by arabnews.com -- Najia Houssari -- BEIRUT: Lebanon’s public sector and legal system are under growing strain amid widening strike action over the plunging value of salaries in the crisis-hit country. Hundreds of judges continued their strike on Thursday in protest at having their salaries based on exchange rate of 1,507 Lebanese pounds to the dollar. Civil servants have also decided to go on strike again for the same reason, despite being granted monthly aid. Meanwhile, Lebanese university professors are continuing their open-ended strike, while students wait for work to resume so they can take last year’s final exams. Lebanon took preliminary steps to raise the customs dollar rate from 1,507 Lebanese pounds — the rate adopted before the economic crisis hit three years ago — to 20,000 pounds. The move created confusion in markets, adding to the chaos they were already facing.

The customs dollar is the price for calculating the customs value of imports, and is paid in Lebanese pounds. On Thursday, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati sent a letter to Finance Minister Youssef Khalil demanding the customs dollar rate of 20,000 pounds be adopted. Khalil told an expanded ministerial consultative meeting about the move. The ministerial committee enjoys exceptional powers that allow it to adjust the customs dollar rate without the need for Cabinet approval. Amin Salam, the caretaker economy minister, told a press conference on Thursday that the preliminary decision will be the subject of discussions between the finance minister and the central bank governor. Salam said that the impact of the new customs dollar rate on prices of goods would be “insignificant,” adding that the current rate was no longer fair. “We want to adjust the wages and salaries of civil servants,” he said. Salam also voiced fears that traders might store goods to be sold later under the new rate. “We are waiting for traders to provide us with the lists of goods they purchased previously,” the minister said.

by english.alaraby.co.uk — Lebanese officials have confirmed plans to demolish the northern section of the grain silos at Beirut port, just weeks …

YAROUN, Lebanon, (Reuters) by Timour Azhari; - Street-side signs in the southern Lebanese village of Yaroun, the ancestral home of the suspect in the stabbing of Salman Rushdie, bear posters of Iran's former supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who in 1989 issued a fatwa calling for the author's death. The logo of Lebanon's powerful, Iran-armed Hezbollah group adorns small monuments to its fighters killed during decades of wars with Israel, which borders Yaroun to the east and south. The mood in the small Lebanese village is apprehensive. Few want to speak about Friday's attack on Rushdie or about Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old Shi'ite Muslim American suspect whose family originally hails from Yaroun, where Hezbollah has strong support.

Locals say the attack on the novelist at a public appearance in New York state has little to do with them. "There is no information... He was born abroad in America and remains there," local official Riad al-Ridha told Reuters. "No one wants to talk about it because no one knows anything." Matar, from New Jersey, has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault. An initial law enforcement review of his social media account showed he was sympathetic to Shi'ite extremism and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), according to NBC New York. The IRGC is a powerful faction that Washington accuses of carrying out a global extremist campaign. U.S. authorities have not offered any additional details on the investigation, including a possible motive.

by venturebeat.com -- Louis Rosenberg, Ph.D -- Many “futurists” insist that technological advances will enable humans to “upload our minds” into computer systems, thereby allowing us to “live forever,” defying our biological limitations. This concept is deeply flawed but has gained popular attention in recent years. So much so, Amazon has a TV series based on the premise called Upload, not to mention countless other pop-culture references. As background, the concept of “mind uploading” is rooted in the very reasonable premise that the human brain, like any system that obeys the laws of physics, can be modeled in software if sufficient computing power is devoted to the problem. To be clear, mind-uploading is not about modeling human brains in the abstract, but modeling specific people, their unique minds represented in such detail that every neuron is accurately simulated, including the massive tangle of connections among them.

Is it even possible?

Of course, this is an extremely challenging task. There are more than 85 billion neurons in your brain, each with thousands of links to other neurons. That’s around 100 trillion connections – a thousand times more than the number of stars in the Milky Way. It’s those trillions of connections that make you who you are – your personality and memories, your fears and skills and ambitions. To reproduce your mind in software (sometimes called an infomorph), a computer system would need to precisely simulate the vast majority of those connections down to their most subtle interactions. That level of modeling will not be done by hand. Futurists who believe in “mind uploading” often envision an automated process using some kind of super-charged MRI machine, that captures the biology down to the molecular level. They further envision the use of artificial intelligence (AI) software to turn that detailed scan into a simulation of each unique neuron and its thousands of connections to other neurons.