Latest news with #LEB
Filipino Times
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Filipino Times
DMW, Legal Education Board partner to provide legal aid to OFWs
The Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) and the Legal Education Board (LEB) have partnered to bring accessible legal assistance to overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) while training future lawyers in the practice of labor rights and social justice. Migrant Workers Secretary Hans Leo Cacdac and LEB Chairperson Jason Barlis signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) on Monday at DMW Central Office in Mandaluyong City. Under the agreement, law schools will open their legal aid clinics to distressed OFWs. In return, law students will gain hands-on experience working on actual migrant cases, transforming their legal education into a platform for advocacy. 'The legal worry that we can take away from our OFWs will go a very long way. The law is the best weapon against exploitation, anxiety, and all the things that can make OFWs unproductive and distressed,' Cacdac said. LEB Chairperson Jason Barlis said the partnership not only brings justice closer to OFWs but also reshapes legal education into a purpose-driven experience. 'It's about making sure that the promise of access to justice reaches even those who are miles away from home. On the other hand, it also gives students a hands-on, purpose-driven experience that cannot be taught inside the classroom. It's in these moments that they feel the law come alive because it is applied in real life,' he added.
Time of India
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Israel marks 60 years since Eli Cohen's public hanging by recovering spy's files from Syria; Here's what was brought back
FILE - Elie Cohen, far left, head of an Israeli spy ring, listens as he is sentenced to death by a special military court in Damascus, Syria, May 8, 1965. (AP Photo/LEB) Sixty years after Israeli spy Eli Cohen was hanged in Damascus, Israel has recovered 2,500 personal and intelligence items held by Syria's security services. The documents, photographs, and belongings—retrieved in a secret Mossad operation—offer a rare glimpse into Cohen's espionage career and the circumstances leading to his execution in 1965. The items were presented to Cohen's widow during a ceremony marking the anniversary of his death. His body remains missing, but Israel vows to continue searching. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Worn folders, keys, and a widow's plea Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads The spy who shaped a war Still searching for a grave Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Eli Cohen: Legacy of a spy Israel has retrieved the entire Syrian intelligence archive on its most celebrated spy, Eli Cohen , 60 years after he was executed in public in Damascus . The trove includes around 2,500 documents, photographs, handwritten letters, forged passports, and personal effects seized by Syrian intelligence after his arrest in 1965.'In a complex covert operation by the Mossad , in cooperation with a strategic partner service, the official Syrian archive on Eli Cohen was brought to Israel,' said the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, as reported by announcement was timed with a ceremony commemorating six decades since Cohen's hanging. Speaking at the event in Jerusalem, Netanyahu and Mossad director David Barnea presented the recovered items to Cohen's widow, Nadia the items were Cohen's original will, written shortly before his death, and letters he had penned to his family while operating undercover in Syria. Also returned were surveillance photos, instructions from Mossad, and a letter authorising Rabbi Nissim Andabo to spend Cohen's final hours with recovered material provides a deeply human view of the man behind the mission. Keys to his Damascus apartment—taken by Syrian intelligence during his arrest—were among the items presented. So were the false identity documents he used to infiltrate the Syrian elite under the alias Kamel Amin delivered to Israel contained worn folders stuffed with handwritten notes. These included directives from Mossad, surveillance reports, and maps detailing Syrian military sites, particularly in Quneitra.A bright orange folder marked 'Nadia Cohen' contained years of efforts by his widow to secure his release. It included her personal appeals to world leaders and the Syrian president, begging for born in Egypt, became one of Israel's most successful intelligence operatives. He joined Mossad in the early 1960s and managed to deeply embed himself in Syrian society. Over four years, he rose to the position of adviser to the Syrian defence intelligence he passed to Israel played a pivotal role in the country's swift victory in the 1967 Six Day War , especially in the capture of the Golan in January 1965, Syrian counterintelligence caught Cohen transmitting radio messages. He was tried and hanged in Marjeh Square on 18 May 1965. His body has never been returned, despite repeated attempts by told Nadia Cohen during the ceremony: 'We conducted a special operation by the Mossad, by the State of Israel, to bring his (Eli Cohen's) archive, which had been in the safes of the Syrian intelligence for 60 years.'He added, 'Eli is an Israeli legend. He's the greatest agent Israeli intelligence has had in the years the state existed. There was no one like him.'Despite this significant recovery, the mission is not over. Nadia Cohen told Netanyahu that what matters most is bringing her husband's remains back to Prime Minister promised, 'We are continuing to work on locating Cohen's body.'Just last week, Israel recovered the remains of Sgt. First Class Zvi Feldman, an Israeli soldier missing since the 1982 Lebanon War. He was found 'in the heart of Syria' through a separate special called the archive recovery 'another step in advancing the investigation to locate the burial place of our man in Damascus.''We will continue to work to locate and return all the missing, the fallen and the kidnapped,' he Cohen's story continues to hold national significance. The spy's life was dramatized in Netflix's The Spy, starring British actor Sacha Baron Cohen. But beyond entertainment, his legacy is deeply rooted in Israel's intelligence said the recovered archive 'will educate generations, and expresses our tireless commitment to returning all of our missing persons, prisoners of war and hostages.'The Mossad, too, described the mission as 'historic,' the result of years of painstaking intelligence work to gather every last detail about Cohen's the operation has brought home his letters, notes, and even his house keys, the search for Eli Cohen's final resting place goes on.(With inputs from AP)
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Tencent Cloud Once Again Recognized as a Representative Vendor for Video Platform Services in the Gartner® Market Guide
Continuously leveraging AIGC technology to drive innovation in the cloud industry HONG KONG, April 1, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, today announced that it is once again recognized as a Representative Vendor in the newly published Gartner® Market Guide for Video Platform Services report. Recently, it was also named as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner® report titled "Competitive Landscape: Video Platform Services". This repeated recognition underscores Tencent Cloud's leadership in audio and video technology, its robust product portfolio, and its global service experience, solidifying its strong competitiveness in the global market. Tencent Cloud leverages its cutting-edge audio and video technology capabilities to help clients overcome their challenges, alongside its highly established and influential hybrid cloud deployment capabilities. Based on AI technologies such as large language models (LLMs) and digital image processing, Tencent Cloud enables the generation and enhancement of audio and video content, covering the entire production chain and multiple scenarios of audio and video content creation. Tencent Cloud's MPaaS offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities, including Media Processing Service (MPS), Cloud Streaming Services (CSS), Video on Demand (VOD), and Live Event Broadcasting (LEB), continuously driving digital transformation for industries worldwide. Deep Integration of AIGC Technology for Smarter Audio and Video Experiences With rapid advancements in large AI models, Tencent Cloud has actively integrated AIGC technologies—such as large language models (LLMs), audio and video generation, and multimodal understanding—into its media intelligence products. These innovations are now widely applied across scenarios like short drama globalization, education, live streaming, sports events, and entertainment. Tencent Cloud also integrates media intelligence capabilities into AI model training and generation workflows to enhance model performance. For example, in short drama globalization, Tencent Cloud's one-stop solution offers smart subtitle extraction, translation, original subtitle removal, translated subtitle embedding, voice cloning, and video synthesis to enable cost-effective global distribution. In educational, news, and speech-related video scenarios, Tencent Cloud leverages its Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and AI technologies to extract and summarize video content, allowing users to grasp key points without manual scrubbing. The solution also supports offline and live segmentation, auto-generating section summaries and keywords to help users quickly locate desired clips, improving efficiency. For live streaming, Tencent Cloud's media intelligence products provide real-time subtitles and translation in over 100 languages, breaking language barriers for global audiences—even allowing non-Chinese speakers to understand phrases such as "123, link up!" In sports, variety shows, and film/TV production, Tencent Cloud's Region-Of-Interest (ROI) intelligent recognition technology identifies visual content and key elements (e.g., faces, game characters, hosts) in real time, transmitting region-of-interest (ROI) data alongside encoded video to playback devices. This enables precise highlight clipping, smart anti-blocking for bullet chats, background blurring, and adaptive vertical cropping of horizontal videos for multi-device compatibility. Notably, Tencent Cloud's audio and video expertise also enhances large model training and generation. During the data cleaning phase of model training, the quality of training data directly affects the clarity and stability of the generated videos. Tencent Cloud's media quality inspection capabilities can automatically remove training materials with format errors or image quality defects, improving the overall quality of training videos. In video generation, outputting high-resolution and high-frame-rate video content has long faced technical challenges such as high computational power consumption and decreased model stability. Tencent Cloud's MPS (Media Processing Service) image quality enhancement capability, based on an improved Stable Diffusion architecture, optimizes the performance of distillation algorithms. It supports enhancing videos from 480P@30fps to 4K@120fps, significantly reducing the cost of generating ultra-high-definition videos while improving their clarity and stability. Currently, this capability has been implemented in several large model generation products, providing stronger technical support for AI content creation and helping various enterprises optimize video content efficiently. Continuous Innovation to Drive Global Digital Transformation Beyond AIGC, Tencent Cloud pushes the boundaries of audio and video technology, excelling in encoding, quality enhancement, and media inspection. It also prioritizes open media processing frameworks and industry collaboration. Tencent Cloud's MPS possesses leading encoding capabilities in the audio and video industry. It can save over 50% of the bitrate without compromising quality, significantly reducing operational costs for enterprises. Its mainstream encoding formats support the most comprehensive standards, including H.264/H.265/H.266/VP9/AV1, as well as the Chinese standards AVS2/AVS3. In the MSU World Video Coding Contest held at Moscow State University in 2024, Tencent's encoder took first place in all 15 indicators, once again achieving the best performance overall. Additionally, it supports the most comprehensive audio and video encoding standards, including VP8, H.264, VP9, H.265, AV1, AVS3, and H.266. Audio and video quality is one of the industry's major concerns. In this regard, for needs such as upgrading old video sources and enhancing image quality, MPS, based on the DiT (Diffusion Transformer) model that combines the advantages of diffusion models and Transformer architectures, provides over ten enhancement capabilities, including detail enhancement, color enhancement, SDR to HDR conversion, super-resolution, intelligent frame interpolation, and more. This can effectively help enterprises and users address various audio and video quality issues and bring a brand-new audiovisual experience. In addition to its leading technology research and development capabilities, Tencent Cloud has actively participated in the development of the H.266/VVC standard, becoming the world's first cloud provider to support H.266/VVC. Tencent Cloud holds key positions in the standardization organization, including as the joint chief editor and co-chair of the H.266/VVC standard, and is a significant technical contributor. Moreover, Tencent Cloud is the only founding member of AV1 in China and actively participates in the development of the AV2 standard, as well as the engineering of the H.267 standard. MPS collaborates with overseas ecosystem partners in areas such as audio and video processing and transmission. It supports technologies like Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision, Nielsen, Nagra digital watermarks, and transmission standards such as SRT, SMPTE2022-07, SMPTE ST2110 with JPEG-XS, and NDI. This ensures that audio and video can be transmitted with low latency, stability, and smoothness. The Tencent Cloud audio and video team actively leads or participates in the development of many open-source audio and video projects such as SRS, SRT, VLC, fostering a mutually beneficial relationship between the cloud and the open-source community. Empowering Global Industries Powered by globally leading technology, Tencent Cloud Media Processing Service (MPS) offers a comprehensive, one-stop solution tailored for industries such as M&E and e-commerce, accelerating digital transformation across global markets. Through the continuous accumulation of technology and experience, Tencent Cloud has established close partnerships and provides stable technical support to overseas enterprises in the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and North Africa regions, including Japan's karaoke app Pokekara, Singapore's streaming platform BeLive, Thailand's digital content platform Ookbee, and Pakistan's network TV service ARY ZAP. By these collaborations, Tencent Cloud expands its global footprint and provide a digital support and business innovation path for enterprise internationalization. Looking ahead, as AI and other technologies evolve, Tencent Cloud will persist in constructing an international business landscape from a global perspective. Leveraging its deep accumulation in the audio and video domain, Tencent Cloud will continue to increase its technological investment in audio and video, exploring innovative applications and business models to deliver superior, efficient, and personalized services that fuel high-quality growth across industries. Gartner, Market Guide for Video Platform Services, 19 March 2025 Gartner, Competitive Landscape: Video Platform Services, 18 December 2024 Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. ### About Tencent Cloud: Tencent Cloud, one of the world's leading cloud companies, is committed to creating innovative solutions to resolve real-world issues and enabling digital transformation for smart industries. Through our extensive global infrastructure, Tencent Cloud provides businesses across the globe with stable and secure industry-leading cloud products and services, leveraging technological advancements such as cloud computing, Big Data analytics, AI, IoT, and network security. It is our constant mission to meet the needs of industries across the board, including the fields of gaming, media and entertainment, finance, healthcare, property, retail, travel, and transportation. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Tencent Cloud Sign in to access your portfolio
