Category: Uncategorized

The leader of Russia’s Wagner Group has threatened to withdraw his troops from the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut by Wednesday, in a row over ammunition.

His statement came after he posted a gruesome video of him walking among dead fighters’ bodies, asking defence officials for more supplies.

Russia has been trying to capture the city for months, despite its questionable strategic value.

Yevgeny Prigozhin pinned his decision squarely on the defence ministry.

“Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where is the… ammunition?… They came here as volunteers and die for you to fatten yourselves in your mahogany offices.”

Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov have often been the focus for Prigozhin’s anger.

Prigozhin is a publicity seeker, and his influence has seemingly waned in recent months. He has previously made threats he has not followed through with – subsequently dismissing them as jokes and military humour.

Only last week he told a Russian pro-war blogger that Wagner fighters in Bakhmut were down to their last days of supplies of bullets and needed thousands of rounds of ammunition.

If shortages were not tackled, his mercenaries would be forced either to retreat or remain and die, he warned: “Then, no matter what our bureaucrats want, everything else will crumble.”

The battle for Bakhmut has dragged for months and is thought to have claimed thousands of lives. Wagner troops and regular Russian forces have fought on the same side, against the Ukrainian military.

Ukraine decided to defend the city at all costs in an apparent attempt to focus Russian military resources on one place of relatively little significance.

Prigozhin said his forces had agreed to stay in Bakhmut until 10 May to allow Russia to mark Tuesday’s Victory Day celebrations.

In February, he posted another image of his dead troops and blamed army chiefs for their deaths.

Although the military denied deliberately starving his Wagner group of shells, at the time they did respond by increasing supplies to the front line.

In his new announcement, standing in front of his men, he said on 10 May they would be “obliged to transfer positions in the settlement of Bakhmut to units of the defence ministry and withdraw the remains of Wagner to logistics camps to lick our wounds”.

US-based military analyst Rob Lee argues that Wagner’s latest complaint of shortages likely reflects Russia’s defence ministry rationing ammunition ahead of Ukraine’s long-anticipated counter-offensive.

The ministry has to defend the whole front, but Prigozhin’s sole concern lies in taking Bakhmut, he wrote on Twitter.

Prigozhin has himself predicted that Ukraine’s counter-offensive will begin by 15 May, as tanks and artillery will be able to advance in dry weather, after the last spring rain.

In a separate move, Prigozhin appears to have hired an army general who was recently dismissed as logistics chief.

Col-Gen Mikhail Mizintsev was dubbed the butcher of Mariupol for his role in last year’s bombardment of Ukraine’s southern port city, captured by Russian forces a year ago.

Videos posted online showed him at a Wagner training camp and then visiting positions in Bakhmut.

Prigozhin said earlier he had offered him the post of deputy to a Wagner commander, pointing out that the general had done his best to help supply mercenaries with ammunition and had co-operated with the group’s efforts to recruit convicted prisoners to its ranks.

Col-Gen Mizintsev was only put in charge of army logistics last September, shortly after Prigozhin was filmed inside a Russian prison telling inmates they would be freed from jail if they served with his men in Ukraine.

A man widely seen as the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI) has quit his job, warning about the growing dangers from developments in the field.

Geoffrey Hinton, aged 75, announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now regretted his work.

He told the BBC some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”.

“Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”

Dr Hinton also accepted that his age had played into his decision to leave the tech giant, telling the BBC: “I’m 75, so it’s time to retire.”

Dr Hinton’s pioneering research on deep learning and neural networks has paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT.

But the British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told the BBC the chatbot could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds.

“Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning.

“And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.”

In the New York Times article, Dr Hinton referred to “bad actors” who would try use AI for “bad things”.

When asked by the BBC to elaborate on this, he replied: “This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario.

“You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own sub-goals.”

The scientist warned that this eventually might “create sub-goals like ‘I need to get more power'”.

He added: “I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have.

“We’re biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world.

“And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”

He stressed that he did not want to criticise Google and that the tech giant had been “very responsible”.

“I actually want to say some good things about Google. And they’re more credible if I don’t work for Google.”

In a statement, Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean said: “We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”

Ghana is the first country to approve a new malaria vaccine that has been described as a “world-changer” by the scientists who developed it.

The vaccine – called R21 – appears to be hugely effective, in stark contrast to previous ventures in the same field.

Ghana’s drug regulators have assessed the final trial data on the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, which is not yet public, and have decided to use it.

The World Health Organization is also considering approving the vaccine.

Malaria kills about 620,000 people each year, most of them young children.

It has been a massive, century-long, scientific undertaking to develop a vaccine that protects the body from the malaria parasite.

Trial data from preliminary studies in Burkina Faso showed the R21 vaccine was up to 80% effective when given in three initial doses, and a booster a year later.

But widespread use of the vaccine hinges on the results of a larger trial involving nearly 5,000 children.

These had been expected to take place at the end of last year, but have still not been formally published. However, they have been shared with some government bodies in Africa and scientists.

I have not seen the final data, but have been told it shows a similar picture to the earlier studies.

Ghana’s Food and Drugs Authority, which has seen the data, has approved the vaccine’s use in children aged between five months to three years old.

Other African countries are also studying the data, as is the World Health Organization.

Prof Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, where the vaccine was invented, says African countries are declaring: “we’ll decide”, after being left behind in the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic.

He told me: “We expect R21 to make a major impact on malaria mortality in children in the coming years, and in the longer term [it] will contribute to the overall final goal of malaria eradication and elimination.”

The Serum Institute of India is preparing to produce between 100-200 million doses per year, with a vaccine factory being constructed in Accra, Ghana.

Each dose of R21 is expected to cost a couple of dollars.

Adar Poonawalla, CEO of the Serum Institute, said: “Developing a vaccine to greatly impact this huge disease burden has been extraordinarily difficult.”

He added that Ghana, as the first country to approve the vaccine, represents a “significant milestone in our efforts to combat malaria around the world”.