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Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 12/17/2020 9:43:14 AM Wednesday 12/16/20 This material is distributed by Ghebi LLC on behalf of Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, and additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia. 'Major Leap’: US Air Force Uses Al to Copilot Military Plane for First Time in History - Photos by Mary F. Artificial intelligence (Al) refers to the ability of machines to conduct tasks that usually require human intelligence, such as learning from experience, making predictions, recognizing patterns and other problem-solving functions. The US Air Force (USAF) has revealed it used Al on a military aircraft for the first time ever during a training flight this week. In a Tuesday news release, the USAF confirmed that an Al algorithm was used to control the sensor and navigation systems of a U-2 Dragon Lady reconnaissance plane during a training flight at Beale Air Force Base in California. The aircraft used during the test is assigned to the 9th Reconnaissance Wing at the air base and is a single-jet engine, high-altitude craft that provides all-weather intelligence gathering. “This flight marks a major leap forward for national defense as artificial intelligence took flight aboard a military aircraft for the first time in the history of the Department of Defense. The Al algorithm, developed by Air Combat Command’s U-2 Federal Laboratory, trained the Al to execute specific in-flight tasks that would otherwise be done by the pilot,” the USAF wrote in the release. “The flight was part of a specifically constructed scenario pitting the Al against another dynamic computer algorithm in order to prove both the new technology capability, and its ability to work in coordination with a human,” the release added. According to the Air Force, the Al system, named ARTUp, was used for “sensor employment and tactical navigation.” The system’s main responsibility was identifying enemy launchers. The plane was still steered by the pilot, and no weapons were involved. However, after takeoff, sensor control was handled by ARTUp, which had learned how to achieve sensor objectives from “over a half-million computer-simulated training iterations.” “We know that in order to fight and win in a future conflict with a peer adversary, we must have a decisive digital advantage,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. said in the release. “Al will play a critical role in achieving that edge, so I’m incredibly proud of what the team accomplished. We must accelerate change and that only happens when our Airmen push the limits of what we thought was possible.” The Al technology was designed to be easily transferable to other systems and is expected to transform air and space domains, the release notes. “Blending expertise of a pilot with capabilities of machine learning, this historic flight directly answers the National Defense Strategy’s call to invest in autonomous systems,” Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett noted. “Innovations in artificial intelligence will transform both the air and space domains.” Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 12/17/2020 9:43:14 AM Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 12/17/2020 9:43:14 AM According to an article by Popular Mechanics. ARTUp is based on an open-source software algorithm called pZero. The publicly accessible algorithm was designed by the Al research company DeepMind, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, the Washington Post reported. This material is distributed by Ghebi LLC on behalf of Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, and additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia. Health Worker in Alaska Experiences Serious Allergic Reaction to Pfizer's COVID-19 Vaccine - Reports by Mary F. On December 11, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the first emergency use authorization for a COVID-19 vaccine to a drug produced by Pfizer and BioNTech. Last week, the vaccine started being administered in the UK. US health care workers began receiving the vaccine this week. A health worker in Alaska reportedly had a serious allergic reaction after receiving Pfizer’s COVID-10 vaccine on Tuesday. According to three people familiar with the unidentified individual’s health, the health worker was hospitalized after receiving the vaccine, according to the New York Times. The individual, who had no history of drug or any other types of allergies, was still in the hospital under observation as of Wednesday morning. Officials believe that the health worker's reaction to the vaccine is similar to the anaphylactic reactions two health workers in Britain experienced after receiving the same vaccine last week. Anaphylaxis is a life-threatening event that involves impaired breathing and a drop in blood pressure seconds or minutes after exposure to an allergen. Both health workers in Britain, who have since recovered, had a history of allergic reactions. In fact, both people, a 49-year-old woman with a history of egg allergies and a 40-year-old woman with allergies to several different types of medications, carried EpiPen-like devices to inject themselves with epinephrine, which helps relax muscles blocking airways, in the event that they experienced allergic reactions. After the two health workers in Britain suffered reactions from the vaccine, Dr. June Raine, chief executive of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the United Kingdom, released new guidance related to the Pfizer vaccine. “We have this evening (Wednesday 9 December 2020) issued updated guidance to COVID-19 vaccination centers about the management of anaphylaxis,” the statement reads. “Any person with a history of anaphylaxis to a vaccine, medicine or food should not receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. A second dose should not be given to anyone who has experienced anaphylaxis following administration of the first dose of this vaccine. Anaphylaxis is a known, although very rare, side effect with any vaccine. Most people will not get anaphylaxis, and the benefits in protecting people against COVID-19 outweigh the risks”. The FDA has also warned people with allergies to consult their doctors to ensure they are not allergic to any components of the vaccine before receiving it. Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 12/17/2020 9:43:14 AM Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 12/17/2020 9:43:14 AM “Do not administer Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals with known history of a severe allergic reaction (e.g., anaphylaxis) to any component of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine,” the FDA writes in its guidance. The Trump administration is currently negotiating with Pfizer to secure more COVID-19 vaccines for the US this spring in addition to the 100 million the company has already pledged to supply, federal health officials confirmed Wednesday. Over the weekend, the company began shipping over 180.000 doses of the vaccine across 50 states. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he is “very optimistic” about negotiations, the Washington Post reported. “We are working with them to provide them whatever assistance now that they have identified some of the production challenges they got,” Azar noted at a Wednesday briefing. This material is distributed by Ghebi LLC on behalf of Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, and additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia. Astronomers Discover Bizarre Exoplanet That Behaves Like Elusive Planet Nine by Mary F. Astronomers have yet to find Planet Nine, a hypothetical planet in the outer region of the solar system. According to some scientists’ calculations, this hypothetical planet could have a mass of about 10 times that of Earth and an elongated orbit 20 times farther from the sun on average than Neptune. In a new study published in The Astronomical Journal, researchers outline novel information about an exoplanet, known as HD 106906 b, that appears to behave similarly to the elusive Planet Nine. Although HD 106906 b was first discovered in 2013 using the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers only recently discovered information about the planet’s orbit using the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990. The recent study reveals that HD 106906 b is 336 light-years from Earth and orbits around a pair of host stars. The exoplanet is also massive, with a size 11 times that of Jupiter. “The exoplanet resides extremely far from its host pair of bright, young stars — more than 730 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. This wide separation made it enormously challenging to determine the 15,000-year-long orbit in such a short time span of Hubble observations. The planet is creeping very slowly along its orbit, given the weak gravitational pull of its very distant parent stars,” the Hubble Space Telescope facility explained in a news release. Astronomers were also surprised to learn that the exoplanet has an elongated and inclined orbit, which is unlike any of the other known planets in our solar system. “To highlight why this is weird, we can just look at our own solar system and see that all of the planets lie roughly in the same plane,” the study's lead author, Meiji Nguyen of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement, the release noted. “It would be bizarre if, say, Jupiter just happened to be inclined 30 degrees relative to the plane that every other planet orbits in. Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 12/17/2020 9:43:14 AM Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 12/17/2020 9:43:14 AM This raises all sorts of questions about how HD 106906 b ended up so far out on such an inclined orbit.” Researchers believe that the exoplanet may have formed close to its host stars.