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Varieties

Trump Says He Will Quickly Release JFK, Robert Kennedy, MLK Assassination Files 

People attend a wreath-laying ceremony at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial marking MLK Day in Washington, Jan. 16, 2023. (AP)
People attend a wreath-laying ceremony at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial marking MLK Day in Washington, Jan. 16, 2023. (AP)
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Trump Says He Will Quickly Release JFK, Robert Kennedy, MLK Assassination Files 

People attend a wreath-laying ceremony at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial marking MLK Day in Washington, Jan. 16, 2023. (AP)
People attend a wreath-laying ceremony at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial marking MLK Day in Washington, Jan. 16, 2023. (AP)

President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday he would release classified documents in the coming days related to the assassinations of US President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Trump, who returns to the White House on Monday, promised on the campaign trail to release classified intelligence and law enforcement files on the 1963 assassination of JFK, as America's 35th president is widely known.

He had made a similar promise during his 2017 to 2021 term, and he did in fact release some documents related to JFK's 1963 slaying. But he ultimately bowed to pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, and kept a significant chunk of documents under wraps, citing national security concerns.

"In the coming days, we are going to make public remaining records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other topics of great public interest," Trump said at a rally in downtown Washington, the day before he takes office for a second, non-consecutive term.

Trump did not specify which documents would be released, and he did not promise a blanket declassification. King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated in 1968.

The JFK assassination, in particular, is a source of enduring fascination in the United States. The murder has been attributed to a sole gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Justice Department and other federal government bodies have reaffirmed that conclusion in the intervening decades. But polls show many Americans believe his death was a result of a wider conspiracy.

Trump's health and human services secretary-designate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of Robert Kennedy and nephew of JFK, has said he believes the CIA was involved in his uncle's death, an allegation the agency has described as baseless.

Kennedy Jr. has also said he believes his father was killed by multiple gunmen, an assertion that contradicts official accounts.

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Varieties

India Uses AI to Stop Stampedes at World's Biggest Gathering

As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
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India Uses AI to Stop Stampedes at World's Biggest Gathering

As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP

Keen to improve India's abysmal crowd management record at large-scale religious events, organizers of the world's largest human gathering are using artificial intelligence to try to prevent stampedes.
Organizers predict up to 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing that began Monday and runs for six weeks.
Deadly crowd crushes are a notorious feature of Indian religious festivals, and the Kumbh Mela, with its unfathomable throngs of devotees, has a grim track record of stampedes.
"We want everyone to go back home happily after having fulfilled their spiritual duties," Amit Kumar, a senior police officer heading tech operations in the festival, told AFP.
"AI is helping us avoid reaching that critical mass in sensitive places."
More than 400 people died after being trampled or drowned at the Kumbh Mela on a single day of the festival in 1954, one of the largest tolls in a crowd-related disaster globally.
Another 36 people were crushed to death in 2013, the last time the festival was staged in the northern city of Prayagraj.
But this time, authorities say the technology they have deployed will help them gather accurate estimates of crowd sizes, allowing them to be better prepared for potential trouble.
Police say they have installed around 300 cameras at the festival site and on roads leading to the sprawling encampment, mounted on poles and a fleet of overhead drones.
Not far from the spiritual center of the festival at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the network is overseen in a glass-panelled command and control room by a small army of police officers and technicians.
"We can look at the entire Kumbh Mela from here," said Kumar. "There are camera angles where we cannot even see complete bodies and we have to count using heads or torsos."
Kumar said the footage fed into an AI algorithm that gives its handlers an overall estimate of a crowd stretching for miles in every direction, cross-checked against data from railways and bus operators.
"We are using AI to track people flow, crowd density at various inlets, adding them up and then interpolating from there," he added.
The system sounds the alarm if sections of the crowd get so concentrated that they pose a safety threat.
'Makes us feel safe'
The Kumbh Mela is rooted in Hindu mythology, a battle between deities and demons for control of a pitcher containing the nectar of immortality.
Organizers say the scale of this year's festival is that of a temporary country -- with numbers expected to total around the combined populations of the United States and Canada.
Some six million devotees took a dip in the river on the first morning of the festival, according to official estimates.
With a congregation that size, Kumar said that some degree of crowd crush is inevitable.
"The personal bubble of an individual is quite big in the West," said Kumar, explaining how the critical threshold at which AI crowd control systems ring the alarm is higher than in other countries using similar crowd management systems.
"The standard there is three people per square foot," he added. "But we can afford to go several times higher than that."
Organizers have been eager to tout the technological advancements of this year's edition of the Kumbh Mela and their attendant benefits for visitors.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a devout Hindu monk whose government is responsible for organizing the festival, has described it as an event "at the confluence of faith and modernity".
"The fact that there are cameras and drones makes us feel safe," 28-year-old automotive engineer Harshit Joshi, one of the millions of visitors to arrive for the start of the festival, told AFP.