Military Situation In Syria On May 13, 2020 (Map Update)

A brief overview of the recent developments in Syria:

The US speculated that the Assad government may have provided Hezbollah with ‘chemical weapons’;

Locals blocked a US military convoy near Tell Tamra;

Bodies of 2 Turkish-backed militants were found near al-Rai;

The SDF reportedly arrested a number of civilians invoved in blocking the US patrol near Tell Tamra;

Syrian soldier was reportedly killed in an IED explosion near Al-Sabkha.

https://southfront.org/military-situation-in-syria-on-may-13-2020-map-update/

Hateful Memes Challenge and data set for research on harmful multimodal content

We’ve built and are now sharing a data set designed specifically to help AI researchers develop new systems to identify multimodal hate speech. This content combines different modalities, such as text and images, making it difficult for machines to understand.

The Hateful Memes data set contains 10,000+ new multimodal examples created by Facebook AI. We licensed images from Getty Images so that researchers can use the data set to support their work. We are also releasing the code for baseline-trained models.

We are also launching the Hateful Memes Challenge, a first-of-its-kind online competition hosted by DrivenData with a $100,000 total prize pool. The challenge has been accepted as part of the NeurIPS 2020 competition track.

In order for AI to become a more effective tool for detecting hate speech, it must be able to understand content the way people do: holistically. When viewing a meme, for example, we don’t think about the words and photo independently of each other; we understand the combined meaning together. This is extremely challenging for machines, however, because it means they can’t just analyze the text and the image separately. They must combine these different modalities and understand how the meaning changes when they are presented together. To catalyze research in this area, Facebook AI has created a data set to help build systems that better understand multimodal hate speech. Today, we are releasing this Hateful Memes data set to the broader research community and launching an associated competition, hosted by DrivenData with a $100,000 prize pool.

The challenges of harmful content affect the entire tech industry and society at large. As with our work on initiatives like the Deepfake Detection Challenge and the Reproducibility Challenge, Facebook AI believes the best solutions will come from open collaboration by experts across the AI community.

We continue to make progress in improving our AI systems to detect hate speech and other harmful content on our platforms, and we believe the Hateful Memes project will enable Facebook and others to do more to keep people safe.

Building a data set for hateful multimodal content

The Hateful Memes data set consists of more than 10,000 newly created examples of multimodal content. The memes were selected in such a way that strictly unimodal classifiers would struggle to classify them correctly (as illustrated in the examples below). We also designed the data set specifically to overcome common challenges in AI research, such as the lack of examples to help machines learn to avoid false positives. It covers a wide variety of both the types of attacks and the groups and categories targeted. (More information on the data set is available in this paper.)

https://ai.facebook.com/blog/hateful-memes-challenge-and-data-set

US Defence Department Awards Boeing $2.6 Billion in Cruise Missile Contracts

US aerospace giant Boeing won two cruise missile contracts worth over $2.6 billion combined to support foreign military sales to Saudi Arabia and six other countries, the Defence Department said in a press release.

"The Boeing Company of St. Louis, Missouri is awarded a $1,971,754,089… contract to provide non-recurring engineering associated with the Stand-off Land Attack Missile – Expanded Response (SLAM ER) obsolescence redesign effort as well as the production and delivery of 650 SLAM ER missiles in support of the government of Saudi Arabia", the release said on Wednesday.

Boeing also won $656 million to provide 467 Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Japan, India, South Korea, Qatar, Brazil, and The Netherlands, the release added.

In December 2019, the Boeing Company received a $265 million modification contract to upgrade the US Ground-based Midcourse Defence (GMD) interceptor system.

The AGM-84H/K SLAM-ER (Standoff Land Attack Missile-Expanded Response) is an advanced standoff precision-guided, air-launched cruise missile. The Harpoon is an all-weather, over-the-horizon, anti-ship missile.

https://sputniknews.com/military/202005141079297950-us-defence-department-awards-boeing-26-billion-in-cruise-missile-contracts/

Confirmed: China Pressured WHO Against Declaring Coronavirus Global Health Emergency

China pressured the World Health Organization (WHO) against declaring the coronavirus pandemic a global health emergency, a senior U.S. intelligence official told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

That official’s account confirms aspects of Newsweek’s reporting, which cited a CIA report stating that China urged the WHO not to declare the pandemic a global health emergency.

The WHO, the health arm of the United Nations, was supposed to decide on Jan. 22 whether to declare a global health emergency, but WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus ended up delaying the decision until the next day.

In his statement announcing the delay, Tedros praised “the cooperation of China’s Minister of Health, who I have spoken with directly during the last few days and weeks.”

“The decision about whether or not to declare a public health emergency of international concern is one I take extremely seriously, and one I am only prepared to make with appropriate consideration of all the evidence,” Tedros added.

The next day, the WHO opted not to declare a global health emergency. “I am not declaring a public health emergency of international concern today,” Tedros, who won his position in 2017 with China’s backing, said on Jan. 23.

“As it was yesterday, the Emergency Committee was divided over whether the outbreak of novel coronavirus represents a PHEIC or not,” he continued. “Make no mistake. This is an emergency in China, but it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one.”

The WHO didn’t declare a global health emergency until Jan. 31.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/13/china-world-health-organization-coronavirus-global-health-emergency-delay/

Exiled Businessman Exposes Sweeping Chinese 'Disinformation Campaign' On Social Media

Were you surprised by the sheer volume of vitriolic tweets about President Trump's decision to use the phrase "Chinese virus"? Well, one London-based Chinese businessman/dissident says he has evidence that might explain this phenomenon, and shed some light on how Beijing manipulates social media platforms to exploit and shape public opinion far beyond the borders of the mainland.

China has been using armies of "bot" accounts on platforms like twitter to harass and criticize those who speak out against the Chinese government in Beijing and its handling of the outbreak, and spread disinformation about the origins of the virus that - you guessed it - blame the American military for unleashing the virus in Wuhan.

The dissident said that during the week before last, he identified more than 1,000 bot accounts on Twitter which he believes to be part of a government-backed "Swarm". He's also identified dozens of suspicious pages on Facebook.

Between April 25 and May 3, Strick said he identified more than 1,000 accounts on Twitter that were associated with the Chinese disinformation effort, as well as more than 50 different pages on Facebook. He estimated that 300 or 400 new Twitter accounts were joining the network each day, as part of the Chinese campaign.

"The network has evolved and is still growing," said Strick, in an interview. "I believe it’s a state-backed Chinese campaign."

Strick said his research is just the latest to highlight one aspect of China's sweeping propaganda campaign to rewrite history as far as the virus is concerned. Yet, liberals who complain constantly about Fox News brainwashing are acting as the CCP's "useful idiots" by amplifying these fake voices.

Strick’s work is the latest research suggesting China has ramped up disinformation around the coronavirus, to dilute their own culpability and shift blame elsewhere, although some have cast doubt on certain findings or suggested they may warrant further investigation.

In research published last week on the investigative website Bellingcat, Strick described the operation as a "well-structured information campaign” that was working in a coordinated way “to skew the narrative around varying topics, and to push set agendas."

The operation bears some of the same hallmarks as a network of 900 accounts that Twitter uncovered in August last year, which the company identified as “a significant state-backed information operation focused on the situation in Hong Kong,” operated from mainland China.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/exiled-businessman-exposes-sweeping-chinese-disinformation-campaign-social-media

Biden camp responds to Flynn 'unmasking' report — and blames racism for the outrage

'The scandal caused by a person of color occupying the White House'

A spokesperson for the Joe Biden presidential campaign responded to the public furor surrounding the revelations about the unmasking of Mike Flynn, and then implied that racism was the cause for the alarm.

Biden faced intense criticism on Wednesday when it was revealed that he was included in the group of Obama era officials that called for the unmasking of Michael Flynn's identity in surveillance reports.

Many used the report to accuse Biden of being part of a politically motivated witch hunt to entrap Flynn in order to force him to testify against President Donald Trump.

The Biden campaign denied the claims in a statement from Andrew Bates, the director of rapid response.

"Donald Trump's attempt at dishonest media manipulation to distract from his response to the worst public health crisis in 100 years has backfired. These documents simply indicate the breadth and depth of concern across the American government including among career officials over intelligence reports of Michael Flynn's attempts to undermine ongoing American national security policy through discussions with Russian officials or other foreign representatives," the statement read.

"Importantly, none of these individuals could have known Flynn's identity beforehand. These documents have absolutely nothing to do with any FBI investigation and they confirm that all normal procedures were followed – any suggestion otherwise is a flat out lie," Bates added.

"What's more, it's telling that these documents were selectively leaked by Republicans abusing their congressional powers to act as arms of the Trump campaign after having them provided by a partisan official installed for this very purpose," he continued. "The only people with questions to answer are [acting Director of National Intelligence] Grenell, Sen. [Chuck] Grassley (R-Iowa), and Sen. [Ron] Johnson (R-Minn.) for their gross politicization of the intelligence process."

Bates retweeted a message that implied the outrage over the unmasking was actually an expression of racism against former President Barack Obama.

"'OBAMAGATE!' [definition] the scandal caused by a person of color occupying the White House," read the sarcastic tweet.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/biden-camp-unmasking-outrage-is-racist