Category: World

JERUSALEM (AP) — An ultranationalist Israeli Cabinet minister on Tuesday visited a flashpoint Jerusalem holy site for the first time since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new far-right government took office last week. The visit drew fierce condemnation from across the Muslim world and a strong rebuke from the United States.

The visit fueled fears of unrest as Palestinian militant groups threatened to act in response. On Tuesday evening, the Israeli military said Gaza militants tried to fire a rocket into southern Israel but the projectile fell short and hit in the Hamas-controlled territory.

Netanyahu attempted to play down the incident, saying it was in line with longstanding understandings at the disputed holy site. But the visit by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir unnerved both enemies and allies that have expressed strong misgivings about the far-right makeup of the new government.

Ben-Gvir, a West Bank settler leader who draws inspiration from a racist rabbi, entered the site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary flanked by a large contingent of police officers. His plans to visit, announced earlier in the week, had drawn threats from Gaza’s Hamas militant group.

“The Israeli government won’t surrender to a murderous organization, to a vile terrorist organization,” Ben-Gvir, known for his anti-Arab rhetoric and provocative stunts, said in a video clip taken during the visit.

Describing the Temple Mount as “the most important place for the Jewish people,” he decried what he called “racist discrimination” against Jewish visits to the site. With the Dome of the Rock in the background and waving his fingers at the camera, he said the visits would continue.

The site is the holiest site in Judaism, home to the ancient biblical Temples. Today, it houses the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. Since Israel captured the site in 1967, Jews have been allowed to visit but not pray there.

Ben-Gvir has long called for greater Jewish access to the holy site. Palestinians consider the mosque a national symbol and view such visits as provocative and as a potential precursor to Israel seizing control over the compound. Most rabbis forbid Jews from praying on the site, but there has been a growing movement in recent years of Jews who support worship there.

The site has been the scene of frequent clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces, most recently in April last year.

Although Tuesday’s visit passed without incident, U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides said he “has been very clear in conversations with the Israeli government on the issue of preserving the status quo in Jerusalem’s holy sites. Actions that prevent that are unacceptable.”

The United Arab Emirates, which established full diplomatic ties with Israel in 2020, “strongly condemned the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard by an Israeli minister under the protection of Israeli forces.” It called on Israel to “halt serious and provocative violations taking place there.”

Bahrain, which also recognized Israel at the same time, did not immediately acknowledge the incident.

Saudi Arabia, a powerful Arab country with which Netanyahu hopes to establish similar ties, condemned the Israeli minister’s action, as did statements from Kuwait and Qatar. None of the three countries have official diplomatic ties with Israel.

Turkey, which only recently re-established full diplomatic ties with Israel, condemned what it said was “the provocative action” by Ben-Gvir. It urged Israel “to act responsibly,” saying such visits could “cause an escalation in the region.”

Israel’s neighbor Jordan, which acts as custodian of the contested shrine, condemned Ben-Gvir’s visit “in the strongest terms” and summoned Israel’s ambassador to lodge a protest.

Egypt, another key Arab ally of Israel’s, warned against “negative repercussions of such measures on security and stability in the occupied territories and the region, and on the future of the peace process.”

Tensions at the disputed compound have fueled past rounds of violence. A visit by then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon in September 2000 helped spark clashes that became the second Palestinian uprising. Clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinian demonstrators in and around the site fueled an 11-day war with Hamas in 2021.

Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said Ben-Gvir’s visit was “a continuation of the Zionist’s occupation aggression on our sacred places and war on our Arab identity.”

“Our Palestinian people will continue defending their holy places and Al Aqsa Mosque,” he said.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, which fought Israel in a monthlong war in 2006, said the visit threatened to “blow up the region.”

Responding to the outcry, Netanyahu late Tuesday said Israel remains committed to “strictly maintaining the status quo” at the site. “The claim that a change has been made in the status quo is without foundation.”

Netanyahu returned to office last week for his sixth term as prime minister, leading the most religious, right-wing government in the country’s history. Its goals include expanding West Bank settlements and annexing the occupied territory.

Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem, with its holy sites to three monotheistic faiths, along with the rest of east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for a future independent state, with east Jerusalem as capital. Israel annexed east Jerusalem in a move unrecognized by most of the international community and considers the city its undivided, eternal capital.

The competing claims to the site lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ben-Gvir is head of the ultranationalist religious Jewish Power faction and has a history of inflammatory remarks and actions against Palestinians. He was once convicted of incitement and supporting a Jewish terrorist group, but in his new job now commands Israel’s police force.

A day earlier, opposition leader Yair Lapid, who until last week was Israel’s prime minister, warned that Ben-Gvir’s intended visit would “lead to violence that will endanger human lives and cost human lives.”

His visit came following months of mounting tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.

Early on Tuesday, Palestinian officials said a 15-year-old boy was killed by Israeli army fire near the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem. The Israeli military said its forces had shot at people throwing firebombs toward troops.

On Monday, the Israeli rights group B’Tselem said 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians since 2004, a period of intense violence that came during a Palestinian uprising. It said nearly 150 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

The Israeli military has been conducting near-daily raids into Palestinian cities and towns since a spate of Palestinian attacks against Israelis killed 19 last spring. A fresh wave of attacks killed at least another nine Israelis in the fall.

The Israeli army says most of the Palestinians killed have been militants. But stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and others not involved in confrontations have also been killed.

___

Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Rome, Bassem Mroue in Beirut and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

BEIJING (AP) — Asian stock markets rose Wednesday ahead of the release of minutes from a Federal Reserve meeting that investors hope might show the U.S. central bank is moderating its plans for more interest rate hikes to cool inflation.

Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul and Sydney advanced. Tokyo retreated. Oil prices were little-changed.

Wall Street fell Tuesday in the year’s first trading day after recording its biggest annual decline in 14 years in 2022.

Traders worry the Fed and other central banks might be willing to push the world into recession to extinguish inflation that is at multi-decade highs. They hope minutes due out Wednesday from the Fed’s December meeting might show policymakers are reducing or delaying planned rate hikes due to signs economic activity is slowing.

“While the Fed expects to keep rates higher for longer, markets continue to push back, betting on easier policy,” Rubeela Farooqi and John Silvia of High-Frequency Economics said in a report. However, they said, “we do not think a pivot to rate cuts is likely this year.”

The Shanghai Composite Index gained 0.4% to 3,128.38 while the Nikkei 225 in Tokyo sank 1.4% to 25,724.66. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong rose 2.2% to 20,581.92.

The Kospi in Seoul advanced 1.2% to 2,244.47 and Sydney’s S&P-ASX 200 was 1.4% higher at 7,043.90. New Zealand and Singapore advanced while Jakarta declined.

On Wall Street, the benchmark S&P 500 index lost 0.4% to 3,824.14.

The S&P 500 shed a 1% gain and finished 0.4% lower. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped less than 0.1% to 33,136.37. The Nasdaq composite dropped 0.8% to 10,386.98.

Technology stocks were among the biggest weights on the market. Apple fell 3.7%, leaving its market value below $2 trillion for the first time since March 8, 2021. Shares in the iPhone maker fell nearly 27% in 2022, their first annual decline in four years.

On top of concerns about inflation, investors worry about the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine and China’s COVID-19 outbreaks.

The Fed’s key lending rate stands at a range of 4.25% to 4.5%, up from close to zero following seven increases last year.

The U.S. central bank forecasts that it will reach a range of 5% to 5.25% by the end of 2023. It isn’t calling for a rate cut before 2024.

The U.S. government is due to release December employment figures Thursday. Those are expected to show a decline in hiring. Investors hope that will encourage the Fed to lower or delay possible rate hikes.

The central bank’s next policy decision on interest rates is set for Feb. 1.

Investors also are looking for corporate profit reports in mid-January. Analysts polled by FactSet expect earnings for companies in the S&P 500 to slip during the fourth quarter and remain flat for the first half of 2023.

In energy markets, benchmark U.S. crude shed 5 cents to $76.88 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $3.33 to $76.93 on Tuesday. Brent crude, the price basis for international oil trading, gained 15 cents to $82.25 per barrel in London. It lost $3.81 the previous session to $82.10.

The dollar edged up to 130.80 yen from Tuesday’s 131.03 yen. The euro advanced to $1.0570 from $1.0547.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.

The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers.

That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven. But there are no confirmed instances of a nation putting into combat robots that have killed entirely on their own.

Experts say it may be only a matter of time before either Russia or Ukraine, or both, deploy them.

“Many states are developing this technology,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a George Mason University weapons innovation analyst. ”Clearly, it’s not all that difficult.”

The sense of inevitability extends to activists, who have tried for years to ban killer drones but now believe they must settle for trying to restrict the weapons’ offensive use.

Ukraine’s digital transformation minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, agrees that fully autonomous killer drones are “a logical and inevitable next step” in weapons development. He said Ukraine has been doing “a lot of R&D in this direction.”

“I think that the potential for this is great in the next six months,” Fedorov told The Associated Press in a recent interview.

Ukrainian Lt. Col. Yaroslav Honchar, co-founder of the combat drone innovation nonprofit Aerorozvidka, said in a recent interview near the front that human war fighters simply cannot process information and make decisions as quickly as machines.

Ukrainian military leaders currently prohibit the use of fully independent lethal weapons, although that could change, he said.

“We have not crossed this line yet – and I say ‘yet’ because I don’t know what will happen in the future.” said Honchar, whose group has spearheaded drone innovation in Ukraine, converting cheap commercial drones into lethal weapons.

Russia could obtain autonomous AI from Iran or elsewhere. The long-range Shahed-136 exploding drones supplied by Iran have crippled Ukrainian power plants and terrorized civilians but are not especially smart. Iran has other drones in its evolving arsenal that it says feature AI.

Without a great deal of trouble, Ukraine could make its semi-autonomous weaponized drones fully independent in order to better survive battlefield jamming, their Western manufacturers say.

Those drones include the U.S.-made Switchblade 600 and the Polish Warmate, which both currently require a human to choose targets over a live video feed. AI finishes the job. The drones, technically known as “loitering munitions,” can hover for minutes over a target, awaiting a clean shot.

“The technology to achieve a fully autonomous mission with Switchblade pretty much exists today,” said Wahid Nawabi, CEO of AeroVironment, its maker. That will require a policy change — to remove the human from the decision-making loop — that he estimates is three years away.

Drones can already recognize targets such as armored vehicles using cataloged images. But there is disagreement over whether the technology is reliable enough to ensure that the machines don’t err and take the lives of noncombatants.

The AP asked the defense ministries of Ukraine and Russia if they have used autonomous weapons offensively – and whether they would agree not to use them if the other side similarly agreed. Neither responded.

If either side were to go on the attack with full AI, it might not even be a first.

An inconclusive U.N. report suggested that killer robots debuted in Libya’s internecine conflict in 2020, when Turkish-made Kargu-2 drones in full-automatic mode killed an unspecified number of combatants.

A spokesman for STM, the manufacturer, said the report was based on “speculative, unverified” information and “should not be taken seriously.” He told the AP the Kargu-2 cannot attack a target until the operator tells it to do so.

Fully autonomous AI is already helping to defend Ukraine. Utah-based Fortem Technologies has supplied the Ukrainian military with drone-hunting systems that combine small radars and unmanned aerial vehicles, both powered by AI. The radars are designed to identify enemy drones, which the UAVs then disable by firing nets at them — all without human assistance.

The number of AI-endowed drones keeps growing. Israel has been exporting them for decades. Its radar-killing Harpy can hover over anti-aircraft radar for up to nine hours waiting for them to power up.

Other examples include Beijing’s Blowfish-3 unmanned weaponized helicopter. Russia has been working on a nuclear-tipped underwater AI drone called the Poseidon. The Dutch are currently testing a ground robot with a .50-caliber machine gun.

Honchar believes Russia, whose attacks on Ukrainian civilians have shown little regard for international law, would have used killer autonomous drones by now if the Kremlin had them.

“I don’t think they’d have any scruples,” agreed Adam Bartosiewicz, vice president of WB Group, which makes the Warmate.

AI is a priority for Russia. President Vladimir Putin said in 2017 that whoever dominates that technology will rule the world. In a Dec. 21 speech, he expressed confidence in the Russian arms industry’s ability to embed AI in war machines, stressing that “the most effective weapons systems are those that operate quickly and practically in an automatic mode.”

Russian officials already claim their Lancet drone can operate with full autonomy.

“It’s not going to be easy to know if and when Russia crosses that line,” said Gregory C. Allen, former director of strategy and policy at the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.

Switching a drone from remote piloting to full autonomy might not be perceptible. To date, drones able to work in both modes have performed better when piloted by a human, Allen said.

The technology is not especially complicated, said University of California-Berkeley professor Stuart Russell, a top AI researcher. In the mid-2010s, colleagues he polled agreed that graduate students could, in a single term, produce an autonomous drone “capable of finding and killing an individual, let’s say, inside a building,” he said.

An effort to lay international ground rules for military drones has so far been fruitless. Nine years of informal United Nations talks in Geneva made little headway, with major powers including the United States and Russia opposing a ban. The last session, in December, ended with no new round scheduled.

Washington policymakers say they won’t agree to a ban because rivals developing drones cannot be trusted to use them ethically.

Toby Walsh, an Australian academic who, like Russell, campaigns against killer robots, hopes to achieve a consensus on some limits, including a ban on systems that use facial recognition and other data to identify or attack individuals or categories of people.

“If we are not careful, they are going to proliferate much more easily than nuclear weapons,” said Walsh, author of “Machines Behaving Badly.” “If you can get a robot to kill one person, you can get it to kill a thousand.”

Scientists also worry about AI weapons being repurposed by terrorists. In one feared scenario, the U.S. military spends hundreds of millions writing code to power killer drones. Then it gets stolen and copied, effectively giving terrorists the same weapon.

To date, the Pentagon has neither clearly defined “an AI-enabled autonomous weapon” nor authorized a single such weapon for use by U.S. troops, said Allen, the former Defense Department official. Any proposed system must be approved by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and two undersecretaries.

That’s not stopping the weapons from being developed across the U.S. Projects are underway at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, military labs, academic institutions and in the private sector.

The Pentagon has emphasized using AI to augment human warriors. The Air Force is studying ways to pair pilots with drone wingmen. A booster of the idea, former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, said in a report last month that it “would be crazy not to go to an autonomous system” once AI-enabled systems outperform humans — a threshold that he said was crossed in 2015, when computer vision eclipsed that of humans.

Humans have already been pushed out in some defensive systems. Israel’s Iron Dome missile shield is authorized to open fire automatically, although it is said to be monitored by a person who can intervene if the system goes after the wrong target.

Multiple countries, and every branch of the U.S. military, are developing drones that can attack in deadly synchronized swarms, according to Kallenborn, the George Mason researcher.

So will future wars become a fight to the last drone?

That’s what Putin predicted in a 2017 televised chat with engineering students: “When one party’s drones are destroyed by drones of another, it will have no other choice but to surrender.”

___

Frank Bajak reported from Boston. Associated Press journalists Tara Copp in Washington, Garance Burke in San Francisco and Suzan Fraser in Turkey contributed to this report.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

___

This story has been updated to correct when the U.N. report was issued. It came out in 2021, not last year.

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy (AP) — The shopkeeper named her daughter after him. The parish priest wears his old vestments. The former mayor dedicated a plaque to him on City Hall, and residents up and down this picturesque hilltop town reminisce about hearing him play the piano behind the palace walls on cool summer evenings.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is particularly beloved in Castel Gandolfo, where he joined a centuries-long list of pontiffs who summered at the papal villa overlooking Lake Alban in the hills south of Rome. Benedict’s death has hit its residents hard, since many knew him personally, and had already said their emotional farewells when he uttered his final words as pope from the palace’s balcony overlooking the town square on Feb. 28, 2013.

On that night, thousands had thronged Castel Gandolfo’s main piazza and gave Benedict a thundering round of applause as the palace’s brass-studded doors swung shut at 8 p.m., signaling the official end of his papacy.

Benedict then began the first papal retirement in 600 years in the seclusion of the palace’s grounds, where he waited out the conclave that elected Pope Francis. He returned to the Vatican two months later to live his remaining years in a converted monastery in the Vatican Gardens, where he died Saturday, nearly 10 years after that momentous night in Castel Gandolfo.

“It was really awful seeing the big door close that night,” said Stefano Carosi, who runs the coffee shop on the main piazza, a stone’s throw from the palace entrance. “It made us realize that this pope wouldn’t be with us anymore … that he had left us.”

It was Pope Urban VIII who had the palace built on the northern end of town in 1624, to give popes an escape from the sweltering Roman summers. It was enlarged over succeeding pontificates to its present size, which is now bigger than Vatican City itself.

Aside from the extensive gardens and a pool that St. John Paul II installed, the palace grounds are home to a working farm that supplies the Vatican with fresh dairy, eggs, honey and produce, as well as an observatory that boasts a world-class meteorite collection.

In the decade since Benedict retired, Castel Gandolfo has had to adapt its livelihood and seasonal rhythms to a new pope who has chosen not to vacation here. Francis has spent every summer of his papacy in Vatican City, depriving Castel Gandolfo’s souvenir shops, restaurants and hotels of the visitors who would pack the town each summer Sunday for noon papal blessings and then stay to enjoy a cool afternoon in the countryside.

Francis has tried to make it up to them, opening the palace and its immaculate gardens to the public in an extension of the Vatican Museums, where visitors can see the papal bedroom, vestments and old uniforms of the papal court.

But even with a year-round tourism opportunity, the absence of a pope still rankles a community that for centuries had a privileged relationship with popes, especially Benedict because of his obvious love for the town and his decision to mark his final moments here as pope.

“When he arrived here (at the beginning of each summer) he looked very tired, but just with the two months he spent in Castel Gandolfo he flourished again,” said Mayor Maurizio Colacchi, whose two terms covered nearly Benedict’s entire eight-year papacy. “It was clear that the air, the atmosphere, the tranquility, the serenity were of great benefit for him.”

Colacchi recalled the visits by heads of state that turned main street into the center of the media universe for a day, as well as Benedict’s lower-profile but more frequent visitor: his late brother, the Rev. Georg Ratzinger, who often spent weeks visiting the pope in summer.

In one of his many papal encounters, Colacchi gave Georg honorary citizenship. In another, Colacchi unveiled a plaque on the façade of City Hall with a quote Benedict once uttered in expressing his love for the town. “Here I have everything: mountains, lake and I can even see the sea, and good people,” the plaque reads.

“We got to know him very well, in the sense that we had the fortune of appreciating him in a more direct way than anyone else, because here everything’s smaller,” said Patriza Gasperini, whose family has run Gasperini Souvenirs, a shop right next to the palace entrance, for three generations.

She remembered how Benedict would greet residents in the main square when he would return from his walks in the gardens, without any bodyguards, or when he’d play his beloved Mozart in the evenings, and passersby could hear it faintly in the main square.

“He was very, very good,” said Gasperini, whose shop still features Benedict-themed religious souvenirs and who named her daughter, Benedetta, when she was born a few months after his 2005 election.

Benedict was remembered with prayer during several moments of the Tuesday morning Mass in the parish church on the main square, where a large photo of him with a black ribbon across the frame was placed next to the altar.

The parish priest, the Rev. Tadeusz Rozmus, donned a white vestment that Benedict had worn during a Mass he celebrated for the Castel Gandolfo faithful in their church and then left behind as a gift.

“The popes who came here didn’t come as guests,” Rozmus said after Mass. “This was their home.”

___

Follow AP’s coverage of Pope Benedict XVI at https://apnews.com/hub/pope-benedict-xvi