Letters: Why Are We Questioning Military Service Of Candidates?

Social media company Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—announced Monday that it will ban RT and other Russian state media from its apps worldwide, days after the State Department announced sanctions against Kremlin-coordinated news organizations. “After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets: Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” Meta said in a statement provided to TIME. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Before the ban, RT had over 7 million followers on Facebook, while its Instagram account had over a million followers. The move is an escalation of actions Meta announced in 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to limit the spread of Russian disinformation, which at the time included labeling and demoting posts with links to Russian state-controlled media outlets and demonetizing the accounts of those outlets and prohibiting them from running ads.

Typhoon Yagi, the most powerful storm to hit Asia this year, killed at least 226 people in Myanmar and affected more than half a million more, adding another strain to the war-torn nation’s already limited resources. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Torrential rains caused water levels in rivers and creeks to rise, resulting in floods that damaged infrastructure and crops in 84 townships including in the capital Naypyidaw, the Ministry of Information said.

LIMA — Wildfires in Peru have left at least 15 dead since July and more than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of cultivated land and natural areas scorched, authorities said Monday. Prime Minister Gustavo Adrianzén told reporters that the fires were started by human activity and that 22 of the 24 regions that make up the country have active outbreaks.

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, researcher and Brookings Institution fellow Chinasa T. Okolo, director of the U. S. Artificial Safety Institute (AISI) Elizabeth Kelly, and Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S, discussed the transformative power of AI during a panel at a TIME100 Impact Dinner in San Francisco on Monday. During the discussion, which was moderated by TIME’s editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, Kurzweil predicted that we will achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that might be smarter than humans, by 2029. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “Nobody really took it seriously until now,” Kurzweil said about AI.

TIME hosted its inaugural TIME100 Impact Dinner: Leaders Shaping the Future of AI, in San Francisco on Monday evening. The event kicked off a weeklong celebration of the TIME100 AI, a list that recognizes the 100 most influential individuals in artificial intelligence across industries and geographies and showcases the technology’s rapid evolution and far-reaching impact.

Erie community members can help to see the town get overrun with fictional zombies at an upcoming Zombie Crawl event that will be held to help fund an action-comedy movie that will be shot in town. Michael Freeman, writer, director and producer of “Eerie Town,” said the film is a love letter to the town of Erie, as well as his love for action-comedy movies.