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SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017 Adelle Chua, Editor

Opinion

Joyce Pangco Pañares, Issue Editor

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MOVIES WRITTEN

BY MACHINES

EDITORIAL

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UNDER ATTACK

By Stephen L. Carter IF YOU’RE looking for a good movie, I suggest that you try “It’s No Game.” If you’ve never heard of it, that’s okay.

The film, just released this week, is a bit less than eight minutes long. It tells the story of a pair of Hollywood writers who learn that they are going to be replaced by an artificially intelligent algorithm that generates screenplays. By now I’m sure you’ve guessed the kicker: “It’s No Game” was itself written by an artificially intelligent algorithm that generates screenplays. Although the algorithm is still crude, we may be looking at the future.

The algorithm is called Benjamin— it chose its own name—and is the brainchild of director Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, an AI researcher who is a graduate student at New York University. Their idea was to feed a neural network lots of sci-fi screenplays and teleplays to give it a feel for dialogue, setting and plot, and then switch on the bot and see what came out.

Last year, as part of a competition, Benjamin scripted “Sunspring,” its first effort at a short sci-fi film. Three people who seem to be trapped somewhere—it feels like a bunker, but the screenplay calls it a “ship”— engage in quick dialogue that is at once utterly nonsensical and yet oddly charming. (Money quote: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”“That’s right.”) Slate magazine opined that the film “feels like a movie shot in a foreign language you once studied but never really understood.” I don’t entirely agree.

The unadorned screenplay is bizarre, but when actually directed and acted, “Sunspring” offers a weirdly compelling tale of passion and betrayal. A monologue at the end is incomprehensible on the page but burns with a certain life on the screen.

What we learn from this is that AI can’t really tell a good story yet, but a determined cast and director can sometimes make a lemon of a screenplay into somewhat watery lemonade. “It’s No Game” is a better film than “Sunspring” in part because the story is better. But so is the acting.

In particular, David Hasselhoff is by turns funny and creepy as an actor who has been infected by nanobots and voices the thoughts of an AI bot that just happens to be named Benjamin.

Yes, a lot of the dialogue is still nonsense, and the ballet number that Benjamin decided to insert toward the end (with an assist from an AI that chooses ballet moves) will try the patience of some viewers. But unlike “Sunspring,” the new film focuses on an actual idea. It’s nicely recursive: an AI-scripted movie about AI-scripted movies. And although the fear of the screenwriters and the robotic nature of the studio mogul are played for laughs, underlying the comedy is an unsubtle prediction: This day will come.

Which perhaps it will. In a paper last year, Google explained how it has trained a neural network to write what I suppose we might call short stories, apparently by feeding it a heavy diet of romance novels. They’re not great short stories. Not yet. A sample: “He was silent for a moment.

It was quiet for a moment. It was dark and cold. There was a pause. It was

REEDOM House, a human-rights organization, says global press freedom has hit a 13-year low and raises concerns over governments to clamp down on dissent.

“Political leaders and other partisan forces in many democracies— including the United States, Poland, the Philippines, and South Africa—attacked the credibility of independent media and factbased journalism, rejecting the traditional watchdog role of the press in free societies,” head researcher Jennifer Dunham said.

The study, available online at https://freedomhouse.org/ sites/default/files/FOTP_2017_booklet_FINAL_April28.pdf, was conducted among 199 countries. It said only 13 percent of the global population enjoyed a free press—defined as robust coverage of political news, guaranteed safety of journalists, minimal intrusion of the state in minimal affairs, and the absence of onerous legal or economic pressures on the press.

Forty-two percent live in partly free press while 45 percent live in places where the press is not free. The Philippines’ media environment is characterized as partly free.

According to Freedom House, politicians in democratic states exert an effort to erode press rights so they can shape news coverage and delegitimize media outlets.

It cites the United States example, whose press remains largely free but which is now threatened by the apparent war that its new president has waged on the media, calling them enemies of the people when they are just a bit critical of him and his team.

These findings seem close to home taken in the light of the Duterte administration’s threat to block the renewal of the license of broadcast network ABS-CBN and to go after the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Both news organizations have been castigated by President Rodrigo Duterte for supposed biased reporting.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines issued a statement saying only tyrants shut down the

news media. “By issuing such threats, Mr. Duterte is blatantly dangling the powers of the presidency and of the state, signaling his willingness to use these to stifle freedom of the press and of expression. And no, lest his mouthpieces attempt to excuse him by invoking hyperbole or his peculiar sense of humor, he was clearly not joking.”

In fact Mr. Duterte is quoted on page 16 of the Freedom House report. “The vultures, pretending to be journalists...” he said. To be sure, he is not the first chief executive who has berated the media. Former President Benigno Aquino III repeatedly berated journalists for focusing on the bad news instead of the good.

Before him, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had the police storm the editorial offices of the Daily Tribune for being a possible source of destabilization materials.

Philippine media are not and have never been perfect. They will continue to struggle with their realities and face big and small ethical decisions. Media organizations may also find differences within and among each other—but all that is immaterial compared to the fundamental goal that brings everybody to the industry in the first place, to put forth the truth, and arm people with information that they need to be truly free and self-governing.

These are challenging times, nationally and globally. Journalists must remind themselves of the reason why they have embraced this profession. It’s not about glorifying oneself or saving the world. It’s doing our job, plain and simple, and fending off anything or anyone that prevents us from doing so.

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PLAY NO GAMES WITH TROLLS

LONG STORY SHORT ADELLE CHUA TROLL is a word that has evolved. It used to refer to a doll with an ugly face and abundant neon-colored hair. I had one of those in high school. The traditional definition goes: It is a mythical, cave-

dwelling being depicted in folklore as either a giant or a dwarf, typically having a very ugly appearance.

Now trolls take on a different meaning altogether. They are those who sow discord on the internet. They start arguments and upset people by posting inflammatory, extraneous or off-topic messages in an

online community.

We’ve seen trolls at work. They are active, at whatever time of day, and you can easily spot them in, say, the comments section of online publications such as this one. They react to the article, or bash the author, or pick a fight with other commenters.

Sometimes they write things completely

unrelated to the article they are supposed to be reacting to. They talk tough.

It may be that they are just earnest social media users who feel too strongly about the world and the people around them. True, their comments are incendiary and controversial, often not based on hard facts or present the complete picture.

Sometimes, they are professionals. *** PETA’s A Game of Trolls starts this way—a bunch of paid hacks waging a war with others online. The exercise is akin to “bunong braso” where a battle is won by whoever makes the stronger Turn to B2

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THE ONLY REAL LESSON FROM TRUMP’S 100 DAYS THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD DOES NOT EXIST

By Pecier Decierdo THIS thing they call “the scientific method?” That does not exist.

Let me clarify.

Science is often methodical. In fact, a lot of the scientific research being done today follow step-by-step procedures.

This step-by-step procedure is often formulated at the very beginning of the research process.

There are several reasons why having a step-by-step procedure at the beginning of a research project is crucial.

First, a step-by-step procedure is important to formulate at the beginning of a research project because scientists don’t come up with their methods from scratch. Scientific progress happens because scientists build on, improve upon, and learn from the shortcomings of other scientists.

Second, research nowadays requires a lot of time and resources. To convince others, and themselves, that their research project is a worthy investment, researchers often need to present promising a step-by-step procedure to a panel that will decide whether or not to support their research.

Third, having a step-by-step procedure at the beginning is helpful because it can actually guide the researchers when they are doing their work, which can be very complex. The complexity can come from the fact that the researchers involved in the project may be scattered over different places.

Some of the researchers might be working in a lab, while others working on the same project might be in the field gathering samples. A research project can also take a long time, sometimes decades. The only way to keep track of the progress is by knowing which step in the procedure is the project currently in.

That said, let me now explain why the so-called “scientific method” does not exist.

In school, many of us are taught that science, all of it, follow a rigid step-bystep process. The worst diagrams of the scientific method show a linear procedure. Better diagrams show it as a loop, an ongoing process where the end result feeds into the next cycle, where the conclusion of a research project leads to more questions that can motivate the next round of research.

Other diagrams show loops within the process, illustrating that the scientific method is not linear, that it is dynamic.

Despite these improvements, it is important to note the concept of the scientific method is fiction. Here are several reasons why.

First, there is not a single step-by-step process that all scientists use in doing research. Instead of talking about “the scientific method,” we should talk about the methods of science. There are as many scientific methods as there are scientific discoveries. Each discovery in science followed a unique life story that lead to its being called a “discovery.” Each unique life story is a scientific method.

While many scientific discoveries were made in the laboratory and through experimentation, others were made by looking through a telescope, or by sifting through data gathered from the Internet, or going out into the field and recording observations of the behavior of animals. Other scientific discoveries were made using mostly mathematics or computer modeling.

Johannes Kepler figured out the laws governing the motion of planets by looking at charts of his mentor Tycho Brahe, and then drawing figures on a piece of paper. Jane Goodall discovered tool use in chimpanzees by chasing after chimps in the forests of Africa, and carefully recording what she saw.

Annie Jump Cannon contributed to our understanding of the stars by thinking up a classification scheme based on temperature and spectral type.

Second, even the most rigorous step-by-step procedures can be taken to completely new directions by pure accident.

Alexander Fleming discovered the penicillin because someone accidentally left a Petri dish and a window open in his lab. Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays when, while performing an experiment involving cathode rays, he noticed that a piece of fluorescent cardboard was lighting up from the other side of the room. When Robert

By Jonathan Bernstein PRESIDENTS have had worse weeks than the one ending Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, but most of the examples I can think of include resignation and worse.

So far this week, Trump has retreated or been defeated on his Mexico wall, on Nafta, on sanctuary cities, and on health care reform. The administration went through something like three positions on North Korea.

Trump rolled out a tax reform “plan” that not only has been ridiculed from all sides, but is also basically dead on arrival; Trump’s one-page of bullet points is vague enough that any Congressional product may resemble it, but he’s not likely to be a significant player in shaping what House and Senate Republicans choose to do.

Beyond that, Trump gave a series of interviews which mostly served to furnish up new humiliations for him, whether it was complaining to Reuters about how unexpectedly hard the job was or obsessing to AP about cable TV news. Other 100-days profiles featured White House staff and Trump friends basically saying the president is ... a moron?

“If you’re an adviser to him, your job is to help him at the margins,” said one Trump confidante. “To talk him out of doing crazy things.”

Advisers have tried to curtail Trump’s idle hours, hoping to prevent him from watching cable news or calling old friends and then tweeting about it. That only works during the workday, though—Trump’s evenings and weekends have remained largely his own.

Also this week, investigations on the Trump-Russia scandal continued with new revelations about former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and a misfire by Ivanka Trump (rapidly walked back) reminded everyone of Trump’s other big scandal involving conflicts of interest, nepotism, emoluments, and more.

I suspect I’m missing a few more.

The good news? It’s always

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This may not be deathless prose, but Google’s AI, which works by interpolating new sentences to link sentences it is provided, seems to have captured something of the genre.

Then there’s Heliograf, the Washington Post’s experimental newswriting bot. Heliograf made its debut providing brief updates from the 2016 Olympics in Rio de

Wilson and Arno Penzias accidentally detected the warm afterglow of the birth of the universe, they thought it was just noise caused by pigeons pooping on their radio telescope.

Third, different scientists have different styles in doing scientific research. Some scientists are neurotic with their methods, others less so. Some researchers are so freewheeling that when you watch them work, you’d think they were just playing.

Science requires just as much creativity as any art. Thinking that one simple, universal method encapsulates all scientific work does a disservice to the immense creativity of the best scientists. Worse, it can stifle the creativity of our best young scientists.

The concept of “the scientific method,” though sometimes useful, can also be a harmful oversimplification. It can make science seem formulaic and mechanical and can obscure the fact that science is a deeply human adventure of discovery.

I advise anyone who uses that fiction with great caution.

Decierdo is resident astronomer and physicist for The Mind Museum.

US President Donald Trump pumps his fist as he walks off Air Force One in Atlanta, Georgia on April 28. AFP

possible Trump could at least somewhat turn it around. He could hire a real chief of staff empowered to clean up the White House. He could start doing the work he’s supposed to be doing— learning about policy and process.

Yes, he does have some potential assets to build on if he is capable of doing so. For that matter, he could still divest his holdings and put an end to what is basically a lawless presidency.

Realistically, however? What’s happening is exactly what anyone with any sense knew what would happen if he became president— indeed, I agree with Ross Douthat that we’ve been relatively lucky that it hasn’t been worse. We can hope he’ll improve as he goes along, but there’s really no sign of it so far, and no realistic reason to expect it.

So what’s the big lesson in Trump’s first 100 days?

It’s the same one that’s been obvious all along: Republican party actors should have done whatever it took to defeat his nomination when they had the

chance. Nominations matter, and none more so than the presidential nomination, and they are worth fighting—hard— over.

That’s mainly because a party only gets so many opportunities at the presidency, and it’s a disaster for groups within the party to waste them—think Jimmy Carter and the Democrats’ failure to achieve important policy goals in 1977 to 1980. It’s also because of the electoral damage an unpopular presidency can inflict on the party, as we’ve seen in the last three midterm elections.

And it’s because presidential nominations are part of defining and (re-)creating the party itself, so that once a party is stuck with a nominee they are stuck with whatever that nominee does.

Especially if that nominee wins the White House. As a result of Trump, some groups will be elevated within the Republican Party and others will be sidelined; the party will come to stand for some policies and not others; some individuals who rose with

Trump will be empowered within the party or at least become credentialed as high-profile representatives of the party for years, maybe decades, to come.

We’ll never know whether another Republican would have won the 2016 election or not.

We’ll never know how, as a worstcase scenario for defeating Trump, how an ugly convention with the party “stealing” the nomination from him would have played out.

My guess is it would have been just fine; Trump’s a paper tiger, and those who swore they were loyal to him would have wound up happy to support any nominee against Hillary Clinton. I certainly can’t prove that, however.

But it doesn’t matter.

Nominating Donald Trump damaged the Republican Party, with the only remaining questions having to do with how bad that damage is. Party leaders let everyone else down by letting this happen. They deserve the blame, and their successors need to learn from this: Never again.

Bloomberg

Janeiro. Last fall the Post used the bot to write some of its election coverage. Heliograf’s stories, to be sure, are short, straightforward and not at all analytical. Still, the results are impressive—and pretty much impossible to distinguish from the work of the Post’s human staff. Bloomberg LP also uses automation technologies for its news products. I am not trying to raise some crazed AI alarm, and I don’t think that creative writers will be going out of business any time soon. On the other hand, we live in an era when an AI-created novel

was able to compete for a major literary prize in Japan. Titled “The Day the Computer Writes a Novel,” the book didn’t win, but did make it past the first round. (A judge said that the novel was weak among other things in its descriptions of characters.) So I suppose we had best stay tuned.

As for Benjamin, he remains capable of wacky nonsense that somehow sounds terribly Hollywood.

Here’s the bot’s own summary of what might be his next effort: THE SQUIRES OF THE LANDSCAPE Set in 1942 in a post-apocalyptic

world, the film follows the journey of a young man who falls in love with a sexy couple who have started to fall in love. As they fall in love, they learn that they are not alone in their own way. The film follows the two groups of people who reconnect with the world and their relationship and the secrets they live.

A post-apocalyptic love triangle featuring big secrets, all set in the era of World War II—what’s not to like? Any day now, Hulu and Netflix will start bidding for an eight-part miniseries. I’ll watch. Bloomberg

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It so damaged her relationship with her husband that, when they finally were set free and had a son, the marriage deteriorated. He started another family while she continued to go around the country helping the poor and doing her bit to make the world seem a little more just. *** Meanwhile, Hector is also confronted by ghosts—real ones, of personalities he just read or heard about. Among those killed during the regime were Bobby dela Paz, Eman Lacaba, Edgar Jopson. Hector doubts whether their stories are true, especially since his employer is in the business of telling the younger generation that those dark days were in fact the most glorious in the country’s history.

In the manner of A Christmas Carol, the ghosts visit Hector and convince him that their stories are not fiction, and that they were real, and that just because he was not yet around during those times does not mean they must be forgotten, or even negated. In fact, they must be told and retold.

These ghosts may as well speak to millennials, whose knowledge of what happened before their time is easily

take-down statement, whether or not it makes sense. They are employed by a shrewd businessman called Bimbam, whose family nurtures ties with a political family deposed decades ago but which is trying to stage a comeback in the present political scene.

Hector, played by Myke Salomon, is a thirtysomething employee in this trolling business. He sometimes questions the things they are made to write online, but he needs the job. He shares an apartment with his friends, and is one day surprised when his mother Tere (Upeng Fernandez) visits. In fact she asks if she could stay a few days—and her son is not too thrilled.

We soon learn the roots of Hector’s Mom issues. He felt she abandoned him in favor of her advocacy. Growing up, he envied other children who had their parents with them all the time. His mother was almost always away, not knowing when she would see him or even how long she could stay with him at any given time.

Aling Tere had reason to fight. She was tortured and raped by her captors.

shaped and swayed by what is available online. The scary thing is, anybody can make anything available online.

In the end, Hector quits his job and mends his relationship with his mother after learning of her harrowing past. He begins to understand that in fighting for the many, she was also fighting for him, and that there is no single way for a mother to show her love for her child. This happened to be Tere’s way.

As for trolling—it suffices that we know better than dignify their trade by replying or getting into arguments with them. It’s a futile act, because there is no room for healthy, reasonable discourse. The good news is that we get to pick our battles; engaging with trolls would be an utter waste of time and energy. In the end, the new definition is not such a far cry from the original after all: both are ugly.

A Game of Trolls was written by Liza Magtoto and directed by Maribel Legarda.

It will be shown again in September this year at the PETA-Phinma Theater in New Manila, Quezon City. It is also available for mobile staging around the country for the rest of the year. adellechua@gmail.com

World MYANMAR BUS PLUNGES INTO GORGE; 19 KILLED YANGON, Myanmar—Nineteen people were killed and 21 injured after their bus toppled into a ravine in eastern Myanmar, police said Saturday.

The bus was carrying around 40 passengers from central Bago province when it plunged off a highway near Myawaddy, a town on the Thai border, on Friday.

“Nineteen people were killed and 21 people were injured, while a few people were lucky to live,” Kyi Lin, the chief of police in Karen state, told AFP. “(The bus) fell down into a narrow and deep gorge,” he said, adding that police believe the driver lost control of the bus because of brake failure.

Police and local aid groups have brought the injured to nearby hospitals for urgent care and are making funeral arrangements for the dead, he added.

A hospital in Mae Sot, the Thai town across the border, took in seven patients from the crash who were in “critical condition,” a medical worker told AFP. Road accidents are common in impoverished Myanmar, whose transport network is in poor condition after decades of underinvestment by the junta that ruled the country for almost half a century until early 2011.

With 20.3 road fatalities per 100,000 people, Myanmar has the second most dangerous roads in Southeast Asia, according to data collected by the World Health Organization in a 2015 report.

AFP

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EU TO UNITE BEHIND BREXIT DEMANDS

RUSSELS, Belgium – European Union leaders will give an unprecedented show of unity at a summit in Brussels on Saturday as they adopt tough guidelines for two years of Brexit talks.

The heads of the remaining 27 countries are set to demand that Britain resolves the key divorce issues of “people, money and Ireland” before any talks on a future EU-UK trade deal can begin.

The united front comes hot on the heels of a war of words between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May over the negotiations.

EU President Donald Tusk said in a letter to the leaders that “before discussing our future, we must first sort out our past” and urged them to “unite around this key principle.”

In a further move that will rile London, the EU is also set to back automatic membership for North-

ern Ireland if it reunifies with Ireland, and call for Spain to have a say over any deal that affects Gibraltar.

They will also discuss for the first time the spoils of Brexit – the relocation of EU medical and banking agencies that are currently based in London.

The EU 27 have considerably toughened the guidelines since Tusk first unveiled them in March, shortly after May triggered the twoyear Brexit process.

Brussels officials insisted that the EU was more united than ever on Brexit, after years of bitter internal divisions on everything from the euro and migration to how to tackle growing euroskepticism.

May’s decision to call a general election in Britain on June 8, in a bid to shore up her mandate and strengthen her negotiating position, has only stiffened their resolve.

“There are issues on which member states agree and issues on which they disagree. Apparently on Brexit all 27 have the same position,” a senior EU official said on the eve of the summit.

The first of the key divorce issues the EU guidelines say Britain must resolve is the fate of three million EU citizens living in Britain and one million Britons on the continent, and what happens to their rights to work and claim benefits abroad.

The EU 27 also call for action to avoid a “hard border” between the Republic of Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland, amid fears that Brexit could undermine the peace process.

But the most touchy issue of all could be Britain’s exit bill, estimated at around 60 billion euros ($65 million), which mainly covers financial

commitments made by the bloc while Britain was a member.

The EU guidelines say that only when “sufficient progress” has been made on these issues can trade talks begin, with sources saying they hope to do that by the end of the year.

But they leave the criteria vague and so at Saturday’ summit the leaders will have their first serious discussion on what exactly constitutes sufficient progress.

The summit is nevertheless set to be “short” – a far cry from the bloc’s famed all-night marathons on the Greek debt crisis, the senior EU official said.

Actual Brexit talks are not expected to begin until after the British election, although the EU is set to give an official mandate to its chief negotiator Michel Barnier on May 22.

The run-up to the summit was marked by bad tempered exchanges between Merkel, Europe’s most powerful leader, and May. AFP

CHINA DEPORTS WOMAN CONVICTED OF ‘SPYING’ FOR US SAN FRANCISCO—An American woman convicted of espionage this week has been deported by China, a human rights group that campaigned for her release said Saturday, removing a source of tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Sandy Phan-Gillis was detained in March 2015 at the Macau border after visiting mainland China with a trade delegation from the Texas oil capital Houston.

She was accused of espionage, stealing state secrets and allegedly passing on intelligence to a third party. She was sentenced to three and a half years in prison and deportation on Wednesday.

On Friday, “Phan-Gillis was deported.

She arrived in Los Angeles the same day. She was met upon arrival by her husband and members of her family,” the Dui Hua group said in a statement.

Her return to the US comes three weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping met US President Donald Trump in Florida, amid a warming of ties between the two countries.

FIRST DIRECT LONDON-CHINA TRAIN ENDS TRIP BEIJING, China—Laden with whisky and baby milk, the first freight train linking China directly to the United Kingdom arrived in the eastern Chinese city of Yiwu Saturday after a 12,000-kilometer (7,500-mile) trip, becoming the world’s second-longest rail route.

The journey is the latest effort in China’s drive to strengthen trade links with western Europe along a modern-day “Silk Road” route.

“The train arrived at around 9:30am (0130 GMT) to Yiwu on Saturday,” the Yiwu Tianmeng Industry Company told AFP. The world’s top trading nation launched the “One Belt, One Road” strategy in 2013, and has since poured millions into constructing vast infrastructure links.

The train—which was also carrying pharmaceuticals and machinery—departed London on April 10 and passed through France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan during its 20-day trip before arriving in Yiwu in eastern Zhejiang province, a major wholesale center for small consumer goods.

The new route is longer than Russia’s famous Trans-Siberian railway, but about 1,000 kilometers shorter than the record-holding China-Madrid link, which opened in 2014. AFP

AUSTERITY PROTEST. Motorbike taxi drivers protest during a nationwide strike called by unions opposing austerity reforms in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Friday. AFP

SOUL-SEARCHING SCIENTISTS LABOR TO IMPART MESSAGE

BLASTED. An Iraqi policeman checks the site of a blast that took place the previous day in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Saturday. A car bomb attack on the traffic police compound in central Baghdad killed at least three people and wounded seven, security and medical sources said. AFP

VIENNA, Austria—“We mortals do not understand you.” That’s the heartfelt cry from former United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres, pleading with scientists to use everyday language to help counter growing public mistrust.

Figueres was giving one explanation of why scientists are struggling to get their message across to a sceptical public at a major conference in Vienna this week.

Delegates made time for soul-searching at the meeting in the Austrian capital, conceding that they bear part of the blame for alienating some people.

Just days after a historic March for Science in Washington, the experts owned up to failures including remoteness and condescension—and operating in an “echo chamber of likeminded people.”

“I think it’s the conceitedness, in a way,” said Heike Langenberg, chief editor of the journal Nature Geoscience.

“The problem is that scientists have not spoken at an even level with people who are out there,” she told AFP on the sidelines of a European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting of more than 14,000 experts in 22 fields.

“They have tended to give long speeches and not listen.... I think they have underestimated intelligence and overestimated knowledge.”

This has contributed to an erosion of

support for science since a high point in the 1960s when humans planted a flag on the Moon.

Led by the United States, a trend has grown since then to challenge certain basic tenets that enjoy overwhelming expert consensus – the benefits of childhood vaccination, evidence for species evolution, and the perils of global warming.

One prominent doubter, Donald Trump, is now in the White House. He has described climate change as a hoax and linked childhood vaccines to autism.

Since taking office, Trump has moved to curb science spending and gag government researchers.

A 2012 study in the American Sociological Review reported a dramatic loss of scientific faith among US conservatives, from nearly 50 percent who reported a “great deal” of trust in 1974 to only 35 percent four decades later.

Liberal views have consistently hovered around the 50-percent mark.

The “politicization” of science is a major part of the problem, conference delegates said.

Not only do politicians cherrypick convenient findings, so creating the impression that research is partisan, but also some scientists have trespassed into what Langenberg described as the “public bazaar of opinions.” AFP

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TRUMP’S ‘CHAOTIC DISCOVERY OF POWER’ W

ASHINGTON—From his resounding setbacks in Congress to his stunning policy flip-flops, Donald Trump has faced a steep learning curve in his opening months at the White House.

Although the new United States president has shown a capacity to change both his tone and positions, he has struggled to convey a clearly articulated worldview.

With the arrival of the symbolic milestone of 100 days in power on Saturday, a cold, hard reality is setting in for the billionaire businessman who promised supporters he would “win, win, win” for them.

At this stage of his presidency, Donald Trump is the least popular leader in modern US history – even if his core supporters still fully back him.

The 70-year-old president, whose election victory unleashed a political shockwave around the world, is still clinging to the take-no-prisoners, unpredictable, impulsive style that made him a property mogul and reality TV star.

But the onetime anti-establishment candidate who promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington appears to have recognized – with a mix of naivete and craftiness – that he has one of the most difficult jobs in the world.

In just his first few weeks in office, Trump suffered some crippling blows. Federal courts halted his proposed travel ban and Congress failed to adopt health care reform.

“Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” he said during his efforts to have Obamacare – his Democratic predecessor’s signature domestic policy achievement – repealed and replaced.

And following talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping about North Korea, he said that “after listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.”

The demands and constraints of the Oval Office – where every word uttered counts – are quite different from the daily stump speeches Trump made on the campaign trail.

Where to turn for advice? What kind of relationship to build with Congress, even when it’s con-

trolled by his own party? How much latitude to afford the usually powerful State and Defense departments?

All of his predecessors have said it: moving into the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a shock to the system.

“There’s just something about this job as president every president faces – you know, that you think one thing going in and then the pressures of the job or the realities of the world, you know, are different than you thought,” George W. Bush said recently.

Aside from his unwavering penchant for morning tweetstorms, often influenced by the ebb and flow of headlines on Fox News, Trump has already changed.

In the choice of his teams as well as in some negotiations, a sort of “presidentialization” seems to be unfolding – albeit haltingly.

Elevated to the highest office in the United States with no prior political, diplomatic or military experience, Trump says his everevolving approach works.

“I do change and I am flexible, and I’m proud of that flexibility,” he said shortly before authorizing air strikes against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over what Washington says was a sarin gas attack on civilians.

On China, Russia and NATO, his about-faces have reassured some Americans to some extent, as well as some of Washington’s allies.

“When a president moves from being so wrong to being so right on such important questions, the sensible response is not to carp but to celebrate, however cautiously,” The Washington Post said in an editorial, reminding readers of the harsh, dark tone of Trump’s inaugural address.

But his approach also includes risks.

From Syria to North Korea, what is the risk of dragging the United States into a military conflict with an unpredictable outcome, a situ-

BATISTA SET TO BE RELEASED FROM BRAZIL PRISON RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil—Fallen tycoon Eike Batista, who rose to become Brazil’s wealthiest man before surrendering to face corruption charges, may be released from prison while awaiting his trial.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes ruled Friday that though Batista’s alleged crimes were serious, they did not warrant custody during legal proceedings.

The 60-year-old former oil and mining magnate is alleged to have paid a $16.5 million bribe to ex-Rio de Janeiro state governor Sergio Cabral, already behind bars for allegedly taking bribes over World Cup and Olympics infrastructure projects.

His downfall represented a new landmark in a series of sprawling but interconnected corruption scandals enveloping much of Brazil’s elite.

He was incarcerated on January 30 after giving himself up to authorities. AFP

DAD-IN-LAW OF ‘EL CHAPO’ GETS 10-YEAR SENTENCE

US President Donald Trump gives a thumbs-up after arriving on Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC on Friday, following a trip to Atlanta, Georgia. AFP ation Trump warned against on the campaign trail?

How would the Republican president react if a major terror attack were to happen on US soil, as it did on 9/11?

Both style and substance reveal that Donald J. Trump is an American

president like no other before him.

In a disconcerting interview given to Time magazine in March, in which Trump defended his controversial, far-fetched or just plain false statements one by one, he said: “What am I going to tell you?

I tend to be right.” AFP

POPE FRANCIS SET TO PRAY WITH EGYPT’S CHRISTIANS

HEADING. Egyptian security forces keep watch as people walk outside the stadium where Pope Francis will celebrate a mass on Saturday in Cairo. Pope Francis is set to lead a mass for Egypt’s small Catholic community as he visits the country in support of its Christians following a series of deadly church bombings. AFP

CAIRO, Egypt—Pope Francis is set to lead a mass for Egypt’s small Catholic community on Saturday as he visits the country in support of its Christians following a series of deadly church bombings.

The spiritual leader of the world’s almost 1.3 billion Catholics will lead mass for some 30,000 believers in a stadium on the outskirts of Cairo.

The event will bring together members of all Catholic rites in the country – Coptic, Armenian, Maronite and Melkite.

Egypt’s Catholic community is estimated at about 272,000.

The Argentine pontiff will give a homily during the mass, which is to be held in Arabic and Latin.

After lunching with Egyptian bishops, the pope will meet seminarians before wrapping up his 27-hour visit in the afternoon.

Earlier this week, 23-year-old student Karim Saber said he was impatient to see the pope in his country.

“By coming to Egypt, the pope is showing us that nothing can prevent us from praying, including terrorism,”

he said, referring to recent church bombings.

The bombings killed 29 people in Cairo in December, and 45 people north of the capital earlier this month. All were claimed by the Islamic State group.

Ibrahim Isaac, the Catholic Coptic patriarch in Egypt, has said the papal visit represents “moral and spiritual support” at a time when “the succession of incidents is causing a form of frustration among the people, and sometimes anger.”

Christians, who make up around 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 92 million, have long complained of marginalization in the Muslim-majority country.

Egypt has the largest Christian community of the Middle East. While most of Egypt’s Christians are Coptic Orthodox, Roman Catholics have also lived in the country since the fifth century.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Catholic orders in Egypt – Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits – developed a network of schools, hospitals and charitable activities. AFP

HERMOSILLO, Mexico—A Mexican judge has sentenced the father-in-law of drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to more than a decade in prison, Mexican officials said Friday.

Ines Coronel Barreras, 49, was accused of smuggling marijuana to the United States and was arrested in the town of Agua Prieta, which borders the US state of Arizona.

The judge condemned Coronel – the father of Guzman’s third wife, former beauty queen Emma Coronel – to 10 years, five months and nine days in prison, in addition to a fine equivalent to 15,930 pesos ($847).

The US Treasury Department had designated Coronel as a “key operative” of the Sinaloa drug cartel prior to his 2013 arrest.

He was detained alongside four other men, with police also seizing two vehicles, four rifles, one gun and 255 kilograms of marijuana.

Guzman – the powerful Sinaloa cartel’s notorious leader accused of running one of the world’s biggest drug empires – is currently detained in Manhattan where he is awaiting trial. AFP

MARINES RETURN TO AFGHANISTAN’S TENSE HELMAND ASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan— United States Marines returned to Afghanistan’s volatile Helmand province Saturday, the first to be deployed in the wartorn country since NATO forces ended their combat role in 2014.

Commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan General John Nicholson attended a handover ceremony marking the return of the prestigious force in the poppy-growing southern province, where American forces faced heated fighting until 2014, an AFP photographer said.

Some 300 Marines will form part of NATO’s train, assist and advise mission in the province, which for years was the centrepiece of the US and British military intervention in Afghanistan – only for it to slip deeper into a quagmire of instability.

The ceremony marking the deployment, first announced in January, came one day after the resurgent Taliban announced the launch of their “spring offensive,” heralding a fresh fighting season.

The Taliban effectively control or contest 10 of the 14 districts in Helmand, the deadliest province for British and US troops over the last decade and blighted by a huge opium harvest that helps fund the insurgency. AFP