China Approves 45 Imported Video Games in December
Technology
Asharq Al-Awsat
People play online games on computers at an internet cafe in Beijing, China August 31, 2021. REUTERS/Florence Lo
China's online game regulator granted publishing licenses to 45 foreign video games for release in the country on Wednesday, further lifting rigid curbs that have hammered the industry for 18 months. The National Press and Publication Administration approved a total of 45 imported online games including "Pokémon Unite" by Nintendo and card game "Gwent: The Witcher Card Game" by CD Projekt, according to a list it released. The regulator approved 84 domestic games for the month of December, according to another list released on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The approval of imported games effectively marks the end of Beijing's crackdown on the video games industry which began last August when regulators suspended the game approval process. Regulators resumed issuing game licenses to homegrown games in April, and the approval of foreign games was seen as the last regulatory curb to be removed. Unlike in most other countries, video games need approval from regulators before release in China, the world's largest gaming market. Beijing's year-long crackdown on the industry has dealt a significant blow to Chinese tech companies including Tencent Holdings and NetEase Inc which derive substantial revenue from publishing both self-developed and imported games. Pokémon Unite is the biggest imported title on the list that has received a publishing license. Co-created by Nintendo and Tencent, the game was first released on the Nintendo Switch outside of China on July last year. The game had surpassed 50 million downloads by the end of last December, according to Tencent.
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From "intelligent" vacuum cleaners and driverless cars to advanced techniques for diagnosing diseases, artificial intelligence has burrowed its way into every arena of modern life. Its promoters reckon it is revolutionizing human experience, but critics stress that the technology risks putting machines in charge of life-changing decisions, AFP said. Regulators in Europe and North America are worried. The European Union is likely to pass legislation next year -- the AI Act -- aimed at reining in the age of the algorithm. The United States recently published a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and Canada is also mulling legislation. Looming large in the debates has been China's use of biometric data, facial recognition and other technology to build a powerful system of control. Gry Hasselbalch, a Danish academic who advises the EU on the controversial technology, argued that the West was also in danger of creating "totalitarian infrastructures". "I see that as a huge threat, no matter the benefits," she told AFP. But before regulators can act, they face the daunting task of defining what AI actually is. - 'Mug's game' - Suresh Venkatasubramanian of Brown University, who co-authored the AI Bill of Rights, said trying to define AI was "a mug's game". Any technology that affects people's rights should be within the scope of the bill, he tweeted. The 27-nation EU is taking the more tortuous route of attempting to define the sprawling field. Its draft law lists the kinds of approaches defined as AI, and it includes pretty much any computer system that involves automation. The problem stems from the changing use of the term AI. For decades, it described attempts to create machines that simulated human thinking. But funding largely dried up for this research -- known as symbolic AI -- in the early 2000s. The rise of the Silicon Valley titans saw AI reborn as a catch-all label for their number-crunching programs and the algorithms they generated. This automation allowed them to target users with advertising and content, helping them to make hundreds of billions of dollars. "AI was a way for them to make more use of this surveillance data and to mystify what was happening," Meredith Whittaker, a former Google worker who co-founded New York University's AI Now Institute, told AFP. So the EU and US have both concluded that any definition of AI needs to be as broad as possible. - 'Too challenging' - But from that point, the two Western powerhouses have largely gone their separate ways. The EU's draft AI Act runs to more than 100 pages. Among its most eye-catching proposals are the complete prohibition of certain "high-risk" technologies -- the kind of biometric surveillance tools used in China. It also drastically limits the use of AI tools by migration officials, police and judges. Hasselbalch said some technologies were "simply too challenging to fundamental rights". The AI Bill of Rights, on the other hand, is a brief set of principles framed in aspirational language, with exhortations like "you should be protected from unsafe or ineffective systems". The bill was issued by the White House and relies on existing law. Experts reckon no dedicated AI legislation is likely in the United States until 2024 at the earliest because Congress is deadlocked. - 'Flesh wound' - Opinions differ on the merits of each approach. "We desperately need regulation," Gary Marcus of New York University told AFP. He points out that "large language models" -- the AI behind chatbots, translation tools, predictive text software and much else -- can be used to generate harmful disinformation. Whittaker questioned the value of laws aimed at tackling AI rather than the "surveillance business models" that underpin it. "If you're not addressing that at a fundamental level, I think you're putting a band-aid over a flesh wound," she said. But other experts have broadly welcomed the US approach. AI was a better target for regulators than the more abstract concept of privacy, said Sean McGregor, a researcher who chronicles tech failures for the AI Incident Database. But he said there could be a risk of over-regulation. "The authorities that exist can regulate AI," he told AFP, pointing to the likes of the US Federal Trade Commission and the housing regulator HUD. But where experts broadly agree is the need to remove the hype and mysticism that surrounds AI technology. "It's not magical," McGregor said, likening AI to a highly sophisticated Excel spreadsheet.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/4067476/ai-rises-lawmakers-try-catch
Asharq Al-Awsat
People wade through a flooded street in the town of Baao in Camarines Sur province on December 30, 2018. (File/AFP)
The death toll from floods in the Philippines has risen to 25, officials said Wednesday, with storms expected to dump more rain over the hardest-hit southern and central regions. Tens of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes as heavy rain submerged rural villages, towns and highways on Christmas Day, dampening festivities on the most important holiday in the mainly Catholic nation, AFP said. At least 13 people died, most from drowning, in the province of Misamis Occidental on the southern island of Mindanao, the national disaster agency said in updating the toll. Twenty-six people were still missing. Nine have been injured. The state weather forecaster said moderate to heavy rains were likely across southern and central regions on Wednesday and Thursday due to a low-pressure area off the coast that could develop into a tropical depression. "Flooding and rain-induced landslides are likely, especially in areas that are highly or very highly susceptible to these hazards," the weather bureau said. The disaster agency said relief efforts were under way to help people in areas hit hard by the flooding, as more than 81,000 people sheltered in evacuation centers. Officials on Wednesday were to conduct aerial surveillance over Misamis Occidental to assess the extent of the damage. The weather turned bad over the weekend as the disaster-prone nation of 110 million people prepared for a long Christmas holiday. The Philippines is ranked among the most vulnerable nations to the impacts of climate change, and scientists have warned that storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/4067461/death-toll-philippine-floods-rises-25
Iran Protests: Regime Challenged by Push for Change
Iran
Asharq Al-Awsat
File photo: Smoke rises during a protest after authorities raised fuel prices, in the central city of Isfahan, Iran, November 16, 2019. (AP)
More than 100 days of protests in Iran have shattered taboos and shaken the ideological pillars of the Iranian republic in a push for change that has defied a fierce crackdown. The demonstrations, which erupted in mid-September following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, are a reflection of pent-up public anger over economic shortcomings and social restrictions, analysts say. While there have been protests in Iran before, this movement has been unprecedented due to its duration, spread across provinces, social classes and ethnic groups and its readiness to openly call for the end of the clerical regime, AFP said. Banners of supreme leader Ali Khamenei have been set ablaze, women have openly walked down streets without hijab headscarves, and demonstrators have at times clashed with the security forces. Iran, for its part, accuses hostile foreign powers of stoking the "riots", chiefly its arch-foe the United States but also other Western nations such as Britain and France as well as exiled opposition groups. In an intensification of the state crackdown, the Iranian republic this month executed two people in connection with the protests, drawing international rebuke and new sanctions. Iran's prosecutor general said in early December that the morality police, which arrested Amini in Tehran for an alleged breach of the strict dress code for women, had been abolished. But activists received the declaration with skepticism, given the continued legal obligation for women to wear a headscarf. This was not any "actual change" and women are still "punished in other ways", said Shadi Sadr, founder of the London-based Justice for Iran group. And it has not changed the movement's key demand. "The protesters want the Iranian republic to go away," she told AFP. - 'Never more vulnerable' - While protests may have decreased in frequency and size in recent weeks, Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR) said they still take place "every day across the country". The regime has been unable to quell the popular unrest, and "there is no turning back," IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam told AFP. The Iranian republic has ruled Iran, first under revolutionary founder Khomeini and then his successor Khamenei, since ousting the more West-leaning and secular shah in 1979. Rights groups accuse the regime of committing gross human rights abuses ever since, including extra-judicial killings and abductions abroad, and holding foreign nationals hostage at home. It now carries out more executions than any country other than China, according to Amnesty International. IHR says the country has executed more than 500 people this year alone. Iran remains at odds with Western powers over its nuclear program, and has also spread its influence throughout the Middle East, notably through Shiite allies in Lebanon and Iraq. Iran has been an active participant in the civil war in Syria and backs rebels in Yemen. International condemnation of the crackdown and waves of Western sanctions have buried any expectation of quickly reviving the 2015 deal on the Iranian nuclear program that the United States walked out of in 2018. US President Joe Biden said in early November the talks were "dead, but we are not going to announce it", according to a video that surfaced last week. The regime is also active in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, tightening relations with Moscow and -- according to Western allegation that Tehran denies -- supplying Russian forces with drones, which have been used to attack Kyiv and other cities. Yet it is at home that the Islamic republic is now facing its greatest threat. "Never before in its 43-year history has the regime appeared more vulnerable," Iran scholar Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the US journal Foreign Affairs. - 'Machinery of repression' - In response to the protests, the authorities have mobilized what Amnesty International has described as their "well-honed machinery of repression", including the use of live fire, mass arrests and death sentences. At least 476 people, including 64 minors aged under 18, have been killed by security forces, IHR said Tuesday. About 14,000 people have been arrested, according to the UN, including several prominent figures such as globally renowned actor Taraneh Alidoosti, who was jailed after making a string of social media posts supporting the protest movement. In the posts, she removed her headscarf and condemned the execution of protesters. The rapper Toomaj Salehi was also arrested and could face the death penalty if convicted. Apart from the executions of Mohsen Shekari and Majidreza Rahnavard, the judiciary has sentenced nine others to death. Two of those have secured a retrial. IHR said on Tuesday more than 80 other defendants face charges that could also see them receive the death penalty. But the "strategy of spreading fear through executions has failed," said Amiry-Moghaddam, arguing they have largely stoked public anger rather than had a chilling effect. "The countdown for the regime has started. It started the day Mahsa was killed." - 'Sure we will win' - Unlike when Khomeini challenged the shah from exile in the late 1970s, there is no single leader to the protest movement. But Kasra Aarabi, Iran program lead at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, said the protesters were drawing inspiration from several figures, all representing different constituencies. Most were deemed such a menace by the authorities that they were locked up. "These protests are not leaderless," Aarabi told AFP, adding the demonstrators believe "they are in the middle of a revolution and there is no going back". Key figures include free speech campaigner Hossein Ronaghi and prominent dissident Majid Tavakoli, who have both since been released, and veteran women's rights activist Fatemeh Sepehri, who remains behind bars. "I continue to fight with the intensity of passion and hope and vitality inside Iran," rights campaigner Narges Mohammadi, who was in detention even before the protests, said in a message from Tehran's Evin prison, relayed by her family to the European parliament. "And I am sure that we will win."
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Suicide Probe Opened after Iranian Found Dead in France’s Rhone River
Iran
Lyon (France) - Asharq Al-Awsat
A local resident lays flowers during tribute to an Iranian man who killed himself after jumping into the Rhone river to raise awareness about the situation of the Iranian people, in Lyon on December 27, 2022. (Photo by JEFF PACHOUD / AFP)
French authorities were Tuesday investigating as suicide the drowning of an Iranian man in the southeastern city of Lyon who had said on social media he was going to kill himself to draw attention to the protest crackdown in Iran. Mohammad Moradi, 38, was found in the Rhone river that flows through the center of Lyon late on Monday, a police source, who asked not to be named, told AFP. Emergency services intervened but were unable to resuscitate him on the riverbank, the source added. Moradi had posted a video on Instagram saying he was about to drown himself to highlight the crackdown on protesters in Iran since the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, after her arrest in Tehran for an alleged breach of the country's strict dress code for women. "When you see this video, I will be dead," Moradi said. "The police are attacking people, we have lost a lot of sons and daughters, we have to do something," Moradi said in the video. "I decided to commit suicide in the Rhone river. It is a challenge, to show that we, Iranian people, we are very tired of this situation," he added. Lyon prosecutors said they had launched a probe to "verify the theory of suicide, in view in particular of the messages posted by the person concerned on social networks announcing his intention" to take his life. The incident has shocked the city, with a small rally to remember Moradi taking place on the banks of the Rhone on Tuesday. Mourners placed candles and wreaths on the riverside railings, an AFP correspondent said. "Mohammad Moradi killed himself to make the voice of revolution heard in Iran. Our voice is not carried by Western media," said Timothee Amini of the local Iranian community. According to several members of the Iranian community, Moradi was a history undergraduate and worked in a restaurant. He lived in Lyon with his wife for three years. "His heart was beating for Iran, he could no longer bear the regime," said Amini, deploring that while the Ukraine conflict was covered "every morning" one heard "very little about Iran" in the news. Lili Mohadjer said Moradi hoped that "his death would be another element for Western media and governments to back the revolution underway in Iran". She said his death was "not suicide" but "sacrifice to gain freedom". Mohadjer said that Moradi in the video said he "could not live peacefully, comfortably here -- where he was very well integrated --" while Iranians were being killed.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/4067326/suicide-probe-opened-after-iranian-found-dead-france%E2%80%99s-rhone-river
Iranian Woman Competes at Chess Tournament Without Hijab
Iran
London - Asharq Al-Awsat
Iranian chess player Sara Khadem competes, without wearing a hijab, in FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships in Almaty, Kazakhstan December 26, 2022, in this picture obtained by Reuters on December 27, 2022. Lennart Ootes/FIDE/via REUTERS
An Iranian chess player has taken part in an international tournament without a hijab, according to media reports, the latest of several Iranian sportswomen to appear at competitions without one since anti-government protests began. Iran has been swept by demonstrations against the country's clerical leadership since mid-September, when 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini died in the custody of morality police who detained her for "inappropriate attire". Iranian news outlets Khabarvarzeshi and Etemad, in reports on Monday, said Sara Khadem had competed at the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships in Almaty, Kazakhstan, without the hijab. Photos posted by both outlets appeared to show her with no headscarf during the tournament. Khabarvarzeshi also posted a photo of her wearing a headscarf but without saying if it was taken at the same event, Reuters reported. There was no comment on Khadem's Instagram page about the tournament or the reports, and she did not immediately respond to a direct message from Reuters. Khadem, born in 1997 and also known as Sarasadat Khademalsharieh, is ranked 804 in the world, according to the International Chess Federation website. The website for the Dec. 25-30 event listed her as a participant in both the Rapid and Blitz competitions. The protests mark one of the boldest challenges to Iran's leadership since its 1979 revolution and have drawn in Iranians from all walks of life. Women have played a prominent role, removing and in some cases burning headscarves, while protesters have taken heart from what they have seen as shows of support from both female and male Iranian athletes. In October, Iranian climber Elnaz Rekabi competed in South Korea without a headscarf, later saying she had done so unintentionally. In November, an Iranian archer said she did not notice her hijab falling during an awards ceremony in Tehran, after a video appeared to show her allowing the headscarf to drop in what was also widely assumed to be a show of support for protesters. In comments reported by state media in November, Iran's deputy sports minister, Maryam Kazemipour, said some Iranian female athletes had acted against Islamic norms and then apologized for their actions. Several national sports teams have refrained from singing the national anthem, notably before Iran's opening match at the soccer World Cup. The team sang ahead of their second and third games. Iranian authorities have cracked down hard on the protests, which they have declared riots fomented by foreign adversaries. According to the activist HRANA news agency, 507 protesters had been killed as of Thursday, including 69 minors. Sixty-six members of the security forces have also been killed. State officials have said up to 300 have been killed, including members of the security forces.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/4067296/iranian-woman-competes-chess-tournament-without-hijab
Russia Threatens Israel with Legal Action to Regain Ownership of 3 Churches in Jerusalem
Varieties
Tel Aviv - Asharq Al-Awsat
This picture taken on December 20, 2021 shows a view of an Israeli flag flying near the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene atop the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. (AFP via Getty Images)
The Russian government has demanded its Israeli counterpart to transfer ownership of three historic churches to Moscow, political sources in Tel Aviv revealed. Russia wants state ownership of the Maria Magdalena Monastery, the Ascension Monastery, and the Viri Galilaei Church (People of the Galilee) all situated on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. The sources quoted former Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, who is responsible on behalf of Russia to regain assets in Israel, as saying that he intends to file a lawsuit at an Israeli court to force the Tel Aviv to return ownership of the churches to Russia if refuses to do so through diplomatic means. According to Israel’s Yediot Aharonot daily, the new lawsuit is intended for internal propaganda in Russia in light of President Valdimir Putin’s declining popularity due to the war in Ukraine. The newspaper said Russians are concerned about church issues and would like to see their president also interested in them. “In Russia, they feel that the Israeli Prime Minister-designate, Benjamin Netanyahu, is facing difficulties in forming a government, and therefore, Russian officials believe this is the appropriate timing to put pressure on him to fulfill previous promises he had made to Putin three years ago,” according to a former political activist working in the file of the expulsion of Jews from Russia to Israel. In 2019, Netanyahu promised Putin that Israel would transfer ownership of the Alexander Nevsky Church and Alexander Square in Jerusalem to Russia. He said Israel must respond to the Russian claims, because its silence would harm Tel Aviv, especially in light of the war in Ukraine and the West’s united front against Moscow. Meanwhile, a source close to the Russian Consulate in Haifa said these churches are Russia, and that the Church of Maria Magdalene houses the remains of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia, who was killed during the 1918 coup by the Russian secret police. The Church also houses the remains of Princess Alice, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria of Britain. Ottoman and British documents show that the two churches and the monastery are Russian, said the source.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/4066001/russia-threatens-israel-legal-action-regain-ownership-3-churches-jerusalem
