US government ‘chipping away’ at press freedom

US government ‘chipping away’ at press freedomDW

 

Inheritance disputes surge to record levels as heirs fight for spoils Financial Times

Was this what became of socialism?Internationalen via machine translation

 

Protecting the press: How Section 702 of FISA must be reformed Freedom of the Press Foundation

China Is Rapidly Overtaking the United States as the World’s Scientific Superpower Futurism

Shaun Rein: “The Longer Iran War Lasts The More China Wins” The Singju Post

China Is Planning Decades Ahead on Clean Energy. The U.S. Has Other Priorities. Council on Foreign Relations

Orban’s remarks that ‘China is simply unbeatable’ in interview draw attention on the Chinese internetGlobal Times

aguar Land Rover halts production at its biggest car factory for a fortnight due to parts supply issue as wider UK vehicle outputs hit the rocks Daily Mail

UK ‘weeks away’ from medicine shortages if Iran war continues, experts say The Guardian

Facial Recognition Is Spreading Everywhere

IEEE Spectrum – “Facial recognition technology (FRT) dates back 60 years. Just over a decade ago, deep-learning methods tipped the technology into more and menacing—territory. Now, retailers, your neighbors, and law enforcement are all storing your face and building up a fragmentary photo album of your life. Yet the story those photos can tell inevitably has errors. FRT makers, like those of any diagnostic technology, must balance two types of errors: false positives and false negatives. 

There are three possible outcomes. In best-case scenarios—such as comparing someone’s passport photo to a photo taken by a border agent—false-negative rates are around two in 1,000 and false positives are less than one in 1 million. In the rare event you’re one of those false negatives, a border agent might ask you to show your passport and take a second look at your face. But as people ask more of the technology, more ambitious applications could lead to more catastrophic errors. 

Let’s say that police are searching for a suspect, and they’re comparing an image taken with a security camera with a previous “mug shot” of the suspect. Training-data composition, differences in how sensors detect faces, and intrinsic differences between groups, such as age, all affect an algorithm’s performance. 

The United Kingdom estimatedthat its FRT exposed some groups, such as women and darker-skinned people, to risks of misidentification as high as two orders of magnitude greater than it did to others. What happens with photos of people who aren’t cooperating, or vendors that train algorithmson biased datasets, or field agents who demand a swift match from a huge dataset? Here, things get murky…”

Bettina Köster, a Leading Voice in Berlin’s 1980s Avant-Garde, Dies at 66 - Kaltes Klares Wasser” (“Cold Clear Water”)

 We were strong women, we wanted to make a point of that.” Gudrun Gut and Beate Bartel interviewed

Kaltes Klares Wasser” (“Cold Clear Water”)

BETTINA KÖSTER: “EVERYTHING CAME EASILY. WE NEVER PUT AN EFFORT INTO GETTING ANY DEALS”

Bettina Köster, a Leading Voice in Berlin’s 1980s Avant-Garde, Dies at 66

She sang lead for influential all-female bands, including Malaria!, and toured in the U.S. and elsewhere with groups like the Birthday Party and New Order.

• April 1, 2026

Bettina Köster, a singer, songwriter, saxophonist and leading figure in the cultural vanguard of 1980s West Berlin, died on March 16 at her home in Capaccio, Italy. She was 66.

Her friend and former bandmate Gudrun Gut announced the death on social mediabut did not provide a cause.

During the Cold War, West Berlin was a 185-square-mile patch of West Germany deep inside the Communist east, encircled by walls and armed guards and kept alive by government subsidies. Large sections of the city still bore the bullet holes and rubble fields of World War II.

By the late 1970s, it had become a refuge and a destination for artists like Ms. Köster, who had lived in West Berlin as a student. Young Germans went there to avoid the military draft and stayed because of the cheap rent. Underground spaces did triple duty as music venues, art galleries and informal squats.

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Cut off from the West, a native, wholly original culture of D.I.Y. creativity flourished among the ruins.

“West Berlin, especially with the Wall around it, was basically like a shabby but fun private club,” Ms. Köster said in a 2017 interview with the website Jungle World. “None of us had any money, so there was a great sense of solidarity.”

After playing in a number of short-lived bands, Ms. Köster joined Ms. Gut and three other women in 1979 to form Mania D, one of the few all-female bands in the city. Though every member of the group played an instrument, one of the founding principles was that they should each play something else: Trained on classical guitar, Ms. Köster picked up the saxophone.

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“We just traipsed through the tulips and made music,” she told Kaput magazine in 2021.

Like much of the scene, Mania D was resolutely anti-commercial: They rarely recorded their performances and released just one single, “Track 4,” a recording that came about almost accidentally, during a 1981 studio visit with the famed BBC D.J. John Peel.

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Mr. Peel called the quintet the “queens of noise” and said the unnamed song that they had performed on the air was among his favorites that year.

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Bettina Köster in the 2017 video, “Der Novak.” In the 1980s. a D.J. for the BBC crowned her “the queen of noise.”Credit...Video: brehmer@filmroyal.de/camera, Axel Warnstedt; photo: Peter Gruchot.

In addition to performing in the band, Ms. Köster and Ms. Gut opened a clothing store, Eisengrau, where they also sold records, gave haircuts, hosted art shows and performed. It became a cultural hub for the city’s bustling avant-garde.

In 1981, the two split off from Mania D to form Malaria!, named for a stray cat they had taken in. The band was more refined and focused, reflecting the shift from the scruffiness of punk to the dark melodies of post-punk and new wave.

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Fitting their cool, distant stage presence, the women dressed entirely in black — riding boots, jodhpurs, tight tunics — and wore red carnations, the symbol of the Socialist movement.

The band toured extensively in Europe and the United States, opening for or pairing with groups like Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Birthday Party and New Order.

In New York City, they opened for John Cale, a founding member of the Velvet Underground, at the Mudd Room and for Nina Hagen, one of the German punk scene’s pioneers, at Studio 54.

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The band had a single hit, “Kaltes Klares Wasser” (“Cold Clear Water”), though “hit” is relative — it didn’t chart, and its popularity remained within the confines of the post-punk universe.

But as a distillation of the Berlin post-punk sound, “Kaltes Klares Wasser” became a favorite of critics and fans, and even today is heralded as a touchstone for the era.

“We never thought that we sounded like the Eighties,” Ms. Köster told Kaput. “The Eighties sounded like us.”

Bettina Köster was born on June 5, 1959, in Herford, a town in central West Germany, where she studied classical guitar and piano as a child.

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When she was 10, she moved to West Berlin with her family, but she returned to West Germany six years later. In 1978, she was drawn back to the city, this time to study at the College for the Arts (now the University of the Arts).

Her time atop the West Berlin underground scene was brief. In 1983, she relocated to New York City. Disenchanted with making music, she left Malaria! the next year.

For a while, Ms. Köster worked as a house cleaner, and then as an accountant for Danceteria, a nightclub in the Flatiron district. Eventually, she became a market analyst for a German bank.

Ms. Köster’s re-entry into music came slowly. During the late 1980s, she recorded in private and rarely performed in public, she told TAZ, a German news site, in 2017.

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She composed the music for the 12-minute-long movie “Peppermills” (1997), which won an award for best short film at the 1998 Berlin International Film Festival.

In 2006, she and Jessie Evans, a musician from San Francisco, released the album “Autonervous.” Three years later, Ms. Köster released her first solo project, “Queen of Noise.” Another solo album, “Kolonel Silvertop,” appeared in 2017.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Köster left New York in the 2000s for a peripatetic life in Europe, living for stretches in Italy and Austria before settling in Capaccio, a town south of Naples.

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In 2021, she told the German magazine L.Mag that she identified as nonbinary.

She never made much money, and nearly went bankrupt financing her last album. But she insisted that it was worth it.

“You have to be prepared to maybe even go hungry sometimes,” she told TAZ. “But in return, that sacrifice allows you an artistic freedom that’s otherwise impossible. You have to decide: Do I want to live to create? Or create to live?”

Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk