...boodling on the grand scale...
Secretary-General António Guterres
...Portuguese politician and diplomat, ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations. Previously, he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees between 2005 and 2015. He was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002 and was the Secretary-General of the Socialist Party from 1992 to 2002. He served as President of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005. In both a 2012 and 2014 poll, the Portuguese public ranked him as the best Prime Minister of the previous 30 years...called on Monday for new rules covering the use of autonomous weapons as a key meeting on the issue opened in Geneva. Negotiators at the U.N. talks have for eight years been discussing limits on lethal autonomous weapons, or LAWS, which are fully machine-controlled and rely on new technology such as artificial intelligence and facial recognition.
But pressure has increased in part due to a U.N. panel report in March that said the first autonomous drone attack may have already occurred in Libya.
"I encourage the Review Conference to agree on an ambitious plan for the future to establish restrictions on the use of certain types of autonomous weapons," Guterres said at the start of the five-day talks.
The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons has 125 parties including the United States, China and Israel.
Some participating states such as Austria call for a total ban on LAWS while others including Washington have been more reticent and have pointed to potential benefits of such weapons which might be more precise than humans in hitting targets.
