The ACLU of Northern California’s test of Amazon’s controversial Rekognition software also found that people of color were disproportionately misidentified in a mugshot database, raising new concerns about racial bias and the potential for abuse by law enforcement.

The report followed revelations in May that Amazon has been marketing and selling the Rekognition technology to police agencies, leading privacy advocates to urge CEO Jeff Bezos to stop providing the product to the government.

“Our test reinforces that face surveillance is not safe for government use,” Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said in a statement. “Face surveillance will be used to power discriminatory surveillance and policing that targets communities of color, immigrants, and activists. Once unleashed, that damage can’t be undone.”

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Of the 28 people misidentified by the ACLU’s test, 11 of them were people of color, nearly 40% of those wrongly matched, despite the fact that people of color make up only 20% of those in Congress. Six members of the Congressional Black Caucus were included in the false matches, including the civil rights leader John Lewis.

Article 5 has only been invoked once, in support of the United States after the 9/11 attacks. This led to NATO's largest-ever military operation, in Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands of Europeans and Canadians stood shoulder-to-shoulder with US troops and more than 1,000 paid the ultimate price," the NATO official told CNN.
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Trump, in an interview on Fox News, appeared to cast doubt on his willingness to defend the country, calling the people of Montenegro "strong" and "aggressive," suggesting that its aggressiveness could draw the US into World War III due to the NATO's mutual security clause enshrined in Article 5 of the NATO treaty. It deems an attack on one member of NATO an attack on all countries in the alliance.
Article 5 -- which is defensive -- aims to deter potential adversaries from attacking NATO members. During the Cold War, the main concern was the Soviet Union, but in recent years, Russia's aggressive actions in Eastern Europe have been the focus of attention. Ukraine and Georgia, the two countries Russia has invaded in the past decade, are not NATO members.
"Our collective defense clause, Article 5, is unconditional and iron-clad. It means that an attack on one is an attack on all. President Trump has made clear that the US is fully committed to NATO and our Alliance is stronger than ever," a NATO official told CNN.

Record high temperatures have been set across much of the world this week as an unusually prolonged and broad heatwave intensifies concerns about climate change.

The past month has seen power shortages in California as record heat forced a surge of demand for air conditioners. Algeria has experienced the hottest temperature ever reliably registered in Africa. Britain, meanwhile, has experienced its third longest heatwave, melting the roof of a science building in Glasgow and exposing ancient hill forts in Wales.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the rising temperatures were at odds with a global cyclical climate phenomena known as La Niña, which is usually associated with cooling.

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Globally, the warmest year on record was in 2016, boosted by the natural climate cycle El Niño. Last year, temperatures hit the highest level without that amplifying phenomenon. This year, at the other cooling end of the cycle, is continuing the overall upward trend.

Vladimir Putin was not in attendance, but his loyal lieutenants were. On 14 July last year, the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, and several members of his cabinet convened in an office building on the outskirts of Moscow. On to the stage stepped a boyish-looking psychologist, Michal Kosinski, who had been flown from the city centre by helicopter to share his research. “There was Lavrov, in the first row,” he recalls several months later, referring to Russia’s foreign minister. “You know, a guy who starts wars and takes over countries.” Kosinski, a 36-year-old assistant professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University, was flattered that the Russian cabinet would gather to listen to him talk. “Those guys strike me as one of the most competent and well-informed groups,” he tells me. “They did their homework. They read my stuff.”

Kosinski’s “stuff” includes groundbreaking research into technology, mass persuasion and artificial intelligence (AI) – research that inspired the creation of the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Five years ago, while a graduate student at Cambridge University, he showed how even benign activity on Facebook could reveal personality traits – a discovery that was later exploited by the data-analytics firm that helped put Donald Trump in the White House.

That would be enough to make Kosinski interesting to the Russian cabinet. But his audience would also have been intrigued by his work on the use of AI to detect psychological traits. Weeks after his trip to Moscow, Kosinski published a controversial paper in which he showed how face-analysing algorithms could distinguish between photographs of gay and straight people. As well as sexuality, he believes this technology could be used to detect emotions, IQ and even a predisposition to commit certain crimes. Kosinski has also used algorithms to distinguish between the faces of Republicans and Democrats, in an unpublished experiment he says was successful – although he admits the results can change “depending on whether I include beards or not”.

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In one of our final conversations, Kosinski tells me he shouldn’t have talked about his visit to Moscow, because his hosts asked him not to. It would not be “elegant” to mention it in the Guardian, he says, and besides, “it is an irrelevant fact”. I point out that he already left a fairly big clue on Facebook, where he posted an image of himself onboard a helicopter with the caption: “Taking off to give a talk for Prime Minister Medvedev.” He later changed his privacy settings: the photo was no longer public, but for “friends only”.