by | Apr 23, 2024 | Aggregate
A woman in her 60s was stabbed to death at the Universal/Studio City Metro station in Los Angeles on Monday morning in an unprovoked attack by a homeless man.
According to police, the victim was stabbed in the neck at 5 am on Monday with small kitchen knives.
The suspect fled the scene. Authorities arrested the suspect later on Monday.
The suspect, identified as 45-year-old Elliot Tramel Nowden, is being held on $2 million bail.
“This does appear to be completely unprovoked from what witnesses have told detectives,” LAPD Det. Meghan Aguilar to KTLA 5’s Rachel Menitoff. “There was no altercation prior to this violent attack.”
KTLA 5 reported:
A woman in her 60s has died following another violent incident involving public transportation in Los Angeles.
The latest incident occurred around 5 a.m. Monday morning. The victim was stabbed on the southbound train before exiting at the Universal City B Line Station at 3901 Lankershim Blvd, close to the major tourist attraction, Universal Studios.
The Los Angeles Police Department arrested Elliot Tramel Nowden. The homeless 45-year-old is charged with murder and is being held on $2 million bail, authorities said.
According to LAPD, Nowden stabbed the victim in the throat using two small kitchen knives. The woman got off the train while bleeding profusely at the station, and Nowden exited right after.
He fled the scene, but a combination of surveillance cameras and witness descriptions about the suspect and his distinctive clothing helped officers locate and arrest him a short time later near Ventura Boulevard and Vineland Avenue.
Authorities say Nowden and the victim did not know each other.
More on this story from KTLA 5:
The post HORROR: Woman Dies After Having Her Throat Slit by Homeless Man at Los Angeles Metro Station in Unprovoked Attack appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Apr 23, 2024 | Aggregate
Columbia university staff overwhelming support the Pro-palestinian protesters and display their loyalty at graduation ceremonies.
Ben Bergquam from Real America’s Voice was reporting at Columbia University in New York City on Tuesday.
The staff on campus were wearing sashes in support of the Palestinians and against Isreal. From the video it appears over two-thirds of the staff were wearing the sashes supporting Palestinians. The sash read “we support our students” meaning the Columbia staff supports the anti-Isreal mob that took over their campus.
Ben confronted staff but not one single professor or staff member would speak to Ben for some reason.
Numerous protesters were carrying flyers that read, “Unsuspend our students.”
Thank goodness Joe Biden is cancelling the loans for these university students.
Only one professor or staff member said he did not support the “Death to America” chants.
Unbelievable! Faculty members at Columbia University come out in support of terror supporting students! Only one said we shouldn’t support students chanting “Death to America” and I don’t even think he was faculty. The rest are either cowards or complicit. Everyone of these… pic.twitter.com/pOS01XdxDb
— Ben Bergquam – Real America’s Voice (RAV-TV) News (@BenBergquam) April 22, 2024
The number of staff and professors wearing the anti-Israel sash is remarkable.
Via Midnight Rider.
The post Ben Bergquam Reports: Columbia Professors Come Out in Force to Support of Anti-Israel Protesters – Refuse to Condemn Hamas Killers – DISTURBING VIDEO appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Apr 23, 2024 | Aggregate
Several days of protests, assaults on Jewish students, and chaos at Columbia University in New York City have now spread to other American college campuses. Columbia has since suspended two Palestinian groups, and a local rabbi has encouraged Jewish students to flee the campus.
Now, roughly 45 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested for ‘trespassing’ at Yale University, according to the New Haven Police Department. All were being released on mere promises to appear in court later, meaning they were released with zero bond to ensure they will reappear in court.
This comes in the wake of 108 pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia University arrested for setting up a ‘tent city’ on the campus last week. Dozens arrested at pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Yale and New York University as student protests concerning Israel’s Gaza war continue.
Trespassing is indeed a crime, as is assault and disorderly conduct. And although hate speech is not in itself a crime, it’s a clear violation of a university’s code of conduct. Why is this so hard for our “elite” college administrators? @Columbia https://t.co/vkWPj6HLR5
— Dave Aronberg (@aronberg) April 22, 2024
A wide range of groups appear to be behind the campus protests and encampments.
The protests are focused on the disparity of the evolving conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. The October 7th terror attacks by Hamas on Israel and Israeli citizens killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis. Israel’s military response, invading the Gaza Strip to hunt down Hamas, has displaced millions and, according to Hamas, widely known for their lies and brutality, claims 34,000 lives have been lost so far.
Columbia University’s tent city, declaring itself for Palestine.
Protests have spread nationwide to the following campuses, where some are taking the form of ‘tent city’ encampment protests:
Columbia University
Yale University
Harvard University
New York University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Cal Poly (California Polytechnic)
Tufts University
Emerson College
The New School (NY)
The University of Michigan
University of Maryland
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
University of Southern California
Vanderbilt University
Washington University in St. Louis
New anti-Israel tent city takes over Columbia University lawn days after NYPD raid as activists vow to stay ‘forever.’ pic.twitter.com/jvVhJjhEKv
— New York Post (@nypost) April 22, 2024
CBS News claims that the spreading protests have left the nation’s colleges “on edge.”
The Anti-Defamation League has denounced the protests and protesters as supporting terror against Israel and violence on college campuses.
The University of Southern California took the unusual step of canceling a planned commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian last week. Which has, yesterday, led to protests.
Earlier this month, a leaked call from the Anti-Defamation League indicated that the organized response of pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli groups in America will be to encourage the federal government to increase social media and official censorship to contain the spread of these ideas.
The post Pro-Palestinian, Anti-Israel, Protests Spread to Yale, UMichigan, NYU and Across America appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Apr 23, 2024 | Aggregate
unknown, Wikimedia Commons
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Delaney Duff
Real Clear Wire
Google’s difficulty in mitigating bias from their artificial intelligence systems – even after explicitly going to great lengths to minimize bias – spells trouble for the Department of Defense. Bias can cause AI tools to irrevocably malfunction and derail AI development. Google recently paused Gemini, their largest and most capable AI model, from generating images after it created historically inaccurate and offensive images of people. Google explained that their attempts to design a less biased, more inclusive image generation tool caused the model to malfunction instead.
This is especially concerning as the Defense Department plans to leverage AI at scale, including for training simulations, intelligence analysis, recruiting personnel, translating documents, drafting policy, and even powering autonomous weapons. If the U.S. continues to prioritize the speed of AI development over safety, biased AI systems will ultimately slow the adoption rate, ceding the country’s technical edge to China.
Biased AI systems are ultimately dangerous. They make mistakes or generate inaccurate assessments leading to poor decision making or even system failures that harm people. Unanticipated AI failures could cause problems ranging from erroneous intelligence reporting to inaccurate targeting.
In the Defense Department, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) is tasked with accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies across the national security ecosystem. CDAO’s Responsible AI team is tackling the problem of biased AI models by instituting a “bias bounty” program, which recruits the public to identify instances of bias in its large language models, starting with chat bots, in exchange for a cash prize.
By identifying bias in generative AI tools, the Pentagon hopes to understand the benefits and risks posed by these systems in order to implement safeguards. Mitigating the risks is crucial as the U.S. increasingly relies on AI development to provide warfighters with a competitive edge over its adversaries.
Relying on infrequent, small-scale public participation programs for identifying AI bias is inadequate because it assumes bias is easily detectable and does not account for the way biased outputs morph overtime, even after developers implement “fixes.” Biased AI systems disproportionately disadvantage certain groups especially when AI model training data is under representative of reality or already reflect existing biases.
Even more concerning are failures in AI-powered weapons targeting. AI systems could inadvertently select targets that violate rules of engagement such as women and children noncombatants. Recent reports accuse two IDF artificial intelligence targeting systems of increasing civilian casualties in Gaza by purposefully targeting Hamas operatives at home and erroneously identifying individuals as militants even when they had no or very tenuous links to these groups.
Policymakers, military officials, and private industry increasingly frame AI development as an arms race with China because Beijing hopes to leverage AI to enhance its power and gain a strategic advantage over the U.S. and its allies. Substantial ethical issues and discrimination as a result of AI bias should be enough to give lawmakers pause.
Overfocus on development speed sidelines real concerns over AI safety. Holding AI to high ethical standards is not an impediment to progress. Rather, it ensures greater system success that is essential for broad trust and adoption.
Removing bias requires more than technical solutions alone. In addition to periodic bias testing to ensure the models are operating properly, the Defense Department should provide and expedite clearances for data scientists and others involved in training AI models, so they have access to larger portions of datasets. Greater access allows those most knowledgeable about AI systems to spot instances where the model is producing biased outputs and correct mistakes more easily.
Operators of these tools should receive more extensive training programs that include instruction on identifying biased outputs enshrining the practice of not blindly trusting the system results. These tools are not perfect, and operators must know when and how to question or override a decision suggested by AI. The DoD should mandate their developers follow CDAO’s Responsible AI Toolkit that aligns with the DoD’s AI Ethical Principles and continuously evaluate and update the framework to keep pace with rapid technological advancement.
Finally, the U.S. should invest greater funding into STEM programs for underrepresented groups and communities. Only 26% of people in computing are women, and women only make up 18% of researchers at lead AI conferences. Representation for people of color is even worse, with less than 7% of employees at lead technology companies being Black or Hispanic. Greater access to STEM education creates a more diverse workforce and this diversity is essential for creating less biased AI systems. These new perspectives disrupt organizational group think and echo chambers, foster creative problem solving, and promote innovation.
Short-sighted focus on AI development speed over safety could spell disaster for the Defense Department. If the United States hopes to shape the future of the 21st century, it must make minimizing AI bias a top priority.
Delaney Duff is a Fellow at the Pallas Foundation for National Security Leadership whose mission is to to foster the education and professional development of emerging leaders from traditionally under-represented groups in global and national security. She is a master’s student in the security studies program at Georgetown University.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
The post Defense Department’s Efforts To Combat AI Bias Don’t Go Far Enough appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
