GCR News Summary May 2014

Pope Francis image courtesy of Jeffrey Bruno/Aleteia under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Billionaire Petro Poroshenko won the Ukrainian presidential election with 55% of the vote. Voter turnout was high, although pro-Russian separatists prevented many people from voting in the eastern part of the country. Poroshenko promised to bring peace to the eastern regions and move the country closer to the European Union. Russia said that it was moving its forces away from the …

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GCR News Summary April 2014

Soap and chlorine image courtesy of UNICEF Guinea under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Tensions continued to run high between Russia and the acting government of Ukraine as well-armed pro-Russian groups occupied strategic buildings across eastern Ukraine and skirmished with the Ukrainian military. An agreement between Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the EU to lower tensions fell apart when separatists captured military observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and …

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GCR News Summary March 2014

US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman at Maidan Memorial in Kyiv image courtesy of the US Embassy in Kyiv under a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License

On March 18, Russia formally annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea. Russian troops without official markings occupied the Crimean peninsula earlier in the month after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country. The Crimean peninsula was part of Russia before it was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. Crimea is …

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GCR News Summary February 2014

Smiling camel image courtesy of Hendrik Dacquin under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil said at a CIO Network conference that we will develop “human-level” artificial intelligence by the year 2029. Kurzweil—who argued in his book The Singularity Is Near that advances in artificial intelligence will lead to runaway technological progress in the near future—predicted that artificial intelligence systems would also be used to enhance human intelligence. Kurzweil also suggested we …

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GCR News Summary January 2014

President Obama delivering the 2014 State of the Union address image courtesy of The White House/Pete Souza

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decided to leave the small hand of its symbolic “Doomsday Clock” at five minutes to midnight. The amount of time left until midnight represents how close we are to global disaster. The clock’s hands were set at two minutes to midnight at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s. In an open letter to the members of …

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GCR News Summary December 2013

Mammoth Hot Springs image courtesy of Brocken Inaglory under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license

Russian President Vladimir Putin told senior Russian officials that long-range conventional high- precision weapons could provide an alternative to nuclear deterrence. Long-range conventional weapons give Russia a conventional means of striking discrete targets quickly anywhere in the world. But conventional ballistic missiles could carry the same danger of escalation as nuclear weapons, since they are difficult to distinguish from nuclear weapons once they have been launched. …

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GCR News Summary November 2013

Iranian Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei image courtesy of the Foundation for Holy Defence Values, Archives and Publications

Iran reached a deal with China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, the US to temporarily limit the amount of uranium it enriches. Iran agreed for the next six months to stop production and dilute its stock of highly-enriched uranium, to stop installing new centrifuges, to stop work on a heavy-water reactor capable of producing plutonium, and to allow greater oversight from the International …

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GCR News Summary October 2013

Indian flying fox image courtesy of Fritz Geller-Grimm under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 Generic license.

The US federal government shut down for 16 days when Congress failed to authorize funds for the 2014 fiscal year. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) furloughed two-thirds of its employees, which left it without enough staff to monitor safety procedures at high-security biolabs, watch for outbreaks of potential pandemics, or respond to a major public health emergency. During the shutdown 338 people in 18 …

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GCR News Summary September 2013

The Earth and the Moon as seen from Voyager 1 image courtesy of NASA.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report concluded after reviewing 9,200 peer-reviewed studies that there’s at least a 95% chance that global warming is primarily caused by human activities. The IPCC said in its 2007 report that there was a 90% chance global warming was caused by humans, but alternate explanations for climate change have been ruled out since then. The IPCC found that the global …

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GCR News Summary August 2013

California Rim Fire image courtesy of the USDA.

California governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for San Francisco County when a large wildfire on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains threatened to disrupt public utilities. Two of the three hydroelectric power stations in the region were forced to shut down. San Francisco also gets 85% of its water from the nearby Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Most of the western US is in drought and the recent increase in the number …

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