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🌎  7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW

• Ukraine missile attack, EU leaders meet in Iceland: Russia launched an intense air attack on Kyiv early on Tuesday but the Ukrainian air defenses have shot down all 18 missiles. No casualties were reported. Meanwhile, leaders from across the continent were heading towards Iceland early Tuesday for a rare summit of the 46-nation Council of Europe that will once more step up support for Ukraine and condemn its since expelled member Russia for invading its neighbor.

• Airstrikes intensify in Sudan: Airstrikes and artillery fire intensified across Sudan’s capital early on Tuesday as the army continued to defend key bases from rivals it has now been fighting for more than a month. The airstrikes, explosions and clashes could be heard in the south of Khartoum, with heavy shelling across the Nile in parts of the adjoining cities of Bahri and Omdurman.

• Rudy Giuliani accused of sexual harassment: Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani is being sued for sexual harassment by a former employee. Noelle Dunphy, who says she was hired by Giuliani's firm in 2019 when he was working as Trump's personal lawyer, filed the legal case in New York state on Monday.

• New Mexico shooting kills three: At least three people have been killed and multiple people injured after a shooting in Farmington, New Mexico, where police killed the suspected 18-year-old gunman.

• New Zealand hostel fire: At least six people were killed after a fire broke out at a hostel in New Zealand’s capital Wellington and forcing others to flee the four-story building in the middle of the night. Officials said 52 people had made it out of the building alive but the search is ongoing.

• Taiwan grants right of adoption to same-sex couples: Taiwan’s legislature passed a bill on Tuesday granting adoption to same-sex couples, clearing one of the final obstacles in achieving full marriage equality. Taiwan in 2019 became the first juridiction in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.

🗞️  FRONT PAGE

Dubai-based newspaper Gulf Today reports on the Syrian delegation attending the meeting of the Arab League in Saudi Arabia. The 32nd Arab League summit is being held in Saudi Arabia on May 19, and marks a significant development as Syria's participation is reinstated after years of suspension and isolation.

💬  LEXICON

笑顔トレ

After three years of COVID-era masking and the lifting of pandemic restrictions, some Japanese people are finding it hard to readjust to life without face coverings. Newspapers report on those turning to coaches for “smile training” (笑顔トレ, pronounced egao tore) to re-learn the art of breaking into a beaming grin in front of others. “With mask wearing having become the norm, people have had fewer opportunities to smile, and more and more people have developed a complex about it,” says Keiko Kawano, a coach working for the “smile education” company Egaoiku.

📰  STORY OF THE DAY

The AI capitalists don't realize they're about to kill capitalism

The threats posed by advanced AI are serious and varied. It will change capitalism so much that in the end we will be faced with a choice between two systems: a new form of communism or unchecked chaos, writes Slavoj Zizek in German daily Die Welt.

🧠💻 An open letter published by the Future of Life Institute at the end of March called for all labs working on artificial intelligence systems more powerful than GPT-4 to “immediately pause” their work for at least six months. The idea was that humanity should use this time to take stock of the risks posed by these advanced systems. Thousands of people have already signed the letter, including big names such as Elon Musk.

⚠️ The panic expressed in the open letter is motivated by a fear that those “driving forward progress” will no longer be able to control what they create — in short, it is expressing our fear of our new, digital overlords. Clearly what the open letter is aiming for is not a wide-ranging public debate — it is more like cooperation between governments and companies. The threat posed by advanced AI is very serious, and it affects those in power and those currently involved in developing, owning and controlling AI.

🤖 The future waiting on the horizon is nothing less than the end of capitalism as we know it: the prospect of a self-reproducing AI system that requires less and less human involvement — the explosion of automated trade on the stock exchange is the first step in this direction. So the true choice facing us is clear: a new form of communism or unchecked chaos, in which machines interact with us as pseudo-human partners.

➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com

📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO

➡️ Watch the video: THIS HAPPENED

#️⃣  BY THE NUMBERS

- 550 million

Due to intensive agriculture, an estimated 550 million fewer birds are flying over Europe, as compared to a generation ago. Researchers blame the use of pesticides and fertilizers in farming, and their detrimental effects on insects, and therefore the impact on other wildlife. The number of wild birds across 28 countries has reportedly fallen by a quarter, with farmland birds hit the hardest.

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