Biometric Update, by Masha Borak: Payments giant Visa showcased its pay-by-palm biometric payment technology at an event marking the transformation of its Singapore Innovation Center last week. During the event, visitors were invited to use the palm reader and link their signature to their payment card for a transaction.
“The future of biometric payments is promising and is set to revolutionize the retail experience,” says Kunal Chatterjee, Head of Innovation at Visa Asia Pacific.
The technology is still relatively nascent and most likely won’t become mass market for a while, he adds. Various factors influence the acceptance of biometric payments, including regulation, technology and consumer acceptance which often depends on the market.
“However, the current pace of integration and acceptance of new technologies that we are seeing is very encouraging, and we expect to see biometric payments becoming more mainstream within the next decade,” Chatterjee told Singaporean tech news site Hardwarezone.
Visa first previewed its palm payment technology in 2015.
The year 2023 saw some progress in advancing palm-based payments. Amazon Web Service introduced its retail-focused palm payment system Amazon One in 200 locations across the U.S. The company is also hoping that more organizations will adopt its palm ID authentication system One Enterprise.
Over in China, WeChat Pay has partnered up with the Beijing Subway to allow palm-based payments on the high-speed Daxing International Airport Line.
According to Chatterjee, some of the main benefits of biometric payments for Visa lie in offering more personalized, simpler and secure shopping.
Visa showcased other payment and retail technologies in its Singapore Innovation Center, originally opened in 2016. These include augmented reality (AR) virtual shopping combined with predictive AI as well as business decision-making based on data.
Our Comment:
Making it easier to make payments and to restrict them.
Prophetic Link:
“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelation 13:17
MSN, by Widlore Mérancourt and Samantha Schmidt: On a ride through the gang-controlled streets of Haiti’s capital on Friday, past an improvised barricade, the motorcycle taxi reached a crossroad. First came the smell — of something burning. Then, the sight: a corpse, charred black, lying in the middle of street, its bones and feet sticking out of the pile of ash.
The night before, Jimmy Boursiquot, a carpenter who lives nearby, heard two gunshots. Peering carefully out his window, checking his watch — it was 8:24 p.m. — he saw two men drive away, leaving the body behind, not far from a university administration office and one of Haiti’s largest telecommunications companies. A few hours later, he said, the men returned and burned the remains.
The streets of Port-au-Prince reek with the stench of the dead.
It’s a grisly new marker of violence and dysfunction in this beleaguered Caribbean nation of 11 million people. In the absence of a functioning state, violent armed gangs have taken control of more than 80 percent of the capital, the United Nations estimates. Gunfire crackles at all hours. Residents who dare leave their homes stumble across bodies that have been left where they fell.
Port-au-Prince reached a high of 92 degrees on Friday. The smell of decaying corpses, human rights activists say, has driven some people from their homes. Others have taken it upon themselves to move or burn the bodies. Because who else will?
Even before the past week, public services in the city were sharply limited. Trash piled up in its slums; cholera had resurfaced. The gangs terrorized the population with systematic rape, indiscriminate kidnapping and mass killing, all with impunity.
Then attacks on two of the city’s largest prisons last weekend freed thousands of inmates, including some of the country’s most notorious criminals. Now the gangs, reinforced by returning comrades, have attacked the city’s airport and main port. They’ve torched at least a dozen police stations.
Intense fighting erupted Friday night between the gangs and police in the Champs de Mars, the largest park in downtown Port-au-Prince. Gangs threw Molotov cocktails at the interior ministry headquarters and fired gunshots at the presidential palace.
Hospitals are closed; security forces are hard to come by. The prime minister, traveling abroad to rally support for an international police force, was unable this week to return to the country.
The gangs are in control.
As gangs attack a critical port, ‘Haiti will go hungry soon’
One morgue director said he has received 20 calls in the past week from residents asking him to pick up bodies. Four calls came in on Friday, Lyonel Milfort said. He has refused all of them.
With gangs barricading the streets, Milfort said, venturing out has been impossible. Other morgues have come under attack, he said, and he doesn’t want to risk the lives of his staff.
Milfort has been in the business since 2002. Violence has forced him to halt operations before, for one or two days — but never, he said, for an entire week.
“What I’m witnessing today is unprecedented. It’s been too long,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to go around and see bodies being eaten by dogs and see the corpses covered with sheets.”
Romain Le Cour, a political scientist who has conducted research in Port-au-Prince in recent weeks, said the unretrieved bodies reflect “extremely high levels of violence, extreme pressure on the population and a feeling of hopelessness and abandonment.”
Le Cour, a senior expert with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, described the violence and instability as among the worst Haiti has suffered in decades. The 2010 earthquake left 220,000 people dead, but there was a national and international response to give Haitians a sense that the crisis was met with action, Le Cour said.
“Right now, what is terrible is the sense of abandonment. You have no one to turn to,” he said. Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been silent. Haitians don’t even know where he is; with the airport under attack as he was attempting to return from Kenya, he flew instead on Tuesday to Puerto Rico.
“You have to do what you have to do,” Le Cour said. “But you have to do it alone.”
Haitian leader, unable to get back home, faces pressure to resign
“The person who speaks the most in Haiti right now,” he said, is Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, “which is insane.” The former police officer, now the country’s most powerful gang leader, has issued Henry an ultimatum: resign or face a civil war.
The presidency has been vacant since the still-unsolved 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moïse; the National Assembly has been empty since the last lawmakers’ terms expired last year. That leaves Henry, unelected and unpopular, to lead what remains of the government.
For the past year, U.S. officials have pressed the 74-year-old neurosurgeon to work with a transitional council to help bring elections, a senior State Department official told The Washington Post, but he has shown an “unwillingness to cede real power.” Last week, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and Caribbean Community leaders urged Henry once again to make concessions.
At the end of the meeting, the official said, a statement was issued “that gave Haitians the erroneous impression that the international community supported Henry staying in power until 2025, which may have exacerbated other factors and contributed to the out-of-control gang violence that we see today.”
As the violence this week became “untenable,” the official said, the United States and Caricom proposed an expedited transition of power in which a transitional council would appoint an interim prime minister and Henry would step down. Henry would not be involved in the organization of that body, the official said, a key change in the U.S. stance toward him.
Henry has not yet publicly accepted the proposal. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under State Department rules, said the conversations with him are ongoing.
While the prime minister remained in Puerto Rico, people here began re-emerging from their homes on Friday in search of food and fuel. Cars and small buses returned to the streets. The few gas stations that were open saw lines stretching for several blocks long. At a street market, a man in a police uniform could be seen exchanging gas with a resident, an apparent sign of an emerging black market for fuel. The only other police officers visible were guarding the shuttered airport.
Late Sunday morning, Jonathan Lindor passed by three corpses lying side by side in the road. They had been men, the 27-year-old said, and around his age. Each had been bleeding, apparently from bullet wounds.
All were barefoot. In Haiti, it’s not unusual for a killer to remove victims’ shoes after shooting them.
“I didn’t eat meat for the rest of the day,” Lindor said.
He returned to the area on Wednesday. Neighbors, unable to bear the stench, had burned the remains. Another witness said the group eventually placed the remains in a ravine.
“The smell is untenable,” Lindor said. “We don’t know who can pick them up, so people don’t have any other choice than to burn them.”
The residents, Lindor said, were part of a neighborhood vigilante group — a mix of off-duty police officers and civilians, often armed with machetes or knives, who take turns watching the neighborhood.
Lindor had seen bodies burned on the streets of his city before, including during last year’s Bwa Kale movement, when large vigilante groups hunted down and killed alleged gang members. But he had never before seen conditions this dire, with an absent government leaving citizens to clear the streets of corpses themselves.
“You cannot sleep in peace,” Lindor said.
Comment:
Is this showing us how the world will end?
Prophetic Link:
“When He leaves the sanctuary, darkness covers the inhabitants of the earth. In that fearful time the righteous must live in the sight of a holy God without an intercessor. The restraint which has been upon the wicked is removed, and Satan has entire control of the finally impenitent. God’s long-suffering has ended. The world has rejected His mercy, despised His love, and trampled upon His law. The wicked have passed the boundary of their probation; the Spirit of God, persistently resisted, has been at last withdrawn. Unsheltered by divine grace, they have no protection from the wicked one. Satan will then plunge the inhabitants of the earth into one great, final trouble. As the angels of God cease to hold in check the fierce winds of human passion, all the elements of strife will be let loose. The whole world will be involved in ruin more terrible than that which came upon Jerusalem of old.” Great Controversy, page 614.1.
Source Reference
]]>Futurism, by Noor Al-Sibai: A controversial theory posits that life began when RNA spontaneously began to replicate itself — and now researchers are claiming they’ve replicated part of that process in a lab.
In interviews with the Washington Post, scientists say they’ve created an RNA molecule that made copies of other types of RNA, which gets its experts ever closer to creating the conditions for early Earth life in a lab.
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies scientists worked from the theory that before there was DNA or proteins, RNA existed as the initial ingredient in the so-called “primordial soup.”
As part of their research, WaPo reports, they created a lab-made RNA molecule that accurately copied others and resulted in a functioning enzyme. Now that the institute has done that, it’s poised to study the earliest evolutionary stages of life in unprecedented ways.
Gerald Joyce, the president of Salk who co-authored a new paper about the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, told WaPo that although the researchers’ lab-made molecule isn’t yet self-replicating, the one they did create is a huge step to creating life in the lab.
If RNA is created that is able to replicate itself, the Salk president said, “then it would be alive.”
“This is the road to how life can arise in a laboratory,” Joyce said, “or, in principle, anywhere in the universe.”
As WaPo explains, RNA must make extremely close copies to the original for Darwinian evolution to occur. If anything goes wrong, things start to deteriorate fast, and like an old, wonky photocopy machine — or, in the meme world, a “deep-fried” image that comes about from screenshotting ad infinitum — each subsequent copy gets fuzzier until it’s unclear what the original source material was in the first place.
“If the error rate is too high, you can’t maintain the [genetic] information,” the Salk president explained. “It just blows up.”
That said, exact replication of RNA also doesn’t work because it doesn’t provide for the kinds of mutations that foster growth. To get just the right amount of deviation, Joyce and his team made an RNA that makes copies of what’s known as “hammerhead RNA,” which chops molecules. When the replicator molecule does its thing on the hammerhead RNA, each new generation, as WaPo reports, was also able to chop — and each subsequent generation gets better at replicating, too.
This new threshold, as pharmaceutical science professor John Chaput of the University of California at Irvine puts it, is “monumental.”
“At first, I looked on it as a little bit jaw-dropping,” Chaput, who was not involved in the research, told the newspaper. “It’s super-neat.”
It’s exciting research — though, if Salk or its fellow travelers succeed in making artificial life in the lab, sure to raise urgent new ethical questions about synthetic lifeforms.
Comment:
Could this lead to circumstances similar to that before the flood?
Prophetic Link:
“But if there was one sin above another which called for the destruction of the race by the flood, it was the base crime of amalgamation of man and beast which defaced the image of God, and caused confusion everywhere. God purposed to destroy by a flood that powerful, long-lived race that had corrupted their ways before him. He would not suffer them to live out the days of their natural life, which would be hundreds of years.” Spiritual Gifts, Vol. 3, page 64.1.
Source Reference
]]>The Jerusalem Post: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspected field training of troops at a major military operations base in the western region of the country on Wednesday and ordered heightened readiness for war, the state Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Thursday.
The tour of the base, the location of which was not identified, came after the start of annual combined military drills by US and South Korean forces on Monday in the South. Twice the number of troops took part compared to last year.
Kim Jong Un told KCNA
Kim said the military must “dynamically usher in a new heyday of intensifying the war preparations in line with the requirements of the prevailing situation,” KCNA reported.
“Our army should […] steadily intensify the actual war drills aimed at rapidly improving its combat capabilities for perfect war preparedness,” KCNA quoted Kim as telling the troops.
KCNA did not mention whether Kim directly referred to the drills by the US and South Korean military. It said he inspected troops conducting actual maneuvers under conditions simulating actual war.
Prophetic Link:
“The Spirit of God is being grieved away from the earth. The nations are angry with one another. Widespread preparations are being made for war. The night is at hand. Let the church arouse and go forth to do her appointed work. Every believer, educated or uneducated, can bear the message.” Testimonies for the Church Vol. 9 page 26.
Source Reference
]]>Daily Star, by Reanna Smith: Haiti’s most notorious gang leader has vowed to oust the country’s prime minister as a spike in gang violence has plunged the Caribbean nation into chaos.
A state of emergency was declared after thousands of “dangerous” inmates escaped Haiti’s two largest prisons over the weekend when gangs launched a series of coordinated attacks that have left at least a dozen dead. The heavily armed groups are being led by Haiti’s most powerful gang boss, Jimmy Cherizier.
Cherizier, who’s known by the nickname “Barbecue”, is a former officer in the Haitian National Police (HNP). He previously worked for the Unit for the Maintenance of Order, which is deployed during unrest or protests.
But he was fired from the police force in 2018 after allegedly orchestrating the massacre of dozens of people in the La Saline neighbourhood, according to the United Nations. The four-day bloodbath saw 71 people killed, 400 homes burned down and at least seven women were raped.
The fearsome gang leader has faced sanctions from both the United Nations Security Council and the US Treasury Department. Chérizier was born in Port-au-Prince’s Delmas next to the slums of La Saline and is one of eight children.
His father died when he was five and the gang boss claims he got his “Barbecue” nickname because his mother was a street vendor who sold fried chicken. But it’s alleged the moniker actually comes from the massacres he’s been accused of masterminding, which left people burned alive.
Since 2020 he’s been running a powerful group of Haitian gangs known as the G9, who are believed to be more heavily armed than Haiti’s police force. The group initially consisted of nine gangs from Cite Soleil, La Saline and lower Delmas but has since reportedly expanded to include more than a dozen.
Chérizier has dubbed them a “revolutionary force”, who seek to overthrow wealthy officials and fight for improved rights for people living in poverty. But Chérizier has been accused of leading them on bloody massacres.
In 2020, the US Treasury Department accused him of “planning and participating” in the 2018 La Saline attack, which they said saw gang members removing “victims, including children, from their homes to be executed and then dragged them into the streets where their bodies were burned, dismembered and fed to animals”.
The department said Chérizier also led “coordinated, brutal attacks” in Port-au-Prince throughout 2018 and 2019 and that in 2020 he planned a five-day attack in multiple Port-au-Prince neighbourhoods in which homes were set on fire and multiple civilians were killed.
Then in 2021, the UN accused him of threatening Haiti’s “peace, security and stability,” as well as “planning, directing or committing” serious “human rights abuses.” Chérizier has an outstanding warrant out for his arrest for his alleged role in the 2017 Grande Ravine massacre, which killed at least nine people.
In 2022, the G9 blocked the entrance to the vital Varreux fuel terminal, which supplies most of Haiti’s oil. The UN has said the group “have directly contributed to the economic paralysis and humanitarian crisis” in the country.
President Jovenal Moise, whose administration was accused of corruption, allegedly turned a blind eye to Chérizier’s rise in power. But following his assassination in July 2021, the country has been in turmoil as gangs cause terror on the streets.
Gang violence has continued to wreak havoc under the rule of Ariel Henry, who took over as prime minister following President Moise’s assassination. Tensions have mounted since he broke his pledge to step down and hold elections by February 7.
Sunday’s prison breaks came as Henry was in Kenya signing a security deal to tackle the escalating gang violence in the country. But in response, Chérizier has called on gangs to work together to overthrow the prime minister.
“We ask the Haitian National Police and the military to take responsibility and arrest Ariel Henry. Once again, the population is not our enemy; the armed groups are not your enemy. You arrest Ariel Henry for the country’s libération,” he said.
Chérizier has denied taking part in massacres and claims he is a revolutionary. “We are fighting for another society – another Haiti that is not only for the 5% of the people who keep all the wealth, but a new Haiti where everyone can have food and clean water, so they can have a decent house to live, another Haiti where we don’t have to leave the country,” he told Al Jazeera in 2021.
He added: “I’m not a gangster. I never will be a gangster. It’s the system I’m fighting against today. The system has a lot of money; they own the media. Now they try to make me look like a gangster.”
Prophetic Link:
“We are living in the midst of an “epidemic of crime,” at which thoughtful, God-fearing men everywhere stand aghast. The corruption that prevails, it is beyond the power of the human pen to describe. Every day brings fresh revelations of political strife, bribery, and fraud. Every day brings its heart-sickening record of violence and lawlessness, of indifference to human suffering, of brutal, fiendish destruction of human life. Every day testifies to the increase of insanity, murder, and suicide. Who can doubt that satanic agencies are at work among men with increasing activity to distract and corrupt the mind, and defile and destroy the body?” The Ministry of Healing, pages 142 and 143.
Source Reference
]]>Yahoo, by Joshua Howat Berger: Brazil called for a “new globalization” to address poverty and climate change as finance ministers from the world’s top economies met Wednesday, but the Ukraine and Gaza wars risked overshadowing the plea.
“It is time to redefine globalization,” Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad told his counterparts from the Group of 20 leading economies, opening their first meeting of the year in Sao Paulo.
“We need to create incentives to ensure international capital flows are no longer decided by immediate profit but by social and environmental principles,” said Haddad, who gave his speech remotely after coming down with Covid-19.
The meeting, which follows one by foreign ministers in Rio de Janeiro last week, will lay the economic policy groundwork for the annual G20 leaders’ summit, to be held in Rio in November.
Brazilian officials said they were working on a compact final statement that would steer clear of divisive issues such as the Ukraine and Gaza wars.
“We know the world is going through a tense geopolitical moment,” said finance ministry executive secretary Dario Durigan.
But “there’s consensus on the economic issues,” he told journalists. “The whole world speaks the same economic language.”
– Taxing the super-rich –
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wants to use the rotating G20 presidency this year to push issues like the fights against poverty and climate change, reducing the crushing debt burdens of low-income nations, and giving developing countries more say at institutions like the United Nations.
International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva called for bolder climate action, urging countries to accelerate emissions cuts, end fossil fuel subsidies – which reached an estimated $1.3 trillion worldwide last year – and massively mobilize climate financing.
“The climate crisis is already upon us, and we have to admit we have been a bit slow to address it,” she said at a panel discussion on the sidelines of the meeting.
Also on the agenda: increasing taxes on corporations and the super-rich.
“We need to ensure the billionaires of the world pay their fair share of taxes,” said Haddad.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire backed that call, telling journalists that Paris is pushing to “accelerate” international negotiations on a minimum tax on the ultra-wealthy.
However, Durigan said the issue was unlikely to make it into the final statement.
– G7 targets Russian assets –
Even before the meeting opened, the conflict in Ukraine took center stage.
The Group of Seven countries – Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, plus the European Union – held their own meeting on the sidelines to discuss shoring up Western support for Kyiv.
Officials said the meeting – attended remotely by Ukrainian Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko – focused on proposals to seize an estimated $397 billion in Russian assets frozen by the West.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Tuesday the issue was “urgent.”
But there were divisions among G7 members.
“I want to be very clear: We don’t have the legal basis for seizing the Russian assets now. We need to work further… The G7 must act abiding by the rule of law,” said France’s Le Maire.
Ukraine has warned it is in dire need of more military and financial assistance, with a fresh $60 billion US package stalled in Congress.
The war in Gaza was also a recurring theme, amid fears Israel’s offensive against Palestinian militant group Hamas could spiral into a wider war, with potentially catastrophic effects for the global economy.
Both conflicts could overshadow Brazil’s bid to use the G20 to amplify the voice of the global south.
“It’s a very tricky global context at the moment,” said Julia Thomson, an analyst at Eurasia Group.
“The international agenda will probably hinder part of Brazil’s ability to advance on some of the broader themes” of its G20 presidency, she told AFP.
Founded in 1999, the G20 accounts for more than 80 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), three-quarters of world trade, and two-thirds of the world’s population.
It has 21 members: 19 of the world’s biggest economies, plus the EU and, participating as a member for the first time this year, the African Union.
Prophetic Link:
“And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Genesis 11:6.
Source Reference
]]>FOX News, by Tracy Wright: Just like a prayer, Madonna knew God was there when she was hospitalized in the ICU with a “serious bacterial infection” in June.
The “Material Girl” singer recalled the “near-death experience” at her sold-out Los Angeles show on Monday night, and told fans that her first word coming out of an induced coma after four days was “no,” according to People.
“I’m pretty sure that was God saying to me, ‘Do you want to come? Want to come up with me? No,’ Madonna said.
The pop icon was forced to reschedule a number of dates on her Celebration World Tour in June due to a medical issue.
“On Saturday June 24, Madonna developed a serious bacterial infection which lead (sic) to a several day stay in the ICU,” her longtime manager Guy Oseary wrote on Instagram at the time. “Her health is improving, however she is still under medical care. A full recovery is expected.”
Madonna previously canceled a string of shows on her last tour in 2019, due to a knee injury, and ultimately ended the tour early.
“This show every night is not really so hard on me physically,” she said, according to the outlet. “It’s hard on me emotionally because I’m really telling you the story of my life. My heart is on my sleeve. I’ve fallen off a lot of horses and broken a lot of bones … but nothing can stop me.”
Madge later recalled a conversation with Oseary while she was hospitalized.
“He said, ‘Well, when do you think you want to go back on tour?’ I took the oxygen out of my nose. I looked at him, and I said, ‘in two f—ing months!” she said. “I just said it. Sometimes you just have to say s— [and] put it out in the universe. And it happens.”
The “Crazy for You” singer gave a shoutout to her doctor who was in the audience, and remembered feeling antsy to get back to performing for her fans once again.
“I would call in every other day and ask [my doctor] why I didn’t have any energy, when was my energy going to come back? When was I going to feel like myself again? When can I go on tour again?” she said.
“All he would say is, ‘Go outside in the sun’ … It was so hard for me to walk from my house to the backyard and sit in the sun. I know that sounds insane, but it was difficult.”
Ultimately, her health scare forced Madonna to slow down and listen to her body.
“It’s a strange thing to finally not feel like I was in control, and that was my lesson: to let go,” she said.
Prophetic Link:
“For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.” 2 Corinthians 11:13, 14, 15