The Week's Good News: September 6, 2018

BERLIN — When Michael Bommer found out that he was terminally ill with colon cancer, he spent a lot of time with his wife, Anett, talking about what would happen after his death. She told him one of the things she’d miss most is being able to ask him questions whenever she wants because he is so well read and always shares his wisdom, Bommer recalled during a recent interview with The Associated Press at his home in a leafy Berlin suburb. That conversation sparked an idea for Bommer: Recreate his voice using artificial intelligence to survive him after he passed away. The 61-year-old startup entrepreneur teamed up with his friend in the U.

Apple, Microsoft and Google are heralding a new era of what they describe as artificially intelligent smartphones and computers. The devices, they say, will automate tasks like editing photos and wishing a friend a happy birthday. But to make that work, these companies need something from you: more data. In this new paradigm, your Windows computer will take a screenshot of everything you do every few seconds.

If DaRon Holmes calls you a legend, don’t be too flattered. It’s nothing personal. It’s just Holmes’ all-encompassing expression, his hello and goodbye. It started in high school. By the end of college, it was practically a comprehensive attitude on life. “Every time he saw you, every time you did something, it’s: ‘You’re a legend.

Baseball is timeless and the Rockies are shameless. It didn’t take long to draw this conclusion (again) during the bottom of seventh inning Wednesday. Watching the game vs. the Astros, the question wasn’t whether the Rockies would lose, but exactly how sloppy their play would become. Shortstop Ezequiel Tovar, a lighthouse in a storm of incompetence this season, lost focus, failing to give way to the center fielder on a popup that dropped for a single, then throwing home on a ground ball when there was clearly no play.

On January 9, 2020, Detroit Police Department (DPD) officers arrested me on my front lawn in Farmington Hills, Michigan, in front of my wife and two young daughters, for a crime I had nothing to do with. They refused to tell me why, and I had to spend the night sleeping on a cold concrete bench in an overcrowded, filthy jail cell before finally finding out that I was being falsely accused of stealing designer watches from a Detroit boutique. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] While interrogating me, a pair of detectives let it slip that I had been arrested based on an incorrect facial recognition identification, a technology that has been proven to be both racist and faulty—especially when used in real-world conditions, like with blurry security footage. This week we finally reached a settlement in my wrongful arrest lawsuit against the City of Detroit that ensures what happened to me won’t happen again. Facial recognition technology has access to massive databases with millions of photos — including, at the time I was arrested, a database of 49 million photographs comprising every Michigan driver’s license photo going back years.

In July 2023, Indian authorities led a Rohingya refugee couple to burial grounds in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir. Their 40-day-old daughter had just died in the refugee detention center where the couple was also held, following refugee-led protests in which police deployed teargas against detainees. As their daughter was buried, they watched on with handcuffed wrists, tethered to police escorts.