TAIPEI Taiwan's export-dependent economy likely returned to growth in the second quarter thanks to resilient domestic consumption although

The Georgia Bulldogs are in for a stressful couple of weeks, as a four-star recruit is visiting two top schools before his decision day.The Georgia Bulldogs are a recruiting powerhouse under head coach Kirby Smart, and it has helped lead the program to back-to-back national title victories. For ...

On Thursday, 'Today' host Jenna Bush Hager got candid about her moment when she almost got a back tattoo while going through a breakup

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Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni told Russian pranksters posing as African diplomats that there is "a lot of fatigue" over the war in Ukraine. In a 13-minute recording released by pranksters “Vova and Lexus”, Ms Meloni claimed that Kyiv’s counteroffensive “didn’t change the destiny of the conflict” and that the time is approaching when Europe will “need a way out". The Italian PM believed she was speaking to senior African Union officials in the call on 18 September, a day before the United Nations General Assembly in New York, but her office later admitted that she “had been deceived”. They also confirmed the authenticity of the audio published by Vova and Lexus, whose real names are Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov, on Wednesday. During the interview, Ms Meloni said: “Everybody understands that [the war in Ukraine] really could last many years if we don’t try to find some solutions.” Speaking in English, she added: “I see that there is a lot of fatigue, I have to say the truth, from all the sides. “We (are) near the moment in which everybody understands that we need a way out. “The problem is to find a way out which can be acceptable for both without destroying the international law. “I have got some ideas about how to manage this situation, but I am waiting for the right moment to put on the table these ideas that I have got.” Mr Kuznetsov and Mr Stolyarov are prominent in Russia and have pranked numerous world leaders, including Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau in 2020. Sir Elton John, Ben Wallace and the Duke of Sussex have also been tricked into giving up controversial opinions in phone conversations. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, without mentioning the audio clip of Ms Meloni, said in his nightly address on Wednesday that Europe was a continent of “cooperation, not disagreements”. “We value our Europe, the Europe of cooperation, not confrontation, the Europe of people, not ideologies, because only in this way can our continent protect and defend human lives both in European countries and in the world,” he said. “I am confident that Ukraine will make our Europe stronger than ever, and we are working actively to remove any obstacles to our accession to the European Union. “I am also confident that no matter how events unfold in the world, among our partners in the United States and elsewhere, unity will prevail. Unity, not division. Unity, not calls for isolation.” Mikhail Podolyak, an advisor to Mr Zelensky, suggested in a statement to X, formerly Twitter, that European fatigue, and its apparent resultant willingness to negotiate a ceasefire, was “absolute propaganda fiction promoted only by authoritarian regimes similar to the Russian one”. Read More More than 900 of Putin’s soldiers killed in past 24 hours, claim Ukraine officials Ukraine says more than 260 civilians killed after stepping on mines and explosives Ukraine suffers most intense bombardment of Russian shelling this year, Kyiv says North Korea has likely sent missiles as well as ammunition and shells to Russia, Seoul says Putin’s troops ‘trying to regroup’ for attacks on besieged town - live Putin is expected to seek reelection in Russia, but who would run if he doesn't?

Oprah Winfrey wrote, 'I had been expecting to hear this news four years ago in 2019 after visiting her at a hospital in Switzerland'

Meta has created a new system that it says can generate convincing speech in a variety of styles – but will not release it for fear of the risks. The new tool is called “Voicebox” and can be set to create outputs in different styles, new voices from scratch as well as with a sample. It makes speech across six languages, as well as a variety of other tools such as noise removal. It says that it is a major development on previous speech systems that required specific training for each task. Instead, Voicebox can just be given raw audio and a transcription, and then be used to modify an audio sample. It is far more effective than its competitors, Meta claimed in its announcement. It can generate words with a 5.9 per cent error rate compared to 1.9 per cent from competitor Vall-E, for instance, and do so as much as 20 times more quickly. Meta said that it had been built on the foundation of a new model it called “Flow Matching”. That allows the system to learn from speech that has not been carefully labelled, so that it can be trained on more and more diverse data. Voicebox was trained on 50,000 hours of speech and transcripts that came from public domain audiobooks in English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, and Portuguese, Meta said. Now that it has been trained, it can be given an audio recording and fill in the speech from the context, Meta said. That could be used to create a realistic sounding voice from just two seconds of speech, for instance, potentially being used to bring voices to people who cannot speak or to add people’s voices into games. It could also be used to translate a passage of speech from one lanagueg to another in a way that keeps the style, Meta said, allowing people to talk to each other authentically even if they don’t speak the same language. It could also be useful in more technical scenarios, such as audio editing, where it can be used to replace words that were not properly recorded, for instance. But Meta said that the risks were such that it would not be releasing the model. It did not point to specific harms, but said that “as with other powerful new AI innovations, we recognize that this technology brings the potential for misuse and unintended harm”. Numerous reports have warned that such systems could be used to copy people’s voices without their consent and in ways that could be harmful, such as creating fake videos of news events or using people’s voices to pose as them during scam calls, for instance. “There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time,” Meta said in a statement. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.” It also pointed to a separate paper, published on its website, in which it detailed how it had built a “highly effective” system that can distinguish between authentic speech and audio that had been generated with Voicebox. Read More Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Meta scrambles to fix Instagram algorithm connecting ‘vast paedophile network’ Reddit user’s protests against the site’s rules have taken an even more bizarre turn

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The Grenon Family created the 'Genesis II Church of Health and Healing' and sold bleach as a cure for diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes