19 Jun 2024

Rifts seem to appear between Israel’s political and military leadership over conduct of the Gaza war

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By JOSEF FEDERMAN and ELENA BECATOROS (Associated Press)

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli army’s chief spokesman on Wednesday appeared to question the stated goal of destroying Hamas in a rare public rift between the country’s political and military leadership.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted Israel will pursue the fight against Hamas, the group running the besieged Gaza Strip, until its military and governing capabilities in the Palestinian territory are eliminated. Hamas has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S., Canada, and European Union.

But with the war now in its ninth month, frustration has been mounting with no clear end or postwar plan in sight.

“This business of destroying Hamas, making Hamas disappear — it’s simply throwing sand in the eyes of the public,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the military spokesperson, told Israel’s Channel 13 TV. “Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party. It’s rooted in the hearts of the people — whoever thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”

Netanyahu’s office responded by saying that the country’s security Cabinet, chaired by the prime minister, “has defined the destruction of Hamas’ military and governing capabilities as one of the goals of the war. The Israeli military, of course, is committed to this.”

The military quickly issued a clarification, saying it was “committed to achieving the goals of the war as defined by the Cabinet” and that it has been working on this “throughout the war, day and night, and will continue to do so.”

Hagari’s comments, it said, “referred to the destruction of Hamas as an ideology and an idea, and this was said by him very clearly and explicitly,” the military statement added. “Any other claim is taking things out of context.”

There have already been open signs of discontent over the handling of the war by Netanyahu’s government, a coalition that includes right-wing hard-liners who oppose any kind of settlement with Hamas. Months of internationally mediated truce talks, including a proposal floated this month by President Joe Biden, have stalled.

Benny Gantz, a former military chief and centrist politician, withdrew from Netanyahu’s war Cabinet earlier this month, citing frustration over the prime minister’s conduct of the war.

And early this week, Netanyahu expressed displeasure with the army’s decision to declare a “tactical pause” in the southern Gaza city of Rafah to help deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged territory. An aide said Netanyahu was caught off guard by the announcement, and Israeli TV stations quoted him as saying “we have a country with an army, not an army with a country.”

Israel attacked Gaza in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 cross-border attack into southern Israel, which killed some 1,200 people and took 250 hostage.

Israel’s war effort initially enjoyed broad public support, but in recent months wide divisions have emerged. While Netanyahu has pledged “total victory,” a growing array of critics and protesters have backed a cease-fire that would bring home the roughly 120 hostages still in Gaza. The Israeli military has already pronounced more than 40 of them dead, and officials fear that number will rise the longer the hostages are held.

Inside Gaza, the war has killed more than 37,100 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. The war has largely cut off the flow of medicine, food and other supplies to Palestinians, who are facing widespread hunger.

The United Nations said Wednesday that its humanitarian workers were once again unable to pick up aid shipments at the Kerem Shalom border crossing from Israel because of a lack of law and order.

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said that although there were no clashes along the route where Israel has declared a daily pause in fighting, the lawlessness in the area prevented U.N. workers from picking up aid. This means that no trucks have been able to use the new route since Israel announced the daily pause on Sunday.

In recent weeks, Israel’s military has concentrated its offensive in the nearby city of Rafah, which lies on the border with Egypt and where it says Hamas’ last remnants are holding out.

More than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people had earlier taken shelter in Rafah to escape fighting elsewhere in the territory, and the city is now nearly empty as the Israeli military carries out airstrikes and ground operations.

The Israeli military says it has killed over 500 fighters and inflicted heavy damage on Hamas’ forces, but officials expect the operation to continue for at least several more weeks.

Israel also has taken over a 14-kilometer (8-mile) corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt, including the Rafah border crossing. Footage circulating on social media shows the crossing blackened and destroyed, with only the former passenger terminal remaining intact. Before Israel moved into the area, the crossing was used to deliver humanitarian aid and to allow Palestinians to leave the territory.

The head of the Rafah municipality, Ahmed al-Sufi, said Wednesday that Israeli strikes have destroyed more than 70% of the facilities and infrastructure. He accused Israeli forces of systematically targeting camps in Rafah, adding that entire residential areas in one neighborhood have been destroyed. Al-Sufi didn’t immediately respond to a request for additional information.

In a separate incident, 11 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, said Dr. Saleh al-Hamas of the nearby European Hospital. There were no further details and the Israeli military had no immediate comment.

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Becatoros reported from Athens, Greece. Associated Press journalists Wafaa Shurafa in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip; Natalie Melzer in Nahariya, Israel; and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

19 Jun 2024

Colombian family’s genes offer new clue to delaying onset of Alzheimer’s

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By LAURAN NEERGAARD (AP Medical Writer)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists studying a family plagued by early-in-life Alzheimer’s found some carry a genetic oddity that delays their initial symptoms by five years.

The finding points to novel ways of fighting the mind-robbing disease – if researchers can unravel how a single copy of that very rare gene variant offers at least a little protection.

“It opens new avenues,” said neuropsychologist Yakeel Quiroz of Massachusetts General Hospital, who helped lead the study published Wednesday. “There are definitely opportunities to copy or mimic the effects.”

The first hint of this genetic protection came a few years ago. Researchers were studying a huge family in Colombia that shares a devastating inherited form of Alzheimer’s when they discovered one woman who escaped her genetic fate. Aliria Piedrahita de Villegas should have developed Alzheimer’s symptoms in her 40s but instead made it to her 70s before suffering even mild cognitive trouble.

The big clue: She also harbored something incredibly rare, two copies of an unrelated gene named APOE3 that had a mutation dubbed Christchurch. That odd gene pair appeared to shield her, staving off her genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s.

Quiroz’s team then tested more than 1,000 extended family members, and identified 27 who carry a single copy of that Christchurch variant.

But would one copy be enough to offer any protection? Those Christchurch carriers on average showed their first signs of cognitive trouble at age 52, five years later than their relatives, concluded a collaboration that includes Mass General Brigham researchers and Colombia’s University of Antioquia.

The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, are encouraging, said Dr. Eliezer Masliah of the National Institute on Aging.

“It gives you a lot of comfort that modifying one of the copies could be really helpful,” at least in helping to delay the disease, he said.

Already some very early work is beginning to explore if certain treatments might induce the protective mutation, he added.

More than 6 million Americans, and an estimated 55 million people worldwide, have Alzheimer’s. Less than 1% of cases are like the Colombian family’s, caused by a gene passed through generations that triggers the disease at unusually young ages.

Alzheimer’s usually is a disease of people over age 65 and while simply getting older is the main risk, the APOE gene has long been known to play some role. It comes in three main varieties. Carrying one copy of the notorious APOE4 gene increases the risk — and recent research found that having two copies of APOE4 can actually cause Alzheimer’s in seniors. Another variety, APOE2, seems to reduce the risk while APOE3 has long been considered neutral.

Then came discovery of the Christchurch variant’s seemingly protective role.

Silent changes in the brain precede Alzheimer’s symptoms by at least two decades — including buildup of a sticky protein called amyloid that, once it reaches certain levels, appears to trigger tangles of another protein, called tau, that kill brain cells. Earlier research has suggested something about the Christchurch variant impedes that tau transition.

Wednesday’s study included brain scans from two people with a single Christchurch copy and autopsy analysis of four others who’d died. Quiroz cautioned there’s still a lot to learn about how the rare variant affects the underlying Alzheimer’s process — including whether it affects the common old-age type — but said tau and inflammation are among the suspects.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

19 Jun 2024

Minnesota facility to provide a handicap-friendly shooting range, retreat for veterans

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McGREGOR — Toward the end of his life, Chuck Evancevich began feeling like a burden on society.

Brenda Evancevich saw her husband’s struggles as an Air Force veteran confined to a wheelchair due to primary progressive multiple sclerosis and neurologic Lyme disease. Once a great athlete recruited by professional sports teams, Chuck eventually had to deal with a life of limits that meant some of his favorite pastimes — like range shooting — became inaccessible.

“He always felt like he was kind of a burden on society,” Brenda Evancevich said Saturday, June 15. “And he always felt like he was just watching life pass him by.”

Chuck died in 2020, but his legacy lives on at Forgotten Heroes Ranges and Retreat.

His story is one of the backbones of a new handicap-accessible outdoor shooting range, campground, veterans center and community center in McGregor. Still in the construction phase, Forgotten Heroes Ranges and Retreat plans to help disabled veterans and others take part in activities that might not otherwise be feasible. It’s also a way to ensure those who dedicated their lives to serving their country are not forgotten.

Bret Sample, an Army veteran and close friend of the Evanceviches, made it his mission to create such a place for veterans and handicapped outdoor enthusiasts alike. Sample is now the executive director/president of Forgotten Heroes Ranges and Retreat, while Brenda Evancevich serves as operations director, vice president and secretary.

Vehicles lined the road out to the facility June 15 to celebrate the work that had been done thus far and raise a special American flag. Congressman Pete Stauber presented a flag flown over the United States Capitol on D-Day. The same banner now waves above Forgotten Heroes Ranges and Retreat.

“It is such an honor to be here with all of you, celebrating the men and women who have given it all — the disabled men and women who have fought for this country, their families, their friends,” Stauber said. “This is what America’s all about — the passion.”

He thanked Sample and all the volunteers who continue to work on the project and make the facility a reality.

“This will be a place for marksmanship and mentorship,” Stauber said. “Our veterans are going to have a safe place — a safe and secure place — to share their stories, to shoot their bow and arrow, to shoot their firearms, for enjoyment. A facility that was specifically built for them — our heroes — that served this nation with honor and integrity. This is going to be a lasting range long after many of us are gone.”

Representatives from the offices of U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith shared words on behalf of the senators. Rachel Loeffler-Kemp, regional outreach director with Klobuchar’s office, read a letter from the senator, praising the nation’s veterans.

“Our service members deserve our consistent, unwavering support,” Loeffler-Kemp read. “There’s no expiration to the benefits that they’ve earned, no limits to the honor they are due and no time when we are not indebted to them.”Klobuchar’s letter thanked everyone in attendance for honoring veterans and service members with their work.

“You’re all part of a proud tradition of men and women in our state who have served with honor, bravery, dignity and humility,” the letter read.

Orion DiFranco represented Smith’s office, thanking the volunteers and those who donated to the project for their blood, sweat and tears over the past several years.

“This is an incredible project,” DiFranco said. “This is what it’s all about. It’s Americans working together to try and do something that’s going to benefit men and women who have served our country and — more broadly — community members who, because of disability or whatever the case might be, have not been able to get out and recreate outdoors and exercise their Second Amendment rights the way that they used to or the way that they’d like to.”

He said Forgotten Heroes has an honorable mission and congratulated those gathered, on behalf of Smith, for the milestone flag-raising and all that is sure to come in the future.

A facility for all

The land on which the range and retreat is to be constructed was once an illegal dump. When cleaning up the property, Sample said volunteers removed 250 appliances, 15.5 tons of scrap metal and 12 dumpsters worth of garbage. They racked up over 13,000 volunteer hours, a fact Sample got choked up about during his speech, thinking about all the help he’s received along the way.

Dan Guida is the construction director on the project and a senior master sergeant with the 934th Airlift Wing, the only Air Force Reserve unit in Minnesota. Known in the military community as the “Global Vikings,” Guida’s unit has been involved in the construction on the property thus far, using the area for training purposes. The military’s Innovative Readiness Training program provides real-world training opportunities for service members, preparing them for war-time missions while helping out communities that wouldn’t otherwise have the resources to complete projects on their own.

Forgotten Heroes Ranges and Retreat is a perfect example, and its proximity to the unit’s base at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport is a big perk.

“It’s huge for us to be able to get training in a manner that we don’t have to take 14 days out of a busy schedule, or seven days out of a busy schedule,” Guida said.

He pointed to the large hydroseeding berms, built up around the gun range for added safety measures, which members of the Airlift Wing built. They’re the same things that would be built to hide a tank behind in a desert combat zone. And the tree removal for the project is the same process that would have to happen in a jungle environment.

“So all these tasks, almost every single one of them, is exactly what we need,” Guida said.

The timeline for completion of Forgotten Heroes Ranges and Retreat is unknown at this point, dependent on funding, as the group is a nonprofit. Once built, there will be a veterans center open to area veterans, alongside a community center open to all. A campground will feature paths, ponds and a fire pit area for campers. Rifle, pistol and archery ranges will cap it all off.

And everything will be completely handicap accessible and free to use for not only disabled veterans but any disabled individuals along with their caretakers, families, law enforcement and first responders. Guida said the team worked with wheelchair users to determine the type of amenities needed for their comfort and accessibility.

Down the road, Brenda Evancevich said there are plans for handicap-accessible hunting, which was another of her husband’s passions.

Billed as a facility “in memory of one, in honor of all,” Forgotten Heroes Ranges and Retreat will serve as a memorial to Chuck Evancevich and a place of outdoor recreation for all, especially those who gave their all in service.

Keeping in mind the high suicide rate among veterans, Brenda Evancevich said Forgotten Heroes hopes also to put efforts toward veteran suicide prevention.

“If we can help one person, then that makes it all worth it,” she said.

Joining the cause

More information on Forgotten Heroes is available at forgottenheroesmn.org . The website allows for online donations and provides a printable donation form for those who would like to donate via check. Checks should be made payable to Forgotten Heroes Ranges and Retreat and can be mailed to: Forgotten Heroes Ranges & Retreat, P. O. Box 405, McGregor, MN 55760. All donations are tax deductible.

Those interested in volunteering with the nonprofit can call or text 218-851-0969.

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19 Jun 2024

Column: AI is coming for Hollywood

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Artificial Intelligence is primed to take over Hollywood with all the subtlety of the Kool-Aid Man busting through a wall.

Proponents of AI are making bold promises. That potentially means human creativity will be replaced by the theft — sorry, data scraping — of pre-existing words, sounds, images and ideas. Jobs will be lost as human actors and crew are eliminated from the process. Clean water will be wasted, with billions of gallons needed to cool data centers. What will be left is anyone’s guess.

Despite these concerns, AI has found (bought?) a berth at film festivals, which purportedly exist to celebrate the art of cinema. At Cannes this year, a producer was hawking AI translations of international films. Actors who make a living dubbing such films? Soon to be obsolete apparently.

Earlier this month, a Korean film festival in the city of Bucheon launched its first competition dedicated to AI filmmaking. And closer to home, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York featured a program of short films made with generative AI.

Among the filmmakers taking part was Nikyatu Jusu, the writer-director of the horror feature “Nanny,” which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance in 2022. My colleague Michael Phillips called it an “eerie, assured feature film debut,” and it also got a home video release from the prestigious Criterion Collection. All of this is background to say: Jusu is respected and her work is well-regarded. So it came as a shock to many that she was embracing AI.

That’s because she expressed her own concerns a year ago on social media: “Can’t stop thinking about all the various ways AI will be used to replace living, breathing minoritized artists already struggling to tell their own stories. AI will become mock representation — an empty mimicry of Black and brown people’s light commodified and vomited back to us.”

These are valid concerns. But last week she was promoting her Tribeca premiere on Twitter with a still image from the film and the caption: “Crucify me now, get it out of your system.” Some people engaged in good faith. “Not an attempt to crucify: What made the plagiarism tool attractive as a filmmaker?” someone said. “Ask the people who created it and studio execs who are currently implementing it,” she replied. “Odd to ask the creatives at the bottom adapting to inevitable change … this is here whether you kick and scream or not.”

I don’t know that AI-made films are inevitable, but let’s table that for a moment.

“This is so depressing,” someone else said. “I know,” she replied facetiously, “so many Black faces.”

But of course, none of the faces in her film belong to actual Black people. Those images were constructed from real people who did not give their consent, nor did they receive compensation. How is that a win for representation? To quote Jusu’s own words, this is “mock representation” and “empty mimicry.”

Others were less polite in their comments and Jusu eventually deactivated her account. I reached out to see if she would be open to talking but did not get a response. Some questions I would have asked: What was it like making a film this way? Was it creatively fulfilling? What did she learn from using this technology? Is she allowed to talk freely about the experience, or was she asked to sign an NDA prohibiting her from discussing the tech in anything but glowing terms?

People make all kinds of decisions for reasons we aren’t privy to. Sometimes there are financial considerations. Sometimes people simply rethink where they stand: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. So I would have also asked: What changed her mind about AI?

I hope Jusu is given grace for what might have been a decision made under stressful conditions — funding and jobs have dried up for many in Hollywood at the moment, where everyone is encouraged to “stay alive until ’25” — but I also hope that, going forward, she gets more opportunities to make films the traditional way.

But we should be wary of AI for ethical and philosophical reasons alone. According to the Human Rights Watch, “personal photos of Brazilian children are being used to create powerful artificial intelligence tools without the children’s knowledge or consent.” According to another report, Google image search is “serving users AI-generated images of celebrities in swimsuits and not indicating that the images are AI-generated” and in some cases, those celebrities “are made to look like underage children.”

Even from a craven capitalistic point of view, does it seem odd that studios aren’t more vocal about potential copyright infringement?

What will remain of Hollywood if AI is embraced over human creativity and efforts? (LPETTET/Getty)

There are aesthetic concerns as well.

As of last year, Robert Zemeckis had plans for a movie starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright that will use “new hyperrealistic technology including AI-generated face replacements and de-aging to allow its stars to tell a story that spans generations.”

Directors used to simply cast other actors to play different versions of the same character — and happily, many still do. That’s one of the more enjoyable aspects of “Interview with the Vampire” on AMC. The show didn’t opt for de-aging software to make 71-year-old Eric Bogosian look younger for scenes set in the past, but hired 36-year-old Luke Brandon Field, who looks a lot like Bogosian and has the talent to emulate his performance. One of my favorite examples is 11-year-old Mayim Bialik playing the younger version of Bette Midler’s character in 1988’s “Beaches.” As a viewer, I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want actors to lose those opportunities, either.

There are other potential uses for AI floating around, one of which was recently touted by Ashton Kutcher: “You’ll just come up with an idea for a movie, then it will write the script, then you’ll input the script into the video generator and it will generate the movie. Instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate and then watch my own movie.”

I can not imagine anything worse. After a long day, I have to do more work just to watch something entertaining? How bleak! “What if each time you watched a movie, it played out differently?” teased another news report. “The idea is to use AI to mix up scenes and create completely different versions of the same movie each time it is played.”

These are terrible ideas.

“Going all the way back to gathering around the fire, we like to be together to tell stories, it’s important to us,” technologist and media analyst Sydette Harry told me. “Cinema was another physical manifestation of that. Social media is the digital manifestation.”

Ashton Kutcher is one famous proponent of AI. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

The word community gets tossed around a lot and may have been flattened in the process. But experiencing entertainment together can be a cultural bonding agent, which has been fractured by the binge-release model on streaming. These proposed uses for AI will fracture the experience even further.

“Another thing about AI,” Harry said, “is that it likes to put a definitive stamp on things: This is ‘the knowledge’ because we’ve scraped all there is to know. Well, we really don’t know all there is to know.” There is an entire history of existence that has not been digitized, which means as far as AI is concerned, it doesn’t exist.

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There’s an assumption that if you’re resistant to AI, you don’t want progress, Harry said. “But if you want creative progress, you have to leave space for things to be sloppy” and allow for ideas to spring from imperfections and happy accidents. “Think about the things in cinema that are really amazing. If you were in a real gunfight, the one thing you never want to do is the traditional John Woo limbs-akimbo pose. But it looks amazing on screen and now it’s a signature thing dreamed up by an amazing filmmaker.”

“People’s discomfort with the human learning process — and the ability to play around — should not become the guide rails for our art forms,” she said. “We have to allow for it if you want any kind of culture. Putting it through a computer that has weighted judgments about what’s important? Well, that makes somebody in an executive office feel good and then nobody has to be accountable for what a show or film is saying because the black box of the computer said it.”

Even if AI is a cheaper way to make films initially, I suspect that will change; once studios become reliant on it, prices will go up (not unlike Uber’s pricing trajectory) but it will be harder for studios to go back to the “old” way because fewer people will have the necessary skills anymore.

It’s worth hearing out the concerns of people who don’t have a financial stake in AI’s domination. Privacy expert Meredith Whittaker recently described the AI business model this way: “It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to train these models, so there is deep pressure from companies — that are basically promising God and delivering email prompts — to make some return on investment in this technology.”

Timnit Gebru is a researcher in AI ethics and she is less convinced the technology is a fait accompli: “This ‘it is inevitable’ discourse is designed to disempower. It’s not inevitable. These dudes don’t need to be handed ridiculous amounts of money to realize their dystopian utopia.”

And according to at least one recent headline: “Payoff from AI projects is ‘dismal’, biz leaders complain.” Despite the marketing and propaganda, AI isn’t even the golden goose.

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.