INDEPTH: Making Their Mark On Art | Liberator Editors Take On BIPOC POP

LASA Students Show Their True Colors Through Their Creation

LiLi Xiong, Delia Rune, Juan (JC) Ramirez Delgadillo, and Alexandra Valencia-Serrano
May 15, 2023

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Global:

Closed AI
The race to innovate new artificial intelligence (AI) continues to ramp up, but a new market has emerged: private defense and security. While previous iterations were immediately made available to the general public as chatbots, new strides like Anthropic’s Mythos model are being restricted to private use out of concern over their newfound ability to discover and exploit cracks in other sites’ security. AI has already been deployed in physical warfare, and this development could extend its use to cyber attacks and other hacks.

War and a Piece of the Japanese Constitution
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi may be trying to revise the country’s constitution to remove Article 9, which prohibits Japan from resorting to military force against other countries. Created by American authorities during the post-World War II occupation, the “pacifist” constitution was intended to prevent Japan from engaging in further warfare. Now, some members of the majority Liberal Democratic Party want to remove Article 9, one of a number of proposed changes to the governing document that Japan’s legislature is considering.

National:

Galaga?
This year’s annual White House Correspondent’s Dinner was interrupted by an armed intruder with plans to assassinate President Donald Trump. Cole Allen, an engineer from Los Angeles, charged past security in an attempt to reach the press gala, which the president was attending. After firing at Allen but missing, Secret Service agents tackled and arrested the perpetrator. Security evacuated top officials as the event disbanded.

Canvas Hackers Triumph
Throughout the first week of May, the crime group ShinyHunters mounted a hacking campaign on the learning management system Canvas. Although Instructure, the company that owns Canvas, initially indicated that the breach was under control, ShinyHunters downed the website for all of its 275 million users on May 7. The URL led only to a ransom message that threatened to release user data without payment. More than 8,000 Canvas clients, including hundreds of American universities and school districts, lost access until Instructure resolved the outage on May 8. Instructure later announced that they agreed to pay ShinyHunters to delete the stolen data.

State:

Jobs Council Gets to Work
On March 16, Governor Greg Abbott launched the Texas Jobs Council to address worker shortages in the state. Brent Taylor, a Teamsters leader, and Megan Mauro, the interim president of the Texas Association of Business, will co-chair the 12-member council. It is made up of union and industry officials and administrators whom Abbott appointed to find ways the state can reduce government regulations that could slow development of the workforce. Abbott, who visited South Texas on a brief speaking tour to promote the advisory board, announced that it was a response to the need for skilled infrastructure workers as business in Texas expands. He specified that the council would pursue training for professions like welding, technician work, and plumbing.

Corpus Christi’s Water Blues
Corpus Christi may be the first Texas city to run out of public water. After seven years of drought, the City of Corpus Christi reports that its reservoirs are diminished to 8% of their full volume, and officials are considering expanding restrictions on home water use, which have been in place since 2023. The port city’s water is strained by the industrial plants who export materials and fuel and consume 60% of municipal water provisions according to KRIS 6 News Corpus Christi.

Local:

Are Our Springs Safe?/The Ideal Spring
A proposed expansion of MoPac Expressway has generated pushback from the environmental group Save Our Springs Alliance (SOS). SOS launched the Better MoPac Coalition to oppose the plan and filed a lawsuit against the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority (CTRMA), which launched the project to ease congestion. The suit challenges CTRMA’s choice to withhold public comments concerning the construction submitted on their website.

Obama Visits Austin
The restaurant Taco Joint now shares one experience with the White House: Barack Obama came, made some people happy, and left. On May 12, former President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to the Tex-Mex venue. He accompanied two Democrats running for statewide office in Texas: State Senator James Talarico, a candidate for the Senate seat, and State Representative Gina Hinojosa, running for governor.