Can Economics Better Value Nature?

A few weeks ago, I wrote in the TIME CO2 newsletter about the economic value of coral reefs as a quick look into the very tangible costs of the damage to the natural world caused by climate change. It was a brief lens into the economics of conservation.

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Earlier this week, I led a panel discussion on the economics of conservation and climate change at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles. For the uninitiated, the Milken conference is a marquee gathering of leaders across a variety of fields with a particular focus on finance. And, from my vantage point, looking across sectors it was encouraging to see nature and climate discussed through an economic and financial lens.

At the heart of the discussion was the simple reality that protecting nature delivers economic dividends—and can be advanced by a range of financial solutions.

First, let’s look briefly at the economic value that protecting nature delivers. More than half of the global economy is highly or moderately dependent on nature, according to data from PWC. That value comes in large part from the way in which natural products are woven into supply chains. “Whether it’s access to plant material for important life saving drugs, whether it’s timber for construction, whether it’s ecosystem services like water,” Jennifer Morris, CEO of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), said on the panel. “If we lose that, we lose everything.”

Crucially, nature also stores carbon dioxide that gets released into the atmosphere when humans destroy the natural environment, avoiding an untold economic cost. Today, about half of carbon emissions are absorbed by nature, namely forests and oceans. But many forests, including the Amazon, are in danger of destruction, which could in turn release dangerous levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “If in the next five years deforestation doesn’t come to zero, the Amazon will no longer be a prevention wall,” said Iván Duque, the former president of Colombia. “It will become a net emitter of greenhouse gasses.”

There are a variety of approaches to tackling these issues. Looking at the problem through an economic lens, those solutions often entail putting a price on the destruction. That could mean implementing an emissions tax that penalizes companies that destroy the Amazon or buy from companies that do.

Financial mechanisms can help incentivize protection, too. Organizations like TNC are helping coordinate the flow of public and private funds to developing countries in exchange for protection of the environment. So-called debt-for-nature swaps, in which lenders give more favorable terms to debtor countries in exchange for conservation efforts, have also risen on the global agenda.

While all these ideas work well in principle, they require significant continued innovation to iron out the details. But it was encouraging to see them come up in my session and others. “The fact that we’re having this panel at the Milken Conference, tells you how top of mind this topic is becoming,” said Wendy Schmidt, president and co-founder of the Schmidt Family Foundation and the Schmidt Ocean Institute. “Not just for conservationists, for everybody.”

source https://time.com/6977021/conservation-milken-conference-nature/

Big Tech Companies Were Investors in Smaller AI Labs. Now They’re Rivals

Amazon and Microsoft have, so far, stood slightly apart from the artificial intelligence arms race. While Google and Meta made developing their own AI models a top priority, Microsoft and Amazon have invested in smaller technology companies, in return receiving access to those companies’ AI models that they then incorporated into their products and services.

Microsoft has invested at least $13 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. As part of this agreement, OpenAI gives Microsoft exclusive access to the AI systems it develops, while Microsoft provides OpenAI with the computational power it needs. Anthropic has deals with both Amazon and Google, receiving $4 billion and up to $2 billion from each, respectively, in exchange for Anthropic making its models available through Amazon and Google’s cloud services platforms. (Investors in Anthropic also include Salesforce, where TIME co-chair and owner Marc Benioff is CEO.)

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Now, there are signs that the two technology giants are wading deeper into the fray. In March, The Verge reported that Amazon has tasked its AGI team with building a model that outperforms Anthopic’s most capable AI model, Claude 3, by the middle of this year. Earlier this month, The Information reported that Microsoft is training a foundation model large enough to compete with frontier model developers such as OpenAI.

While there are many types of AI systems that are used in a multitude of ways, the big trend of the last couple of years is language models—the AI systems that can generate coherent prose and usable code, and that power chatbots such as ChatGPT. While younger companies OpenAI and Anthropic, alongside the more established Google DeepMind, are in the lead for now, their new big tech rivals have advantages that will be hard to offset. And if the tech giants come to dominate the AI market, the implications—for corporate concentration of power and for whether the most powerful AI systems are being developed safely—could be troubling.

A change in strategy

Over the course of the 2010s, AI researchers began to realize that training their AI systems with more computational power would reliably make them more capable. Over the same period, the computational power used to train AI models increased rapidly, doubling every six months according to researchers at Epoch, an AI-focused research institute.

The specialized semiconductor chips required to do that much computational work are expensive, as is employing the engineers who know how to make use of them. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has stated that GPT-4 cost over $100 million to train. Needing more and more capital is why OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, changed its structure and went on to ink multibillion dollar deals with Microsoft, and why Anthropic has signed similar agreements with Amazon and Google. Google DeepMind—the AI team within Google that develops Google’s most powerful AI systems—was formed last year when Google merged its elite AI group, Google Brain, with DeepMind. Much like OpenAI and Anthropic, DeepMind started out as a startup before it was acquired by Google in 2014. 

Read More: Amazon’s Partnership With Anthropic Shows Size Matters in the AI Industry

These partnerships have paid off for all parties involved. OpenAI and Anthropic have been able to access the computational power they need to train state-of-the-art AI models—most commentators agree that OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, along with Google DeepMind’s Gemini Ultra, are the three most capable models currently available. Companies behind the frontier have so far tried alternative business strategies. For example, Meta gives more thorough access to its AI models in order to benefit from developers outside the company tuning them up, and to attract talented researchers who prefer to be able to openly publish their work.

At quarterly earnings reports in April, Microsoft and Amazon reported bumper months, which they both partly credited to AI. Both companies also benefit from the agreements in that a large proportion of the money flows back to them, as it’s used to purchase computational power from their cloud computing services units.

However, as the technical feasibility and commercial utility of training larger models has become apparent, it has become more attractive for Microsoft and Amazon to build their own large models, says Neil Thompson, who researches the economics of AI as the director of the FutureTech research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Building their own models should, if successful, be cheaper than licensing the models from their smaller partners and give the big tech companies more control over how they use the models, he says.

It’s not only the big tech companies that are making advances. OpenAI’s Altman has pitched his company’s products to a range of large firms that include Microsoft customers.

Who will win out?

The good news for OpenAI and Anthropic is that they have a head start. GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus, alongside Google’s Gemini Ultra, are still in a different class from other language models such as Meta’s Llama 3, according to a popular chatbot ranking site. OpenAI notably finished training GPT-4 back in August 2022.

But maintaining this lead will be “a constant struggle,” writes Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner at venture capital firm Air Street Capital, in an email to TIME. “Labs are in the challenging position of being in constant fundraising mode to pay for talent and hardware, while lacking a plan to translate this model release arms race into a sustainable long-term business. As the sums of money involved become too high for US investors, they’ll also start having to navigate tricky questions around foreign sovereign wealth.” In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that Altman was in talks with investors including the U.A.E government to raise up to $7 trillion for AI chip manufacturing projects.

Read More: The UAE Is on a Mission to Become an AI Power

Big technology companies, on the other hand, have ready access to computational resources—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google account for 31%, 24%, and 11% of the global cloud infrastructure market, respectively, according to data from market intelligence firm Synergy Research Group. This makes it cheaper for them to train large models. It also means that, even if further development of language models doesn’t pay off commercially for any company, the tech companies selling access to computational power via the cloud can still profit.

“The cloud providers are the shovel salesmen during the gold rush. Whether frontier model builders make money or lose it, cloud providers win,” writes Benaich. “Companies like Microsoft and Amazon sit in an enviable position in the value chain, combining both the resources to build their own powerful models with the scale that makes them an essential distribution partner for newer entrants.”

But while the big technology companies may have certain advantages, the smaller companies have their own strengths, such as greater experience training the largest models, and the ability to attract the most talented researchers, says Thompson.

Anthropic is betting that its talent density and proprietary algorithms will allow it to stay at the frontier while using less computational resources than many of its competitors, says Jack Clark, one of the company’s co-founders and head of policy. “We’re going to be on the frontier surprisingly efficiently relative to others,” he says. “For the next few years, I don’t have concerns about this.”

If Big Tech wins

It is still very much an open question whether big technology companies will manage to outcompete their smaller investees. But if they were to, there could be implications for market competition and for efforts to ensure the development of powerful AI systems benefits society. 

While it could be argued that more companies entering the foundation model market would increase competition, it is more likely that the vertical integration will serve to increase the power of already powerful technology companies, argues Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, a research institute that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence.

“Viewing this as ‘more competition’ would be the most inventive corporate spin that obscures the reality that all the versions of this world serve to consolidate the concentration of power in tech,” she writes to TIME. “We need to be wary of this kind of spin especially in the context of heightened antitrust scrutiny from the UK CMA, the FTC and European Commission.”

Read More: U.K. Competition Watchdog Signals Cautious Approach to AI Regulation

Larger companies coming to dominate could also be troubling because the smaller companies that currently lead were explicitly founded in order to ensure that the building of powerful AI systems goes well for humanity, says Anton Korinek, an economics professor at the University of Virginia. OpenAI’s founding goal was to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,” and Anthropic’s founding goal was “to make the fundamental research advances that will let us build more capable, general, and reliable AI systems, then deploy these systems in a way that benefits people.” 

“In some sense, you can say, the AGI labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind—were all founded on the basis of idealism,” he says. “Large shareholder owned and controlled corporations, they just can’t follow that strategy—they have to produce value for the shareholder ultimately.”

Even so, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic cannot act entirely in the public interest, because they’re also exposed to commercial incentives through the need to raise funds, says Korinek. “It’s part of that broader movement, that capital in the form of [computational power] is becoming the most important input,” he says. “If your training runs are in the millions, it is much easier to raise philanthropic funding for this. But if your training rounds are in the billions, you do need financial returns, in the way that our economy is currently organized.”

With reporting by Billy Perrigo/San Francisco

source https://time.com/6977424/ai-competition-openai-anthropic-microsoft-amazon/

Russian Forces Seize Nine Villages, Amid ‘Difficult Situation’ for Ukraine

Russian forces have seized at least nine villages amid a new push in northeastern Ukraine that began on Friday, the most square miles taken per day since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

On Friday, Russian troops pushed deeper into territory in two border areas of Vovchansk and Lyptsi in Kharkiv region. On Saturday, they took five villages and on Sunday another four.

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Meanwhile, Nazar Voloshyn, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military, told RBC-Ukraine that Yuri Galushkin, the commander responsible for the northeastern front, has been replaced by Brigadier General Mykhailo Drapatyi. Russia too, just experienced a major reshuffling, with President Vladimir Putin announcing on Sunday that he had replaced his long time defense minister Sergei Shoigu with economist Andrey Belousov.

“This week, the situation in Kharkiv Oblast has significantly worsened. Currently, there are ongoing battles in the border areas along the state border with the Russian Federation,” Oleksandr Syrskii, Ukraine’s army chief, wrote on Telegram. “It is a difficult situation, but the Defense Forces of Ukraine are doing everything to hold defensive lines and positions and inflict damage on the enemy.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged the situation in a video message posted to X on Sunday. “Defensive operations and fierce battles are taking place in the Kharkiv region along a significant border strip,” he wrote. “Some villages have effectively turned from a grey zone to a war zone. Occupiers are attempting to seize control of some of them while using others to advance.”

Ukraine has struggled in recent months. A lack of ammunition combined with a dwindling supply of soldiers is forcing Ukrainian forces to retreat as Russians attack from both air and land. “It’s necessary to increase the pace of building fortifications … so that when we retreat, we will retreat to a prepared position,” a unit commander told the Associated Press, a week before Russia’s latest push in Kharkiv. “These fortifications are not enough.”

The U.S. announced another $400 million aid package for Ukraine on Friday that will include High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), munitions for Patriot and National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, artillery, anti-aircraft and anti-tank munitions, and armored vehicles.

But it will take months for many of these supplies to reach the frontline. Russia is taking advantage of this time gap by launching this offensive push, says Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, an expert in Russian multidimensional warfare at the London-based RUSI think-tank. “They believe that they have a window of opportunity during these next few months, and they will do the best to achieve more territorial gains,” he tells TIME. “It’s clear that Ukraine is in a critical shortage of ammunition specifically and the most important part of military capabilities in this war is artillery.”

Russia’s latest push follows months of dug-in warfare where the frontlines have barely moved. It also comes as border regions such as Belgorod are routinely shelled by Ukraine.

In March, Russia announced plans to evacuate 9,000 children from the city to parts of Russia less impacted by the war. On Sunday, at least 15 people in Belgorod were killed when fragments of a Ukrainian missile intercepted by Russia hit an apartment building in the city. 

source https://time.com/6977403/russia-kharkiv-offensive/

Exclusive: Democrats Urge Biden To Investigate Grocery Store Price-Fixing

A group of Democratic lawmakers are calling on President Joe Biden to investigate grocery store chains for price manipulation, writing in a letter sent Monday morning that he should use executive authority to take additional enforcement action to address rising food prices without the help of Congress.

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The letter, shared exclusively with TIME, comes after a report from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that major grocery chains took advantage of supply chain disruptions during the pandemic to hike up prices to increase their profits. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who led the letter and is one of its signatories, has called for more competition and stronger enforcement of antitrust laws to bring down grocery prices for families—but her proposed legislation on the topic has been largely stalled in Congress.

She’s now hoping that Biden will leverage his executive authority to initiate a thorough investigation into the alleged price-fixing practices of major grocery store chains. “Big food companies want to keep these huge profits and they’re hiring plenty of lobbyists to keep Congress from acting,” Warren tells TIME in an interview. “Congress has stalled out on doing work that it could do to help families lower costs… and the President has the tools to fight back.”

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Martin Heinrich (D-N. Mex.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Peter Welch (I-Vt.) also signed on to the letter requesting Biden’s intervention, along with 35 House Democrats. The lawmakers outlined several proposals in their letter that the Biden Administration could take—from encouraging the FTC to issue guidance on potential violations of price discrimination laws, to creating a joint task force to investigate food price manipulation throughout the supply chain.

As Biden seeks re-election, he has been hard pressed to construct an accessible story about how his economic policies are affecting real Americans. Polling data shows that the public remains deeply displeased by the prices they pay for food, which have gone up 21% in the last three years. And the majority of voters continue to rank inflation at the top of their list of issues facing the country, with most voters concerned about inflation naming “the cost of food and groceries” as the main source of their angst.

Research shows that from January 2020 to January 2024, the grocery expenses for a family of four on a “thrifty food plan” increased by 50%, while major supermarket conglomerates saw revenue spikes of up to 36% during this timeframe. “Purchasing food isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity,” says Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank that released a report in February on the key drivers of grocery inflation. “There’s no getting around a trip to the grocery store in modern America, so I think Congress and the Biden Administration are rightly focused on what they can do, what suite of tools they have at their disposal for bringing down food and grocery prices for Americans, particularly when food and grocery prices are being kept artificially high because of market manipulation, collusion, and price gouging.”

The letter underscores what many progressive Democrats and liberal economic minds see as an urgent need for regulatory intervention to level the playing field in the food and grocery sector, ensuring fair competition and affordable prices for consumers nationwide. Studies have found that corporate profits account for more than 50% of current inflation as many American families are being hit with higher costs for groceries. In the food industry alone, four retailers—Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons—account for over a third of national grocery sales, potentially allowing dominant retailers to extract more favorable prices and terms from suppliers.

The letter highlights several exclusionary practices that may be employed by dominant grocery firms, including slotting fees for product placement, category captain arrangements that skew market dynamics, and rebates incentivizing purchasing from dominant firms—all of which the lawmakers say effectively shut out smaller suppliers and drive up costs for American families. They claim that such practices may violate existing antitrust laws and regulations, including the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act, and the Robinson-Patman Act—which together prohibit monopolistic behavior, certain anti-competitive practices, and price discrimination.

To address these concerns, the lawmakers propose that the Biden Administration encourage the FTC to promulgate a rule under Section 5 of the FTC Act, aimed at prohibiting or curbing exclusionary contracting in the food industry. They also urge the Administration to work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to take similar action under the Packers & Stockyards Act, a law designed to ensure fair competition and prevent deceptive practices in the livestock and poultry industries.

“Our letter is about pointing out areas that exist in the law, but have long been underused,” Warren says of the proposals sent to Biden’s desk. “Now is the perfect moment to move.”

In their letter, the group of lawmakers proposed the Biden Administration also encourage the FTC to issue guidance on potential violations of the Robinson-Patman Act and Section 5 of the FTC Act within the food industry, and to investigate and enforce those violations where merited. While the FTC already does provide general guidance on antitrust laws and regulations, the proposal calls for more targeted guidance for industry stakeholders and consumers on what constitutes violations, and to take legal action against companies found to engage in anti-competitive practices or deceptive conduct.

The lawmakers also noted the importance of collaboration between regulatory bodies in addressing corporate practices that inflate consumer prices, proposing in the letter that Biden create a joint task force between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the FTC that aims to synergize their resources and tools to effectively address anti-competitive behaviors.

Additionally, they urge Biden to direct the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FTC to scrutinize and potentially block mergers and acquisitions in the food and agricultural sectors, aiming to prevent further consolidation, while also encouraging the DOJ to prosecute actors in these sectors for price-fixing and other anti-competitive behavior. 

The FTC has already taken such steps, blocking a merger between two large grocery-store chains, Kroger and Albertsons, under Biden’s presidency. Critics of the merger argued that it would diminish competition and potentially lead to increased prices for consumers.

A White House spokesperson noted that the Administration does not play a role in or comment on enforcement actions but pointed to another example of Biden’s DOJ blocking a merger that would have raised prices for lettuce and packaged salads, and also suing to address price-fixing of chicken, pork, and turkey meats.

The Biden Administration has also taken other steps to lower grocery costs, updating the Thrifty Food Plan to offer an extra $36 per month to low-income individuals on SNAP, partnering with over 30 state attorneys general to address anticompetitive behavior and price gouging in food and agricultural markets, and finalizing a rule to make meat and poultry markets more competitive for farmers and ranchers. During his State of the Union address, Biden complained about shrinkflation—the practice of firms reducing product or portion sizes while keeping package prices the same—using smaller Snickers bars and less chips as an example. “Too many corporations raise prices to pad the profits, charging more and more for less and less,” Biden said. “The snack companies think you won’t notice if they change the size of the bag and put a hell of a lot fewer—same size bag—put fewer chips in it.”

Warren stressed that Biden is “fully committed to lowering costs for families” and is “willing to take on giant corporations to do that.” 

“That’s who Joe Biden is and what he fights for,” she adds. “This effort around stopping giant food companies from cheating consumers is just one more piece of Joe Biden’s effort to bring down costs for American families.”

A White House spokesperson did not address whether the Administration will heed the calls in the letter and take additional action when asked by TIME, but noted “the President supports fair and vigorous antitrust enforcement.”

Progressive Democrats, led by Warren, introduced federal legislation earlier this year that would make it “unlawful for a person to sell or offer for sale a good or service at a grossly excessive price” during an “exceptional market shock.” But the anti‐​price‐​gouging legislation is unlikely to become law due to concerns from Republicans that it would effectively allow the FTC to control prices and prolong shortages for many goods and services.

Warren and the other Democrats who support cracking down on price gouging are now turning to Biden to use his executive authority to bypass Congress.

“The White House has been responsible for picking up tools that have been left to rust for decades,” Warren says. “They are now using those tools to lower costs for American families. Our letter points out there are even more tools available and reminds the White House that there will be plenty of support in Congress if the Administration will pick those tools up and use them.”

source https://time.com/6977026/democrats-biden-executive-authority-grocery-prices/

Duke Students Walk Out on Seinfeld as Graduation Ceremonies Are Marked by Protests

Enough is enough.

That’s the message from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia to the University of Chicago as U.S. colleges took a hard line against student protesters, resorting to arrests, suspensions and threats of expulsion to subdue unrest sparked by the Israel-Hamas war.

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Graduation season is underway and families are descending on campuses for the festivities, raising the stakes for administrators seeking to ensure public safety. Smaller demonstrations by pro-Palestinian activists went ahead at weekend commencements, including at Duke University and at the University of California at Berkeley.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld avoided addressing the protests at Duke, where about 30 students chanting “Free Palestine” and waving flags walked out as the university president introduced him as keynote speaker. Seinfeld, who has publicly backed Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas militants, took a dig at Harvard University.

student walkout at Duke university commencement as Jerry Seinfeld’s speech is announced. his introduction by university president is being drowned out by “free free Palestine” chants ❤️‍🔥🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/oNLesaput3

— the great clown snorman (@iamschvitzing) May 12, 2024

“You’re never going to believe this, but Harvard used to be a great place to go to school — now it’s Duke,” Seinfeld told the crowd in Durham, North Carolina, where Duke awarded almost 7,000 degrees, including an honorary doctor of arts to the comedian.

A pro-Palestinian student camp remained on Harvard’s campus into the weekend, contrasting with MIT and Penn which cleared similar encampments last week.

Read More: What America’s Student Photojournalists Saw at the Campus Protests

At the University of California, Berkeley, a small group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators emerged during commencement ceremonies at California Memorial Stadium on Saturday, waving flags and chanting. A university spokesperson said the protesters left the stadium voluntarily, with no violence or arrests, and the ceremony proceeded as planned.

Two thousand miles away, a handful of students held a largely silent protest at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Camp Randall Stadium. No arrests were made, the Associated Press reported.

“A small number of the thousands of students who attended Saturday’s commencement chose to express themselves, but the ceremony itself was not interrupted,” UW Madison spokesman John Lucas said by email.

Divestment hardliners

Responses to the turmoil have varied among schools, though most of the richest colleges have signaled they won’t cave to demands to divest from companies with ties to Israel and have cleared student protest camps. 

Columbia, where the encampments began, canceled its main university-wide graduation ceremony last week after protests culminated with a police raid and more than 100 arrests after dozens of people barricaded themselves inside a university building.

The University of Southern California hosted a scaled-down ceremony on Thursday, a far cry from the big commencement that usually brings 65,000 people to the Los Angeles school—after canceling its 2024 valedictorian’s speech over her social media posts on the Middle East. Comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Will Ferrell chimed in with pre-recorded messages to the graduates.

Read More: USC Faces Backlash Over Alleged ‘Censorship’ of Pro-Palestinian Valedictorian’s Speech

MIT gave four warnings that protesters would face arrest if they didn’t depart a nearly two-week encampment that ended Friday morning with the arrest of 10 protesters. President Sally Kornbluth said she had “no choice but to remove such a high-risk flashpoint at the very center of our campus.”

The University of Chicago declared the “intractable and inflexible” aspects of the demands by protesters incompatible with the its principle of institutional neutrality and had a student camp cleared last week after nine days. 

Harvard, which began suspending students Friday, has also signaled that administrators are losing patience with protesters who have set up tents at Harvard Yard, where a commencement ceremony with more than 30,000 people is scheduled for May 23.

Read More: Harvard Commencement Speaker Maria Ressa Denies Antisemitism Accusation

Campuses across the U.S. erupted in protests after Israel’s military assault on Gaza, which followed the attack on Israelis by Hamas militants who infiltrated from Gaza. Hamas is considered a terrorist group by the U.S. and the European Union. Protesters’ demands include colleges divesting from entities related to Israel, which they say are held in college endowments.

George Washington University in Washington, a school of 26,000 that became the target of politically charged recriminations over pro-Palestinian protests on its campus, has kept its commencement on the schedule for May 19. 

People who disrupt the event on the National Mall in the nation’s capital will be asked to leave or “they will be removed by law enforcement,” according to the university.

source https://time.com/6977315/duke-seinfeld-walkout-college-graduation-commencement-protests-gaza/

Putin Replaces Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in Russia’s Biggest Political Shake-Up in Years

Vladimir Putin replaced his long-serving defense minister with a trained economist in an unexpected change of guard that signals the focus on growing the Russian war economy more than two years after the invasion of Ukraine.

Putin put forward his former economy aide and First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov, 65, to take over from Sergei Shoigu, 68, who was given a gentle demotion and put in charge of the security council. Nikolai Patrushev, an old ally of Putin who had held that post, was dismissed and is due to take another, unspecified job.

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Most of Shoigu’s predecessors under Putin also didn’t have military background, but this is the first time Putin is picking a career economist to be a defense minister.

The reshuffle comes mere days after the Russian president was sworn in for a fifth term, extending his quarter-century in power, and would appear to show Putin’s displeasure with the handling of the war by those in charge of security.

Read More: Appeasing Putin Won’t Work

This is also Putin’s biggest political shake-up since 2020, when then-prime minister Dmitry Medvedev was pushed aside to make way for technocrat Mikhail Mishustin, who is staying on alongside Foreign Minister and veteran diplomat Sergei Lavrov.

Russia has lately been making limited, local gains along the frontline as Ukrainian forces wrestle with shortages of weapons and manpower, along with a dire need for more air defense systems. 

The Kremlin controls almost 20% of Ukrainian territory, but its forces are advancing cautiously as Putin has been wary of ordering another unpopular mobilization after the call-up of 300,000 Russians in September 2022 provoked panic and an exodus from the country.

The appointment of Belousov is about Putin exerting more control over military affairs as the Ukraine war drags on, said Sergei Markov, a political consultant close to the Kremlin. The need for a new face to represent Russia’s armed forces also became urgent after a corruption scandal involving former deputy defense minister Timur Ivanov, a key Shoigu aide.

“Belousov is personally loyal to Putin and he’ll sort this all out,” Markov said by phone. “There have been too many personal interests.”

There was also still the whiff of unfinished business after the conflict with Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin led to a failed mutiny last year. At the time, there was speculation of whether Shoigu was on his way out but that decision was put off. 

In the end, Putin took his time making changes, waiting until after the death of Prigozhin in the late summer in mysterious circumstances and his own re-election this month. Putin trusts Belousov and views him as honest and not corrupt, according to a Kremlin insider who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the reshuffle.

“The shake-up is about consolidating the role of the military-industrial complex as the main locomotive of the economy,” said Evgeny Suvorov, chief Russia economist at CentroCredit Bank.

Belousov graduated from Moscow State University in 1981 with a degree in cybernetics economics and later got his doctorate. Initially he had pursued a career at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

His first official job with Putin was as director of the department of economics and finance in 2008, when Putin briefly stepped down as president—swapping jobs with Medvedev with a view to returning to the top job later. Belousov later briefly served as economy minister and then as Putin’s top economic aide. He was instrumental in the transformation of Russia into a war economy.

He is well known for taking a harsh stance toward companies and business and was a driving force behind the government’s initiative to increase taxes from metals and mining industry, including after the war started.

Shoigu, instead, was on a different trajectory after becoming a target of Prigozhin during the June 2023 revolt. His fall from grace comes after having once been a close confidant to Putin, accompanying him on highly publicized hunting and horse-riding trips in Siberia, and heading Russia’s emergencies ministry for nearly 20 years.

His transfer to the security council shows that the body—already centralized around the president’s decision-making on national security strategy—has become powerless and is being used as a “reservoir for former Putin key figures,” Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of the political consultancy R.Politik, said on Telegram.

The deputy head of the Security Council is Medvedev, who has seen his role greatly reduced over the years. Putin in 2020 changed the Constitution to allow him two more mandates, which means he could rule to 2036, when he’ll be 83.

source https://time.com/6977312/russia-putin-reshuffle-defense-minister-shoigu-belousov-economist/

First Person to Receive Pig Kidney Transplant Dies Nearly Two Months Later

BOSTON — The first recipient of a genetically modified pig kidney transplant has died nearly two months after he underwent the procedure, his family and the hospital that performed the surgery said Saturday.

Richard “Rick” Slayman had the transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital in March at the age of 62. Surgeons said they believed the pig kidney would last for at least two years.

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The transplant team at Massachusetts General Hospital said in a statement it was deeply saddened by Slayman’s passing and offered condolences to his family. They said they didn’t have any indication that he died as a result of the transplant.

The Weymouth, Massachusetts, man was the first living person to have the procedure. Previously, pig kidneys had been temporarily transplanted into brain-dead donors. Two men received heart transplants from pigs, although both died within months.

Slayman had a kidney transplant at the hospital in 2018, but he had to go back on dialysis last year when it showed signs of failure. When dialysis complications arose requiring frequent procedures, his doctors suggested a pig kidney transplant.

In a statement, Slayman’s family thanked his doctors.

“Their enormous efforts leading the xenotransplant gave our family seven more weeks with Rick, and our memories made during that time will remain in our minds and hearts,” the statement said.

They said Slayman underwent the surgery in part to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive.

“Rick accomplished that goal and his hope and optimism will endure forever,” the statement said.

Xenotransplantation refers to healing human patients with cells, tissues or organs from animals. Such efforts long failed because the human immune system immediately destroyed foreign animal tissue. Recent attempts have involved pigs that have been modified so their organs are more humanlike.

More than 100,000 people are on the national waiting list for a transplant, most of them kidney patients, and thousands die every year before their turn comes.

source https://time.com/6977261/pig-kidney-transplant-patient-dies-two-months-after-procedure/