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Novak Djokovic Asks U.S. for COVID Vaccine Exemption to Play Upcoming Tournaments
Top-ranked men’s tennis player Novak Djokovic said Wednesday he hopes to secure an exemption to the U.S. policy requiring foreign travelers to present proof of vaccination against COVID-19 to participate in a pair of American events later this spring, as Djokovic’s unwavering objection to the jab continues to cost him millions of dollars.
The 35-year-old, who maintains he won’t receive the vaccine, is apparently once again seeking an exemption to vaccine requirements a year after Australian authorities famously deported Djokovic ahead of the 2022 Australian Open after rejecting Djokovic’s medical exemption to the country’s own vaccine mandate for non-residents.
The U.S. requires any travelers who are not citizens, permanent residents or immigrant visa holders to show proof of COVID vaccination upon entering the country.
The State Department lists a handful of groups who are exempt to the policy, none of which Djokovic is known to belong to: children, participants in COVID vaccine trials, military members and individuals with “rare medical contraindications to the vaccines” are among those spared from the policy.
Most Americans Are Uncomfortable With Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, Survey Finds
Most Americans feel “significant discomfort” about the idea of their doctors using artificial intelligence to help manage their health, a new survey finds, but they generally acknowledge AI’s potential to reduce medical mistakes and to eliminate some of the problems doctors may have with racial bias.
Sixty percent of Americans who took part in a new survey by the Pew Research Center said that they would be uncomfortable with a healthcare provider who relied on artificial intelligence to do something like diagnose their disease or recommend a treatment. About 57% said that the use of artificial intelligence would make their relationship with their provider worse.
Only 38% felt that using AI to diagnose disease or recommend treatment would lead to better health outcomes; 33% said it would lead to worse outcomes; and 27% said it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
About 6 in 10 Americans said they would not want AI-driven robots to perform parts of their surgery. Nor do they like the idea of a chatbot working with them on their mental health; 79% said they wouldn’t want AI involved in their mental healthcare. There’s also concern about security when it comes to AI and healthcare records.
Takeaways From the Supreme Court’s Hearing on Twitter’s Liability for Terrorist Use of Its Platform
After back-to-back oral arguments this week, the Supreme Court appears reluctant to hand down the kind of sweeping ruling about liability for terrorist content on social media that some feared would upend the internet.
On Wednesday, the justices struggled with claims that Twitter contributed to a 2017 ISIS attack in Istanbul by hosting content unrelated to the specific incident. Arguments in that case, Twitter v. Taamneh, came a day after the court considered whether YouTube can be sued for recommending videos created by ISIS to its users.
The closely watched cases carry significant stakes for the wider internet. An expansion of apps and websites’ legal risk for hosting or promoting content could lead to major changes at sites including Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, to name a few.
For nearly three hours of oral argument, the justices asked attorneys for Twitter, the U.S. government and the family of Nawras Alassaf — a Jordanian citizen killed in the 2017 attack — how to weigh several factors that might determine Twitter’s level of legal responsibility, if any. But while the justices quickly identified what the relevant factors were, they seemed divided on how to analyze them.
The Raucous Battle Over Americans’ Online Privacy Is Landing on States
Tech privacy advocates frustrated by failures on Capitol Hill are looking to mine state capitals for legislative victories.
A broad bipartisan federal privacy bill that died in Congress last year has quickly become the template for a statehouse-by-statehouse campaign to enact tough new restrictions on how Americans’ personal data can be mined and shared.
Lawmakers in Massachusetts and Illinois are already proposing privacy measures modeled on the federal bill, and Democrats in Indiana are using it as inspiration to strengthen legislation that’s already been proposed. Four other states have already passed their own data-privacy laws in the past two years — raising anxiety levels among tech companies about a national “patchwork” of hard-to-navigate data rules — but encouraging advocates who see an appetite for broader consumer protections.
The new statehouse focus by privacy advocates isn’t necessarily designed to sweep across all 50 states but rather tighten regulations just enough in just enough places to force the industry into a de facto national standard.
NSA’s ‘State Secrets’ Defense Kills Lawsuit Challenging Internet Surveillance
The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday denied a petition to review a case involving the National Security Agency’s surveillance of Internet traffic, leaving in place a lower-court ruling that invoked “state secrets privilege” to dismiss the lawsuit.
The NSA surveillance was challenged by the Wikimedia Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The Supreme Court’s denial of Wikimedia’s petition for review (formally known as “certoriari”) was confirmed in a long list of decisions released yesterday.
“As a final development in our case, Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA, the United States Supreme Court denied our petition asking for a review of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance of Internet communications and activities. This denial represents a big hit to both privacy and freedom of expression,” the Wikimedia Foundation said yesterday.
For Tech Giants, AI Like Bing and Bard Poses Billion-Dollar Search Problem
As Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL.O) looks past a chatbot flub that helped erase $100 billion from its market value, another challenge is emerging from its efforts to add generative artificial intelligence to its popular Google Search: the cost.
In an interview, Alphabet’s Chairman John Hennessy told Reuters that having an exchange with AI known as a large language model likely cost 10 times more than a standard keyword search, though fine-tuning will help reduce the expense quickly.
Even with revenue from potential chat-based search ads, the technology could chip into the bottom line of Mountain View, Calif.-based Alphabet with several billion dollars of extra costs, analysts said. Its net income was nearly $60 billion in 2022.
Morgan Stanley estimated that Google’s 3.3 trillion search queries last year cost roughly a fifth of a cent each, a number that would increase depending on how much text AI must generate. Google, for instance, could face a $6-billion hike in expenses by 2024 if ChatGPT-like AI were to handle half the queries it receives with 50-word answers, analysts projected. Google is unlikely to need a chatbot to handle navigational searches for sites like Wikipedia.
Joe Biden Can’t Be Trusted on Chinese Spy Balloons, Americans Say
Around half of Americans believe that the U.S. government can’t be trusted to tell the truth about the alleged Chinese spy balloon and other high-altitude flying objects shot down in recent weeks, polling for Newsweek shows.
A majority of Americans surveyed by the U.K.-based global consulting firm Redfield & Wilton Strategies on behalf of Newsweek said they believe that the balloon shot down on February 4 was sent from China and was spying on the U.S. — and that the U.S. did well to destroy it.
On the other hand, they don’t think that the government is telling them the whole truth about what was going on with the balloon — and the other three unidentified objects shot down over northern Canada, Alaska and Lake Huron after that.
Only 13% of respondents were not concerned at all about the presence of unidentified flying objects above American airspace. Some 32% were extremely concerned, 34% were fairly concerned and 21% were slightly concerned.
I Didn’t Take a COVID Vaccine. I Shouldn’t Lose My Job at San Diego City College.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported:
As a pregnant woman with a high-risk pregnancy, I am facing a new challenge. The San Diego Community College District is threatening me with termination unless I receive the COVID-19 vaccine, which is in stark contrast to many other institutions of higher education that have accommodated their employees’ legal, religious and medical exemptions. Last year, after a decline in enrollment, the San Diego Community College District dropped the COVID-19 vaccine requirement for students,but it has not been dropped for faculty and staff.
On Jan. 19, the San Diego Community College Board of Trustees terminated three employees for noncompliance with the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. On March 2, the Board of Trustees plans to terminate me and five of my colleagues. At the board meeting, I will have only five minutes to defend my life’s work and my livelihood. Why is the San Diego Community College District denying its employees the same civil rights and accommodations it affords its students?
The answer from Chancellor Carlos Cortez is, “We prioritize the health and safety of our employees. We have no intention of changing this policy moving forward.”
It’s time for the district to live up to its commitment to diversity, inclusion and equity. By accommodating its employees’ legal religious and deeply held beliefs, the district can create a workplace that truly values and respects all its employees. We should not have to choose between our beliefs and our livelihoods.
Bill Proposed to Reinstate Federal Employees After Vaccine Mandate
On Friday, Congressman Matt Gaetz proposed a bill called the “COVID-19 Federal Employee Reinstatement Act.” This legislation, if passed, is supposed to provide financial compensation or full reinstatement for federal employees that resigned from their careers between Sep. 9, 2021 and Jan. 24, 2022 due to the vaccination mandate.
Gaetz introduced a similar amendment last year, stating service members should be reinstated with their full rank and pay.
“Forcing public servants to choose between destroying their livelihood or complying with immoral demands from the federal government is sickening. The Biden administration should have never forced federal employees to resign due to the vaccine mandate. Reinstating and compensating these individuals is the first step toward reconciliation. Vaccine mandates have no place in a free country,” said Congressman Gaetz.
FTC Won’t Challenge Amazon’s One Medical Deal
The Federal Trade Commission has decided it won’t challenge Amazon’s $3.9 billion deal for primary care provider One Medical, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
The time period in which the FTC can sue to block the deal prior to its closing expires today, the person said. The decision paves the way for the deal to close later this week. The deal, announced in July, had been undergoing an in-depth review at the FTC for the past eight months.
However, while the companies are free to close the deal, the FTC is not ruling out a challenge in the future, and is warning the companies it will continue to investigate. Any FTC challenge, though, would focus on unwinding the deal, a more difficult proposition than preventing it from closing.
“The FTC’s investigation of Amazon’s acquisition of One Medical continues,” said FTC spokesperson Douglas Farrar. “The commission will continue to look at possible harms to competition created by this merger as well as possible harms to consumers that may result from Amazon’s control and use of sensitive consumer health information held by One Medical.”
Microsoft Cofounder Bill Gates Says the Rise of AI Poses a Threat to Google’s Search Engine Profit
Bill Gates — the cofounder of tech giant Microsoft — said Google‘s profits from its search engine are likely to fall in the future because the company he cofounded has been able to move rapidly on artificial intelligence.
Gates was speaking on a Monday episode of “In Good Company,” a podcast hosted by Norwegian sovereign wealth fund boss Nicolai Tangen, when he said: “Google has owned all of the search profits, so the search profits will be down, and their share of it may be down because Microsoft has been able to move fairly fast on that one.”
For context, Google posted $224 billion in advertising revenues in 2022 — far dwarfing Microsoft’s $18 billion in advertising revenues. Google has dominated search for the past two decades and according to web analytics service Statcounter, it accounts for about 93% of the global search-engine market, while Bing accounts for about 3%.
While Gates said on the podcast he was “not sure” there’ll be a winner from the AI race, at least one prominent analyst — Wedbush’s Dan Ives — said Microsoft is “leading the pack” in the AI race right now.
