Donald Trump would 'cancel' Paris climate deal

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said he would "cancel" the Paris climate deal in his first major speech on energy policy.

More than 195 countries pledged to reduce carbon emissions in a landmark agreement last year.

The billionaire businessman has said before there is no evidence that humans are responsible for climate change.

He called for more drilling, fewer regulations and the approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada.

"Any regulation that's outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers or contrary to the national interest will be scrapped and scrapped completely," Mr Trump said.

"We're going to do all this while taking proper regard for rational environmental concerns."

 

Donald Trump's desire to see the end of US participation in the Paris climate agreement is increasing the pressure for a rapid ratification around the world.

But that's not easy as the process can often get bogged down in national parliaments. The Obama administration and others believe they are well on the way to securing that level of support which they feel would then make a US withdrawal, in the face of global condemnation, much less likely. But they could be dead wrong about that.

Mr Trump though doesn't have to go to such lengths to end US involvement. He could choose to ignore or reverse or delay Obama's initiatives on climate including the Clean Power Plan. The real strength of the Paris agreement is that it comes from the bottom up, countries decide for themselves what their emissions cutting commitments will be. But this could also be a huge weakness.

If a President Trump doesn't put emissions cutting regulations into place, no one could force him to. Would China or India and others continue to cut their carbon while the US did not? Unlikely.

 

Before this speech, he had said he would "renegotiate" the global agreement involving nearly all countries, but this time he went further and said the US would pull out.

The climate change deal is "bad for US business" and said the pact allows "foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use".

Under the deal, countries set emission limits themselves, not an outside panel.

Mr Trump has called climate change "a hoax" devised by the Chinese government.

It is uncertain whether Mr Trump, if elected, could actually make any changes to the deal.

The accord will have legal force once it is ratified by 55 countries that contribute 55% of global emissions.

If the deal is ratified by January, a new American president would have to wait four years to withdraw from the deal. 

While the US is the second-largest greenhouse gas polluter, it has been instrumental in helping other countries such as India reduce emissions.

Mr Trump said on Friday that the US would stop funding these efforts.

Environmental advocates called Mr Trump's proposals "frightening".

"Trump's energy policies would accelerate climate change, protect corporate polluters who profit from poisoning our air and water, and block the transition to clean energy that is necessary to strengthen our economy and protect our climate and health," Tom Steyer, a billionaire environmental activist, told Reuters.

On Thursday, he officially became the presidential nominee for his party, surpassing the 1,238 delegates required.

 

Barack Obama has become the first serving US president to visit Hiroshima since the World War Two nuclear attack.

Mr Obama said the memory of 6 August 1945 must never fade, but did not apologise for the US attack - the world's first nuclear bombing.
Mr Obama spoke to two survivors and in an address called on nations to pursue a world without nuclear weapons.
At least 140,000 people died in Hiroshima and another 74,000 three days later in a second bombing in Nagasaki.

Best of friends'

Mr Obama first visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum before walking to the Peace Memorial Park, accompanied by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Both men stood in front of the eternal flame. Mr Obama laid a wreath first, followed by Mr Abe

Death fell from the sky and the world was changed," Mr Obama said in his address, noting that the bombing had shown that "mankind possessed the means to destroy itself".
Mr Obama said the memory of Hiroshima must never fade: "It allows us to fight complacencies, fuels our moral imagination and allows us to change."
Of nuclear weapons, he said: "We must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them."
Mr Obama then spoke to two survivors, hugging 79-year-old Shigeaki Mori.
"The president gestured as if he was going to give me a hug, so we hugged," Mr Mori said.
Mr Obama also talked to Sunao Tsuboi, 91.

Symbols and codes - BBC's John Sudworth in Hiroshima

The image of President Obama hugging a survivor will resonate deeply with the Japanese public. Opinion polls show that the majority of people welcome this visit and most, it seems, do not mind either about the absence of an apology.
The deep symbolism is enough; the leader of the only country ever to have used an atomic weapon laying a wreath in a city that has become a monument to the perils of our nuclear age.
But others will point out that, while his speech was long on lofty idealism, he remains the commander in chief of one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals, one that he has approved billions of dollars to modernise.
Standing just a few rows away from the president, as he always does, an officer could be seen holding the briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes.

Mr Obama had earlier flown into the nearby Iwakuni Marine Corp base nearby, after leaving the G7 summit.
Mr Obama told service personnel at the base: "This is an opportunity to honour the memory of all who were lost during World War Two."
Mr Obama praised the US-Japan alliance as "one of the strongest in the world", with his visit "a testament to how even the most painful divides can be bridged - how our two nations, former adversaries, cannot just become partners, but become the best of friends and the strongest of allies".

Many in the US believe the use of the nuclear bomb, though devastating, was right, because it forced Japan to surrender, bringing an end to World War Two.
The daughter of one survivor, who was visiting the memorial on Friday, said the suffering had "carried on over the generations".
"That is what I want President Obama to know," Han Jeong-soon, 58, told the Associated Press news agency. "I want him to understand our sufferings."
Seiki Sato, whose father was orphaned by the bomb, told the New York Times: "We Japanese did terrible, terrible things all over Asia. That is true. And we Japanese should say we are sorry because we are so ashamed, and we have not apologised sincerely to all these Asian countries. But the dropping of the atomic bomb was completely evil."

India probes Nigerian student 'attack'

India's foreign ministry says it is looking into an alleged attack on a Nigerian student by a local man in the southern city of Hyderabad.

Police said 26-year-old Bamilola Kazim was allegedly assaulted by Mohammed Gafoor after a row on Wednesday
Mr Kazim was treated for wounds at a local hospital and released.
Last week a student from the Democratic Republic of Congo was beaten to death by a group of Indian men after an argument in Delhi.
Two men have been arrested in connection with the killing of the Congolese man.
Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted on Friday that Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj "had urgently sought report" on Wednesday's incident from the local government "and is monitoring the case".
Police said Mr Kazim allegedly parked his car in front of Mr Gafoor's house, and was attacked with an iron rod by the latter after an altercation.
Hyderabad police officer K Srinivas told BBC Hindi's Imran Qureshi that the two men had "reached some understanding" after Mr Gafoor was arrested and released on bail.
Gideon Omodowale of the local Nigerian Students Association said it was a "small issue".

"He [Mr Gafoor] has apologised and we have also forgiven him. It happens," he told the BBC.
There are more than 4,000 students from African countries in Hyderabad.
Following last week's killing of an African student in Delhi, a group of African embassies had said they did not want to participate in Africa Day celebrations on Thursday because of repeated attacks on African students in India.
They relented after Ms Swaraj promised to ensure the safety of African students in India.
Mr Swarup said the Indian government had received news from its embassy in Kinshasa, the capital of Democratic Republic of Congo, that some "Indian establishments and shops were attacked on 23 and 25 May as a reaction perhaps to the killing of the Congolese national" in Delhi.
"It has been reported that by Wednesday, things have calmed down," Mr Swarup was quoted as saying by The Hindu newspaper.
Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo have not yet commented on the remarks.
In February, a Tanzanian student was assaulted and partially stripped by a mob in the southern city of Bangalore.

N Korea could be linked to cyber-attacks on banks, security firm says

A top cyber-security firm is investigating whether North Korea could be linked to attacks on banks in recent months.

Symantec said it had evidence that the same group attempted to steal money from a bank in the Philippines, one in Vietnam and Bangladesh's central bank.
It also said the rare malware deployed was similar to that used in the hacking of Sony Pictures in 2014.
The US government said North Korea was behind the Sony hack.
If North Korea is found to be behind the bank attacks, it would be the first time a country has been detected stealing money in a cyber-attack, Symantec's technical director Eric Chien told Reuters.
In February this year, hackers stole $81m (£55m) from the central bank of Bangladesh.
According to Symantec, it was the same group that attempted to steal $1m from the Tien Phong Bank in Vietnam and attacked a bank in the Philippines.
In addition, the code shares similarities with malware used by the group known as Lazarus which has been accused of various attacks on the US and South Korea, including the attacks against Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Hard task: By Mark Ward, BBC Technology correspondent

On the internet, no-one knows if you are a dog and they have an equally difficult time working out what kind of cyber thief you are too.
It is common for online criminals to take attack code from other groups and bend it to their own malign purposes. They do it to cover their tracks and because what worked well against one target might work for them too.
That code-sharing is less true when it comes to nation-state attacks which is why some security firms will name those they believe are behind these relatively rare intrusions. Typically the code used in these attacks is more about stealthy spying than outright theft so is less useful to those after cash.
But that is not the case here as the code has been used to target bank networks and go after huge amounts of money. But it is difficult to be sure because code is code and once it is widely disseminated online it becomes harder to see who is behind the keyboard.

'Mass rape' video on social media shocks Brazil

Brazilian police are hunting more than 30 men suspected of raping a teenage girl in Rio de Janeiro, and of putting video of the attack on social media.

The girl, 16, believes she was doped after going to her boyfriend's house on Saturday and says she woke up in a different house, surrounded by the men.
Arrest warrants have been issued, including one for the boyfriend.
The assault has provoked an online campaign against what campaigners call a culture of rape in Brazil.
Conflicting versions of the story are still coming in, but the alleged rape is said to have taken place in a poor community in western Rio over the weekend.
According to a statement she is reported to have given to police, she woke up on Sunday, naked and wounded, and made her way home.
Only days later did she find out that some of the alleged rapists had put images of the attack on Twitter.
A 40-second-video was widely shared and followed by a wave of misogynistic comments, before the users' accounts were suspended.
Speaking to local media, the girl's grandmother said the family watched the video and cried.
"I regretted watching it. When we heard the story we didn't believe what was happening. It's a great affliction. It's a depressing situation," she told Folha de S.Paulo newspaper.
"She is not well. She is very confused. This was very serious."
The attack has shocked Brazil, says the BBC's Julia Carneiro, and campaign groups have been already been calling for protests over the coming days.
There has also been an outpouring of anger on social media, under the hashtag #EstuproNuncaMais (Rape never again).
A collective of journalists posted a satirical image of citizens donning devil's horns, condemning a rape victim for having provoked the attack.
The inscription reads "No to sexism", and the images, clockwise from top right: "But look at her clothes…", "She deserved it!", "16 years old and already has a son…", "Apparently she was on drugs".

The United Nations group UN Women issued a statement calling for authorities to investigate the case, but to respect the victim and not victimise her once more by invading her privacy.
Experts say many cases of rape in Brazil go unreported as victims fear retaliation, shame, and blame for the violence they have suffered.

Obama in Vietnam: Arms and trade deal on agenda as trip begins

 

 

Barack Obama has arrived for the start of his three-day visit to Vietnam, only the third by a sitting US president since the end of the Vietnam War.

The trip comes amid warming ties between the countries as the US seeks to build relations with Pacific allies.

Vietnam is keen for the US to lift an arms embargo that has been in place since 1984.

Mr Obama will later fly to Japan for a G7 summit. He will also become the first US president to visit Hiroshima.

Vietnamese embrace new US relations

While in Vietnam, Mr Obama is expected to meet dissidents and make the case for Vietnam to remove obstacles to the US-led Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal.

Ben Rhodes, Mr Obama's deputy national security adviser, said before the visit that talks on removing the United States' embargo on selling arms to Vietnam would be discussed.

Doing so would allow Vietnam to bolster its defences at a time of territorial disputes with its neighbour China, which was unhappy with a partial lifting of the ban in 2014.

However, White House officials indicated the ban would be lifted only if there was an improvement in human rights in Vietnam.

On Friday, Mr Obama will tour Hiroshima, where a US nuclear bomb was detonated in 1945, killing at least 140,000 people.

In an interview with Japanese broadcaster NHK on Friday, Mr Obama said he would not apologise during his remarks in Hiroshima.

"It's important to recognise that in the midst of war, leaders make all kinds of decisions, it's a job of historians to ask questions and examine them," he said.

"But I know, as somebody who's now sat in this position for the last seven-and-a-half years, that every leader makes very difficult decisions, particularly during wartime."

 

Scary-smart AI is still 'decades and decades' away, Google says

The tech giant's head of search says it's far too early to be concerned about a machine-ruled, Terminator-like dystopia. That's good, because Google has bet its future on artificial intelligence.

Whenever we talk about artificial intelligence, someone inevitably mentions Skynet, the destructive machine system in the Terminator movies.

But we shouldn't be worried about a dystopian rise of the robots. At least that's the opinion of John Giannandrea, Google's chief of search and the company's former AI boss.

Why? Because we're so far away from anything that would even resemble that scenario, he said Friday at Google's I/O developer conference near the company's HQ in Mountain View, California.

"I think researchers in the field don't really put much thought into that," he said. "I think it's a concern that's decades and decades away."

Giannandrea is talking about a concept called "superintelligence," where, as he puts it, "AI begets more AI."

He adds that while there are not many of them, there are some people in the artificial intelligence community who do focus on that stuff and the ethical questions behind machine learning. He said Google works with those researchers and supports those kinds of inquiries.

That's important, because Google has staked its future on AI. When CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage for the conference opening keynote presentation on Wednesday, he talked about bringing Google into every part of people's lives with a new service called the Google assistant. It's a voice-powered incarnation of Google's search engine and other services that will live in your phone, smartwatch, car, living room speakers and more. And the more you use it, the more it learns about you and the smarter it gets.

"It's Google asking users, 'Hi. How can I help?'" Pichai told CNET last week, ahead of the conference. "Think of it as building your own individual Google."

During his keynote talk, Pichai also showed a video of several robot arms that a research group at Google taught to pick up objects. In one breakthrough, a robot arm pushed an object out of the way to pick up another item, an action the machine learned on its own. The maneuver was both awe inspiring and unsettling.

"It's also conflated with the fact that people look at things like robots learning to pick things up and that's somehow inherently scary to people," Giannandrea said.

Google isn't the only Silicon Valley powerhouse working on AI. In April, Facebook unveiled a new Applied Machine Learning group. And Microsoft has been developing technology of its own, though its Twitter chatbot, Tay, devolved into a meme after it started spewing racist and sexual comments.

Meanwhile, luminaries like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have warned against the dangers of AI. In December, Musk, along with prominent tech investors Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, funded a newresearch nonprofit called OpenAI with $1 billion, the goal being to make sure AI technology is developed in a way that doesn't let it run amok.

One major tech executive who agrees with Giannandrea is Facebook's Palmer Luckey, who founded Oculus, the virtual-reality company that the social network bought in 2014 for $2 billion. He said in March that a lot of people are "creeped out" about AI because science fiction sensationalizes it.

Giannandrea said one way Google can help people get over that is for the company to just build good services.

"It's our job, when we bring products to market, to do it in a thoughtful way that people find genuinely useful," he said.

Bill Gates-approved historian says AI will make some people totally useless (Lubyal)

Technically Incorrect: Yuval Harari's latest book offers a very dark view of the future, one in which some people will have no reason to get out of bed.

Making dire predictions is easy and safe.

If you're wrong, you'll have a nice surprise. If you're right, however, everyone will respect your fine judgment.

Still, some dire predictions simply make sense.

Historian Yuval Harari is a touch pessimistic about the human race.

In essence, he thinks we're losing it to the robots.

As The Guardian reports, his new book, "Homo Sapiens: A Brief History of Tomorrow," to be published in September,

presents a dire prognostication.

He concedes that artificial intelligence might make some people gods. This will cheer the likes of Google's director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, who truly can't wait to rise to the level of deity.

Kurzweil reasons this will be bliss because he'll finally be able to say something witty to his boss Larry Page.

Harari, though, also foresees "the rise of the useless class."

Technology will move swiftly. No one will know what to study at college because no one will know what skills will be useful as time runs apace.

Personal reinvention will have to happen faster and faster in order to assure mere survival. Not everyone will be able to keep up.

Some will therefore be deemed useless.

"I choose this very upsetting term, useless, to highlight the fact that we are talking about useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system, not from a moral viewpoint," he says.

Harari believes that governments might choose to pay these people enough to keep them alive.

However: "What might be far more difficult is to provide people with meaning, a reason to get up in the morning."

Those who see themselves as cheery futurists will say they've heard this sort of thing before. For hundreds of years, in fact.

"I'm aware that these kinds of forecasts have been around for at least 200 years, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they never came true so far," says Harari. "It's basically the boy who cried wolf. But in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time."

The difference for Harari is that previous machine inventions replaced our physical abilities. The current machines being created by Google and many more actually try to replicate and replace our cognitive skills.

Once that's done, what good are we to anyone?

You might still think him a miserable crank. His previous book, however, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" appeared this week on Bill Gates' list of 5 books to read this summer.

So if Microsoft's co-founder thinks Harari has something interesting to say, perhaps even he fears for many in the world.

If you're still unsure whether Harari makes any sense, ask Siri, Cortana, Amazon Echo or Google Now what they think.

I'm sure they'll offer a very objective view. My Siri did. I asked her whether robots would take over the world.

"It doesn't matter what I think," she said.

So I asked her whether there will be a useless class in the