FERGUS FALLS, Minn. (AP) — A jury convicted two men on Friday of charges related to human smuggling for their roles in an international operation that led to the deaths of a family of Indian migrants who froze while trying to cross the Canada-U.S. border during a 2022 blizzard. Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, 29, an Indian national who prosecutors say went by the alias “Dirty Harry,” and Steve Shand, 50, an American from Florida, were part of a sophisticated illegal operation that has brought increasing numbers of Indians into the U.S., prosecutors said. They were each convicted on four counts related to human smuggling, including conspiracy to bring migrants into the country illegally. “This trial exposed the unthinkable cruelty of human smuggling and of those criminal organizations that value profit and greed over humanity,” Minnesota U.S. Attorney Andy Luger said. “To earn a few thousand dollars, these traffickers put men, women and children in extraordinary peril leading to the horrific and tragic deaths of an entire family. Because of this unimaginable greed, a father, a mother and two children froze to death in sub-zero temperatures on the Minnesota-Canadian border,” Luger added. The most serious counts carry maximum sentences of up to 20 years in prison, the U.S. Attorney’s Office told The Associated Press before the trial. But federal sentencing guidelines rely on complicated formulas. Luger said Friday that various factors will be considered in determining what sentences prosecutors will recommend. Federal prosecutors said 39-year-old Jagdish Patel; his wife, Vaishaliben, who was in her mid-30s; their 11-year-old daughter, Vihangi; and 3-year-old son, Dharmik, froze to death Jan. 19, 2022, while trying to cross the border into Minnesota in a scheme Patel and Shand organized. Patel is a common Indian surname, and the victims were not related to Harshkumar Patel. The couple were schoolteachers, local news reports said. The family was fairly well off by local standards, living in a well-kept, two-story house with a front patio and a wide veranda. Experts say illegal immigration from India is driven by everything from political repression to a dysfunctional American immigration system that can take years, if not decades, to navigate legally. Much is rooted in economics and how even low-wage jobs in the West can ignite hopes for a better life. Before the jury’s conviction on Friday, the federal trial in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, saw testimony from an alleged participant in the smuggling ring, a survivor of the treacherous journey across the northern border, border patrol agents and forensic experts. Defense attorneys were pitted against each other, with Shand’s team arguing that he was unwittingly roped into the scheme by Patel. Patel’s lawyers, The Canadian Press reported , said their client had been misidentified. They said “Dirty Hary,” the alleged nickname for Patel found in Shand’s phone, is a different person. Bank records and witness testimony from those who encountered Shand near the border didn’t tie him to the crime, they added. Prosecutors said Patel coordinated the operation while Shand was a driver. Shand was to pick up 11 Indian migrants on the Minnesota side of the border, prosecutors said. Only seven survived the foot crossing. Canadian authorities found two parents and their young children later that morning, dead from the cold. The trial included an inside account of how the international smuggling ring allegedly works and who it targets. Rajinder Singh, 51, testified that he made over $400,000 smuggling over 500 people through the same network that included Patel and Shand. Singh said most of the people he smuggled came from Gujarat state. He said the migrants would often pay smugglers about $100,000 to get them from India to the U.S., where they would work to pay off their debts at low-wage jobs in cities around the country. Singh said the smugglers would run their finances through “hawala,” an informal money transfer system that relies on trust. The pipeline of illegal immigration from India has long existed but has increased sharply along the U.S.-Canada border. The U.S. Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians on the Canadian border in the year ending Sept. 30, which amounted to 60% of all arrests along that border and more than 10 times the number two years ago. By 2022, the Pew Research Center estimates more than 725,000 Indians were living illegally in the U.S., behind only Mexicans and El Salvadorans. Jamie Holt, a Special Agent with Homeland Security Investigations, said the case is a stark reminder of the realities victims of human smuggling face. “Human smuggling is a vile crime that preys on the most vulnerable, exploiting their desperation and dreams for a better life,” Holt said. “The suffering endured by this family is unimaginable and it is our duty to ensure that such atrocities are met with the full force of the law.” One juror Kevin Paul, of Clearwater, Minnesota, told reporters afterward that it was hard for the jurors to see the pictures of the family’s bodies. He said he grew up in North Dakota and is familiar with the kind of conditions that led to their deaths. “It’s pretty brutal,” Paul said. “I couldn’t imagine having to do what they had to do out there in the middle of nowhere.”Oaktree Capital Group sells $30.4 million in CBL & Associates stockA 7-year-old rivalry between tech leaders Elon Musk and Sam Altman over who should run OpenAI and prevent an artificial intelligence "dictatorship" is now heading to a federal judge as Musk seeks to halt the ChatGPT maker's ongoing shift into a for-profit company. Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued the artificial intelligence company earlier this year alleging it had betrayed its founding aims as a nonprofit research lab benefiting the public good rather than pursuing profits. Musk has since escalated the dispute, adding new claims and asking for a court order that would stop OpenAI’s plans to convert itself into a for-profit business more fully. The world's richest man, whose companies include Tesla, SpaceX and social media platform X, last year started his own rival AI company, xAI. Musk says it faces unfair competition from OpenAI and its close business partner Microsoft, which has supplied the huge computing resources needed to build AI systems such as ChatGPT. “OpenAI and Microsoft together exploiting Musk’s donations so they can build a for-profit monopoly, one now specifically targeting xAI, is just too much,” says Musk's filing that alleges the companies are violating the terms of Musk’s foundational contributions to the charity. OpenAI is filing a response Friday opposing Musk’s requested order, saying it would cripple OpenAI’s business and mission to the advantage of Musk and his own AI company. A hearing is set for January before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland. At the heart of the dispute is a 2017 internal power struggle at the fledgling startup that led to Altman becoming OpenAI's CEO. Musk also wanted the job, according to emails revealed as part of the court case, but grew frustrated after two other OpenAI co-founders said he would hold too much power as a major shareholder and chief executive if the startup succeeded in its goal to achieve better-than-human AI known as artificial general intelligence , or AGI. Musk has long voiced concerns about how advanced forms of AI could threaten humanity. “The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI," said a 2017 email to Musk from co-founders Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman. “You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you.” In the same email, titled “Honest Thoughts,” Sutskever and Brockman also voiced concerns about Altman's desire to be CEO and whether he was motivated by “political goals.” Altman eventually succeeded in becoming CEO, and has remained so except for a period last year when he was fired and then reinstated days later after the board that ousted him was replaced. OpenAI published the messages Friday in a blog post meant to show its side of the story, particularly Musk's early support for the idea of making OpenAI a for-profit business so it could raise money for the hardware and computer power that AI needs. It was Musk, through his wealth manager Jared Birchall, who first registered “Open Artificial Technologies Technologies, Inc.”, a public benefit corporation, in September 2017. Then came the “Honest Thoughts” email that Musk described as the “final straw.” “Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Musk wrote back. OpenAI said Musk later proposed merging the startup into Tesla before resigning as the co-chair of OpenAI's board in early 2018. Musk didn't immediately respond to emailed requests for comment sent to his companies Friday. Asked about his frayed relationship with Musk at a New York Times conference last week, Altman said he felt “tremendously sad” but also characterized Musk’s legal fight as one about business competition. “He’s a competitor and we’re doing well,” Altman said. He also said at the conference that he is “not that worried” about the Tesla CEO’s influence with President-elect Donald Trump. OpenAI said Friday that Altman plans to make a $1 million personal donation to Trump’s inauguration fund, joining a number of tech companies and executives who are working to improve their relationships with the incoming administration. —————————— The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement allowing OpenAI access to part of the AP’s text archives.

AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EST

On the south side of Austin, Texas, engineers at semiconductor maker Advanced Micro Devices designed an artificial intelligence chip called MI300 that was released a year ago and is expected to generate more than $5 billion in sales in its first year of release. Not far away in a north Austin high-rise, designers at Amazon developed a new and faster version of an AI chip called Trainium . They then tested the chip in creations including palm-size circuit boards and complex computers the size of two refrigerators. Those two efforts in the capital of Texas reflect a shift in the rapidly evolving market of AI chips, which are perhaps the hottest and most coveted technology of the moment. The industry has long been dominated by Nvidia , which has leveraged its AI chips to become a $3 trillion behemoth. For years, others tried to match the company's chips, which provide enormous computing power for AI tasks, but made little progress. Now the chips that Advanced Micro Devices, known as AMD, and Amazon have created -- as well as customer reactions to their technology -- are adding to signs that credible alternatives to Nvidia are finally emerging. For some crucial AI tasks, Nvidia's rivals are proving they can deliver much faster speed, and at much lower prices , said Daniel Newman, an analyst at Futurum Group. "That's what everybody has known is possible, and now we're starting to see it materialize," he said. Artificial Intelligence(AI) Generative AI for Dynamic Java Web Applications with ChatGPT By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) ChatGPT Mastery from Zero to Hero: The Complete AI Course By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Entrepreneurship From Idea to Product: A Startup Development Guide By - Dr. Anu Khanchandani, Startup Coach with more than 25 years of experience View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) Master in Python Language Quickly Using the ChatGPT Open AI By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Office Productivity Zero to Hero in Microsoft Excel: Complete Excel guide 2024 By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Finance AI and Generative AI for Finance By - Hariom Tatsat, Vice President- Quantitative Analytics at Barclays View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) AI-Powered Python Mastery with Tabnine: Boost Your Coding Skills By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Marketing Digital Marketing Masterclass by Neil Patel By - Neil Patel, Co-Founder and Author at Neil Patel Digital Digital Marketing Guru View Program Entrepreneurship Startup Fundraising: Essential Tactics for Securing Capital By - Dr. Anu Khanchandani, Startup Coach with more than 25 years of experience View Program Web Development Advanced Java Mastery: Object-Oriented Programming Techniques By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Data Science SQL Server Bootcamp 2024: Transform from Beginner to Pro By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Web Development Mastering Full Stack Development: From Frontend to Backend Excellence By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) AI and Analytics based Business Strategy By - Tanusree De, Managing Director- Accenture Technology Lead, Trustworthy AI Center of Excellence: ATCI View Program Web Development Intermediate C++ Skills: Master Pointers, Structures and File Stream By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Marketing Digital marketing - Wordpress Website Development By - Shraddha Somani, Digital Marketing Trainer, Consultant, Strategiest and Subject Matter expert View Program Finance Value and Valuation Masterclass By - CA Himanshu Jain, Ex McKinsey, Moody's, and PwC, Co - founder, The WallStreet School View Program Finance Financial Literacy i.e Lets Crack the Billionaire Code By - CA Rahul Gupta, CA with 10+ years of experience and Accounting Educator View Program Entrepreneurship Crafting a Powerful Startup Value Proposition By - Dr. Anu Khanchandani, Startup Coach with more than 25 years of experience View Program Entrepreneurship Building Your Winning Startup Team: Key Strategies for Success By - Dr. Anu Khanchandani, Startup Coach with more than 25 years of experience View Program Web Development A Comprehensive ASP.NET Core MVC 6 Project Guide for 2024 By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Data Science SQL for Data Science along with Data Analytics and Data Visualization By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Office Productivity Excel Essentials to Expert: Your Complete Guide By - Study At Home, Quality Education Anytime, Anywhere View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) Mastering C++ Fundamentals with Generative AI: A Hands-On By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program The shift is being driven by an array of tech companies -- from large competitors such as Amazon and AMD to smaller startups -- that have started tailoring their chips for a particular phase of AI development that is becoming increasingly important. That process, called "inferencing," happens after companies use chips to train AI models. It allows them to carry out tasks such as serving up answers with AI chatbots. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories "The real commercial value comes with inference, and inference is starting to gain scale," said Cristiano Amon, chief executive of Qualcomm, a mobile chipmaker that plans to use Amazon's new chips for AI tasks. "We're starting to see the beginning of the change." Nvidia's rivals have also started taking a leaf out of the company's playbook in another way. They have begun emulating Nvidia's tactic of building complete computers -- and not just the chips -- so that customers can wring the maximum power and performance out of the chips for AI purposes. The increased competition was evident Tuesday, when Amazon announced the availability of computing services based on its new Trainium 2 AI chips and testimonials from potential users including Apple. The company also unveiled computers containing either 16 or 64 of the chips, with ultrafast networking connections that particularly accelerate inferencing performance. Amazon is even building a kind of giant AI factory for the startup Anthropic, which it has invested in, said Matt Garman, chief executive of Amazon Web Services. That computing "cluster" will have hundreds of thousands of the new Trainium chips and will be five times as powerful as any that Anthropic has ever used, said Tom Brown, a founder and the chief compute officer of the startup, which operates the Claude chatbot and is based in San Francisco. "This means customers will get more intelligence at a lower price and at faster speeds," Brown said. In total, spending on computers without Nvidia chips by data center operators, which provide the computing power needed for AI tasks, is expected to grow 49% this year to $126 billion, according to Omdia, a market research firm. Even so, the increased competition does not mean Nvidia is in danger of losing its lead. A spokesperson for the company pointed to comments made by Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, who has said his company has major advantages in AI software and inferencing capability. Huang has added that demand is torrid for the company's new Blackwell AI chips, which he says perform many more calculations per watt of energy used, despite an increase in the power they need to operate. "Our total cost of ownership is so good that even when the competitor's chips are free, it's not cheap enough," Huang said in a speech at Stanford University this year. The changing AI chip market has partly been propelled by well-funded startups such as SambaNova Systems, Groq and Cerebras Systems, which have lately claimed big speed advantages in inferencing, with lower prices and power consumption. Nvidia's current chips can cost as much as $15,000 each, and its Blackwell chips are expected to cost tens of thousands of dollars each. That has pushed some customers toward alternatives. Dan Stanzione, executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, a research center, said the organization planned to buy a Blackwell-based supercomputer next year but would most likely also use chips from SambaNova for inferencing tasks because of their lower power consumption and pricing. "That stuff is just too expensive," he said of Nvidia's chips. AMD said it expected to target Nvidia's Blackwell chips with its own new AI chips arriving next year. In the company's Austin labs, where it exhaustively tests AI chips, executives said inferencing performance was a major selling point. One customer is Meta , the owner of Facebook and Instagram, which says that it has trained a new AI model, called Llama 3.1 405B, using Nvidia chips but that it uses AMD MI300s chips for providing answers to users. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are also designing their own AI chips to speed up specific computing chores and achieve lower costs, while still building big clusters of machines powered by Nvidia's chips. This month, Google plans to begin selling services based on a sixth generation of internally developed chips, called Trillium, which is nearly five times as fast as its predecessor. Amazon, sometimes seen as a laggard in AI, seems particularly determined to catch up. The company allocated $75 billion this year for AI chips and other computing hardware, among other capital spending. At the company's Austin offices -- run by Annapurna Labs, a startup that it bought in 2015 -- engineers previously developed networking chips and general-purpose microprocessors for Amazon Web Services. Its early AI chips, including the first version of Trainium, did not gain much market traction. Amazon is far more optimistic about the new Trainium 2 chips, which are four times as fast as previous chips. On Tuesday, the company also announced plans for another chip, Trainium 3, which was set to be even more powerful. Eiso Kant, chief technology officer of Poolside, an AI startup in Paris, estimated that Trainium 2 would provide a 40% improvement in computing performance per dollar compared with Nvidia-based hardware. Amazon also plans to offer Trainium-based services in data centers across the world, Kant added, which helps with inferencing tasks. "The reality is, in my business, I don't care what silicon is underneath," he said. "What I care about is that I get the best price performance and that I can get it to the end user."

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( MENAFN - Gulf Times) Registration for the "Al Daou" and "Al Talaa" championships, as part of the 16th edition of the Qatar International Falcons and Hunting Festival (Marmi 2025), will begin this evening at the headquarters of Al Gannas Qatari Society in Katara – the Cultural Village. The festival, held under the patronage of HE sheikh Joaan bin Hamad al-Thani and supported by the Social and Sports Activities Support Fund (Daam), is scheduled to take place from January 1 to February 1 at Sabkhat Marmi in the Sealine Area. Registration and inspection for the "Al Daou" and "Al Talaa" championships will continue until December 26. Online registration for these events is open until 11pm on December 25. Meanwhile, registration for the "Haddad Al Tahaddi" championship, which started Monday, continues until December 26. However, registration for the Saluki Race has officially closed. Haddad Al Tahaddi Committee chairman Shawqi al-Kaabi said that the second day of registration saw a high turnout, as expected, following strong participation on the first day. He stressed that registration for Haddad Al Tahaddi will continue until Thursday evening in Katara. “We saw registrations from competitors across the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries, which is a promising sign of an exciting competition ahead between falcons and homing pigeons on the field,” he said. "The registration witnessed significant and expected turnout for the various races, including the hybrid and Arabian categories,” said Ibrahim Khalil al-Tamimi, a member of the Saluki Race Committee. “We anticipate a thrilling race and wish all participants success,” he added.“The Saluki Race is a vital part of the Marmi Festival, attracting a dedicated audience due to its excitement, challenge, and entertainment." MENAFN23122024000067011011ID1109025650 Legal Disclaimer: MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.SIGMA LITHIUM'S PRODUCTION AT FULL CAPACITY; RECORD SHIPMENT OF 27,500T OF QUINTUPLE ZERO GREEN LITHIUM TO ABU DHABI's IRH TRADING COMPANYPublished 19:09 IST, December 22nd 2024 POEM-4, the fourth stage of ISRO's PSLV rocket, will test seed germination in space, robotic debris capture, and green propulsion systems, all in orbit. New Delhi: Demonstration of seed germination in outer space, a robotic arm to catch a tethered debris there, and testing of green propulsion systems are some of the experiments planned on the POEM-4 -- the fourth stage of ISRO's PSLV rocket that remains in orbit after launching a satellite. The PSLV-C60 mission, slated for an yearend launch, is scheduled to place the twin satellites 'Chaser and Target' to demonstrate the space docking technologies that are crucial for building India's space station. The PSLV Orbital Experiment Module (POEM) will carry 24 experiments -- 14 from various ISRO labs and 10 from private universities and start-ups -- to demonstrate various technologies in space. ISRO plans to grow eight cowpea seeds from seed germination and plant sustenance until the two-leaf stage in a closed-box environment with active thermal control as part of the Compact Research Module for Orbital Plant Studies (CROPS) developed by the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. The Amity Plant Experimental Module in Space (APEMS), developed by Amity University, Mumbai, plans to study the growth of spinach in a microgravity environment. Two parallel experiments will be carried out simultaneously -- one on POEM-4 in space and one on the ground at the university. The experiment's outcome will provide insights into how higher plants sense the direction of gravity and light. The Debris Capture Robotic Manipulator, developed by VSSC, will demonstrate the capturing of tethered debris by a robotic manipulator using visual servoing and object motion prediction in the space environment. The robotic manipulator will be capable of capturing free-floating debris and refuelling tethered and free-floating spacecraft in future POEM missions. Mumbai-based start-up Manastu Space will test Vyom-2U, the green propulsion thruster, that uses a blend of hydrogen peroxide and in-house additives as fuel, with the goal of providing a safer and higher-performing alternative to hydrazine for space applications. The Varuna payload, developed by Piersight Space-Ahmedabad, is an in-orbit demonstration of a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in a CubeSat form factor. This mission marks the initial step towards establishing a constellation of SAR and Automatic Identification System (AIS) satellites, aiming to provide persistent, near real-time monitoring of all human and industrial activity at sea. (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Republic and is published from a syndicated feed.) Get Current Updates on India News , Entertainment News along with Latest News and Top Headlines from India and around the world. Updated 19:09 IST, December 22nd 2024