Turtleneck (left) and Squeller, two alpacas wearing green-dyed coats courtesy of their owner, Deborah Westerfield, participate in a St. Patrick’s Day celebration on March 16, 2001, in Frankfort, Kentucky.
Chris Gardner / AP; David Lefranc / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Left: Jack the dog sports his Irish green paint job as he marches in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, March 13, 2005, in Baltimore. Right: an attendee at the St Patrick’s Day Parade in New York on March 17, 2001.
The water in the fountain on the North Lawn of the White House is seen dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day in Washington, DC, on March 17, 2021.
A server prepares green beers during St. Patrick’s Day celebrations at the Sheraton Hotel in Surabaya, Indonesia, on March 14, 2014.
Don Heupel / Associated Press
The Niagara River flows over the Horseshoe Falls section of Niagara Falls, painted in green light to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2001, in New York.
New York Daily News Archive / NY Daily News via Getty Images; Paul Faith / PA Images via Getty Images
Left: Shamrocks dot the face and hat of this viewer at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1999. Right: One of the many faces watch the parade through the streets of Dublin to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in 2001, which was postponed from the traditional March 17 due to the foot and mouth disease crisis.
An aerial picture shot with a drone shows the Chicago River as it flows through downtown after it was dyed green in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day on March 13, 2021.
Dressed in her best St. Patrick’s Day green, Lucky, a 7-year-old dog from Minnelon, Florida, gets a pat on the head, March 17, 2004, during the 180th annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in Savannah, Georgia.
Julie Scheidegger / AP
Four-year-old Evan Sanders contemplates a problem with a green ribbon in his bike chain prior to the start of the St. Patrick’s Day parade on March 17, 2005, in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.
Richard Levine / Corbis via Getty Images
St. Patrick’s Day–themed baked goods on sale at a supermarket in New York on March 14, 2015.
Winnipeg has experienced its third highest recorded snowfall ever. Over five and a half feet has fallen in the city and all across southern Manitoba. The three snow disposal sites Winnipeg uses have become little mountains.
Bulldozers and dump trucks pile up an ever increasing mountain of snow on McPhillips near the perimeter. See story.. February 26, 2022 – (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)
PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS – A single cat pushes snow up the Kenaston St Snow Dump Tuesday morning after the city’s latest blizzard cleared. Often dubbed “Mount Manitoba” the site is filling up fast with this year’s snow accumulation. At one point over 100 pieces of equipment were clearing streets for the morning rush hour.
There is still mounds of snow along city streets and in parks etc. Forecasters are predicting good chance of flooding once all this white stuff melts.
The maker of the lethal drone claims that it can identify targets using artificial intelligence.
A RUSSIAN “SUICIDE drone” that boasts the ability to identify targets using artificial intelligence has been spotted in images of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Photographs showing what appears to be the KUB-BLA, a type of lethal drone known as a “loitering munition” sold by ZALA Aero, a subsidiary of the Russian arms company Kalashnikov, have appeared on Telegram and Twitter in recent days. The pictures show damaged drones that appear to have either crashed or been shot down.
With a wingspan of 1.2 meters, the sleek white drone resembles a small pilotless fighter jet. It is fired from a portable launch, can travel up to 130 kilometers per hour for 30 minutes, and deliberately crashes into a target, detonating a 3-kilo explosive.
ZALA Aero, which first demoed the KUB-BLA at a Russian air show in 2019, claims in promotional material that it features “intelligent detection and recognition of objects by class and type in real time.”
The drone itself may do little to alter the course of the war in Ukraine, as there is no evidence that Russia is using them widely so far. But its appearance has sparked concern about the potential for AI to take a greater role in making lethal decisions.
“The notion of a killer robot—where you have artificial intelligence fused with weapons—that technology is here, and it’s being used,” says Zachary Kallenborn, a research affiliate with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
Advances in AI have made it easier to incorporate autonomy into weapons systems, and have raised the prospect that more capable systems could eventually decide for themselves who to kill. A UN report published last year concluded that a lethal drone with this capability may have been used in the Libyan civil war.
It is unclear if the drone may have been operated in this way in Ukraine. One of the challenges with autonomous weapons may prove to be the difficulty of determining when full autonomy is used in a lethal context, Kallenborn says.
The KUB-BLA images have yet to be verified by official sources, but the drone is known to be a relatively new part of Russia’s military arsenal. Its use would also be consistent with Russia’s shifting strategy in the face of the unexpectedly strong Ukrainian resistance, says Samuel Bendett, an expert on Russia’s military with the defense think tank CNA.
Bendett says Russia has built up its drone capabilities in recent years, using them in Syria and acquiring more after Azerbaijani forces demonstrated their effectiveness against Armenian ground military in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. “They are an extraordinarily cheap alternative to flying manned missions,” he says. “They are very effective both militarily and of course psychologically.”
The fact that Russia seems to have used few drones in Ukraine early on may be due to misjudging the resistance or because of effective Ukrainian countermeasures.
But drones have also highlighted a key vulnerability in Russia’s invasion, which is now entering its third week. Ukrainian forces have used a remotely operated Turkish-made drone called the TB2 to great effect against Russian forces, shooting guided missiles at Russian missile launchers and vehicles. The paraglider-sized drone, which relies on a small crew on the ground, is slow and cannot defend itself, but it has proven effective against a surprisingly weak Russian air campaign.
This week, the Biden administration also said it would supply Ukraine with a small US-made loitering munition called Switchblade. This single-use drone, which comes equipped with explosives, cameras, and guided systems, has some autonomous capabilities but relies on a person to make decisions about which targets to engage.
But Bendett questions whether Russia would unleash an AI-powered drone with advanced autonomy in such a chaotic environment, especially given how poorly coordinated the country’s overall air strategy seems to be. “The Russian military and its capabilities are now being severely tested in Ukraine,” he says. “If the [human] ground forces with all their sophisticated information gathering can’t really make sense of what’s happening on the ground, then how could a drone?”
Several other military experts question the purported capabilities of the KUB-BLA.
“The companies that produce these loitering drones talk up their autonomous features, but often the autonomy involves flight corrections and maneuvering to hit a target identified by a human operator, not autonomy in the way the international community would define an autonomous weapon,” says Michael Horowitz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who keeps track of military technology.
Despite such uncertainties, the issue of AI in weapons systems has become contentious of late because the technology is rapidly finding its way into many military systems, for example to help interpret input from sensors. The US military maintains that a person should always make lethal decisions, but the US also opposes a ban on the development of such systems.
To some, the appearance of the KUB-BLA shows that we are on a slippery slope toward increasing use of AI in weapons that will eventually remove humans from the equation.
“We’ll see even more proliferation of such lethal autonomous weapons unless more Western nations start supporting a ban on them,” says Max Tegmark, a professor at MIT and cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, an organization that campaigns against such weapons.
Others, though, believe that the situation unfolding in Ukraine shows how difficult it will really be to use advanced AI and autonomy.
William Alberque, Director of Strategy, Technology, and Arms Control at the International Institute for Strategic Studies says that given the success that Ukraine has had with the TB2, the Russians are not ready to deploy tech that is more sophisticated. “We’re seeing Russian morons getting owned by a system that they should not be vulnerable to.”
Ukrainian punk band Beton win blessing of the Clash to record new version of song to raise funds for support network
Bohdan Hrynko, Oleg Hula and Andriy Zholob of Beton are now playing a part in the war effort. Photograph: @betonbanda/Instagram
The Clash have given their blessing to a new version of their song London Calling by a Ukrainian punk band called Beton. Kyiv Calling, recorded near the frontline, has lyrics that call upon the rest of the world to support the defence of the country from Russian invaders.
All proceeds of what is now billed as a “war anthem” will go to the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement (FURM) to help fund a shared communications system that will alert the population to threats and lobby for international support.
Above, the western Himalaya spot where the Ganges begins, at the confluence of the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda rivers.
From May to December, a female-led Nat Geo expedition team traveled the length of India’s holiest river, from sea to source, to get an unprecedented view of plastic pollution in a watershed–and ultimately, how to solve it.
As visual storytellers, immersive producer Veda Shastri and photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Sara Hylton depicted a complex and nuanced portrait of the Ganges—the dependence on both the river and plastic for people who live alongside it; their utmost respect and love for it; and their relative powerlessness at changing the structures that lead to plastic pollution.
“It was eye-opening seeing how dependent and integrated with the river the communities were—the spiritual component has a sanctity regardless of the levels of pollution,” Veda tells me. “It is truly a life source—for everyday sustenance.”
For Veda, the end of the 2019 journey, published in the April issue of National Geographic, is what stays with her. As they traveled upstream, the team witnessed a marked reduction in the level of pollution, and by the time they reached the city of Rishikesh, they were able to get a more unadulterated view of the Ganges.
“Incredible to witness that magic,” she says.
Fishing amid the trash: Fisherman Babu Sahni, 30, and his eight-year-old son, Himanshu Kumar Sahni, approach a bank on a Ganges tributary. Trash collection is rare in rural India, and ad hoc dump sites like this one are common. Most plastic waste in the ocean gets there by washing off the land.
Before the goddess is submerged: Celebrants transport a likeness of the goddess Durga through the streets of Howrah, near Kolkata, during the Durga Puja festival. It ends with the immersion of the idols in a tributary of the Ganges.
A personal interest in a cleaner river: Swami Shivanand Saraswati, 75, bathes in the Ganges at his Matri Sadan ashram in Haridwar. He leads a long-running and ambitious campaign to protect the river from mining, new dams, and pollution.
Concrete military bunkers are a ubiquitous sight in Albania, with an average of 5.7 bunkers for every square kilometre (14.7 per square mile). The bunkers (Albanian: bunkerët) were built during the Stalinist and anti-revisionist government of Enver Hoxha from the 1960s to the 1980s; by 1983 a total of 173,371 bunkers had been constructed around the country.
Hoxha’s program of “bunkerization” (bunkerizimi) resulted in the construction of bunkers in every corner of the then People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, ranging from mountain passes to city streets. They were never used for their intended purpose during the years that Hoxha governed. The cost of constructing them was a drain on Albania’s resources, diverting them away from more pressing needs, such as dealing with the country’s housing shortage and poor roads.
The bunkers were abandoned following the dissolution of the communist government in 1992. A few were used in the Albanian insurrection of 1997 and the Kosovo War of 1999. Most are now derelict, though some have been reused for a variety of purposes including residential accommodation, cafés, storehouses, and shelters for animals or the homeless.
From the end of World War II to his death in April 1985, Enver Hoxha pursued a style of politics informed by hardline Stalinism as well as elements of Maoism. He broke with the Soviet Union after Nikita Khrushchev embarked on his reformist Khrushchev Thaw, withdrew Albania from the Warsaw Pact in 1968 in protest of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and broke with China after U.S. President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China.
His regime was also hostile towards the country’s immediate neighbours. Albania did not end its state of war with Greece, left over from the Second World War, until as late as 1987 – two years after Hoxha’s death – due to suspicions about Greek territorial ambitions in southern Albania as well as Greece’s status as a NATO member state.
Hoxha was virulently hostile towards the government of Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, accusing Tito’s government of maintaining “an anti-Marxist and chauvinistic attitude towards our Party, our State, and our people”. He asserted that Tito intended to take over Albania and make it into the seventh republic of Yugoslavia, and castigated the Yugoslav government’s treatment of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, claiming that “Yugoslav leaders are pursuing a policy of extermination there.”
Albania still maintained some links with the outside world at this time, trading with neutral countries such as Austria and Sweden, and establishing links across the Adriatic Sea with its former invader Italy. However, a modest relaxation of domestic controls was curtailed by Hoxha in 1973 with a renewed wave of repression and purges directed against individuals, the young and the military, whom he feared might threaten his hold on the country. A new constitution was introduced in 1976 that increased the Labor Party’s control of the country, limited private property, and forbade foreign loans. The country sank into a decade of isolation and economic stagnation, virtually cut off from the outside world.
A bunker on a city street in Shkoder. The street’s inhabitants would have been expected to defend it.
A bunker in a cemetery.
Starting in 1967 and continuing until 1986, the Albanian government carried out a policy of “bunkerisation” that saw the construction of hundreds of thousands of bunkers across the country. They were built in every possible location, ranging from “beaches and mountains, in vineyards and pastures, in villages and towns, even on the manicured lawns of Albania’s best hotel”.[9] Hoxha envisaged Albania fighting a two-front war against an attack mounted by Yugoslavia, NATO or the Warsaw Pact involving a simultaneous incursion by up to eleven enemy airborne divisions. As he put it, “If we slackened our vigilance even for a moment or toned down our struggle against our enemies in the least, they would strike immediately like the snake that bites you and injects its poison before you are aware of it.”
A “triple series” of linked Qender Zjarri bunkers in the coast of Himara, southern Albania
The bunkerisation programme was a massive drain on Albania’s weak economy. The construction of prefabricated bunkers alone cost an estimated two percent of net material product, and in total the bunkers cost more than twice as much as the Maginot Line in France, consuming three times as much concrete. The programme diverted resources away from other forms of development, such as roads and residential buildings. On average, they are said to have each cost the equivalent of a two-room apartment and the resources used to build them could easily have resolved Albania’s chronic shortage of housing. According to Josif Zagali, building twenty smaller bunkers cost as much as constructing a kilometre of road. It also had a human cost; 70–100 people a year died constructing the bunkers. In addition, the bunkers occupied and obstructed a significant area of arable land.
A line of bunkers in Dhërmi, Himara The bunkerisation of the country had effects that went beyond their ubiquitous physical impact on the landscape. The bunkers were presented by the Party as both a symbol and a practical means of preventing Albania’s subjugation by foreign powers, but some viewed them as a concrete expression of Hoxha’s policy of isolationism – keeping the outside world at bay. Some Albanians saw them as an oppressive symbol of intimidation and control.
Albanian author Ismail Kadare used the bunkers in his 1996 novel The Pyramid to symbolise the Hoxha regime’s brutality and control, while Çashku has characterised the bunkers as “a symbol of totalitarianism” because of the “isolation psychology” that they represented. It has been argued that the bunkerisation programme was a form of “patterned large-scale construction” that “has a disciplinary potential as a means of familiarising a population with a given order of rule”. The regime’s xenophobia had the effect of creating a siege mentality and a sense of constant emergency.
There have been various suggestions for what to do with them: ideas have included pizza ovens, solar heaters, beehives, mushroom farms, projection rooms for drive-in cinemas, beach huts, flower planters, youth hostels, and kiosks. Some Albanians have taken to using the bunkers for more romantic purposes. In a country where until recently cars were in short supply, they were popular places for lovers to have sex; as travel writer Tony Wheeler puts it, “Albanian virginity is lost in a Hoxha bunker as often as American virginity was once lost in the back seats of cars.”
In November 2014, a “five star” nuclear shelter built near Tirana for Hoxha was opened as a tourist attraction and art exhibition. The large bunker contains a museum with exhibits from World War II and the Hoxhaist period.
Albania’s bunkers have become a national symbol. Pencil holders and ashtrays in the shape of bunkers have become one of the country’s most popular tourist souvenirs. One such line of bunker souvenirs was promoted with a message to buyers: “Greetings to the land of the bunkers. We assumed that you could not afford to buy a big one.”
The American space agency has rolled out its new giant Moon rocket for the first time.
The vehicle, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), was taken to Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to conduct a dummy countdown.
If that goes well, the rocket will be declared ready for a mission in which it will send an uncrewed test capsule around the Moon.
This could happen in the next couple of months.
IMAGE SOURCE,NASA/KEEGAN BARBERImage caption,
Bill Nelson was a prime mover behind the rocket when he was a US Senator
Ultimately, it’s hoped astronauts would climb aboard later SLS rockets to return to the Moon’s surface sometime in the second half of this decade.
These missions are part of what Nasa calls its Artemis programme.
Watching the roll-out, agency administrator Bill Nelson said we were entering a golden era of human space exploration.
“The Artemis generation is preparing to reach new frontiers,” he told the spectator crowds gathered at Kennedy.
“This generation will return astronauts to the Moon and this time, we will land the first woman and the first person of colour on the surface, to conduct ground-breaking science.
“Nasa’s Artemis programme will pave the way for humanity’s giant leap (to) future missions to Mars.”
Image caption,The Crawler Transporter is now more than 50 years old
SLS is a colossus. A touch under 100m in height, it was designed to be more powerful than the Apollo Saturn vehicles of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
It will have the thrust to not only send astronauts far beyond Earth but additionally so much equipment and cargo that those crews could stay away for extended periods.
Thursday’s rollout from Kennedy’s Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) is the rocket’s debut in the sense that it’s the very first time everyone has got to see all its different elements fully stacked together.
Image caption,The rocket uses a lot of technology repurposed from the space shuttle programme
The SLS move from the VAB began 17:47 local Florida time.
The rocket came out attached to a support gantry known as the Mobile Launcher. This structure, which is itself 120m high and weighs 5,000 tonnes, was sitting atop the same mammoth tractor that used to move the Saturn Vs back in the day, and later the space shuttles.
The Crawler Transporter goes very slowly, with a cruising speed of just over 1km/h (under 1mph). And after engineers had stopped and started the tractor for various checks, it was 04:15 on Friday morning by the time the procession had reached Pad 39B. A total journey distance of 6.75km.
SLS will now be prepared for a “wet dress rehearsal”, likely to occur on 3 April.
This will see the rocket loaded with propellants and taken through a practice countdown all the way to a mere 9.4 seconds from the moment of lift-off. The “scrub” point is just before they would normally light the four big shuttle-era engines under the rocket.
Assuming everything proceeds to the satisfaction of the engineers, Nasa will then be able to set a flight date.
The end of May remains a possibility, but more likely it will be June or July.
This mission, dubbed Artemis-1, will propel the rocket’s Orion crew capsule on a 26-day journey that includes an expanded orbit around the Moon. There will be no-one in the capsule for the test flight. This should happen on a second mission in a couple of years’ time.
IMAGE SOURCE,NASA/AUBREY GEMIGNANIImage caption,
The Moon is the initial target, but eventually Nasa wants to get people to Mars
While Nasa is developing the SLS, the American rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk is preparing an even larger vehicle at his R&D facility in Texas.
He calls his giant rocket the Starship. Like SLS it has yet to have a maiden flight. Unlike SLS, Starship has been designed to be totally reusable and ought therefore to be considerably cheaper to operate.
A recent assessment from the Office of Inspector General, which audits Nasa programmes, found that the first four SLS missions would each cost more than $4bn to execute – a sum of money that was described as “unsustainable”.
Florida Man Asked Cops To Test His Meth Because He Was Worried The Drugs Were Actually Bath Salts
A Florida man dialed 911 to implore police to test the meth he bought as he worried his dealer had sold him bath salts instead. Thomas Colluci, 41, requested a sheriff be sent to his home in Spring Hill, a suburb of Tampa, to look into the purity of the drugs he’d purchased at a local bar. He’d used a bit of the substance but felt from the effects that he may not have a pure product on his hands. He ended up drugless and in cuffs by the end of the night.
1. COLUCCI DESCRIBED HIMSELF TO POLICE AS AN EXPERIENCED DRUG USER.Because of that, he was sure he would “know what it should feel like” when he did meth. When he tried the product he bought from the random man at the bar, however, something felt different and he was obviously concerned for his health.
2. HE HANDED OVER TWO BAGGIES FULL OF A “CRYSTALLINE SUBSTANCE” TO AUTHORITIES.In Colucci’s head, he legitimately believed that police would test the drugs and give them back. That obviously wasn’t how things went down, much to his disbelief.
3. COLUCCI WAS LOOKING OUT FOR OTHER DRUG USERS.He told police that he didn’t want other customers to end up with “fake” meth from the man. Also, despite the fact that he didn’t have any contact info or even a name for the dealer, he said he wanted to “put the person in trouble” for selling narcotics.
4. THE PRODUCT COLUCCI BOUGHT DID INDEED CONTAIN METH.The Hernando County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the presence of methamphetamines in the bags, which was bad news for Colucci after all as he was arrested on a felony drug possession charge as well as two misdemeanor drug paraphernalia charges. He was released from the county jail after posting $7,000 bail.
5. THIS WASN’T COLUCCI’S FIRST BRUSH WITH THE LAW. As per The Smoking Gun, Colucci was convicted in 2019 of slamming his SUV into another vehicle while under the influence of alcohol. As he drove away from the scene without stopping, he hit another vehicle that was getting gas and knocked the driver to the ground while injuring the passenger as well. He pleaded no contest to DUI and leaving the scene of an accident and was given a year of probation as well as an order to attend outpatient substance abuse treatment. Looks like that worked well!
IMAGE SOURCE,NASA/KEEGAN BARBERImage caption,
IMAGE SOURCE,NASA/AUBREY GEMIGNANIImage caption,
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