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2020s on Course To Be Weakest Decade for Global Economy Since 1960s, Says World Bank

3 weeks 6 days ago
The World Bank sharply reduced its global economic growth forecast for 2025 to 2.3% from 2.7%, warning that the current decade is on track to become the weakest for the global economy since the 1960s. The Washington-based lender attributed the downgrade to mounting costs from "international discord -- about trade, in particular," as Donald Trump's tariff policies create unprecedented uncertainty. The revised forecast would mark the slowest growth rate outside full-blown recessions since 2008. Even with a modest recovery to 2.4% expected in 2026, the bank characterized the outlook as merely "tepid." Chief economist Indermit Gill said "outside of Asia, the developing world is becoming a development-free zone." Growth in developing economies has steadily declined from 6% annually in the 2000s to 5% in the 2010s, now falling below 4% in the 2020s. The bank said that "many of the forces behind the great economic miracle of the last 50 years" have reversed, with more than half of low-income countries either in debt distress or at high risk.

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Gabbard Says AI is Speeding Up Intel Work, Including the Release of the JFK Assassination Files

3 weeks 6 days ago
AI is speeding up the work of America's intelligence services, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Tuesday. From a report: Speaking to a technology conference, Gabbard said AI programs, when used responsibly, can save money and free up intelligence officers to focus on gathering and analyzing information. The sometimes slow pace of intelligence work frustrated her as a member of Congress, Gabbard said, and continues to be a challenge. AI can run human resource programs, for instance, or scan sensitive documents ahead of potential declassification, Gabbard said. Her office has released tens of thousands of pages of material related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother, New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, on the orders of President Donald Trump. Experts had predicted the process could take many months or even years, but AI accelerated the work by scanning the documents to see if they contained any material that should remain classified, Gabbard said during her remarks at the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington. "We have been able to do that through the use of AI tools far more quickly than what was done previously -- which was to have humans go through and look at every single one of these pages," Gabbard said.

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Cisco Borgs all its management tools into a single Cloud Control console

3 weeks 6 days ago
Not just a salve for netadmins – this is also a play to ensure Switchzilla is AI-relevant

Cisco Live  There’s light at the end of the tunnel for netadmins tired of juggling multiple management consoles: Cisco announced it’s testing a tool called Cloud Control that will drive all its networking, security, and observability tools – and hopefully make the biz more relevant in the AI era.…

Simon Sharwood

Tinfoil hat wearers can thank AI for declassification of JFK docs

3 weeks 6 days ago
Plus: AWS launches second Secret-level cloud region

AI has been a "game changer" for the intelligence community, according to US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who noted two key applications of the technology for classified government work at the Amazon Web Services DC Summit on Tuesday.…

Jessica Lyons

Texas warns 300,000 crash reports siphoned via compromised user account

3 weeks 6 days ago
Lone Star State drivers with accident records need to be careful about fraud

The Texas Department of Transportation says a compromised user account was used to improperly download nearly 300,000 crash reports, exposing personal data that could be exploited for financial fraud against Lone Star drivers.…

Iain Thomson

1.5 TB of James Webb Space Telescope Data Just Hit the Internet

3 weeks 6 days ago
A NASA-backed project using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released more than 1.5 TB of data for open science, offering the largest view deep into the universe available to date. From a report: The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), a joint project from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Rochester Institute of Technology, has launched a searchable dataset for budding astrophysics enthusiasts worldwide. As well as a catalog of galaxies, the dataset includes an interactive viewer that users can search for images of specific objects or click them to view their properties, covering approximately 0.54 square degrees of sky with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and a 0.2 square degree area with the Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Although the raw data was already publicly available to the science community, the aim of the COSMOS-Web project was to make it more usable for other scientists.

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