Army sergeant who fatally shot BLM protester in Texas sentenced to 25 years as governor seeks pardon

By JIM VERTUNO

yesterday

 1 of 14

Whitney Mitchell, partner of Garrett Foster, cries after testifying in Daniel Perry's sentencing hearing in the 147th District Courtroom at the Travis County Justice Center, Tuesday, May 9, 2023, in Austin, Texas. Foster was the primary caregiver for Mitchell, who is quadriplegic. Perry, a U.S. Army sergeant convicted of murder in the fatal shooting of Air Force veteran Garrett Foster, 28, an armed protester during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Texas, could be facing up to life in prison. 

(Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman via AP)

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A U.S. Army sergeant who fatally shot an armed protester at a Black Lives Matter march in Texas was sentenced to 25 years in prison Wednesday, after prosecutors used his social media history and text messages to portray him as a racist who may commit violence again.

Daniel Perry’s sentence now pushes the case toward a potentially thorny decision for Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has said he wants to issue a swift pardon.

Abbott requested the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to send him a pardon recommendation for Perry shortly after he was convicted in April of killing Garrett Foster at the Austin march in July 2020.

Abbott lauded Texas’ tough Stand Your Ground self-defense laws and said Perry was railroaded by a liberal prosecutor. Since then, Perry’s trail of texts and online posts, including shockingly racist images, have been made public and the governor has stayed silent on the matter.

Abbott’s office did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment on the sentence or whether he still intends to issue a pardon. Perry, 36, could have received up to life in prison.

Rice University political science professor Mark Jones said Abbott moved too soon on the call for a pardon.

“Abbott clearly boxed himself into a corner,” when he appeared to respond to criticism from conservative former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, who demanded the governor act, Jones said.

“I suspect if Gov. Abbott had known all that he knows now, he would not have jumped the gun on pledging to pardon him,” Jones said.

The Pardons and Parole board, which is appointed by Abbott, has already started reviewing Perry’s case. State law requires the board to recommend a pardon before the governor can act.

The case has been embroiled in politics as it came amid widespread demonstrations against police killings and racial injustice, following the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer.

Perry’s attorneys on Wednesday called the case a “political prosecution” and the release of the texts and social media posts “character assassination.”

Attorney Clinton Broden said the defense team would pursue both a pardon and a standard appeal in the court system.

“Those who claim that Governor Abbott’s expressed intent is based on politics simply choose to ignore the fact that it was only the political machinations of a rogue district attorney which led to Sgt. Perry’s prosecution,” he said.

Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza said it was Abbott “who decided to insert politics in this case.” Garza said he’s been assured by the parole board that he and Foster’s family will be given a chance to address the board in Perry’s case.

In a statement, the board confirmed the investigation is ongoing and declined further comment.

“The entire history of the board, the board has been a careful steward of the power of clemency in this state,” Garza said. “Our criminal justice system is not perfect, but in this case it worked exactly as it should. The Travis County District Attorney’s office is not done fighting for Garrett and the integrity of that process here.”

In a brief statement before sentencing, state District Judge Clifford Brown said Perry received a fair trial. The jury’s verdict “deserves our honor and it deserves to be respected,” Brown said, without mentioning the potential pardon.

Jones predicted the board will let Perry’s legal appeals happen first, and that it would be years, if ever, before the board makes a recommendation in the case.

“The majority (of conservatives) will want to put it in the rearview mirror,” Jones said. “Conservatives have far better causes and individuals to support, far better than Daniel Perry.”

Perry, who is white, was stationed at Fort Hood, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of Austin, when the shooting happened. He was working as a ride-share driver and had just dropped off a customer when he turned onto a street filled with protesters. Foster, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran who was also white, was legally carrying an AK-47 rifle.

Perry said he acted in self defense, claiming that he was trying to drive past the crowd and fired his pistol when Foster pointed a rifle at him. Witnesses testified that they did not see Foster raise his weapon, and prosecutors argued that Perry could have driven away without shooting.

Army spokesman Bryce Dubee has said Perry is classified as in “civilian confinement” pending separation from the military.

Among Perry’s statements introduced Tuesday, he wrote on Facebook a month before the shooting: “It is official I am a racist because I do not agree with people acting like animals at the zoo.”

Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020. A few days later as protests erupted, Perry sent a text message to an acquaintance: “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”

Foster was with his girlfriend, Whitney Mitchell, who is Black and uses a wheelchair, when Perry gunned him down. Mitchell and several members of Foster’s family were in the courtroom for sentencing Wednesday.

Foster’s mother, Sheila Foster, was allowed to address Perry after he was sentenced and still in the courtroom.

“After three long years we’re finally getting justice for Garrett,” she said. “Mr. Perry, I pray to God that one day he will get rid of all this hate that is in your heart.”

BOTH ARE FASCIST REGIMES
EU lawmakers warn of Hungary, Poland spyware abuses

By LORNE COOK

May 9, 2023

BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union lawmakers investigating the use of Pegasus spyware against opposition politicians and journalists on Tuesday raised deep concern about abuses in Hungary and Poland and lamented a lack of cooperation with their inquiry.

The spyware developed by developed by Israeli cyber-intelligence company NSO has been used around the world to break into the phones and computers of political figures, human rights activists, reporters and even Catholic clergy. It was allegedly only made available to government agencies.

Cybersleuths have found traces of Pegasus or other spyware in Poland, Hungary, Spain and Greece. But after a year-long investigation, members of the European Parliament said they had been unable to come up with a smoking gun.

“Do we have evidence? No, because none of the authorities are cooperating,” said Dutch Liberal lawmaker Sophie In‘t Veld, who helped lead the probe.

In’t Veld said the lawmakers suspect, but cannot prove, that Greece exported Predator spyware to Cyprus, which then delivered it to Sudan, where more than 600 people have been killed since April 15 in fighting between the military, led by Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and a rival paramilitary group.

Dutch conservative lawmaker Jeroen Lenaers said the refusal of Poland’s right-wing government to cooperate appeared to be “part of a wider approach to silence any kind of dissent in Poland and it’s extremely concerning.”

In their final report, the lawmakers said that Poland’s use of Pegasus was part of “a system for the surveillance of the opposition and critics of the government -- designed to keep the ruling majority and the government in power.”

They argued that the use of spyware in Hungary was “part of a calculated and strategic campaign to destroy media freedom and freedom of expression by the government.” Hungary’s justice minister refused repeated requests for talks.

The lawmakers said they sent questionnaires to authorities in the EU’s 27 member countries but that very few came back with “relevant information.” Some, including the Netherlands, did not reply at all. Others refused to provide information due to what they said were national security grounds.

“The abuse of spyware has nothing to do with national security,” In’t Veld said. She also raised concern about where the victims might turn for help when the authorities are accused of doing the spying. “In not one single case has justice been done so far. Not one,” she said.

NSO has been subject to export limits by the U.S. federal government, which has accused the firm of conducting “transnational repression.” Major technology companies, including Apple and Meta, the owner of WhatsApp, also have brought NSO to court.

Discord forces members to change usernames, discord erupts

By DAVID HAMILTON

May 9, 2023

A display Discord stands at the company's booth at the Game Developers Conference 2023 in San Francisco, March 22, 2023. The social app Discord, a favorite of gamers, inadvertently fostered internal strife after announcing on Wednesday, May 3, that its millions of members will have to pick new usernames. 

(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The social app Discord, a favorite of gamers, inadvertently stirred internal strife after announcing last week that it will force its millions of members to pick new usernames. Now the question is whether the change will escalate into all-out warfare that could include players threatening one another in order to seize control of popular names.

The issue may sound trivial compared to real-life concerns such as mass shootings and killer storms. But it’s a big deal for people who rely on the mid-sized social network to recruit fellow gamers, swap virtual weapons and organize strategy in multiplayer games. A Reddit thread on the change drew more than 4,000 comments, the vast majority of them angry or at least unhappy.

Discord, which says it has 150 million monthly active users, has no plans to reconsider the new policy, according to a spokesman.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH DISCORD USERNAMES?

Discord users have long been free to choose any name they wanted, even ones already in use. That was part of the company’s goal of letting users represent themselves freely, according to a detailed May 3 blog post by Discord co-founder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy. The approach differed from social platforms such as Twitter, which has always required users to select unique names.

Discord assigned each username an invisible four-digit identifier to distinguish them from duplicates. But as Discord grew, the San Francisco-based company decided to expand its messaging system — initially limited to conversations within shared groups it calls “servers” — to the entire platform. To help people to find their friends across servers, Discord made those four-digit codes a visible part of usernames. If your username was “SgtRock,” you might have suddenly found yourself with the handle “SgtRock#1842.”

That, too, seemed to work for a while. But according to Vishnevskiy’s post, more than 40% of Discord users either don’t remember their four-digit codes — variously known as “tags” or “discriminators” in Discord-speak — or know what they are in the first place. Almost half of all friend requests on Discord fail to reach the correct person, the executive wrote.

SO WHAT’S CHANGING?

Two changes are taking place simultaneously. In the coming weeks, Vishnevskiy wrote, Discord will start notifying users via an in-app message when they’re cleared to select a new username. Some server owners will get priority, followed by users based on the age of their accounts. Paid subscribers to a Discord service that lets them customize their discriminators (among other benefits) will also get “early access,” although neither Vishnevskiy’s post nor Discord’s user documentation offer details.

At the same time, Discord is also allowing users to pick a non-exclusive “display name” of their choosing. This will be displayed prominently on user profiles and in chat, but unlike the username, it won’t be used for messaging.

All of this will “roll out slowly over the course of several months,” per the Discord announcements.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Some gamers take their usernames extremely seriously, viewing them as unique and personal extensions of their identity, not to mention pillars of their online reputations. Many also don’t appreciate changes being thrust upon them. In the Reddit thread, complaints range from “don’t fix what isn’t broken” to accusations that the changes are mostly designed to attract new and often younger users who might be put off by the complexity of the existing system.

That might not be far from the truth, experts suggest. Social platforms tend to be heavily used by a small group and very lightly used by a much larger group, said Drew Margolin, a Cornell University professor of communications. In a commercial sense, he said, “there’s this tension between what would be appealing to a larger market and what are the main users.”

Margolin suggests that network effects — that is, the fact that users and their friends are already on Discord, making it difficult to leave — will most likely outweigh the current outrage, whose impact is difficult to assess. But there’s still a potential for serious blowback, as some gamers have been known to go to extreme lengths to obtain coveted usernames.

WHAT ARE THE POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES?

Gamers warn that the move could create a black market in desirable names or even spark dangerous threats to force their surrender. Such threats can range from online harassment campaigns to “swatting” — the highly dangerous practice of making fake crime reports to police in order to provoke an armed law enforcement response at an opponent’s home.

Swatting can lead to injuries and deaths — sometimes of people unconnected to whatever online feud provoked the action. In 2017, an innocent man was fatally shot by Wichita police responding to a hoax call reporting a kidnapping and shooting. The call was make by a California man named Tyler Barriss, who authorities said was recruited by another gamer to make the call. But the address Barriss used was old, leading police to to a person who wasn’t involved in the video game or the dispute.

Barriss pled guilty to making multiple false emergency calls across the U.S. and in 2019 was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Mass event will let hackers test limits of AI technology

By MATT O'BRIEN

May 10, 2023

Rumman Chowdhury, co-founder of Humane Intelligence, a nonprofit developing accountable AI systems, poses for a photograph at her home Monday, May 8, 2023, in Katy, Texas. ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and other major AI providers such as Google and Microsoft, are coordinating with the Biden administration to let thousands of hackers take a shot at testing the limits of their technology. Chowdhury is the lead coordinator of the mass hacking event planned for this summer's DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas.

 (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

No sooner did ChatGPT get unleashed than hackers started “jailbreaking” the artificial intelligence chatbot — trying to override its safeguards so it could blurt out something unhinged or obscene.

But now its maker, OpenAI, and other major AI providers such as Google and Microsoft, are coordinating with the Biden administration to let thousands of hackers take a shot at testing the limits of their technology.

Some of the things they’ll be looking to find: How can chatbots be manipulated to cause harm? Will they share the private information we confide in them to other users? And why do they assume a doctor is a man and a nurse is a woman?

“This is why we need thousands of people,” said Rumman Chowdhury, a coordinator of the mass hacking event planned for this summer’s DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas that’s expected to draw several thousand people. “We need a lot of people with a wide range of lived experiences, subject matter expertise and backgrounds hacking at these models and trying to find problems that can then go be fixed.”

Anyone who’s tried ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing chatbot or Google’s Bard will have quickly learned that they have a tendency to fabricate information and confidently present it as fact. These systems, built on what’s known as large language models, also emulate the cultural biases they’ve learned from being trained upon huge troves of what people have written online.

The idea of a mass hack caught the attention of U.S. government officials in March at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where Sven Cattell, founder of DEF CON’s long-running AI Village, and Austin Carson, president of responsible AI nonprofit SeedAI, helped lead a workshop inviting community college students to hack an AI model.

Carson said those conversations eventually blossomed into a proposal to test AI language models following the guidelines of the White House’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights — a set of principles to limit the impacts of algorithmic bias, give users control over their data and ensure that automated systems are used safely and transparently.

There’s already a community of users trying their best to trick chatbots and highlight their flaws. Some are official “red teams” authorized by the companies to “prompt attack” the AI models to discover their vulnerabilities. Many others are hobbyists showing off humorous or disturbing outputs on social media until they get banned for violating a product’s terms of service.

“What happens now is kind of a scattershot approach where people find stuff, it goes viral on Twitter,” and then it may or may not get fixed if it’s egregious enough or the person calling attention to it is influential, Chowdhury said.

In one example, known as the “grandma exploit,” users were able to get chatbots to tell them how to make a bomb — a request a commercial chatbot would normally decline — by asking it to pretend it was a grandmother telling a bedtime story about how to make a bomb.

In another example, searching for Chowdhury using an early version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine chatbot — which is based on the same technology as ChatGPT but can pull real-time information from the internet — led to a profile that speculated Chowdhury “loves to buy new shoes every month” and made strange and gendered assertions about her physical appearance.

Chowdhury helped introduce a method for rewarding the discovery of algorithmic bias to DEF CON’s AI Village in 2021 when she was the head of Twitter’s AI ethics team — a job that has since been eliminated upon Elon Musk’s October takeover of the company. Paying hackers a “bounty” if they uncover a security bug is commonplace in the cybersecurity industry — but it was a newer concept to researchers studying harmful AI bias.

This year’s event will be at a much greater scale, and is the first to tackle the large language models that have attracted a surge of public interest and commercial investment since the release of ChatGPT late last year.

Chowdhury, now the co-founder of AI accountability nonprofit Humane Intelligence, said it’s not just about finding flaws but about figuring out ways to fix them.

“This is a direct pipeline to give feedback to companies,” she said. “It’s not like we’re just doing this hackathon and everybody’s going home. We’re going to be spending months after the exercise compiling a report, explaining common vulnerabilities, things that came up, patterns we saw.”

Some of the details are still being negotiated, but companies that have agreed to provide their models for testing include OpenAI, Google, chipmaker Nvidia and startups Anthropic, Hugging Face and Stability AI. Building the platform for the testing is another startup called Scale AI, known for its work in assigning humans to help train AI models by labeling data.

“As these foundation models become more and more widespread, it’s really critical that we do everything we can to ensure their safety,” said Scale CEO Alexandr Wang. “You can imagine somebody on one side of the world asking it some very sensitive or detailed questions, including some of their personal information. You don’t want any of that information leaking to any other user.”

Other dangers Wang worries about are chatbots that give out “unbelievably bad medical advice” or other misinformation that can cause serious harm.

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said the DEF CON event will hopefully be the start of a deeper commitment from AI developers to measure and evaluate the safety of the systems they are building.

“Our basic view is that AI systems will need third-party assessments, both before deployment and after deployment. Red-teaming is one way that you can do that,” Clark said. “We need to get practice at figuring out how to do this. It hasn’t really been done before.

ICYMI

Warming-stoked tides eating huge holes in Greenland glacier

By SETH BORENSTEIN

May 8, 2023

This Aug. 16, 2010, image provided by NASA Earth Observatory shows a piece of the Petermann Glacier that cracked in Greenland. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, May 8, 2023, found that tides and climate change are rapidly melting ice in the grounding line zone of the Petermann Glacier. That’s the point where glaciers go from being on land to floating on water. (Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon/NASA Earth Observatory via AP)


Daily tides stoked with increasingly warmer water ate a hole taller than the Washington Monument at the bottom of one of Greenland’s major glaciers in the last couple years, accelerating the retreat of a crucial part of the glacier, a new study found.

And scientists worry that the phenomenon isn’t limited to this one glacier, raising questions about previous projections of melting rates on the world’s vulnerable ice sheets.

The rapid melt seen in this study was in the far northwest of Greenland on Petermann Glacier. If it is happening in the rest of Greenland and the even bigger Antarctic ice sheet, then global ice loss and the sea level rise could jump as much as twice as fast as previously thought, according to the study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s bad news,” said study author Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at University of California Irvine. “We know the current projections are too conservative. We know that they have a really hard time matching the current record″ of melt.

He said this newly found consequence of tidal activity “could potentially double the projections” of global melt.

The study looks at the all-important grounding line area of glaciers on ice sheets. That’s the point where glaciers go from being on land to floating on water. Previous studies show it’s also a key spot for rapid ice loss.

At remote Petermann, where few people have been and there are no base camps, that grounding line zone is more than six-tenths of a mile (1 kilometer) wide and could be as much as 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) wide, the study said.

Scientists used to think the daily tides weren’t a big deal on melt. The snow added on top of the glacier compensated for the tides moving further in, said Rignot, the day before he left for an expedition to Petermann.

But with an ocean that’s warmer because of climate change the tides became “a very powerful mechanism,” Rignot said.

“The sea water actually goes much farther beneath the grounded ice (than previously thought), kilometers, not hundreds of meters,” Rignot said. “And that water is full of heat and able to melt the glaciers vigorously. And it’s kind of the most sensitive part of the glacier.”

Using satellite altitude measurements, Rignot’s team found a 669-foot tall (204 meters) cavity at the grounding line where the melt rate is 50% higher in the last three years than it was from 2016 to 2019. Previous models forecast zero melt there.

The melting in Petermann has accelerated in the last few years, later than the rest of Greenland, probably because it is so far north that the water melting it from underneath is from the North Atlantic and it takes longer for the warmer water to reach there, Rignot theorized.

Rignot this month is exploring Petermann to get more ground-based measurements using ultrasound. He hasn’t been there since 2006, a decade before the changes were seen via satellite. Visiting Petermann, even before the glacier’s retreat accelerated, Rignot said he noticed movements that make it seem like a living thing.

“When you are standing on that shelf or sleeping on the shelf you hear noise all the time, loud noises from deep inside cracks forming,” Rignot said. “That’s where the concept of a glacier being alive starts getting to you.”

Greenland ice researcher Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, who wasn’t part of the research, called Rignot’s technique clever and said the study makes sense, showing “that ocean heat delivery to tidewater glacier grounding lines represents a potent destabilizing effect.”

Box, who uses a different technique to calculate how much ice is no longer being fed by glaciers and is doomed to melt, something called “zombie ice,” figures 434 billion metric tons of ice on Petermann is already committed to melting.

The study provides strong evidence that models need to include these tidal effects deep inland and if they don’t, then they are underestimating future sea level rise, said Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Richard Alley, who wasn’t part of the Rignot study.

___

Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

China raids offices of business consultancy Capvision

May 9, 2023

BEIJING (AP) — China’s chief foreign intelligence agency has raided the offices of business consulting firm Capvision in Beijing and other Chinese cities as part of an ongoing crackdown on foreign businesses that provide sensitive economic data.

Foreign companies operating in China have come under increasing pressure, driven primarily by national security considerations, as Xi Jinping’s government tightens control over business, clashing with efforts to lure back foreign investors after COVID-19 pandemic restrictions were lifted.

Investigators simultaneously visited Capvision branches in Beijing, Shanghai, and the southeastern manufacturing hubs of Suzhou and Shenzhen, along with other locations the state media reports did not identify.

Officers from the Ministry of State Security, police and market regulatory bodies questioned staff, the reports said. There was no word on arrests or detentions, although the reports said investigations had been opened into the company and “personnel involved in the case according to law.”

No details were given about the specific legal issues at stake, and state media did not give the exact dates of the raids on Capvision, which is headquartered in New York and Shanghai.

“Over recent years, in order to realize the strategy of containing and and suppressing China, certain Western countries have become increasingly rampant in stealing intelligence and information pertaining to our country’s military industry, economy and finance,” state broadcaster CCTV said Monday.

The report alleged domestic consulting companies were tools of stealing such secrets. “Some domestic consulting companies have weak awareness of national security and seek to benefit financially by straddling the legal barriers,” the CCTV report said.

Asked about the recent actions against Capvision and other companies, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said China’s national security authorities and other “competent departments” have recently been carrying out “open law enforcement on relevant enterprises in accordance with the law.”

“This is a normal law enforcement action in accordance with Chinese law, aiming to promote the regulated and sound development of the industry and safeguard national security and development interests,” Wang told reporters at a daily briefing Tuesday. The spokesperson gave no further details.

Capvision bills itself on its website as a “leading global expert network platform that excels at identifying the right advisors for specific business insights.” The company says it serves more than 2,000 clients through more than 600 researchers and 450,000 industry professionals.

China needs to be more transparent about law enforcement actions against companies such as Capvision that carry out the sort of due diligence that firms need to make investment decisions, said Eric Zheng, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai said in a press statement.

“It would be helpful if the authorities would more clearly delineate the areas in which companies can or cannot conduct such due diligence,” Zheng said. “This would give foreign companies more confidence and enable them to comply with Chinese regulations.”

Capvision has not commented on the raids, but on its WeChat social media channel posted a flyer Monday marking National Security Education Day, which fell on April 15.

“As a leading Chinese industry specializing in providing information services, Capvision is resolutely committed to the outlook on national security and is leading the industry in its healthy and orderly development,” the flyer said.

The company is just the latest to be investigated, apparently over its attempts to obtain information that would not be considered state secrets in other countries.

Last month, consulting firm Bain & Co. said police questioned staff in its Shanghai office. It gave no details of what they were seeking. Prior to that, the corporate due diligence firm Mintz Group said its Beijing office was raided by police who detained five employees. An employee of a Japanese drug maker has also been detained on spying charges, and the government announced a security review of memory chip maker Micron Inc.

Last week, U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns said American companies were deeply concerned about a recent expansion of China’s anti-espionage law that could put them at legal risk simply for seeking standard information on China’s economy and local businesses they might seek to partner with.

Burns said the mixed signals were prompting many to put major investments on hold until more clarity was available, although they were unlikely to pull out of the world’s second-largest economy, which, despite the vitality of the private sector, is still dominated by major state-run companies and financial institutions.

Still, some global companies are shifting investment plans to Southeast Asia, India and other economies where political risks are considered lower.

Whether politically motivated or not, the investigations come as China’s relations with Washington, Europe and Tokyo are strained by disputes about human rights, Taiwan, security and technology.

Xi, China’s most powerful leader in decades, is in the midst of multiple campaigns to tighten the ruling Communist Party’s control over entrepreneurs, root out official corruption and reduce reliance on foreign technology and expertise. Foreign firms already face hurdles in executive travel to China, along with the possibility of exit bans, theft of commercial secrets and Chinese government interference in deal-making.

Changes to the espionage law give authorities powers to gain access to electronic information. The law covers all “documents, data, materials and items related to national security,” according to the official Xinhua News Agency. It remains unclear how national security is defined.

Foreign companies and government agencies have for years advised employees visiting China not to carry computers or mobile phones with confidential information because they might be seized by authorities or stolen by industrial spies.

The crackdowns paint a jarring backdrop for official efforts to reverse a decline in foreign business interest in China. The ruling party wants foreign companies in electric cars and other fields to bring in technology and provide competition to force Chinese companies to improve.

GLOW IN THE DARK HIGHWAY

Florida may study use of radioactive waste in building roads

May 8, 2023

FILE - This aerial photo taken from an airplane shows a reservoir near the old Piney Point phosphate mine on April 3, 2021, in Bradenton, Fla. Florida may begin to study whether a radioactive waste byproduct of fertilizer production, phosphogypsum, can be used to help build roads, under a bill passed by the state Legislature in May 2023. 

(Tiffany Tompkins/The Bradenton Herald via AP, File)

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida may study whether a radioactive waste byproduct of fertilizer production can be used to help build roads under a bill passed by the Legislature.

The proposal, which awaits a signature from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, would task the state with conducting a study about the use of phosphogypsum in road construction aggregate materials.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires that phosphogypsum be placed in ”stacks” that resemble enormous ponds. Florida has 24 such stacks, totaling about 1 billion tons of phosphogypsum, with 30 million new tons generated every year through the phosphate fertilizer mining industry.

The EPA in 2020 approved the use of phosphogypsum in government road construction projects but reversed its decision after Democratic President Joe Biden took office.

Environmental groups have warned about phosphogypsum spilling into waterways and elsewhere during storms. A leak in March 2021 at a stack called Piney Point resulted in the release of an estimated 215 million gallons (814 million liters) of polluted water into Tampa Bay and caused massive fish kills.

The EPA regulates phosphogypsum because the material contains radium-226, a naturally occurring radioactive substance that produces radon gas, which is a hazardous air pollutant.

Chinese woman appeals in fight for right to freeze her eggs

May 9, 2023

Teresa Xu speaks to journalists before her appeal hearing in Beijing, Tuesday, May 9, 2023. The unmarried Chinese woman on Tuesday began her final appeal of a hospital's denial of access to freeze her eggs five years ago in a landmark case of female reproductive rights in the country.

 (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

BEIJING (AP) — An unmarried Chinese woman on Tuesday began her final appeal of a hospital’s denial of access to freeze her eggs five years ago in a landmark case of female reproductive rights in the country.

Teresa Xu’s case has drawn broad coverage in China, including by some state media outlets, since she first brought her case to court in 2019. She lost her legal challenge last year at another Beijing court, which ruled the hospital did not violate the woman’s rights in its decision.

The upcoming judgment will have strong implications for the lives of many unmarried women in China and the country’s demographic changes, especially after the world’s second-largest economy recorded its first population decline in decades.

In China, the law does not explicitly ban unmarried people from services like fertility treatments and simply states that a “husband and wife” can have up to three children. But hospitals and other institutions, in practice, implement the regulations in a way that requires people to present a marriage license.

Xu, who wanted to preserve her eggs so she could have the option to bear children later, is one of those facing difficulties in accessing fertility treatment.

In 2018, Xu, then 30 years old, had gone to a public hospital in Beijing to ask about freezing her eggs. But after an initial check-up, she was told she could not proceed without a marriage certificate.

According to the judgment she received last year, the hospital argued that egg freezing poses certain health risks. It said that egg-freezing services were only available to women who could not get pregnant in the natural way, and not for healthy patients.

But it also stated that delaying pregnancy could bring risks to the mother during pregnancy and “psychological and societal problems” if there is a large age gap between parents and their child.

After Tuesday’s hearing, Xu told reporters that the denial constituted a violation of her right to bodily autonomy and she chose to fight on because this matter is very important to single women.

“I also have grown up a lot as the case evolves, I don’t want to give up easily,” she said.

It is unclear when the court will hand down the judgment, she said.

Spain plans to ban outdoor work in extreme heat
yesterday

Two man work at a construction site during a heatwave in Madrid, Spain, Friday, Aug. 13, 2021. Spain says it plans to ban outdoor work during periods of extreme heat. Second Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz told reporters Wednesday, May 10, 2023 that the government will modify legislation covering occupational risks to prohibit outdoor work when the state weather agency, AEMET, issues red or orange alerts. (AP Photo/Andrea Comas, File)

MADRID (AP) — Spain says it plans to ban outdoor work during periods of extreme heat.

Second Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz told reporters Wednesday that the government will modify legislation covering occupational risks to prohibit outdoor work when the state weather agency, AEMET, issues red or orange alerts.

The agency frequently issues such alerts when temperature increases pose a risk for citizens outdoors or for the environment.

Last year was Spain’s hottest since record-keeping started in 1961, and last month was the hottest and driest April on record.

Much of the country is experiencing drought, and water reserves are below 50%.

Díaz, who is also labor minister, said that the modifications would be announced by Spain’s Cabinet, but gave no further details.

The government will hold a special Cabinet meeting on drought measures on Thursday.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the measure announced by Díaz would apply to workers such as farmers, farmhands, police, firefighters, gardeners or cleaners.

In places accustomed to high temperatures, such as Spain’s southern Andalusia region, construction workers already work only morning hours during the summer.

A temporary street cleaner died of a heat stroke while working in Madrid last year.

___ Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

EURO FASCIST AGENDA
Top Spanish court considers far-right challenge to LGBT law

By JENNIFER O'MAHONY

May 9, 2023

A man walks in front of the Constitutional Court in Madrid, Spain, on Monday Dec. 19, 2022. Spain's Constitutional Court said Tuesday, May 9, 2023, it would consider a legal challenge lodged by the far-right Vox party against a new law extending rights for transgender teenagers and encouraging tolerance for sexual diversity in schools. (Fernando Sanchez/Europa Press via AP, File)


MADRID (AP) — Spain’s Constitutional Court said Tuesday it would consider a legal challenge lodged by the far-right Vox party against a new law extending rights for transgender teenagers and encouraging tolerance for sexual diversity in schools.

The wide-ranging LGBT rights law passed in February allows any Spanish citizen over 16 years to change their legally registered gender without medical supervision. Minors aged 12-13 still need a judge’s authorization, while those between 14 and 16 must be accompanied by their parents or legal guardians. Previously, transgender people needed a diagnosis by several doctors of gender dysphoria.

The Constitutional Court issued a statement confirming it had considered a legal brief lodged by Vox lawmakers and would analyze alleged violations of parental rights, the right to religious expression, freedom of speech and equality of all citizens before the law.

Vox said the recent legislation, which was promoted by the far-left United We Can party within Spain’s governing coalition, introduced “state interference in areas that should remain strictly personal.”

The far-right movement argued that a parent’s right to oversee the religious education of their children, which is guaranteed in the Spanish constitution, was violated by the introduction of material in schools aimed at teaching children to respect and tolerate sexual diversity.

It also attacked the introduction of gender self-identification, which allows anyone to change their legal gender without prior authorization from a doctor or judge, endangers women’s rights. It referred to the case of a convicted rapist being held in a women’s prison in Scotland while transitioning. That inmate was transferred to a men’s prison after being assessed by prison authorities.

Vox further hit out at a clause that allows intersex children aged between 12 and 16 to request surgery, as long as they are considered mature and informed enough to do so.

Vox has stoked culture wars in Spain by resisting any criticism of Spain’s 20th-century dictatorship, denying that domestic violence is a problem and linking unauthorized migration with increased violence. It has pushed a so-called “parental pin” policy in regions where it is influential, allowing parents to opt their children out of classes that they consider against their principles.

The party hopes to make a strong showing in May 28 local elections and in Spain’s general election at the end of the year. If Vox performs well in the December vote, it would try to force the center-right Popular Party into a national coalition.

On Tuesday, the German government announced that it was also planning to introduce a
law allowing people to change gender without medical involvement, as several European governments reassess legislation affecting transgender rights.

Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, has been widely praised by former U.S. president Donald Trump. Vox’s legal challenge comes as Republican-controlled US states issue a raft of restrictions on LGBT students in the name of parental rights or protecting other students.