Author: ALJAZEERA

Wall Street Journal rejects ‘false and baseless’ charge against 32-year-old reporter who has been in custody since March 2023.Russian prosecutors have said US journalist Evan Gershkovich will face trial in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg, where he was detained more than a year ago after he was accused of working for the CIA. Gershkovich, 32, is accused of “gathering secret information” on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility that produces and repairs military equipment, the prosecutor general’s office said in a statement, revealing for the first time the details of the accusations against him. The statement gave no…

The Israeli military is continuing attacks on Gaza and imposing restrictions on Al-Aqsa Mosque during the Muslim festival of sacrifice.Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank are marking a sombre Eid al-Adha as the Israeli military continues its deadly attacks more than eight months after the start of the war. In the besieged enclave, where more than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed, people gathered in the rubble of their neighbourhoods to pray on Sunday. This is while the Israeli military is aggressively attacking western areas of Rafah as it advances with its ground invasion of the southernmost…

The United States Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have reportedly reached a deal on how they will pursue an antitrust investigation into tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI. The companies are all major players in generative artificial intelligence: OpenAI is the nonprofit startup behind ChatGPT, the blockbuster AI-powered chatbot. Microsoft, the world’s largest company by market capitalisation, has invested more than $13bn in OpenAI and holds a 49 percent stake in the company’s for-profit subsidiary. Chipmaker Nvidia is a global leader in graphic processing units (GPU), a key piece of hardware needed in AI. The company…

The United States’ position on the Gaza ceasefire is that Hamas is causing all the problems and that Israel has not just accepted the deal – it produced it. In the weeks since US President Joe Biden announced his proposal for a ceasefire, his administration has repeated this point. The US even took the notion to the United Nations, where the Security Council backed a text that said Israel accepted the deal. Is Hamas really the reluctant one? Hamas, despite the US trying to make it the intransigent party, has made positive statements about the proposal. In contrast, Israel refuses…

News consumers most opposed to use of AI for sensitive topics such as politics, report finds.Most news consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom would be uncomfortable with journalism produced mainly by artificial intelligence (AI), a survey has found. Only 23 percent of respondents in the US and 10 percent in the UK would be comfortable with AI-produced news, with consumers especially suspicious of the technology being used for sensitive topics such as politics and crime, the survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism showed on Monday. More than half of US respondents and 63…

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is opposed to plans announced by the military to hold daily tactical pauses in fighting along one of the main roads into the besieged and bombarded Gaza Strip to facilitate aid delivery into the Palestinian enclave. The military had announced the daily pauses from 05:00 GMT until 16:00 GMT in the area from the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing to the Salah al-Din Road and then northwards. “When the prime minister heard the reports of an 11-hour humanitarian pause in the morning, he turned to his military secretary and made it clear that this…

The United States is between 10 and 15 years behind China in rolling out next-generation reactors, research institute says.The United States is falling far behind China in nuclear energy, with the world’s largest economy lagging behind the Asian giant by 10 to 15 years in rolling out next-generation reactors, a report has found. China has 27 nuclear reactors under development, with the average reactor taking seven years to come online – far faster than for most other countries, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said in a report released on Sunday. Between 2008 and 2023, China’s share of nuclear patents…

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Defence minister says Israel will not participate in trilateral group with US and France because of Paris’s ‘hostile policies’.Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has rejected a French initiative aimed at defusing the growing tensions between Israel and Hezbollah as fears of an all-out war between the two sides grow. Gallant said on Friday that Israel would not take part in a French-proposed trilateral group with the United States and France as he slammed Paris’s position on the war on Gaza. “As we fight a just war, defending our people, France has adopted hostile policies against Israel,” Gallant said in a…

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus, an investigation by the Reuters news agency has found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vaccination campaign, Reuters reported in a story released on Friday. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation. The clandestine operation has…