Liberia

April 4, 2007 by yorksranter 6 comments

Update on Falcone, Chichakli

In a wonderfully-titled article, (“Former Miss Bolivia on Drugs Charges, Second Beauty Queen in Trouble”), the Associated Press reports that Sonia Falcone, cosmetics enterpreneur, Bush-Cheney’00 donor, and wife of Elf-Aquitaine/Arms to Africa fugitive Pierre Falcone, copped a plea to charges of illegally employing some immigrants (they were legal immigrants, but not allowed to work, so…

October 15, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Kilari Anand Paul

Remember the flight and arrest of Charles “Fiddy Cent Thousand Dead Child Soldiers” Taylor back in March? Sure ya do. You may also recall the bizarre involvement of Kilari Anand Paul, an Indian Protestant evangelist and – to be brutally frank – charlatan with a Boeing 747. Paul, who claimed to be Taylor’s “spiritual adviser”,…

March 29, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Who Are You Going to Massacre Next?

Charles Taylor has been re-nailed, after a day or so of freedom on the lam from the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone. I was amused by this description of his arrest on the Nigerian-Cameroonian border: The former Liberian leader had arrived at the frontier in a Range Rover jeep with diplomatic corps number plates,…

Mass Precision Strike: Designing UAV Complexes for Land Forces - mass-precision-strike-final.pdf
If a new UAV control technique is used near to a specialised counter-UAV EW asset such as the Russian Shipovnik-Aero, then the process of enemy adaptationis significantly faster – typically around two weeks...The development of AI-enabled signals analysis and EW signal development means that these timeframes for hostile adaptation against newly deployed UAV control and […]
L&Q’s house exchange scheme turned our lives into a nightmare | Property | The Guardian
It stirred itself when I first got in touch in December, and contractors were redeployed. It wasn’t until March that a technician discovered the boiler was leaking gas and capped the supply. L&Q’s scanty terms and conditions on mutual exchange state tenants accept properties “as seen”. However, that does not absolve it of basic legal […]
Apple releases eight small AI language models aimed at on-device use | Ars Technica
Apple also released the code for CoreNet, a library it used to train OpenELM—and it also included reproducible training recipes that allow the weights (neural network files) to be replicated, which is unusual for a major tech company so far.
US probe into China's RISC-V role casts shadow on Samsung's AI chip ambitions and foundry biz expansion
the DOC is conducting probes into possible national security risks associated with China's significant presence in the RISC-V domain. In addition, they are also assessing possible countermeasures while highlighting the need to avoid harming US companies engaged in RISC-V development...It is reported that Samsung is conducting trial production of server chips for Baidu, a Chinese […]
Three women contract HIV from dirty “vampire facials” at unlicensed spa | Ars Technica
The woman's case led investigators to VIP Spa, which was unlicensed, had no appointment scheduling system, and did not store client contact information. In an inspection in the fall of 2018, health investigators found shocking conditions: unwrapped syringes in drawers and counters, unlabeled tubes of blood sitting out on a kitchen counter, more unlabeled blood […]
(1) Sarastro on X: "Imagine the impact of this in places like the Caribbean where power prices are very high and there are huge problems with sourcing drinking water." / Twitter
outrageous cheap solar! really ironically the only place it *will* be kosher to have a golf course will be in the desert.
A Few Thoughts on Rachel Reeves - by Simon Nixon
Police insfrastructure, police performance, and crime: Evidence from austerity cuts - WP202416-Police-infrastructure-police-performance-and-crime-evidence-from-austerity-cuts.pdf
I estimate a positive elasticity of violence with respect to distance of approximately 0.09, so that a 10% increase in distance increases violent crimes by roughly 1%. This effect translates in 3 additional assaults and murders in each block per year, for a total of 5,500 additional violent offenses city-wise...614 more assaults and murders are […]
jetmoe/jetmoe-8b · Hugging Face
We used a 96×H100 GPU cluster for 2 weeks, which cost ~$0.08 million // cool moddle. very tiny, too, and an MOE to boot
microsoft/rho-math-7b-v0.1 · Hugging Face
Rho-1 base models employ Selective Language Modeling (SLM) for pretraining, which selectively trains on clean and useful tokens that aligned with the desired distribution.