine the Laws of God the true Profession of the Gospell and the Protestant Reformed Religion Established by Law” and seek to set aside the title of “Supreme Governor”, he would achieve more than any radical has for two centuries.

The Church of England, like many established sects, is waning. Its own statistics reveal that in 2022 the “worshipping community” was less than one million, with weekly attendance at 654,000.

Although it has an endowment of £8.7bn, its liabilities are vast. Its established status, the very wellspring of its existence in the 16th century, is central to its identity and stature. Absent that, its future would surely look bleaker still.

Read it all.

Snippets from @hardmanr’s new book suggest the Prince of Wales wants to dilute his ties to the @churchofengland as king. In @theipaper, I warn that it could lead to disestablishment: pro or anti, it shouldn’t result from carelessness. #PrinceWilliamhttps://t.co/16EOTSzHfK

— Eliot Wilson (@EliotWilson2) January 18, 2024

Tumors constantly shed DNA from dying cells, which briefly circulates in the patient’s bloodstream before it is quickly broken down. Many companies have created blood tests that can pick out this tumor DNA, potentially helping doctors diagnose or monitor cancer or choose a treatment.

The amount of tumor DNA circulating at any given time, however, is extremely small, so it has been challenging to develop tests sensitive enough to pick up that tiny signal. A team of researchers from MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has now come up with a way to significantly boost that signal, by temporarily slowing the clearance of tumor DNA circulating in the bloodstream.

The researchers developed two different types of injectable molecules that they call “priming agents,” which can transiently interfere with the body’s ability to remove circulating tumor DNA from the bloodstream. In a study of mice, they showed that these agents could boost DNA levels enough that the percentage of detectable early-stage lung metastases leapt from less than 10 percent to above 75 percent.

Read it all.

Researchers improve blood tests’ ability to detect and monitor cancer: The advance makes it easier to detect circulating tumor DNA in blood samples, which could enable earlier cancer diagnosis and help guide treatment. https://t.co/cPA3MJVQ08 pic.twitter.com/CRRIFAFWbQ

— Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (@MIT) January 19, 2024

In the year ahead, the use of biometrics — an individual’s unique physical identifiers, such as fingerprints and faces — will be expanded at airports in the United States and abroad, a shift to enhance security, replace physical identification such as passports and driver’s licenses, and reduce the amount of time required by travelers to pass through airports. Biometric technology will be seen everywhere from bag drops at the check-in counters to domestic security screening.

In the United States, the Transportation Security Administration is expanding its program allowing passengers to opt in for a security screening relying on a facial recognition match with their physical identification — a photo taken in real time is compared against a scan of a license or passport and assists the T.S.A. officer in verifying a traveler’s identity. This program is currently available at 30 airports nationwide, including Salt Lake City International Airport and Denver International Airport; the T.S.A. said it will expand to more than 400 airports in the coming years.

T.S.A. PreCheck travelers who are flying on Delta Air Lines may not even need to show their identification at all during bag drop and security, if they opt in to Delta’s digital ID program.

Read it all.

Will Passports Be Replaced by Biometrics? https://t.co/4uBMQ6D0JE pic.twitter.com/2nvuvuv7Z1

— Stephanie Maurice Zapata (@StephanieZapa12) January 19, 2024

It is now possible to generate fake but realistic content with little more than the click of a mouse. This can be fun: a TikTok account on which—among other things—an artificial Tom Cruise wearing a purple robe sings “Tiny Dancer” to (the real) Paris Hilton holding a toy dog has attracted 5.1m followers. It is also a profound change in societies that have long regarded images, video and audio as close to ironclad proof that something is real. Phone scammers now need just ten seconds of audio to mimic the voices of loved ones in distress; rogue ai-generated Tom Hankses and Taylor Swifts endorse dodgy products online, and fake videos of politicians are proliferating.

The fundamental problem is an old one. From the printing press to the internet, new technologies have often made it easier to spread untruths or impersonate the trustworthy. Typically, humans have used shortcuts to sniff out foul play: one too many spelling mistakes suggests an email might be a phishing attack, for example. Most recently, ai-generated images of people have often been betrayed by their strangely rendered hands; fake video and audio can sometimes be out of sync. Implausible content now immediately raises suspicion among those who know what ai is capable of doing.

The trouble is that the fakes are rapidly getting harder to spot.

Read it all.

Phone scams, fake videos of politicians and AI-generated Tom Hankses and Taylor Swifts are proliferating. As fakes rapidly get harder to spot, dystopian possibilities abound—yet societies will also adapt to the fakers. Here’s how: https://t.co/yLgDa37oSd 👇

— The Economist US (@EconUS) January 19, 2024

Their intervention represents a shift in HTB leaders’ approach to long-running debates in the Church of England. For many years, HTB has sought to avoid public comment, seeking common ground, emphasising the importance of unity and evangelism, and steering clear of divisive questions. This stance also reflected awareness of differing views among leaders and members. HTB’s 10,000-strong congregations include people in gay relationships, it says.

It remains unclear to what extent the churches in the HTB network share the concerns expressed by the signatories to the Alliance letter. Responses to the Church Times email this week indicate that some undoubtedly do.

In the 6 December letter, the Alliance referred to “a growing number of parishes and clergy that wish to come under our umbrella of partners whilst not being linked to any of the main networks that are represented by the Alliance”.

Read it all.

HTB’s allies alarmed by bid to resist same-sex blessings https://t.co/Fyr0wms75E

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 16, 2024

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes Covid-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world, congressional investigators said, raising questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days.

Documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by a House committee and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a U.S. government-run database on Dec. 28, 2019. Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial Covid-19 outbreaks.