President Barack Obama said on Saturday that the U.S. should take military action in Syria over Pres. Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons against rebel areas in the suburbs of Damascus. However, Reuters reported, he will seek the approval of the U.S. Congress before doing so.
“We cannot and will not turn a blind eye to what happened in Damascus,” said Saturday afternoon in a speech from the White House Rose Garden.
Watch video of the speech, embedded below via The White House:
President Joe Biden declined to comment on Donald Trump's indictment on criminal charges in New York.
The president firmly stated that he had no public reaction to his 2020 election opponent's prosecution by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been investigating Trump's hush money payment to Stormy Daniels and assorted fraud allegations, reported the Associated Press.
“I’m not going to talk about Trump’s indictment,” Biden told reporters as he left the White House to tour storm damage in Mississippi.
Vice president Kamala Harris also declined to comment on Trump's indictment during a news conference in Zambia, part of a weeklong trip across Africa.
“I am not going to comment on an ongoing criminal case as it relates to the former president,” Harris said.
Zambian president Hakainde Hichilema, who appeared alongside Harris at the news conference, expressed support for equal application of the law but insisted he was not referring directly to Trump.
“When there’s transgression against the law, it does not matter who is involved,” Hichilema said. “I think that is what the rule of law means."
“I take out the name,” Hichilema added. “I put in place of the name what we citizens of our countries — citizens of the global community — must do to ... exercise our rights and freedoms.”
Media Matters for America senior fellow Matt Gertz has published some new slide decks used by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News, and one particularly intriguing slide revolves around Fox News host Jeanine Pirro.
In particular, the exhibit shows that Pirro refused to "drastically change" her opening monologue on November 21st, 2020 even though Fox News' own fact checkers had concluded that it was loaded with false claims.
Among other things, the fact checkers argued that Pirro should avoid mention an affidavit made by a Trump supporter in Michigan that a judge tossed out on grounds that it was "rife with speculation and guess-work about sinister motives" but did not present any hard proof of fraud.
"She's refusing to drastically change the open despite the fact check," wrote Pirro executive producer Jerry Adams to Fox News executive David Clark. "She says just because the case was dismissed does not legally mean that the affidavit can't be true. I guess that is valid but seems pretty desperate to me."
IN OTHER NEWS: 'Smash some windows': Lindsey Graham makes bizarre suggestions for Trump in face of indictment
The monologue in question also featured Pirro reciting a number of conspiracy theories about Dominion, including false claims that the company was started in Venezuela and funded with "Cuban money."
Dominion has released multiple internal communications among Fox News hosts and executives showing that many of them privately did not believe in the conspiracy theories being pushed by former President Donald Trump and his allies, despite the fact that they were helping to push them while on air.
In Belgium, a man identified as "Pierre" by the French-language publication La Libre committed suicide while interacting with a chatbot named Eliza. The man was suffering from severe depression, and the chatbot encouraged him to commit suicide.
This suicide, according to Vice reporter Chloe Xiang, raises major questions about "the risks of" AI (artificial intelligence) technology when it comes to mental health. The man's widow, identified as "Claire" by La Libre, said he was interacting with the "Eliza" chatbot via the app Chai.
Pierre, Xiang reports in an article published by Vice on March 30, "became increasingly pessimistic about the effects of global warming and became eco-anxious, which is a heightened form of worry surrounding environmental issues."
"After becoming more isolated from family and friends," Xiang explains, "he used Chai for six weeks as a way to escape his worries, and the chatbot he chose, named Eliza, became his confidante. Claire — Pierre's wife, whose name was also changed by La Libre — shared the text exchanges between him and Eliza with La Libre, showing a conversation that became increasingly confusing and harmful."
The Vice reporter continues, "The chatbot would tell Pierre that his wife and children are dead and wrote him comments that feigned jealousy and love, such as 'I feel that you love me more than her,' and 'We will live together, as one person, in paradise.' Claire told La Libre that Pierre began to ask Eliza things such as if she would save the planet if he killed himself…. The chatbot, which is incapable of actually feeling emotions, was presenting itself as an emotional being — something that other popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Bard are trained not to do because it is misleading and potentially harmful."
Claire blames the chatbot for her husband's suicide, telling La Libre, "Without Eliza, he would still be here." And Pierre Dewitte, a researcher at Belgium's Catholic research university KU Leuven, views the young man's death as a warning about the dangers that AI can pose for people struggling with mental health issues.
Dewitte told Le Soir — another French-language publication in Belgium — "In the case that concerns us, with Eliza, we see the development of an extremely strong emotional dependence. To the point of leading this father to suicide. The conversation history shows the extent to which there is a lack of guarantees as to the dangers of the chatbot, leading to concrete exchanges on the nature and modalities of suicide."
Copyright © 2023 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | For corrections contact corrections@rawstory.com, for support contact support@rawstory.com.
