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☆ Storm Franklin hits Dominican Republic and Haiti, killing one
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-24 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Franklin, which brought stormy winds and rainfall across the Dominican Republic and neighboring Haiti, is forecast to gather strength over the Atlantic Ocean and could near hurricane force this weekend. "Franklin could be near hurricane strength over the southwestern Atlantic by Saturday," the NHC said, saying it expected the storm to gradually strengthen from its current maximum sustained winds near 40 mph. The head of the Dominican COE emergency services a man had been found dead earlier on Wednesday in San Cristobal province, after trying to swim through floodwaters. In a briefing with COE, Dominican President Luis Abinader said the government would attend to communities whose infrastructure was damaged by the storm and that schools and businesses would resume on Thursday. The storm also cut off access to six Dominican communities and damaged roads, water infrastructure and the electrical grid, emergency services said.

Persons: SANTO, Storm Franklin, Franklin, Luis Abinader, Paul Mathiasen, Harold Isaac, Sarah Morland, Harshit Verma, Ananya, Lincoln Organizations: PORT, U.S, National Hurricane Center, NHC, country's Hydro, Meteorological Unit, The United Nations, Food Programme, Thomson Locations: SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic, Hispaniola, Haiti, Puerto Plata, Dominican, Atlantic, San Cristobal province, Sud, Santo Domingo, Port, Mexico City, Bengaluru

☆ Olive oil is in trouble as extreme heat and drought pushes the industry into crisis
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-19 | by ( Laura Paddison | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

CNN —There is a crisis brewing in the olive oil industry. The situation is all the more concerning as it comes on the heels of a bad olive harvest last year, following Europe’s hottest summer on record. In Spain, the world’s biggest olive oil producer, production plunged to roughly 620,000 metric tons, compared to the five-year average of around 1.3 million metric tons, said Holland. This summer, heat gripped swaths of the Mediterranean region, bringing a “heat hell” scientists say would have been virtually impossible without climate change. “It’s getting to the stage where the concerns are significant not just for olive oil but for a lot of crops,” Holland said.

Persons: Kyle Holland, “, ”, Walter Zanre, Filippo Berio, Carlos Gil, Farmer Cristobal Cano, Jorge Guerrero, Holland, Zanre, ” Holland, It’s, Corey Lesk, Lorenzo Bazzana, Bazzana, Claudia Greco, Burger King, Nicholas Paulson, ” Paulson, “ We’re, ” Lesk Organizations: CNN, Getty, International Olive Council, Dartmouth College, “, Reuters, University of Illinois Locations: Europe, Spain, Holland, Jaen, AFP, Italy, Greece, Emilia, Romagna, Forli, India, South, University of Illinois Urbana, Champaign

CNN —At least 12 people died and 65 more were injured in an explosion in the Dominican Republic, the Dominican Red Cross said in a statement. Some 55 people are also missing after the incident on Monday, which occurred in Villa Valdez, San Cristobal province, according to the Tuesday statement. Three structures completely collapsed following the blast near a shopping center, added the Red Cross. Fires burn after the blast on August 14. Abinader ordered the mobilization of emergency services, including 20 ambulances and 14 firetrucks, to respond to the incident, emergency services said.

Persons: Jolivel Brito, Luis Abinader, Abinader Organizations: CNN, Dominican Red Cross, RTVD’s Locations: Dominican Republic, Dominican, Villa Valdez, San Cristobal

☆ How AI startup Runway aims to simplify video editing and filmmaking, from removing backgrounds to generating scenes from text prompts
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-17 | by ( Marta Biino | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

The buzzy generative-AI startup Runway wants to revolutionize video creation and editing. Filmmakers and creators have been using the startup to make video editing more efficient. All sorts of AI startups are cropping up with the promise of simplifying video creation and editing. In traditional video editing, this would be done frame by frame, but Runway's AI can do it automatically. "This is a perfect example, the video required the initial iPhone shot that he recorded and the text prompts," Valenzuela said.

Persons: Cristóbal Valenzuela, It's, Ben Mathews, Valenzuela, Stephen Colbert, Oscar, Quinn Murphy, popstar Alicia Keys, Murphy, Kevin Parry, Runway's, Martin Haerlin, Paul Trillo, it's Organizations: Ventures, Runway, Netflix, Star Wars, Wars

☆ How AI startup Runway is trying to make content creation faster and easier, according to its cofounder
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-13 | by ( Marta Biino | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

The buzzy generative-AI startup Runway wants to revolutionize video creation and editing. Filmmakers and creators have been using the startup to make video editing more efficient. All sorts of AI startups are cropping up with the promise of simplifying video creation and editing. Valenzuela said Runway's research focuses on making storytelling easier in two ways: helping to "see the world" with video editing, and "generating things in the world" with content generation. In traditional video editing, this would be done frame by frame, but Runway's AI can do it automatically.

☆ VC firm Sequoia is pulling out all the stops to dominate AI, insiders say. The firm is using everything from 'speed dating' to star studded summits to woo founders.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-22 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | Ben Bergman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

It's just one move of many the VC firm has taken to cement its position in the white-hot AI space. Huang and Grady wrote a public blog post on Sequoia's website inviting AI founders to email them their ideas and pitches directly. But the firm has been louder where it counts, investing in splashy AI startups like Harvey and LangChain. Every member of the firm, from managing partner Roleof Botha on down, has made AI a top priority, with Grady, Huang, and Buhler most prominently involved. Both Huang and Buhler now spend over 90% of their time researching AI companies, versus 50% in previous years, they said.

☆ How to Wear a Sari? A New Exhibition Counts the Ways.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Phyllida Jay | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The sari, in essence, is a six- to nine-yard cloth draped freely around the body. In April, Zendaya wore a sparkling deep-blue sari by Rahul Mishra on a red carpet in Mumbai, India. At the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, the Indian actress Deepika Padukone wore a shimmering gold-and-black sari by Sabyasachi Mukherjee that Vogue France called “the star piece” of the festival. Ms. Poonawalla’s Met Gala sari is among the pieces featured in a new exhibition, “The Offbeat Sari,” opening on Friday at the Design Museum in London. The show, which runs through September, explores how the sari is being newly defined, said Priya Khanchandani, the head of curatorial at the museum.

☆ I tried Runway, a buzzy generative AI platform that lets you transform images and videos with text. The results were not what I expected.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-11 | by ( Lakshmi Varanasi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Runway is a generative AI platform with tools for transforming images and video clips. Runway has now made some of its tools publicly available. Theoretically, that makes me an ideal candidate to test Runway, a generative AI platform that aims to make photo editing and filmmaking more accessible to the general public. Runway relies on AI models to let users revamp images and videos in a variety of creative ways, and create images from text prompts. Still, I was a little skeptical that I would actually produce anything of artistic value in my trial of Runway.

"This is the right's best chance for people to pick a Pinochet constitution without Pinochet's signature," said Patricio Navia a political scientist at New York University. "The political climate in Chile isn't the same as in 2019 or 2020," said political analyst Cristobal Bellolio. An estimated 3,200 Chileans were murdered and another 28,000 tortured by the state during Pinochet's rule. Many of the victims were affiliated with the socialist government of Salvador Allende, who was deposed in a 1973 coup. "The issue is that if it's more right then Pinochet's constitution, people are going to reject it," Navia added, who added the loss for Boric left the leader who once promised to bury Chile's market-led model sorely wounded.

☆ Exclusive: Generative AI startup Runway just raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation from a cloud service provider
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | Ben Bergman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Generative AI startup Runway has raised a funding round of at least $100 million, Insider has learned. The deal tripled the startup's valuation from its last round to a whopping $1.5 billion. Investors recently told Insider that they were big fans of buzzy photo and video generative AI startup Runway. Runway has raised a Series D funding round of at least $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation from a cloud service provider, according to multiple people familiar with the deal. Have a tip on a startup funding round?

☆ How Runway's idea for AI-driven video and photo editing and generation went from a "crazy" concept to a Silicon Valley darling worth half a billion dollars
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-01 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

When Runway's founders first came up with the idea for an AI art startup, they were called crazy. Now, the generative AI startup has become a fan favorite of VCs and the public alike. When Cristóbal Valenzuela began building his generative AI company Runway in 2018, investors, filmmakers, and advertisers told the cofounder that he was crazy. "They were saying, 'why would you want to build AI tools for video and filmmaking?'" Many of these features were developed hand-in-hand with customers, who often described to Runway the problems and obstacles they ran into while creating videos, Valenzuela said.

☆ Inside the AI talent wars: Tech companies are ransacking university AI programs at Stanford, MIT, and Cornell in search of engineers
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | Melia Russell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

Driven by the recent AI boom, companies are raiding top college campuses for rare technical talent. She's currently on leave from her Stanford AI Ph.D. program to focus on Moonhub. In 2011, new AI Ph.D. graduates took jobs in the tech industry and academia in about equal measure. But since then, the majority of new grads have headed to the AI industry, with nearly double the percentage of AI Ph.D. grads taking industry jobs versus academic roles in 2021, according to Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI's 2023 AI Index Report. "All AI companies have roles for people with Ph.D.s and without," said Attaluri, the soon-to-be researcher at DeepMind.

☆ Inside the AI talent wars: Tech companies are ransacking university AI programs at Stanford, MIT, and Cornell in search of rare talent
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-12 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | Melia Russell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

☆ Startup behind Stable Diffusion releases AI system for generating videos from text
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-20 | by ( Anna Tong | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

SAN FRANCISCO, March 20 - Runway, the startup that co-created the popular Stable Diffusion AI image generator, has released an AI model that takes any text description – such as “turtles flying in the sky” – and generates three seconds of matching video footage. Citing safety and business reasons, Runway is not releasing the model widely to start, nor will it be open-sourced like Stable Diffusion. The text-to-video model, dubbed Gen-2, will initially be available on Discord via a waitlist on the Runway website. Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) and Google (GOOGL.O) both released research papers on text-to-video AI models late last year. However, the difference is that Runway’s text-to-video AI model is being made available to the general public, said Cristobal Valenzuela, Runway’s chief executive.

[1/5] A Venezuelan flag next to some flags of Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA is pictured near the company's headquarters, in Caracas, Venezuela March 20, 2023. REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez ViloriaCARACAS, March 20 (Reuters) - Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro on Monday accepted the resignation of the country's powerful oil minister following the detention of at least six high level officials amid a corruption probe focused on state-run company PDVSA and the judiciary. Arresting government officials for corruption is rare in Venezuela, a country that rights groups such as Transparency International have described as opaque. The sources also said that at least 20 lower level officials at PDVSA have been arrested in recent days. The arrests are the largest recent crackdown on alleged PDVSA corruption.

☆ Venezuelan liquor cocuy is winning awards, but producers face hurdles
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-27 | by ( Keren Torres | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

Venezuela's cocuy producers, however, say limited wild crops and the labor-intensive process of making the drink without additives - the prize-winning version of the liquor - are complicating efforts to increase output. Producers say there is no data on annual national production or sales because much of cocuy output is made for local consumption. A liter of 100% agave cocuy can sell for between $18 and $60, while its production costs average about $12 without commercialization costs. Of the 365 cocuy producers in Lara, whose arid and semi-arid climate makes agave abundant, just 70 make the liquor with 100% agave. The difficult production process begins by cutting back the plant's leaves to reach its "head," said Siquisique producer Nelson de la Rosa.

☆ Venezuelan teachers march for better pay amid sky-high inflation
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-16 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Jan 16 (Reuters) - Teachers, retirees and workers' unions marched in at least six Venezuelan cities on Monday to demand better salaries, as the government of President Nicolas Maduro faces renewed challenges in its attempt to fight inflation. The minimum monthly salary for a public school teacher is about $10, while university professors earn between $60 and $80. I earn 460 bolivars a month (about $23)," said Odalis Aguilar, a 50-year-old teacher who marched in the city of Maracay. In the central state of Carabobo, teachers and public employees also held demonstrations, saying salaries do not cover the cost of food and medicine. Over the weekend the government paid public employees a bonus equivalent to $29.80.

[1/6] Burning vehicles are seen blocking a road after drug lord Ovidio Guzman's capture, in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico January 5, 2023. Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval told a news conference that security forces had captured the 32-year-old senior member of the Sinaloa Cartel. Ovidio, a fugitive since the previous arrest attempt, was now being held in the capital Mexico City, Sandoval said. The city's airport was caught up in the violence, with Mexican airline Aeromexico (AEROMEX.MX) saying one of its planes had been hit by gunfire ahead of a scheduled flight to Mexico City. "It's very important the government bear in mind that the weakening of the Sinaloa Cartel may also bring about an even greater expansion, a greater presence of the Jalisco Cartel."

☆ After a slow start, the 2022 hurricane season roared in with memorable and destructive storms
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-30 | by ( Jennifer Gray | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +8 min

CNN —As the hurricane season closes, a handful of blockbuster storms made history after an eerily quiet first half of the season gave false hope. In fact, we didn’t have any named storms from July 3 to August 31, the first time that’s occurred since 1941. One of those storms was Hurricane Ian, which hit land in late September and will go down as the most memorable storm of the 2022 season. “Tropical storms have formed in every month outside of hurricane season, and there have been a few hurricanes, too,” NOAA said. Historically, we’ve seen at least 15 named storms form in the month of December, even all the way up to December 30.

☆ Future Florida homebuyers face increasing costs and greater exposure to natural disasters, which could devastate residents and the state's booming real estate market
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-17 | by ( Alcynna Lloyd | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Data from Freddie Mac shows an increasing share of people are relocating to areas more prone to natural disasters. This is especially the case in Florida, a pandemic housing hotspot that has experienced severe flooding and storms. Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest on the culture & business of sustainability — delivered weekly to your inbox. Flordians are the most at risk to natural disastersIndeed, certain US housing markets — particularly cities in Florida — are more vulnerable to natural disasters than others. The organization anticipates that by April 2027, Florida's population will average 294,756 net new residents per year, averaging 808 each day.

Los Angeles County officials have reached an $8 million settlement with the family of Andres Guardado, an 18-year-old who was shot five times in the back by a deputy in June 2020. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office has not yet decided whether to file charges against Vega and Hernandez. Guardado’s settlement was unanimously approved Tuesday by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors alongside four other settlements involving the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. All the settlements combined cost county taxpayers more than $47 million “with a range of extremely disturbing allegations,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell said Tuesday. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to NBC News' request for comment.

☆ Mexican growers hope for bumper marigold sales for Day of the Dead
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-17 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Oct 17 (Reuters) - Mexican flower growers are preparing for bumper sales of marigolds for the upcoming Day of the Dead celebrations, helped by the return of public events after the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many other industries, marigold growers have been hit hard by higher costs - including a jump in the price of fertilizer. But a return to public celebrations after two years of pandemic restrictions is expected to offer a boost to sales. In Mexico, the marigolds are placed alongside candy skulls, chocolate coffins, paper-mache skeletons and photographs of the deceased at the altars. Cakes, tequila and cigarettes are also offered up to entice a dead relative to return.

☆ World’s most beautiful castles
▼ + stars: | 2019-08-07 | by ( Joe Yogerst | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +19 min

As the UK crowns a new monarch, we’re exploring all things royal, from castles to grand tours. “Castles are places were plots were hatched, marriages were consummated, murders carried out, royal babies born, and so on. With castles, you are never short of fascinating things to talk about.”Read on to find out more about 21 of the world’s most beautiful castles, fortified homes that are both a feast for the eyes and a time trip back to the bygone age during which they were created. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket/LightRocket via Getty ImagesThis classic medieval castle towers above the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea. The castle’s vivid red-and-yellow color pattern – and its flashy clock tower – endow Pena with a much more playful air than the somber castles found elsewhere in Europe.

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