Adyen NV provided a more moderate set of growth targets for the next three years as the Dutch

Charlie Munger dies at 99, Apple moves to end Goldman Sachs card partnership, Amazon and Nvidia expand AI offerings, and other news to start your day.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has stripped one of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical distributors of its license to sell highly addictive painkillers after determining it failed to flag thousands of suspicious, high-volume orders at the height of the opioid crisis

ONTARIO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 1, 2023--

Russia’s top court has ruled that LGBT+ activists should be designated as “extremists” and issued a ban against such work – the most drastic step in a years-long crackdown on the community in the country. This effectively outlaws LGBT+ activism across the country, in a move that representatives of the gay and transgender communities fear will lead to arrests and prosecutions. The hearing took place behind closed doors and with no defendant. Multiple rights activists have pointed out that the lawsuit targeted the “international civic LGBT movement”, which is not an entity but rather a broad and vague definition that would allow Russian authorities to crack down on any individuals or groups deemed to be part of the “movement”. In a statement announcing a lawsuit filed to the court earlier this month, Russia’s justice ministry argued that authorities had identified “signs and manifestations of an extremist nature” by an LGBTQ+ “movement” operating in Russia, including “incitement of social and religious discord”, although it offered no details or evidence. In its ruling, the court declared the “movement” to be extremist and banned it in Russia. “Despite the fact that the justice ministry demands to label a nonexistent – ‘the international civic LGBT movement’ – extremist, in practice it could happen that the Russian authorities, with this court ruling at hand, will enforce it against LGBT+ initiatives that work in Russia, considering them a part of this civic movement,” Max Olenichev, a human rights lawyer who works with the Russian LGBT+ community, told the Associated Press ahead of the hearing. The ruling is the latest in more than a decade of restrictions on LBGT+ rights under Vladimir Putin, who has put what he calls “traditional family values” at the centre of his appeal to the Russian public. In 2013, the Kremlin adopted legislation known as the “gay propaganda” law, banning any public endorsement of “nontraditional sexual relations” to children. In 2020, constitutional reforms pushed through by Mr Putin to extend his rule by two more terms also included a provision to outlaw same-sex marriage. After sending troops into Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin ramped up its comments about protecting “traditional values” from what it called the West's “degrading” influence, in what many have seen as an attempt to legitimise the invasion as Western nations have lined up to support Ukraine. The language from Mr Putin regarding LGBT+ communities has ramped up as the Russian president has sought to set Moscow against the West in almost every facet of society. In the wake of the Ukraine invasion, the authorities adopted a law banning propaganda of “nontraditional sexual relations” among adults, also, effectively outlawing any public endorsement of LGBT+ people. Another law passed earlier this year prohibited gender-transitioning procedures and gender-affirming care for transgender people. The legislation prohibited any “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person”, as well as changing one’s gender in official documents and public records. It also amended Russia’s family code by listing gender change as a reason to annul a marriage and adding those “who had changed gender” to a list of people who can’t become foster or adoptive parents. Samples of Mr Putin’s degrading language were illustrated by a speech last year where he said the West was welcome to adopt “rather strange, in my view, new-fangled trends like dozens of genders, and gay parades” but had no right to impose them on other countries. Such rhetoric has been decried by nations across the world. Mr Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters before the latest court decision was announced that the Kremlin was “not following” the case and had no comment on it. The Supreme Court took around five hours to issue its ruling. The proceedings were closed to media, but reporters were allowed in to hear the decision. LGBT+ groups had seen the decision as inevitable after the request by the justice ministry, which said – without giving examples – that “various signs and manifestations of extremist orientation, including the incitement of social and religious discord” had been identified in the activities of what it called the LGBT+ movement in Russia. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Turk, has repeatedly called on Russia to repeal its repression of LGBT+ rights and the UN as a whole, along with nations such as the US, UK and others have condemned such moves from the 2013 propaganda law onwards. Russian officials have tried to reject accusations of discrimination, despite a crackdown on freedom of expression. Earlier this month, Russian media quoted Andrei Loginov, a deputy justice minister, as saying that “the rights of LGBT people in Russia are protected” legally. Mr Loginov spoke in Geneva, while presenting a report on human rights in Russia to the UN Human Rights Council, and argued that “restraining public demonstration of non-traditional sexual relationships or preferences is not a form of censure for them.” For LGBT+ groups and activists, there are deep fears that this is just the beginning of another round of arrests. “Of course, it’s very alarming, and I don’t remember the threat ever being so serious and real,” Alexei Sergeyev, an LGBT+ activist in St Petersburg, told Reuters earlier this month. More than 100 groups are already banned in Russia as “extremist”. Previous listings, for example of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious movement and organisations linked to opposition politician Alexei Navalny, have served as a prelude to arrests and court cases. Mr Sergeyev said activities such as psychological and legal support, or even “meetings where you can just sit and drink tea”, would be driven underground, given the broad and vague nature of this ruling – depriving many LGBT+ people of support. Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report Read More Russia's Lavrov faces Western critics at security meeting, walks out after speech Putin asks Russian women to have ‘eight or more’ children amid deaths in his war Russia-Ukraine war live: Families trapped under rubble after missile strike Ukraine spy chief’s wife treated for suspected metal poisoning Putin won’t consider stopping Ukraine war until after US election – official Chechen warlord Kadyrov offers Putin 3,000 more fighters amid heavy Russian losses

OpenAI has built a new bot that will crawl over the internet, gathering information to educate artificial intelligence systems. Operators of websites will be forced to actively opt out, and block the bot, if they want to stop it taking data from their site. Artificial intelligence systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT rely on vast amounts of data to train their models and learn how to give the correct outputs. So far, much of that data has been taken freely from the web. That has prompted numerous complaints from authors and other web users. Many have criticised OpenAI and others for taking personal information and copyrighted content to train their models, with that writing potentially informing or even being replicated in the system's answers. Artificial intelligence companies have also faced criticism from others who claim that such crawlers are stretching their web infrastructure. Elon Musk, for instance, has said that the load from such bots has forced Twitter to place limits on how many posts users could see on the site. OpenAI's existing ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 were trained on data taken from the internet that was taken up to late 2021. There is no way for owners of that data or the websites it was gathered from to remove it from OpenAI's models. Now OpenAI says that the new system, named 'GPTBot', will be crawling over data and writing on the web to gather more information to train future models. It told website administrators that they should include instructions to the bot to stop it from crawling a website, if they did not want that information to be gathered. Administrators are able to include such information in a file called "robots.txt", which gives instructions to other crawlers such as those used by Google for its search results. OpenAI says the bot "may potentially be used to improve future models". It also says that it is built to "remove sources" that require a paywall, gather personally identifiable information or have text that violates its rules. It suggested that letting the bot access sites "can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety". Read More Meta’s Twitter rival Threads sees ‘steep drop in daily users by 80 per cent’ Google Assistant will be ‘supercharged’ with AI like ChatGPT and Bard PayPal launches dollar-backed cryptocurrency

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German authorities crack down on the skinhead group known for organising far-right concerts.