Two Years of Hell in Myanmar

Start your day smarter with the most important world news, plus intriguing and offbeat stories. www.ozy.com [OZY]( [OZY]() Your World. Bold & Bright [Presidential Daily Brief]( Start your day smarter with a dossier on the most important world news, rounded off with a shot of intriguing and offbeat stories. Like the president, you deserve no less. Feb 01, 2023 Today Myanmar protesters marked the second anniversary of the military coup with a “silent strike.” Four suspects in the 2021 assassination of Haiti’s president have been charged in the United States. An Iranian couple has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for dancing. And the makers of ChatGPT have launched a tool to detect A.I. plagiarism. All this and more in today’s PDB. IMPORTANT Two Years On Coup Anniversary Sees Myanmar in the Grip of Civil War In the two years since Myanmar’s military ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, the junta has cracked down on dissidents, imprisoned journalists and executed pro-democracy activists. Human rights groups estimate 2,900 people have been killed and more than 17,500 have been arrested — and accusations of atrocities, like air strikes on schools, have become more frequent as clashes with rebel groups have escalated into a civil war. Today protesters marked the second anniversary of the coup with a “silent strike.” Photos on social media showed nearly empty streets in capital Yangon as residents stayed home in protest against military rule. (Sources: [BBC](, [CNN](, [AP]() Offshore Justice Four More Suspects in Haiti Assassination Charged in US A total of seven suspects in the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse are now in American custody, the U.S. Justice Department confirmed Tuesday. Three Haitian Americans and a Colombian national, considered the ringleaders of the plot, were transferred to Miami Tuesday and are due in court today. The men had been held in detention in Haiti since shortly after Moïse’s murder, but authorities decided to try them in the U.S. — on the grounds that the plot was partly conceived in Florida — as the Caribbean nation’s government institutions have crumbled in the years since the assassination. (Sources: [Al Jazeera](, [NYT]() Dancing in the Dark Iranian Couple Sentenced to 10 Years for Dancing in Public Instagram influencers Astiaj Haghighi and Amir Mohammad Ahmadi were convicted of “encouraging corruption and public prostitution” as well as “gathering with the intention of disrupting national security” after they were filmed dancing near Tehran’s Azadi (Freedom) Tower in November. In the viral video, Haghighi was not wearing a head covering, in defiance of Iran’s strict dress code for women — who are also not allowed to dance in public. Tehran has cracked down on dissent since protests erupted over the death of Mahsa Amini in September: More than 14,000 people have been arrested and hundreds have been killed. (Sources: [WaPo](, [AFP]() OK, Computer Maker of ChatGPT Releases Plagiarism-Detection Tool Educators have grown increasingly concerned over students using ChatGPT — the popular chatbot capable of producing detailed and articulate answers — since OpenAI released it Nov. 30. Some districts have banned ChatGPT from classrooms, while others are encouraging its use as a learning tool rather than a plagiarism machine. On Tuesday the company launched its new AI Text Classifier to help spot when text was produced by artificial intelligence. But OpenAI’s Jan Leike said the tool “is imperfect and it will be wrong sometimes,” warning, “We don’t fundamentally know what kind of pattern it pays attention to, or how it works internally.” (Sources: [The Verge](, [AP]() Briefly Here are some things you should know about today: Monkey business. Two emperor tamarins that went missing from the Dallas Zoo Tuesday have been recovered from a closet in a nearby home. The zoo’s had a spate of trouble recently as a clouded leopard escaped from a vandalized enclosure and an endangered vulture was found dead under suspicious circumstances. (Source: [WaPo]() Needle in a haystack. The missing radioactive capsule that fell out of a truck in Western Australia has been found lying near the side of the road. (Source: [BBC]() Just visiting? Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has applied for a tourist visa to remain in the U.S. after he entered the country on a special visa for heads of state two days before his successor’s inauguration. (Source: [The Guardian]() INTRIGUING A.I. Phone Home Has a College Student’s Machine Learning Algorithm Found Aliens? When Peter Ma was [still in high school]( he started developing a new neural network technique to scan space noise for “technosignatures” of intelligent life — and now he’s found some. The University of Toronto undergrad’s algorithm reexamined 150 terabytes of data from 820 nearby stars — data that was previously analyzed by classical techniques and found to be “devoid of interesting signals.” But Ma’s deep learning algorithm has already returned eight signals of interest — and together with SETI and Breakthrough Listen, the team is about to scale up their search to 1 million more stars using South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope array. (Sources: [Phys.org](, [Popular Science]() Life Finds a Way ‘De-Extinction’ Startup Plans to Bring Back the Dodo On Tuesday genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences announced it has secured $150 million in seed funding to resurrect the famously extinct flightless bird — along with the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Colossal, founded in 2021 by Harvard geneticist George Church and entrepreneur Ben Lamm, aims to edit the genomes of living relatives of the extinct creatures to create proxy species that would fill their empty ecological niches. All three animals’ genomes have been sequenced, but “de-extinction” will probably take years: It relies on technology that’s still being developed — though it could eventually benefit human health care too. (Sources: [Gizmodo](, [Wired]() Art Pollution Study Suggests Impressionist Paintings Inspired by Smog Researchers have analyzed changes in style and color by Claude Monet and Joseph Mallord William Turner during the Industrial Revolution, revealing that their hazy skies may have been less a stylistic choice and more a reflection of industrial air pollution. Using a mathematical model, researchers tracked sharpness of outlines and levels of contrast in 60 Turner paintings and 38 Monets and found that their painted landscapes got hazier as sulfur dioxide emissions increased. “Impressionism is often contrasted with realism,” study co-author Peter Huybers said, “but our results highlight that Turner and Monet’s impressionistic works also capture a certain reality.” (Source: [WaPo]() Apex Predator Influencer Fined $18K for Cooking and Eating Great White Shark A food blogger in Nanchong, China, is in deep water after buying, cooking and consuming a six-foot shark and broadcasting it to millions of followers. The woman, username Tizi, said, “It may look vicious, but its meat is truly very tender.” She then tore chunks from the carcass with her teeth. Great white sharks are endangered in China and it’s illegal to kill, buy or eat them, and Tizi has been fined $18,500. It’s unclear if she’ll face jail time — but authorities may look higher up the food chain for the person who sold the ill-fated shark online. (Source: [Fortune]() Order on the Court Coach Busted for Impersonating 13-Year-Old JV Basketball Player A high school girls’ basketball program in Portsmouth, Virginia, has ended its season early after it was discovered that a 22-year-old assistant coach suited up and pretended to be an absent player. Arlisha Boykins, who [took the court]( in a junior varsity game against young teens on Jan. 21, has since been fired, along with the varsity and JV coaches. The father of the impersonated 13-year-old said, “Coaches always preach to the kids about integrity and those types of things, so I was just shocked.” He noted that his daughter won’t be returning to Churchland High School next year. (Sources: [USA Today](, [Yahoo Sports]() NOW STREAMING FROM OZY STUDIO COMMUNITY What else are you curious about? 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