By Najia Houssari — arabnews.com — BEIRUT: Stray bullets injured three people in Beirut and Tripoli, and damaged two passenger jets at Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport as the Lebanese welcomed the new year in traditional style with celebratory gunfire. Another man miraculously survived a random bullet that struck his phone while he was wheeling his baggage trolley out of the airport. With a single bullet costing up to $1, traditional celebrations proved expensive in a country ravaged by economic hardship and currency depreciation, but even the high cost of ammunition failed to dampen the new year festivities, with heavy gunfire heard in many Lebanese regions at midnight, including poor airport neighborhoods inhabited by people forced out of their rural homes. Stray gunshots caused minor damage to two Middle East Airlines Airbus A321Neo aircraft.

Security services earlier issued warnings against shooting near the airport, and erected checkpoints around its perimeter, as well as in areas where restaurants, cafes and bars are scattered. Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi oversaw the deployment of extra security patrols. He also visited checkpoints, and praised security forces for their efforts and sacrifices, especially amid the growing crises. Mawlawi asked security personnel to remain alert to protect tourists and Lebanese returning for family gatherings. “I urge you to maintain security and order, and enforce the law firmly without renouncing your humanity and the principle of human rights,” he said. In the lead-up to the celebrations, Mawlawi described “random shootings” as a crime and promised to carry out strict punishments. The Internal Security Forces directorate-general said that it is working to identify suspected shooters. A total of 116 people have been identified so far and now face arrest, it said.

by vaticannews.va — By Vatican News Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has returned to the Father’s House. The Holy See Press Office announced that the Pope Emeritus died at 9:34 AM on Saturday morning in his residence at the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, which the 95-year-old Pope emeritus had chosen as his residence after resigning from the Petrine ministry in 2013. “With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 AM in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican. Further information will be provided as soon as possible. As of Monday morning, 2 January 2023, the body of the Pope Emeritus will be in Saint Peter’s Basilica so the faithful can pay their respects.”

News of worsening health condition

Already for several days, the health conditions of the Pope Emeritus had worsened due to advancing age, as the Press Office had reported in its updates of the evolving situation. Pope Francis himself publicly shared the news about his predecessor’s worsening health at the end of the last General Audience of the year, on 28 December. The Pope had invited people to pray for the Pope Emeritus, who was “very ill,” so that the Lord might console him and support him “in this witness of love for the Church until the end.” Following this invitation, prayer initiatives sprung up and multiplied on all continents, along with an outpouring of messages of solidarity and closeness from secular leaders.

Funeral plans

During a briefing at the Holy See Press office, the director, Matteo Bruni, told journalists that Pope Francis will preside over the funeral of the Pope Emeritus on 5 January at 9.30 CET in St. Peter’s Square. No tickets are foreseen for participation in the Mass. Bruni also said the Pope Emeritus on Wednesday 28th, in the afternoon, received the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery at the end of Holy Mass. And speaking to reporters after the briefing he said Benedict specifically asked that everything – including the funeral – be marked by simplicity, just as he lived his life. A statement later in the day shed more light on details regarding the lying in state, the funeral ceremony and the burial. It noted that at the conclusion of the Eucharistic celebration presided over by the Holy Father, the Final Commendation and Valediction will take place. The Pope Emeritus‘ remains will then be taken into St. Peter’s Basilica and then to the Vatican Grottos where he will be laid to rest.

Lying in state

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s remains will rest at the Mater Ecclesiae monastery until the morning of Monday, 2 January; official visits or public prayers are not foreseen. From 9am on the same day, Benedict’s body will lie in state in St. Peter’s Basilica so the faithful can pay their final respects. On Monday the Basilica will remain open from 9am to 7pm; on Tuesday and Wednesday from 7am to 7pm.

The Spiritual Testament of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

By Vatican News — Pope renews invitation to pray for Benedict XVI in these difficult hours In a response to questions from journalists, the Director of the Holy See Press Office, Matteo Bruni, on Friday confirmed that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s health condition remains stable at this time. He added that yesterday evening Benedict XVI was able to have a good rest, and earlier in the afternoon he participated in the celebration of Mass in his room. In related news, at 5:30 pm Rome time on today, Mass will be celebrated at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, remembering in prayer Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and his health. Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, Vicar of the Diocese of Rome, will preside over the celebration.

The Diocese of Rome has encouraged “parish communities, chaplaincies, religious men and women, all the faithful of the diocese and all the men and women of good will who live in Rome,” to gather in prayer for Benedict XVI, “remembering with gratitude the road travelled together with our bishop emeritus,” and accompanying him now “in this time of suffering and hardship, praying to the Lord that He may console him and sustain him in his witness of love for the Church until the end.”

By Lisa Zengarini — Cardinal De Donatis presides over special Mass for Benedict XVI —

As cardinals, bishops, bishops’ conferences and faithful around the world continue to offer prayers for Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the Cardinal Vicar General for the Diocese of Rome, Angelo De Donatis, on Friday presided over a special evening Mass for him in St John’s Basilica in the Lateran.

Affection and gratitude

Cardinal De Donatis introduced his homily by expressing the prayerful “affection” and “gratitude” of the entire Church of Rome to the Pope Emeritus, who – he noted – loved his Diocese “so much and served (it) with unselfish love.” Reflecting on today’s Gospel of the Solemnity of the Holy Family, the Archpriest St John’s Basilica highlighted the likeness between the “trusting abandonment” to God of Benedict XVI whose baptismal name is Joseph, to that of St. Joseph when fleeing Herod with Mary and Baby Jesus.

by Patrick Hauf foxnews.com — The mother of Hunter Biden’s 4-year-old daughter requested in court to change the last name of her child so she can “benefit from carrying the Biden family name.” Lunden Roberts, a former exotic dancer, made the request through her lawyer Tuesday in a case where Hunter asked to lower his child support payments. Roberts’ lawyer asked the court to dismiss this request due to Hunter’s “long, and lengthy, history of attempting to avoid discovery by filing endless and recurrent motions for protective orders.” She countered with a request that their daughter, Navy, takes the Biden last name. “To the extent this [estrangement] is misconduct or neglect, it can be rectified by changing her last name to Biden so that she may undeniably be known to the world as the child of the defendant and member of the prestigious Biden family,” her lawyer wrote, according to documents first reported by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and reviewed by the New York Post.

Hunter initially claimed he had no recollection of meeting Roberts, but he was later ordered to pay child support in 2020 after a DNA test proved he is the father of Navy. Roberts’ lawyer argued that the Biden last name would benefit Navy because it is “now synonymous with being well educated, successful, financially acute, and politically powerful.” The lawyer also asked for information on the federal tax fraud investigation into Hunter, for which Roberts reportedly testified. Roberts previously worked at a strip club in Washington, D.C. She claims neither Hunter nor his father, the president, have met the child.

by catholicherald.co.uk — Diane Montagna — New details about Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s condition have emerged following Pope Francis’s request yesterday for prayers for the former pontiff. News of Benedict’s declining health was revealed on Wednesday, at the end of the usual general audience, when Pope Francis asked the faithful assembled in the Vatican’s Paul […]

Elle Hardy — Business Insider — After he predicted that ecommerce was about to take off, Bezos founded Amazon as an online book retailer in 1994. A pioneer of aggressive digital growth and focus on total customer satisfaction, “the everything store” under Bezos’ guidance has become one of the highest-valued companies in the world in terms of market capitalization, revenue, and brand. Amazon’s rise left several early internet competitors in the dust. In the company’s first post-IPO shareholder letter, Bezos mentioned strategic partnerships with several peers like America Online, Prodigy, and Yahoo that have either gone out of business entirely or been purchased by competitors in the years since. Bezos stepped down from his role as CEO and president of Amazon in late 2021, but still remains the owner of aerospace company Blue Origin as well as the newspaper The Washington Post. His net worth is estimated at around $122 billion.

So how do you go from zero to richest man in the world? Experts believe that his distinct leadership style has a lot to do with it. Amazon famously has 14 leadership principles that form the backbone of the company and its decision-making, including “customer obsession,” “invent and simplify,” “bias for action,” and “have backbone; disagree and commit,” among others. These values highlight Bezos’ belief that a strong set of principles goes a long way to achieving success, and leaders need to be held accountable to high standards.

Fast forward app building – The fastest way to build apps In a letter to shareholders back in 1998, he said that “setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.” According to the man himself, the value that “surprises people” is Amazon’s fourth leadership principle: “are right, a lot.” “Good leaders are right a lot,” Bezos said at the 2016 Pathfinder Awards in Seattle. “You’re not going to be right all the time, but I think with practice you can be right more often.”

Courage, curiosity, and putting the customer first

By Najia Houssari — arabnews.com — BEIRUT: Unidentified persons hurled a Molotov cocktail at the NewTV station building in Beirut Tuesday morning. Security forces are currently inspecting the station’s surveillance cameras and looking into the incident to prosecute the perpetrators. About a week ago, NewTV broadcast a satirical clip within a weekly political show. The clip referenced the attack on the UNIFIL vehicle in southern Lebanon and the death of an Irish peacekeeper. Hezbollah supporters took offense at the clip and launched a fierce online campaign against NewTV, the station’s news editor Maryam Al-Bassam, the show’s host Dalia Ahmed and comedian Joanna Karaki.

Jawad Hassan Nasrallah, son of Hezbollah’s secretary-general, participated in the campaign. Karaki, who played a southern Lebanese woman, said in the clip that “when the UNIFIL peacekeepers first came to southern Lebanon, they took Lebanese wives, so the majority of southerners now have blue or green eyes with blond hair, with some who look more Italian and British than Lebanese,” referring to intermarriage between residents and peacekeepers operating in the south since 1978. Hezbollah supporters said this clip offends the honor of women in the south of Lebanon. Karaki refused to apologize for what she said, stressing that she is also from the south and is not accusing the women there of doing anything wrong. The incident escalated into a sectarian crisis with the intervention of the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council, which denounced “slander, misinformation and defamation targeting the Shiite Islamic community…under the guise of satirical shows.”

By NAJIA HOUSSARI — arabnews.com — BEIRUT: A Lebanese MP has called for action against smugglers who are worsening the economic crises by smuggling already scarce US dollars out of the country to Syria. Hadi Abu Al-Hassan said the smugglers, who are capitalizing on the weak Lebanese pound, were worsening the availability of hard currency and causing “insane” rises in exchange rates. He said that “well-known gangs buy dollars from the local market in frightening quantities and smuggle them into Syria,” and added that the official and black market exchange rates had “risen insanely and without controls” as a consequence. “The bag changers who are present at night on the road to the Al-Masnaa border point are known by name and their destination is Syria. Why do the judiciary and security services not act?

Are these money changers even licensed in the first place?” His comments came as the central bank blamed a sharp devaluation of the Lebanese pound since Christmas on currency speculation and smuggling. The bank devalued the pound to 38,000 to the dollar on Tuesday on the official Sayrafa exchange platform, after it soared to more than 47,000 pounds on the parallel market and at exchange houses.

Story by Gergana Krasteva — metro.com — The Life in the UK test may look like your average pub quiz – but instead of a bottle of wine, you are awarded with a citizenship if you pass it. ‘Who built the Tower of London?’, or ‘What did the Chartists campaign for?’, these are just some of the example questions applicants will need to know the answers of, even though, according to Meghan Markle, even Prince Harry struggled with them. Almost 200,000 immigrants took the test in 2022 as part of their applications for citizenship or settlement. According to Home Office figures obtained by Metro.co.uk, more than a third of them failed to reach the minimum score of 75%. The test is intended to prove applicants have ‘sufficient knowledge’ of British life, but those who have been through it described the questions asked as ‘irrelevant’ and ‘outdated’. Hassan Akkad, a BAFTA and Emmy-winning director and producer behind Netflix’s film The Swimmers, arrived in the country as a refugee from Syria in 2015.

After completing the test a year ago, he told us that most of the questions do not prove the level of integration into everyday British life. ‘I am all for testing people who want to live in the UK,’ he stressed. ‘The language test is essential – everyone who wants a citizenship should be able to speak English. Otherwise, they will not have a voice in this society. ‘But the Life in the UK test should test things from everyday life, like for example, how to file taxes, or how to register to vote, or how to register your car. ‘I am not too keen on the historical questions, asking me how many wives Henry VIII had. ‘How is that going to prove the level of integration into everyday British life?’ The test itself costs £50, and cannot to be done in-person, forcing all applicants to also pay for transportation to one of the 30 centres in the country. ‘Did I learn anything useful? No. Literally nothing. Do I think that the government is making big money out of this? Yes,’ he said.

By Sharon Goldman — venturebeat.com — These are the 5 biggest AI stories I’m waiting for:

1. GPT-4

ChatGPT is so 2022, don’t you think? The hype around OpenAI’s chatbot “research preview,” released on November 30, has barely peaked, but the noisy speculation around what’s coming next — GPT-4 — is like the sound of millions of Swifties waiting for Taylor’s next album to drop. If expert predictions and OpenAI’s cryptic tweets are correct, early to mid-2023 will be when GPT-4 — with more parameters and trained on more data — makes its debut and “minds will be blown.” It will still be filled with the untrustworthy “plausible BS” of ChatGPT and GPT-3, but it will possibly be multi-modal — able to work with images, text and other data. It has been less than three years since GPT-3 was released, and only two since the first DALL-E research paper was published. When it comes to the pace of innovation for large language models in 2023, many are saying “buckle up.”

2. The EU AI Act

AI technology may be rapidly advancing, but so is AI regulation. While a variety of state-based AI-related bills have been passed in the U.S., it is larger government regulation — in the form of the EU AI Act — that everyone is waiting for. On December 6, the EU AI Act progressed one step towards becoming law then the Council of the EU adopted its amendments to the draft act, opening the door for the European Parliament to “finalize their common position.” The EU AI Act, according to Avi Gesser, partner at Debevoise & Plimpton and co-chair of the firm’s Cybersecurity, Privacy and Artificial Intelligence Practice Group, is attempting to put together a risk-based regime to address the highest-risk outcomes of artificial intelligence. As with the GDPR, it will be an example of a comprehensive European law coming into effect and slowly trickling into various state and sector-specific laws in the U.S., he recently told VentureBeat. Boston Consulting Group calls the EU AI Act “one of the first broad-ranging regulatory frameworks on AI” and expects it to be enacted into law in 2023. Since it will apply whenever business is done with any EU citizen, regardless of location, this will likely affect nearly every enterprise.

3. The battle for search

Last week, the New York Times called ChatGPT a “code red” for Google’s search business. And in mid-December, You.com announced it had opened up its search platform to generative AI apps. Then, on Christmas Eve, You.com debuted YouChat, which it called “Conversational AI with citations and real-time data, right in your search bar.” To me, this all adds up to what could be a real battle for the future of search in 2023 — I’m already munching on popcorn waiting for Google’s next move. As I wrote recently, Google handles billions of searches every single day — so it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But perhaps ChatGPT — and even You.com — is just the beginning of new, imaginative thinking around the future of AI and search. And as Alex Kantrowitz told Axios recently, Google may have to make a move: “It’s game time for Google,” he said. “I don’t think it can sit on the sidelines for too long.”

4. Open source vs closed AI