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DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO TRUE, REAL, EVERYDAY FEELINGS LIKE MINE.(But I think you would enjoy it)
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On Saturday, Queen Elizabeth appointed her grandson as the new Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
In the position, William will become the British monarch’s personal
representative to the Church of Scotland, carrying out various official
visits and ceremonial duties.
William, 37, takes over the role from Richard Scott, the 10th Duke of Buccleuch and 12th Duke of Queensberry. Before Scott, Princess Anne held the position.
The appointment comes as William’s brother Prince Harry and Harry’s wife Meghan Markle step back as senior members of the royal family.
Last week, Queen Elizabeth and her family — including William, Harry and Prince Charles — cemented an agreement for
the terms of Harry and Meghan’s royal exit. After a period of
transition that ends this spring, Meghan, 38, and Harry, 35, will lose
their “Royal Highness” titles, repay renovation costs to their Frogmore
Cottage home and split their time between North America and the U.K.
Queen Elizabeth; Prince William | ALASTAIR GRANT/AFP via Getty Images; Pool/Samir Hussein/WireImageRELATED: Kate Middleton and Prince William Host Buckingham Palace Reception Amid Meghan and Harry’s Exit
Amid the royal drama, William and wife Kate Middleton have been continuing their royal duties, recently hosting a reception at Buckingham Palace
on behalf of the Queen. The reception marked the U.K.-Africa Investment
Summit taking place in London. (Harry also attended the summit, taking
part in meetings with leaders from three countries.)
In his speech, William offered some personal words about the couple’s personal connection to the region.
Prince William and Kate Middleton | Yui Mok/PA ImagesCan’t get enough of PEOPLE‘s Royals coverage? Sign up for our free Royals newsletter to get the latest updates on Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle and more!
“The
African continent holds a very special place in my heart,” the royal
dad said. “It is the place my father took my brother and me shortly
after our mother died. And when deciding where best to propose to
Catherine, I could think of no more fitting place than Kenya to get down on one knee.”
Kate, 38, and William are also set to attend the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards — the British equivalent of the Oscars — on Feb. 2.
Clearview AI, a small startup that was mostly unknown until a story from The New York Times
called it the app to "end privacy as we know it," lets strangers figure
out your identity through the quick snap of a single photo.
Hundreds of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, are already using this facial recognition technology, despite bans on the tech in cities like San Francisco.
The
app uses over three billion images to find a match. These photos were
sourced from social media sites and even apps like Venmo.
Let's
say a random stranger approaches you on the street, snaps a quick photo
of you in a public place (which is perfectly legal), uploads the photo
to an app, and soon finds your social media profiles. And your Venmo
account. And your full name. And your address.
That's a privacy disaster any way you slice it—but it's also at the heart of an app called Clearview AI, which The New York Timesrecently called "The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It."
It's
not just extremely dangerous because stalkers could instantly find
people through the app and hound them over social media or even show up
at their house, but because hundreds of law enforcement agencies, plus
the FBI, are currently using this facial recognition technology, despite
the pushback the tech has seen in legislative spaces.
In San Francisco, for instance, it's not even legal
for law enforcement to use facial recognition. What's more, some
security companies even have access to Clearview AI, which sets a
dangerous precedent.
Clearview AI features a database of over
three billion images, which were scraped from websites like Facebook,
Twitter, and even Venmo. Other databases pale in comparison, according
to marketing materials the company provided to law enforcement agencies.
The FBI has a database of 411 million photos, while more local
authorities, like the Los Angeles Police Department, only have access to
about eight million images.
Sure, Clearview AI isn't readily
available to the public, and when you visit the company's website, there
isn't really much information on the app at all. You have to request
access to learn more, let alone use the service. However, both the Times and investors in Clearview AI think that the app will be available for anyone to use in the future.
That's
frightening, and it's led technology think tanks like Fight for the
Future, a nonprofit based in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the
Washington, D.C.-based Demand Progress, to call on legislators to take
action on facial recognition tech.
Even Google Wouldn't Build This
When companies like Google—which has received a ton of flack for taking government contracts
to work on artificial intelligence solutions—won't even build an app,
you know it's going to cause a stir.
Back in 2011, former Google
Chairman Eric Schmidt said a tool like Clearview AI's app was one of the few pieces of tech that the company wouldn't develop because it could be used "in a very bad way."
Facebook,
for its part, developed something pretty similar to what Clearview AI
offers, but at least had the foresight not to publicly release it. That
application, developed between 2015 and 2016,
allowed employees to identify colleagues and friends who had enabled
facial recognition by pointing their phone cameras at their faces. Since
then, the app has been discontinued.
Meanwhile, Clearview AI is nowhere near finished. Hidden in the app's code, which the New York Times evaluated,
is programming language that could pair the app to augmented reality
glasses, meaning that in the future, it's possible we could identify
every person we see in real time.
Early Pushback
Perhaps
the silver lining is that we found out about Clearview AI at all. Its
public discovery—and accompanying criticism—have led to well-known
organizations coming out as staunchly opposed to this kind of tech.
Fight
for the Future tweeted that "an outright ban" on these AI tools is the
only way to fix this privacy issue—not quirky jewelry or sunglasses that
can help to protect your identity by confusing surveillance systems.
Demand Progress tweeted that "our worst fears have become real."
These fears and disavowals of facial recognition tech come just
months after two senators introduced a bipartisan bill to limit how the
FBI and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency could use
it.
"Facial recognition technology can be a powerful tool for law
enforcement officials," Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, said in a
statement at the time. "But its very power also makes it ripe for
abuse."
State of Ignorance: California Pushes False Information to School Kids on the Second Amendment
Sunday, January 19, 2020
As an incorporated provision of the United States Bill of
Rights, the Second Amendment is the supreme law of the land, applying to
all U.S. jurisdictions and to the actions of federal, state, and local
officials. The U.S. Supreme Court provides the final and authoritative
interpretation of that provision, as well as other provisions of the
U.S. Constitution. All of this is elementary civics.
But the State of California believes it knows better, requiring
publisher McGraw-Hill to annotate a discussion of the Bill of Rights in a
popular social studies textbook with the state’s own peculiar view of
the Second Amendment’s meaning.
According to pictures from the California edition in the New York Times, the annotation states:
Right to Bear Arms
This amendment is often debated. Originally it was intended to prevent
the national government from repeating the actions of the British, who
tried to take weapons away from the colonial militia, or armed forces of
the citizens. This amendment seems to support the right of citizens to
own firearms, but the Supreme Court has ruled it does not prevent
Congress from regulating the interstate sale of weapons.
The Times article goes on to state that the publisher “said it had
created the additional wording on the Second Amendment and gun control
for the California textbook.” The same language, however, does not
appear in a national version of the same section, according to the Times
report.
The point of the New York Times article is to suggest that different
states emphasize different aspects of U.S. history in otherwise similar
textbooks, depending on the prevailing political outlook among the
state’s education officials.
Whatever might be said of that approach, the problem with
California’s account of the Second Amendment isn’t just one of emphasis
but of accuracy. California, which prides itself on being one of the
most anti-gun states in the nation, simply gets it wrong, using language
that falsely portrays the Second Amendment as a “debated” provision
that has changed meaning over time and that only “seems” to protect an
individual right.
Any “debate” about the Second Amendment’s protection of an individual
right have been authoritatively settled by the U.S. Supreme Court: The
Second Amendment protects “the individual right to possess and carry
weapons in case of confrontation,” independent of service in an
organized militia. That fact was unambiguously articulated in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008.
That decision, moreover, was based on the public understanding of the
Second Amendment at the time it was ratified. In other words, not only
was the Second Amendment an individual right as of 2008, it has always been
an individual right. As the Supreme Court noted, “virtually all
interpreters of the Second Amendment in the century after its enactment
interpreted the Amendment as we do.” It is false to suggest, as the
California textbook does, that it originally meant something different
and then somehow changed meaning in 2008.
Regarding the prefatory militia clause, the Supreme Court took pains
to explain the difference between the justification for including the
Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights and the scope and substance of
that right.
“The debate with respect to the right to keep and bear
arms, as with other guarantees in the Bill of Rights, was not over
whether it was desirable (all agreed that it was) but over whether it
needed to be codified in the Constitution,” the court wrote. What
justified its codification was “the threat that the new Federal
Government would destroy the citizens' militia by taking away their arms
… .” But, the court noted, the prefatory militia clause announcing the
reason for the right’s codification “does not limit or expand the scope
of the operative clause.”
That scope, meanwhile, included using arms for “self-defense and hunting,” with self-defense being “the central component of the right itself,” according to the Supreme Court.
The California textbook also misconstrues what the term “militia”
meant to the founding generation at the time of the Second Amendment’s
enactment. It wasn’t just a discrete, organized military force, the
court explained, but members of the population “physically capable of
acting in concert for the common defense,” whether they were mustered in
that capacity or not. Thus, the terms “militia” and “the people” are
not at odds with each other in the Second Amendment. The people, with
their own arms, are the basis of the militia. To protect the peoples’
private right to arms is therefore to protect the militia’s ability to
muster with arms and to preserve its viability.
As for Congress’ ability to regulate the interstate sale of weapons, the Supreme Court indicated in Heller
that “laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial
sale of arms” are part of the “longstanding” history and tradition of
the Second Amendment, and are thus “presumptively lawful.” That does not
mean, however, that every such law trumps the amendment’s protections,
especially if there is no longstanding precedent for it.
In any event, the Supreme Court has yet to hear a case that pits the
Second Amendment against the Commerce Clause, and it explicitly reserved
that and other questions for later consideration. “[S]ince this case
represents this Court’s first in-depth examination of the Second
Amendment, one should not expect it to clarify the entire field,” the
court wrote. “[T]here will be time enough to expound upon the historical
justifications for the exceptions we have mentioned if and when those
exceptions come before us.”
California likes to emphasize how it sees things differently than the
rest of the United States. That’s why common consumer products come
with warnings that they include substances “known to the State of
California” to pose various hazards, including cancer or birth defects.
So numerous are these warnings that people at this point are most likely
to ignore them as sensational and unreliable.
The state’s students would be wise to take the same approach to
official state pronouncements about firearms and the Second Amendment.
California, as the saying goes, is entitled to its opinions. But it’s not entitled to its own facts. And when it comes to the Second Amendment, the facts are different
than the opinions expressed in the California-specific version of
McGraw-Hill’s social studies textbook.
Activist Wilma Mankiller is quoted as saying, “Whoever controls the education of our children controls our future.”
Year after year California chips away at the Second Amendment with its ever-expanding gun control regime.
If this continues unabated, the right to keep and bear arms will
effectively be nullified for future generations of Californians.
What’s worse – if California’s educational bureaucrats have their way
– is that those generations will be too ignorant of their liberties to
even understand what has been taken from them.
Our advice to these students is to exercise their First Amendment
rights to learn and speak the truth, and as soon as they are able,
exercise the right to vote in favor of those who respect their
fundamental liberties, rather than those who try to write them out of
history.
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for BAFTA LA, Getty Images
Piers
Morgan leaked a private message that he claimed was sent to him by
Meghan Markle in 2015, in which the then-actress said she was a "big
fan" of the TV host.
"When Meghan first slid into my DMs ... think it's fair to say she's probably not such a 'big fan' of mine now," Morgan wrote on Twitter.
Piers Morgan leaked a private message that he claimed Meghan Markle sent him back in 2015.
Writing
on Twitter, the TV host said: "In happier times... when Meghan first
slid into my DMs... think it's fair to say she's probably not such a
'big fan' of mine now."
He shared a photo
of a message that appeared to be from the then-actress, which read:
"Well hello there — thanks for the follow. Big fan of yours!"
The date of the message shows it was sent in September 2015 — 10 months before she met Prince Harry in July 2016.
Morgan has repeatedly criticized the Duchess of Sussex over the years.
"Like
all good actresses, Meghan knows how to distract attention and
self-promote herself as a 'charitable' person," he wrote in his recent column for the Daily Mail.
"Yet
what does it say about her that she would take a seaplane to go and see
complete strangers (after taking four transatlantic flights between the
UK and Canada in just seven weeks), yet has never once got on a plane
to go see her own father after he suffered a heart attack amid the
stress of her wedding?
"It says to me that Meghan Markle's
pretense to be the Queen of Hearts is built on the flimsiest of
self-interested sand. Oh, she's all heart for strangers when there are
cameras around," he added.
Before she became a member of the royal family, the pair seemed to be on friendly terms.
According to Morgan, he met Markle for drinks at his local pub back in 2016 after a year of exchanging messages on social media.
On "Good Morning Britain," Morgan recalled:
"To cut a long story short, we then spent the next year trading funny
messages, then she began emailing me the 'Suits' episodes early."
When
the duchess was in London to watch her friend Serena Williams play in
Wimbledon that summer, she reportedly asked to meet up.
"She sent me a message: 'Hey, I'm in town, do you want to meet up?' and I said 'Sure, come to my local pub for a pint," he said.
However, the TV host says Markle "ghosted" him after she met Prince Harry in July.
"I was friendly with Meghan but she ghosted me. I am not impressed," he told The Mirror.
"There seems to be a pattern of her doing that to people, it's a bit worrying," he added.
"From
my personal experience, she is someone I thought I was pretty matey
with and 'bang,' she met somebody more important and that was it, and
told other members of her show who I was friendly with to stop talking
to me," Morgan added, referencing Markle's former cast members on legal
drama "Suits."
"It is rather poor social climbing. The moment she
met Harry she cut everybody off who she thought might be no longer
desirable in her friend and family circle.
Prince Harry 'Cut Off' Close Friends During Meghan Markle's Pregnancy: 'There's a Lot of Resentment'
Stephanie Petit
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Many close to Prince Harry are concerned about the growing distance between him and the rest of the royal family — especially given that he has recently pulled away from many longtime friends.
A well-connected source tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story that the Queen’s grandson, 35, “cut off” many of his close pals “about six months into” Meghan Markle‘s pregnancy with son Archie, born May 6.
“Most no longer even have his cell number,” says the insider. “They totally understand that men often drift from their friends after marriage, but there’s still a lot of resentment because they had been so close for so long.”
One exception is Charlie van Straubenzee. The pals met at Ludgrove Prep School and have remained close ever since — in fact, they were all smiles attending each other’s weddings just months apart in 2018. Van Staubenzee is also a godfather to Archie. RELATED: Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Felt Their ‘Hand Was Forced’ to Leave Royal Family Amid ‘Bad Blood’
Neil Mockford/GC Images
Charlie van Straubenzee, Prince Harry and James Middleton attend the England vs. Australia match during the Rugby World Cup 2015 | Max Mumby/Indigo/GettyMeghan, 38, remains close to many of her friends from her pre-royal days. It is believed that Archie stayed in Canada with Meghan’s longtime pal Jessica Mulroney, whose three children served as page boys and a flower girl in the couple’s royal wedding in May 2018, while the Duke and Duchess of Sussex returned to London last week for engagements. In addition, Meghan’s Suits costar Abigail Spencer was spotted with the couple during a New Year’s Day hike. Both women also attended Meghan’s baby shower in Feb. 2019, held in New York City.
Meghan Markle and Jessica Mulroney | George Pimentel/WireImageA fracture between Prince Harry and Prince William began when the older sibling voiced concern that Harry and Meghan were moving too fast — and the split widened as the newlyweds increasingly felt ostracized from the rest of the family.
Those close to Prince Charles deny reports that the heir sought to slim-down the monarchy by squeezing out his younger son and daughter-in-law. “Charles has always envisioned working with both of his sons and their families in the future,” says a close source. The leaner monarchy that has been proposed by Charles for cost-cutting purposes “included Harry and whoever he married,” adds a palace insider.
Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry | Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/WireImageThe Duke and Duchess of Sussex released a statement last week announcing their intent to “carve out a progressive new role within this institution” — however, the public announcement came with little formal warning and left senior royals “hurt,” a royal source says.
But in this week’s cover story, a family friend tells PEOPLE that the couple felt they had no choice but to manage things the way they did, even as they went against the family’s “never complain, never explain” mantra.
“This is not how they wanted to handle this, but Meghan and Harry’s hand was forced,” says the friend. “There is so much bad blood in that family — it’s toxic.”
The friend adds, “If relationships had been better, things would have been different.”
Photo credit: Fanatic Studio / Gary Waters - Getty Images
piers morgan, meghan markle
