"You won't be able to tell," said Hao Li, a leading researcher on computer-generated video at USC who founded Pinscreen in 2015. "With further deep-learning advancements, especially on mobile devices, we'll be able to produce completely photoreal avatars in real time." The technology is a triumph of computer science that highlights the gains researchers have made in deep neural networks, complex algorithms that loosely mimic the thinking of the human brain.

Similar breakthroughs in artificial intelligence allowed University of Washington researchers to move President Obama's mouth to match a made-up script and the chipmaker Nvidia to train computers to imagine what roads would look like in different weather.

What used to take a sophisticated Hollywood production company weeks could soon be accomplished in seconds by anyone with a smartphone. Not available for a video chat? Use your lifelike avatar as a stand-in. Want to insert yourself into a virtual reality game? Upload your picture and have the game render your character.

Those are the benign applications.

Much of the focus has been on the exploding debt of the federal government… But on an individual level, US consumers have been extremely irresponsible as well.  In fact, one new survey has found that more than 80 percent of all American adults are currently in debt… It’s no secret that America is a nation that runs on debt, but it may surprise you to learn that the overwhelming majority of US adults owe money in some way, shape, or form.

According to new data from Comet, here’s how many Americans have debt at present:

80.9% of Baby Boomers

79.9% of Gen Xers

81.5% of Millennials

For most of us, it starts very early.  We were told that going into debt to get a college education would not be a problem because we would be able to pay those loans off with the good jobs we would get after graduation. Unfortunately, those good jobs never really materialized for many of us, and now millions of former college students are absolutely drowning in debt…

The university put out an email to announce the vacancy for the position of vice-provost of student affairs, which was previously held by Dr Arig al Shaibah, who also comes from a visible minority background. Provost and vice-president academic Carolyn Watters, who wrote the email, claimed that the move was to increase representation from “underrepresented groups”, CBC reports.

The publicly-funded university is only the latest organisation that receives Canadian taxpayer cash to exclude white candidates from positions based on their race. The CBC itself has been the subject of controversy in the past for ads that excluded white applicants.

“Let’s stop lying about this,” he said. “The calls we are hearing today for gun control have nothing to do with protecting Americans from violence. What you’re witnessing is a kind of class war. The left hates rural America, red America, gun-owning America, the America that elected Donald Trump. They hate them.

Progressives are still in charge of most of the major institutions in this country, and they despise the autonomy of an armed population. They want collective punishment for the sins of a few. They seek to obliterate a core constitutional right rather than trying to mitigate its downsides. They call it gun control, but it’s not. It’s people control. For the left, voters who can’t be controlled, can’t be trusted.”

When children are killed by guns, the news is emotionally multiplied with pseudojournalism "theatrics" to push for gun control while ignoring the far more devastating causes of preventable death in America. You see, while the Florida school shooting happened just once, the deaths of hundreds of Americans from FDA-approved prescription medications goes on every single day, without pause.

That's why, according to scientific research, at least 106,000 Americans are killed each year by legal medications which are prescribed by licensed doctors. The website PharmaDeathClock.com counts the number of people killed by toxic medicine every day, both in America and around the world. According to the site, chemotherapy alone kills an estimated 2700 people every day around the world.

Even more alarmingly, the Florida high school shooter had been treated with mind-altering medications - a common thread we almost always discover in school shootings. In nearly every school shooting over the last two decades, the shooter was taking psychiatric medications prescribed by a psychiatrist or a doctor. The dishonest media refuses to report this link for the simple reason that they earn billions of dollars a year in ad revenue from drug makers.

If you develop digestive problems after a change in diet, do you look for the cause in foods you always ate or the new ones you started eating? While the answer is obvious, this common sense is painfully uncommon when analyzing the new phenomenon of continual mass shootings: Many blame the long-present “foods” — guns in this case — and ignore the new diet whose embrace coincided with the problem. And part of what’s new is the widespread use of psychiatric drugs.

As a case in point, the Parkland, Florida, shooter who murdered 17 on Valentine’s Day, was on medication for emotional issues, his aunt related. This is now a familiar story, too. As WND.com’s David Kupelian put it Thursday, the following is par for the course: As information about a “perpetrator emerges, a relative confides to a newspaper that the ‘troubled youth’ who committed the mass murder was on psychiatric medications — you know, those powerful, little understood, mind-altering drugs with fearsome side effects including ‘suicidal ideation’ and even ‘homicidal ideation.’”

Yet, Kupelian laments, the media have little appetite for exploring this issue. Politicians don’t, either. Unlike with guns, legal drugs aren’t a sexy issue that can be used to scare people and win votes. Moreover, as The Guardian reported last year, “Pharmaceutical companies spend far more than any other industry to influence politicians,” having poured “close to $2.5 billion into lobbying and funding members of Congress over the past decade.” This dwarfs the “gun lobby’s” political contributions, mind you.

The country is slipping into a crisis and Germany, the bastion of stability in Europe, is becoming politically unstable. And every month the country continues to be run by a provisional government is another month that Germany doesn't have a voice in Europe or the world. This is by no means purely a domestic development. The party system is currently being turned upside down across Western democracies.

Owing to Germany's prosperity and the sedative power of its chancellor, it long appeared that Merkel had been spared by the international development. But the torturous wrangling to create a new government has now dashed that hope.

Suddenly, upheaval is everywhere.

The SPD’s 464,000 members will begin to vote on Tuesday on whether the center-left party should form a coalition government with Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and her Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). Party leaders reached a deal last week to renew a 'grand coalition', four months after Germany’s federal election last September. Now SPD party members must decide whether to accept the deal by March 4.

The comments come as a poll shows that support for the SPD, Germany’s second largest party, has reached an all time low. The survey, conducted by Infratest dimap, which surveyed 1,001 people, showed that support for the party fell to just 16 per cent, only one percentage point ahead of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, between 13-15 of February.

In what may be his last major speech as German foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel on Saturday told delegates to the Munich Security Conference that the European Union needed to develop a joint foreign policy agenda to counter growing assertiveness from countries such as China and Russia.

At the same time, he stressed the continued importance of US-European cooperation, saying now was not the time for "just pursuing individual national interests." Gabriel's comments come amid widespread European concern that the US, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, is increasingly turning its back on traditional trans-Atlantic partnerships.

He said that particularly Germany, which had learnt so much from the US about democracy, multilateralism and free trade after World War II, was "perturbed" at the new course taken by Washington "because we no longer recognize our America." "As a German, I know that without the United States I would not have grown up in a peaceful and democratic situation" says Germany's Foreign Minister in an interview with Deutsche Welle. "We need a European moment”.

Anxieties have been creeping in amid a global rise in xenophobia that was also felt in Poland. Matters escalated a few weeks ago when Israeli officials sharply criticized new Polish legislation that criminalizes blaming Poland as a nation for crimes committed by Nazi Germany. They accused Poland of seeking to use the law to whitewash the role of the Poles who helped Germans kill Jews during the war.

Amid Israeli criticism, a prominent Polish right-wing commentator used an offensive slur to refer to Jews. Rather than being punished, he was welcomed on TV programs, including a state television talk show where he and the host made anti-Jewish comments, including jokes about Jews and gas chambers. The negative comments just kept on coming.

A Catholic priest said on state TV that it was hard to like Jews, and his words were then quoted by the ruling party spokeswoman. An adviser to the president said he thought Israel's negative reaction to the law stemmed from a "feeling of shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust."