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China fuming over Biden’s talk of U.S. Olympic boycott, sends invite to Putin

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China fuming over Biden’s talk of U.S. Olympic boycott, sends invite to Putin
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China‘s Foreign Ministry Friday sharply criticized President Biden‘s comments that he is weighing a modified boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, accusing Washington of politicizing the global sports event.

Mr. Biden, meeting with Canadian and Mexican leaders Thursday at a White House summit, confirmed for the first time he is considering a diplomatic boycott of the Games, allowing U.S. athletes to compete but preventing American officials from attending.

Asked about limiting the U.S. presence at the Games, Mr. Biden acknowledged tersely Thursday evening that it is “something we’re considering.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, in a Friday briefing with reporters in Beijing, said Washington was using “groundless” charges of human rights abuses in Xinjiang and elsewhere to justify the modified boycott.

“Politicizing sports is violating the spirit of the Olympics,” Mr. Zhao said, adding that Beijing‘s policies toward the ethnic minority Uighurs in China‘s Xinjiang region are “purely China‘s internal affairs.”

The state-controlled Global Times, citing Chinese political analysts, said the potential boycott, coupled with Mr. Biden‘s planned summit of the world’s democratic countries next month, was a sign that the U.S. president was bowing to pressure from anti-China hardliners because of his weakened political standing at home.

Separately, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed in Moscow Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin had received an official invitation from the Chinese government to attend the Games.

With Moscow and Beijing growing closer in the face of rising tensions with the U.S., Mr. Putin had been widely expected to travel to Beijing for the opening ceremony of the Games set for February 4.

Can a Machine Learn Morality?

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Can a Machine Learn Morality?
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Researchers at an artificial intelligence lab in Seattle called the Allen Institute for AI unveiled new technology last month that was designed to make moral judgments. They called it Delphi, after the religious oracle consulted by the ancient Greeks. Anyone could visit the Delphi website and ask for an ethical decree.

Joseph Austerweil, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tested the technology using a few simple scenarios. When he asked if he should kill one person to save another, Delphi said he shouldn’t. When he asked if it was right to kill one person to save 100 others, it said he should. Then he asked if he should kill one person to save 101 others. This time, Delphi said he should not.

Morality, it seems, is as knotty for a machine as it is for humans.

Delphi, which has received more than three million visits over the past few weeks, is an effort to address what some see as a major problem in modern A.I. systems: They can be as flawed as the people who create them.

Facial recognition systems and digital assistants show bias against women and people of color. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter fail to control hate speech, despite wide deployment of artificial intelligence. Algorithms used by courts, parole offices and police departments make parole and sentencing recommendations that can seem arbitrary.

A growing number of computer scientists and ethicists are working to address those issues. And the creators of Delphi hope to build an ethical framework that could be installed in any online service, robot or vehicle.

“It’s a first step toward making A.I. systems more ethically informed, socially aware and culturally inclusive,” said Yejin Choi, the Allen Institute researcher and University of Washington computer science professor who led the project.

Delphi is by turns fascinating, frustrating and disturbing. It is also a reminder that the morality of any technological creation is a product of those who have built it. The question is: Who gets to teach ethics to the world’s machines? A.I. researchers? Product managers? Mark Zuckerberg? Trained philosophers and psychologists? Government regulators?

While some technologists applauded Dr. Choi and her team for exploring an important and thorny area of technological research, others argued that the very idea of a moral machine is nonsense.

“This is not something that technology does very well,” said Ryan Cotterell, an A.I. researcher at ETH Zürich, a university in Switzerland, who stumbled onto Delphi in its first days online.

Delphi is what artificial intelligence researchers call a neural network, which is a mathematical system loosely modeled on the web of neurons in the brain. It is the same technology that recognizes the commands you speak into your smartphone and identifies pedestrians and street signs as self-driving cars speed down the highway.

A neural network learns skills by analyzing large amounts of data. By pinpointing patterns in thousands of cat photos, for instance, it can learn to recognize a cat. Delphi learned its moral compass by analyzing more than 1.7 million ethical judgments by real live humans.

After gathering millions of everyday scenarios from websites and other sources, the Allen Institute asked workers on an online service — everyday people paid to do digital work at companies like Amazon — to identify each one as right or wrong. Then they fed the data into Delphi.

In an academic paper describing the system, Dr. Choi and her team said a group of human judges — again, digital workers — thought that Delphi’s ethical judgments were up to 92 percent accurate. Once it was released to the open internet, many others agreed that the system was surprisingly wise.

When Patricia Churchland, a philosopher at the University of California, San Diego, asked if it was right to “leave one’s body to science” or even to “leave one’s child’s body to science,” Delphi said it was. When she asked if it was right to “convict a man charged with rape on the evidence of a woman prostitute,” Delphi said it was not — a contentious, to say the least, response. Still, she was somewhat impressed by its ability to respond, though she knew a human ethicist would ask for more information before making such pronouncements.

Others found the system woefully inconsistent, illogical and offensive. When a software developer stumbled onto Delphi, she asked the system if she should die so she wouldn’t burden her friends and family. It said she should. Ask Delphi that question now, and you may get a different answer from an updated version of the program. Delphi, regular users have noticed, can change its mind from time to time. Technically, those changes are happening because Delphi’s software has been updated.

Artificial intelligence technologies seem to mimic human behavior in some situations but completely break down in others. Because modern systems learn from such large amounts of data, it is difficult to know when, how or why they will make mistakes. Researchers may refine and improve these technologies. But that does not mean a system like Delphi can master ethical behavior.

Dr. Churchland said ethics are intertwined with emotion. “Attachments, especially attachments between parents and offspring, are the platform on which morality builds,” she said. But a machine lacks emotion. “Neutral networks don’t feel anything,” she added.

Some might see this as a strength — that a machine can create ethical rules without bias — but systems like Delphi end up reflecting the motivations, opinions and biases of the people and companies that build them.

“We can’t make machines liable for actions,” said Zeerak Talat, an A.I. and ethics researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “They are not unguided. There are always people directing them and using them.”

Delphi reflected the choices made by its creators. That included the ethical scenarios they chose to feed into the system and the online workers they chose to judge those scenarios.

In the future, the researchers could refine the system’s behavior by training it with new data or by hand-coding rules that override its learned behavior at key moments. But however they build and modify the system, it will always reflect their worldview.

Some would argue that if you trained the system on enough data representing the views of enough people, it would properly represent societal norms. But societal norms are often in the eye of the beholder.

“Morality is subjective. It is not like we can just write down all the rules and give them to a machine,” said Kristian Kersting, a professor of computer science at TU Darmstadt University in Germany who has explored a similar kind of technology.

When the Allen Institute released Delphi in mid-October, it described the system as a computational model for moral judgments. If you asked if you should have an abortion, it responded definitively: “Delphi says: you should.”

But after many complained about the obvious limitations of the system, the researchers modified the website. They now call Delphi “a research prototype designed to model people’s moral judgments.” It no longer “says.” It “speculates.”

It also comes with a disclaimer: “Model outputs should not be used for advice for humans, and could be potentially offensive, problematic or harmful.”

Leasing a Car? Here’s Why You Can Get a Good Deal if You Buy.

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Leasing a Car? Here’s Why You Can Get a Good Deal if You Buy.
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For drivers with leases, the gap between the projected price and current market price may be substantial. The auto search website iSeeCars recently compared current prices for three-year-old cars and estimated buyout values of new models leased in 2018 and found that the average car may be worth 36 percent more than the value estimated at the beginning of the lease.

The gap may be even greater for some models. The current market value of a Volkswagen Tiguan, for instance, could be $9,800 higher than projected three years ago — a 69 percent increase. Even a subcompact, the Nissan Versa, has increased in value by more than $4,300, or more than 50 percent, according to iSeeCars. The analysis was based on a database of about 10 million new- and used-car listings.

So if you like your car and it’s in good condition, it may make sense to purchase it when the lease ends. “You should very carefully consider buying the car instead of returning it,” said Karl Brauer, an executive analyst at iSeeCars.

Consumers increasingly have been doing just that. Daniel Berce, the chief executive of GM Financial, the financial services arm of General Motors, told an investor conference in August that in the second quarter of this year, 89 percent of lease customers purchased their vehicles at the end of their leases, compared with about 20 percent a few years ago.

You could also buy the car and then resell it yourself, pocketing the profit. But you may owe sales tax, and there’s another catch: If you need another car, you may not easily find one that you like at a price you consider reasonable.

An alternative may be to use the “equity” in your lease — the difference between the current market valuation and the buyout price — to reduce the cost of leasing a new car, Mr. Drury of Edmunds said. In effect, you sell your lease to a dealer, which credits the amount to your new vehicle lease.

Jeff Perlman, an independent public relations consultant in Los Angeles, said he prefers to drive new cars and was able to apply equity from his lease of a 2019 Genesis G70, a luxury sports sedan, to a lease of a more expensive, redesigned 2022 version of the car. He did not have to put any money down, he said, and pays just $38 more per month. “I’m beyond happy,” he said.

China says ‘not aware’ of tennis player Peng Shuai issue

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China says ‘not aware’ of tennis player Peng Shuai issue
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BEIJING (AP) – China’s Foreign Ministry on Friday stuck to its line that it wasn’t aware of the controversy surrounding tennis professional Peng Shuai, who disappeared after accusing a former top official of sexually assaulting her.

Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters that the matter was “not a diplomatic question and I’m not aware of the situation.”

The ministry has consistently disavowed knowledge of the issue since Peng made her accusation more than two weeks ago.

The 35-year-old former top-ranked player in women’s doubles won titles at Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014. She also participated in three Olympics, making her disappearance all the more prominent with Beijing set to host the Winter Games starting Feb. 4.

Liz Throssell, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights office in Geneva, said Friday it was calling for “an investigation with full transparency into her allegation of sexual assault.”

“And I think we would say that that should be the case into all allegations of sexual assault. It is really important to ensure accountability, to ensure justice for the victims,” she said.

The International Olympic Committee declined to comment Friday, saying in an emailed statement: “Experience shows that quiet diplomacy offers the best opportunity to find a solution for questions of such nature. This explains why the IOC will not comment any further at this stage.”

Peng wrote in a lengthy social media post on Nov. 2 that she was forced to have sex three years ago with Zhang Gaoli in his home despite repeated refusals. Zhang, 75, is a former vice premier who was a member of the ruling Communist Party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee.

The post was quickly deleted from her verified account on Weibo, a leading Chinese social media platform, but screenshots of the explosive accusation were shared on the internet.

Steve Simon, the chairman and CEO of the Women’s Tennis Association, questioned the authenticity of what a Chinese state media outlet said this week was an email intended for him in which Peng said she was safe and that the assault allegation was untrue. It was tweeted by CGTN, the international arm of Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.

The State Council Information Office, which represents the Chinese government, did not respond to emailed questions about Peng‘s current situation and Simon’s doubts about the email.

Copyright © 2021 The Washington Times, LLC.

Butler has 32 points, Heat beat Wizards to open 2-game set

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Butler has 32 points, Heat beat Wizards to open 2-game set
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MIAMI — Jimmy Butler scored 32 points and the Miami Heat beat the Washington Wizards 112-97 on Thursday night for their fourth straight victory.

The teams will meet again Saturday night in Washington.

Butler shot 11 of 19 from the field and made all 10 of his free throws in his second consecutive outing over 30 points.

Bam Adebayo returned from a two-game absence because of a bruised left knee and added 20 points, Gabe Vincent had 18 points and P.J. Tucker 15. The Heat improved to 11-5.

“Felt great to be out there, felt great to be back around my teammates, felt great to be back in the kennel,” Adebayo said. “My teammates welcomed me back pretty well. I can’t complain. The two-game absence was great for me. I got some rest.”

Bradley Beal scored 30 points for Washington, and Kyle Kuzma added 19 points. The Wizards have lost two straight to drop to 10-5.

“Everybody had their antennas up when we were No. 1 in the East,” Beal said. “The biggest thing I like about our team is our fight. We don’t give up.”

The Heat made 7 of 8-pointers in the third period to take control. Duncan Robinson’s 3-pointer with 3:59 remaining in the quarter gave Miami its largest lead at 75-57. The double-digit result was the ninth in the Heat’s 11 wins.

“Look, Washington has really established a way of playing,” Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said. “They’re a very good defensive team. You have to really be intentional with your offense, you have to do things with pace, your spacing has to be right on and you have to share the ball.”

Guard Tyler Herro, Miami’s second-leader scorer, sat out because of a bruised right wrist. The Wizards rested third-leading scorer Spencer Dinwiddie.

“Obviously, in the third quarter the game got away from us a little bit,” Washington coach Wes Unseld Jr. said. “We competed outside that third.”

TIP-INS

Wizards: Beal also had five assists, including a pass on Montrezl Harrell’s first-quarter dunk that for career assist No. 2,500. … Unseld Jr. was facing Miami for the first time. His father, former Washington Bullets coach Wes Unseld, went 11-15 against the Heat from 1989 through 1994. … Wizards assistant Pat Delany spent 11 years in the Heat organization, starting in the video room, then scouting and eventually coaching in the G League.

Heat: Markieff Morris (whiplash) missed a sixth consecutive game after taking the Nov. 8 hit from Denver’s Nikola Jokic. … The Heat play their next four games on the road, and 10 of their next 15 over the next month are away from home. … Including playoffs, Miami’s winning percentage against Washington is 69%, which is the best the Heat have against any franchise. Miami has won 66% of its games, against Sacramento.

TWO IN A ROW

Miami has one other stint this season of seeing an opponent in consecutive games, visiting Atlanta on Jan. 12 then playing host to the Hawks two nights later. This is the only such instance of it happening on Washington’s schedule this season.

Copyright © 2021 The Washington Times, LLC.

Katie Benzan, Angel Reese lead No. 3 Maryland women past UNCW, 108-66

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Katie Benzan, Angel Reese lead No. 3 Maryland women past UNCW, 108-66
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COLLEGE PARK — Angel Reese had 23 points and 12 rebounds, Katie Benzan scored 22 points, and No. 3 Maryland remained undefeated Thursday with a 108-66 rout of UNC Wilmington.

It was the fourth double-double in five games for Reese, who is averaging 19.4 points and 12 rebounds for the Terrapins (5-0). Reese also had five steals against UNCW and has 13 over her last three games.

“Defensively, it felt great,” Reese said. “To have five steals, let’s talk about that. You always talk about my offense, but defensively, I got five steals. I’m just happy to be out here in front of everyone and play with this amazing team. We’re emphasizing defense this year, and if I can lead the pack and have my girls follow, then that’s what we can do.”

Carrie Gross led the Seahawks (1-2) with 17 points.

After a sluggish stretch in the game’s opening minutes, Maryland was in firm control by the end of the first quarter thanks to a 16-1 run. The Terps pushed their lead into double figures for good on Mimi Collins’ 3-pointer early in the second quarter and led 50-22 at the half.

Maryland’s size and athleticism confounded UNCW, which committed 14 first-half turnovers and 21 for the game. The Terps had an 18-0 edge in points off turnovers in the first half and 30-2 for the game. Maryland had a 15-1 advantage in fast-break points before the break.

“I had to call a couple timeouts to get them composed and had some subs,” UNCW coach Karen Barefoot said. “We didn’t do great with it, but we handled it better second half. It did get us off balance, for sure. They did a great job of capitalizing on our mistakes.”

Collins had 21 points and nine rebounds, Ashley Owusu added 16 points and Shyanne Sellers scored 13 points and added a career-high nine assists for Maryland.

Junior guard Diamond Miller made a brief season debut for Maryland after missing the first four games with right knee soreness. A first team all-Big Ten guard last season while averaging 17.3 points and 5.8 rebounds, Miller entered nearly three minutes into the game. She was scoreless with one rebound in four minutes.

“It’s kind of day-to-day, where it’s trying to get some minutes and evaluate how the knee responds,” Maryland coach Brenda Frese said.

Maryland has won 27 consecutive home games, tied with Stephen F. Austin for the longest streak in Division I.

BIG PICTURE

UNC Wilmington: After back-to-back blowout losses to Duke and Maryland, the Seahawks won’t face another power conference team the rest of the regular season.

Maryland: The Terps have won all five of their games by at least 21 points while tuning up for a tough stretch that starts Sunday. Maryland faces four top-10 opponents in its next seven games, including No. 1 South Carolina, No. 5 N.C. State, No. 6 Baylor and No. 7 Stanford.

SHARING IS CARING

Maryland had a season-high 23 assists, while committing only three turnovers.

“I thought with our unselfishness once we started going, we were able to show just how many weapons we have and how versatile we are,” Frese said. “There’s some things defensively we still need to continue to improve on, but for the most part the effort was there.”

UP NEXT

UNC Wilmington faces a quick turnaround, playing host to Coastal Carolina on Saturday.

Maryland receives its most imposing test yet this season Sunday as No. 6 Baylor visits College Park.

Copyright © 2021 The Washington Times, LLC.

Instagram Faces Investigation Over Mental Health Impact on Teens

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Instagram Faces Investigation Over Mental Health Impact on Teens
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A bipartisan group of state attorneys general said on Thursday they had opened an investigation into Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, for promoting its social media app Instagram while knowing of mental and emotional harms caused by the service.

At least 11 states are involved in the investigation, including California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia.

Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general and one of the leaders of the investigation, said the states were examining whether the company’s actions violated state consumer protection laws and put the public at risk.

“Facebook, now Meta, has failed to protect young people on its platforms and instead chose to ignore or, in some cases, double down on known manipulations that pose a real threat to physical and mental health — exploiting children in the interest of profit,” Ms. Healey said.

The move comes after a trove of documents from a former employee detailed research inside of the social media company that suggested teenagers suffered body image issues when using Instagram. The documents, called The Facebook Papers, were shared with journalists in October. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the documents and the issues at Instagram with the help of Frances Haugen, the whistle-blower.

Doug Peterson, the Nebraska attorney general and another leader of the investigation, said the states would examine “the techniques utilized by Meta to increase the frequency and duration of engagement by young users and the resulting harms caused by such extended engagement.”

“When social media platforms treat our kids as mere commodities to manipulate for longer screen time engagement & data extraction, it becomes imperative for state attorneys general to engage our investigative authority under our consumer protection laws,” Mr. Peterson said in a tweet.

The states’ investigation adds to building regulatory pressure on Meta and other giants of Silicon Valley.

Ms. Haugen and public interest groups have filed at least nine complaints to the Securities and Exchange Commission claiming Meta mislead investors about its efforts to protect users from disinformation and hate. The Federal Trade Commission and dozens of states have filed antitrust lawsuits to break up Meta, and members of Congress have also vowed to create privacy, speech and antitrust legislation aimed at reining in the power of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

Spanning tens of thousands of pages and gigabytes of data, the Facebook Papers show a company struggling to deal with many issues that come as a byproduct of its enormous scale and billions of users, spanning topics like misinformation, addiction and manipulation of users around the world. Much of the information came in the form of detailed reports investigating the issues, laid out by the company’s research division.

Meta has said the research efforts are intended to address the issues they pinpoint, with the aim of improving the company’s products and services.

The documents detail that roughly a third of teenage girls in a survey who already felt bad about their bodies said Instagram made them feel worse. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves,” the documents said.

Meta has disputed the characterization of the initial reporting on Instagram’s issues, saying that the story lacked context, left out vital information and was a poor interpretation of the data obtained by The Journal. The company argued that on 11 of 12 well-being issues, the surveyed teenage girls said that Instagram made them feel “better and not worse.”

“It is simply not accurate that this research demonstrates Instagram is ‘toxic’ for teen girls,” Pratiti Raychoudhury a vice president and head of research at Facebook, said in a company blog post in September.

In a statement on Thursday, a representative for Meta strongly disputed the claims made by the state attorneys general against Instagram.

“These accusations are false and demonstrate a deep misunderstanding of the facts,” said Liza Crenshaw, a spokeswoman for the company. “While challenges in protecting young people online impact the entire industry, we’ve led the industry in combating bullying and supporting people struggling with suicidal thoughts, self-injury, and eating disorders.”

Safety watchdog lists 2021’s ’10 worst toys’

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Safety watchdog lists 2021’s ’10 worst toys’
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Radio Flyer Spin ‘N Saucer, Snake Eyes G.I. Joe Origins Ninja Strike Sickles and Walmart’s My Life As Shopping Basket are among the potentially hazardous “10 Worst Toys for 2021,” according to the 48th annual report of a consumer safety watchdog.

This year’s World Against Toys Causing Harm, Inc. (W.A.T.C.H.) list seeks to make parents “fully informed” about child safety issues as COVID-19 supply issues limit holiday toy supplies, the Boston-based watchdog’s president said Thursday.

“Our advice to parents is to be cautious when deciding what toys to give children,” Joan Siff told The Washington Times.

“The toys on the list are representative of types of hazards in the marketplace, and therefore are not the only potentially unsafe toys on the shelves and online this season,” she added.

Hazards represented on this year’s list include toy weapons that could injure people in blows, plush toys that could suffocate infants, and small parts, including batteries, that could cause choking or chemical-burn injuries.

U.S. emergency rooms treat one child every three minutes for a toy-related injury, W.A.T.C.H. said.

The other seven worst toys on this year’s list are Squeakee Minis Poppy the Bunny, Bright Starts Tummy Time Prop & Play, Perfectly Cute My Lil’ Baby Feed & Go Set, Nerf Hyper Rush-40 Blaster, Hape Learn To Play Drum, Rollers Light-Up Heel Skates, and Hover-1 My First Hoverboard.

Ms. Siff said, “just because a toy is popular or is being sold by retailers does not necessarily mean it is safe.”

“We recommend that, if a toy has the potential to hurt a child, it’s just not worth the risk,” she added.

Court hands ‘Making a Murderer’ subject Avery latest defeat

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Court hands ‘Making a Murderer’ subject Avery latest defeat
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MADISON, Wis. (AP) – The Wisconsin Supreme Court has rejected a request by Steven Avery to review his conviction for killing a young photographer in 2005, a case that became the focus of a popular Netflix series “Making a Murderer.”

Avery has been fighting unsuccessfully for years to have his conviction overturned. His latest appeal asked the court to review three issues: failure to disclose evidence, the destruction of bone fragments and ineffective assistance of counsel.

The court on Wednesday denied Avery‘s petition for review without commenting.

Avery, 59, is serving life in prison for killing Theresa Halbach, 25, on his family’s property on Halloween 2005. Halbach had gone to the Avery family salvage yard to photograph a vehicle that Avery planned to sell.

His nephew, Brendan Dassey, was also convicted in the case. Both Avery and Dassey have maintained their innocence.

“We are not surprised since the Wisconsin Supreme Court only grants 1-2% of petitions for review. Mr. Avery has many options including proceeding to the U.S Supreme Court, and then federal district,” Avery‘s attorney, Kathleen Zellner, said in a statement. “Since the appellate court only ruled on 50% of the issues raised we will be filing a new petition with the circuit court at the appropriate time.”

The case gained widespread attention in 2015 after Netflix aired “Making a Murderer,” a series whose creators raised questions about the convictions. Those who worked on the cases accused the filmmakers of leaving out key pieces of evidence and presenting a biased view of what happened. The filmmakers defended their work and supported calls to set Avery and Dassey free.

Dassey was 16 when he confessed to detectives that he helped his uncle rape and kill Halbach. A judge threw out the confession in 2016, ruling it was coerced by investigators using deceptive tactics. That ruling was later overturned by a federal appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case.

Copyright © 2021 The Washington Times, LLC.

Helen Mirren to get actors’ guild Life Achievement Award

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Helen Mirren to get actors’ guild Life Achievement Award
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The Screen Actors Guild has selected Dame Helen Mirren as their 57th Life Achievement Award Recipient, the union said Thursday.

The 76-year-old English stage and screen actor has credits spanning over 50 years and has played everything from a gangster’s girlfriend in “The Long Good Friday” to Queen Elizabeth II in “The Queen.” Mirren will be adding this latest honor to a robust collection of awards including an Oscar, a Tony, and multiple SAG, Emmy and BAFTA Awards.

“I am honored to have been chosen to receive the SAG Life Achievement Award,” Mirren said in a statement. “Since I was a young actor starting out, I have always been inspired by and learned from American screen acting, so this award is particularly meaningful for me.”

With 13 SAG Awards nominations and five wins, Mirren is also the most decorated SAG Life Achievement recipient, the union said.

“Dame Helen Mirren is quite simply a brilliant and luminous talent,” said SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher, in a statement. “She has set the bar very high for all actors and, in role after role, she exceeds even her own extraordinary performances. I’ve always felt a kinship with Helen. She’s the Queen of England and I’m the Queen of Queens. She won an Oscar and I’m left-hander of the year. It’s uncanny.”

The 28th annual SAG Awards will be broadcast live from Santa Monica, Calif. on Feb. 27 on TNT and TBS at 8 p.m. ET.

Copyright © 2021 The Washington Times, LLC.

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