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‘We are officially hostages.’ How the Israeli kibbutz of Nir Oz embodied Hamas hostage strategy

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:13:50 GMT

NIR OZ, Israel (AP) — The Hamas attack on the kibbutz of Nir Oz started a little after 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 7 and lasted long into the afternoon, with dozens of fighters rampaging unopposed through the community with an apparent mission: To capture as many civilians as possible.By the time the last fighter left, one in five residents of Nir Oz was a hostage. The remaining residents emerged from their safe rooms and gathered together in a shelter, spending the long night tallying the missing. Eight weeks into the Israel-Gaza war, the recent release of dozens of Israeli hostages – with as many still in captivity – is bringing new focus on what Hamas did on Oct. 7, the day its fighters rounded them up from communities across southern Israel. In the kibbutz of Nir Oz, where militants rampaged unopposed, is perhaps the best place to understand Hamas’ hostage strateg y, an operation that was unprecedented both in its scope and execution.More than 100 Palestinian militants stormed Nir Oz on O...

Activists at COP28 summit ramp up pressure on cutting fossil fuels as talks turn to clean energy

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:13:50 GMT

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Activists had a series of events and actions lined up Tuesday at the United Nations climate summit seeking to amp up pressure on conference participants to agree to phase out coal, oil and gas, responsible for most of the world’s emissions, and move to clean energy in a fair way. The question of how to handle fossil fuels is central to the talks, which come after a year of record heat and devastating weather extremes around the world. And even as the use of clean energy is growing, most energy companies have plans to continue aggressive pursuit of fossil fuel production well into the future.A team of scientists reported Tuesday that the world pumped 1.1% more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than last year, largely due to increased pollution from China and India.Protests — which are limited to “action zones” around the U.N. site — centered on phasing out fossil fuels and calling for finance to ramp up the move to clean energy.Meanwhi...

AI’s future could be ‘open-source’ or closed. Tech giants are divided as they lobby regulators

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:13:50 GMT

Tech leaders have been vocal proponents of the need to regulate artificial intelligence, but they’re also lobbying hard to make sure the new rules work in their favor.That’s not to say they all want the same thing.Facebook parent Meta and IBM on Tuesday launched a new group called the AI Alliance that’s advocating for an “open science” approach to AI development that puts them at odds with rivals Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.These two diverging camps — the open and the closed — disagree about whether to build AI in a way that makes the underlying technology widely accessible. Safety is at the heart of the debate, but so is who gets to profit from AI’s advances.Open advocates favor an approach that is “not proprietary and closed,” said Darío Gil, a senior vice president at IBM who directs its research division. “So it’s not like a thing that is locked in a barrel and no one knows what they are.”WHAT’S OPEN-SOURCE AI?The term “open-source” comes f...

Owners of a funeral home where 190 decaying bodies were found to appear in court

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:13:50 GMT

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The owners of a Colorado funeral home where 190 decomposing bodies were found are set to appear in court Tuesday, facing allegations that they abused corpses, stole, laundered money and forged documents.Jon and Carie Hallford own Return to Nature Funeral Home, which has a facility in Penrose where investigators in early October discovered dozens of stacked bodies, some that had death dates as far back as 2019, according to a federal affidavit.Family members had been falsely told their loved ones were cremated and had received materials that were not their ashes, court records said.Several families who hired Return to Nature to cremate their loved ones have told The Associated Press that the FBI confirmed to them privately that their loved ones were among the decaying bodies.The Hallfords were arrested in Oklahoma last month, after allegedly fleeing Colorado to avoid prosecution. They have been jailed on a $2 million bond. Both have been charged with ap...

Brutal killings of women in Western Balkan countries trigger alarm and expose faults in the system

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:13:50 GMT

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — A man in Bosnia killed his wife and streamed the murder live on Instagram. In neighboring Serbia, 27 women were killed in gender-based attacks this year, despite efforts to raise awareness and reverse the trend. Activists in Kosovo say violence against women there is a “national emergency.”Throughout the Western Balkans, women are harassed, raped, beaten and killed, often by their partners and after repeatedly reporting the violence to the authorities. The region is staunchly conservative, with a centuries-old tradition of male dominance, but the problem surged following the wars in the 1990s and the political, economic and social crises that have persisted since the conflicts ended. In response, women’s groups in the region have organized protests to draw public attention and demand action. They have set up help lines and shelters for women. But activists blame authorities for not acting more decisively to protect women and counter a culture of impunity. The...

AP PHOTOS: Photographers in Asia capture the extraordinary, tragic and wonderful in 2023

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:13:50 GMT

TOKYO (AP) — Individually, the photographs are the product of a moment, capturing glimpses of joy, grief, rage, hope, and resilience. As a whole, the work this year of Associated Press photojournalists in Asia forms a visual patchwork quilt, an extraordinary reflection of the varied panoply of human experience in one of the world’s most fascinating regions.Some of these pictures delight. Some horrify.Some, even after repeated examination, retain a sense of mystery.Take an American ballerina, clad in shimmering white, caught in a blur of revolving motion as she rehearses in China. Or a Muslim bride who gazes pensively through a saffron-colored veil during a mass wedding ceremony in Indian-controlled Kashmir.Or footprints left in a patch of green moss after prayers in New Delhi.In Malaysia, a base jumper dives from a tower above the sparkling city lights of Kuala Lumpur at night. Blood splatters like raindrops from the tattooed body of a Filipino penitent as he flagellates himself to ...

Handcuffed and sent to the ER – for misbehavior: Schools are sending more kids to the hospital

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:13:50 GMT

SALISBURY, Md. (AP) — Three times a week, on average, a police car pulls up to a school in Wicomico County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A student is brought out, handcuffed and placed inside for transport to a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.Over the past eight years, the process has been used at least 750 times on students. Some are as young as 5 years old. The state law that allows for these removals, known as petitions for emergency evaluation, is meant to be limited to people with severe mental illness, who are endangering their own lives or safety or someone else’s. It’s the first step toward getting someone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. But advocates say schools across the country are sending children to the emergency room for psychiatric evaluations in response to behaviors prompted by bullying or frustration over assignments. The ER trips, they say, often follow months, and sometimes years, of their needs not being met. Black student...

Biden is spending most of the week raising money at events with James Taylor and Steven Spielberg

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:13:50 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is making a big push to raise money for his reelection effort before the end of the year, appearing at seven events through next Monday — with more to come. Biden was traveling to Massachusetts on Tuesday to schmooze with donors at a trio of Boston fundraisers to benefit his campaign and the broader Democratic Party, including an event in the city’s theater district featuring a concert by singer-songwriter and guitarist James Taylor.Later this week, the Democrat will touch down on the West Coast on Friday for his first Los Angeles fundraisers since the end of the strikes by actors and screenwriters, featuring film director Steven Spielberg and “Scandal” showrunner Shonda Rhimes, among other celebrities. Biden will also attend a fundraiser Wednesday near the White House and another one on Monday in Philadelphia. “This next election is going to be different,” the president said last week at a money event in Denver, where he sought to draw co...

The Supreme Court is taking up a case that could rule out a tax on wealth favored by some Democrats

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:13:50 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is taking up a case Tuesday over a Washington couple’s $15,000 tax bill that is widely seen as a test of a never-enacted tax on wealth.A decision in favor of Charles and Kathleen Moore of Redmond, Washington, could strike down a provision of the 2017 tax bill that is expected to bring in $340 billion, threaten other provisions of the tax code and rule out a wealth tax that is favored by some Democrats who argue that the wealthiest Americans don’t pay their fair share of taxes.Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who was Speaker of the House when the tax bill was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by then-President Donald Trump, has called the challenge “misguided” and said “a lot of the tax code would be unconstitutional if that thing prevailed.”The couple is backed by conservative political groups and business interests, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.The law applies to companies that are owned by Americans, bu...

The fourth GOP debate will be a key moment for the young NewsNation cable network

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:13:50 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — By airing the fourth Republican presidential primary debate scheduled for Wednesday — again, minus Donald Trump — the young NewsNation television network will almost certainly reach the largest audience in its history.Yet with two of the three debate moderators associated with conservative media and not NewsNation, including podcast star Megyn Kelly, the event threatens to be at odds with the centrist image the network is trying to cultivate.“I think it’s an amazing opportunity and allows us to have more people fully sample the network and see who we are and what we’re doing,” said Cherie Grzech, NewsNation’s senior vice president of news and politics.Her advice to those who have doubts about how NewsNation can pull it off: Just watch.A NETWORK STILL SEEKING AN AUDIENCEThe debate is to air from 8 to 10 p.m. ET and will also be shown on the CW network, which like NewsNation is owned by the Nexstar Media Group. The CW will show it live in the eastern ...