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Al Jazeera

Why has Trump rejected Iran’s peace proposal?

That was the immediate reaction from US President Donald Trump to Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.Tehran says it’s still awaiting what it called a ‘definitive repsonse’ from Washington, through mediators.So, is his rejection of the proposal an effort to pressure Tehran for more concessions?Abas Aslani – Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Middle East Strategic StudiesAmbassador Henry Ensher – Former U.S. diplomat and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State

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The Straits Times

Israel’s Netanyahu visited Abu Dhabi on Sept 27, Israeli official says

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the 81st United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York City, on Sept 24.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Abu Dhabi and met with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan on Sept 27, a senior Israeli official told Reuters.There was no immediate comment from Netanyahu’s office and the UAE’s foreign ministry.The visit comes after Israeli newspaper Haaretz earlier in September reported that Sheikh Mohamed had warned Netanyahu a week and a half before Oct 7, 2023 that Hamas was planning a major operation against Israel. The warning was not passed to Israeli intelligence agencies or the military, Haaretz reported.Netanyahu, who has denied the report and threatened legal action against the newspaper, is facing a tough reelection campaign. Opposition leaders have accused the prime minister of bearing responsibility for security failures that preceded Hamas’ Oct 7 attack.The UAE has declined to comment on the Haaretz report but has said that UAE and Israel have maintained “open and direct lines of communication” since establishing diplomatic relations in 2020.A UAE source previously told Reuters that the UAE discusses security matters with countries through the “relevant entities,” but not “at the level of national leaders.”Earlier in 2026, the UAE denied that President Sheikh Mohamed met with Netanyahu after the Israeli prime minister’s office said in May that Netanyahu had “secretly visited” the Gulf country and met with the president.A source familiar with the meeting said at the time that Netanyahu and Sheikh Mohammed met in Al-Ain, an oasis city in Abu Dhabi along the country’s border with Oman, on March 26.Since coming under attack during the Iran war, the UAE has strengthened its relationships with the United States and Israel, with which it opened ties as a result of the 2020 Abraham Accords.The relationship with Israel gives UAE a lever for regional influence and a unique channel to Washington. REUTERS

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The Straits Times

Pope Leo pledges action on clergy abuse after meeting French survivors

Pope Leo leads the prayer of the Holy Rosary on the day of a candlelight procession on Sept 27, at the Grotto of the Apparitions at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, in Lourdes, France.LOURDES, France - Pope Leo reaffirmed his commitment to ending abuse of children by Catholic priests in a meeting with French abuse survivors on Sept 27, the Vatican said, hours after the pontiff urged the Church to admit its own failings and heal its “deep wounds.”In a two-hour meeting with seven survivors in France, where Leo is on a three-city weekend visit, the pope met privately with each of the victims and heard proposals for how to improve the Church’s safeguarding measures, said a Vatican statement.“He thanked them for their painful testimony and reaffirmed his commitment to ensuring that the harm they experienced is not repeated for others,” it said.The survivors said after the meeting that it was emotional and touching. They said they felt listened to by the pontiff, and they were impressed by his compassion and his knowledge of their individual cases, but they also hoped that the words would be accompanied by action.“He certainly believes that the Church has done a great deal in France, but he also believes that the Church in France still has a tremendous amount left to do,” Jerome Guillement said.Leo is on a whirlwind four-day visit to France. Local Church leaders are hoping he will help repair the Church’s standing after a 2021 report found that some 330,000 French children had been abused by Catholic clergy and lay leaders over seven decades.The pope told an estimated 150,000 people gathered for a Mass in a field near the famed Catholic shrine in Lourdes that the Church must have the courage to face its past.“In order to heal the deep wounds, infidelities and painful errors that have occurred within (the Church), we must humbly place ourselves under the Lord’s purifying gaze,” the first US pope said.Veronique Garnier, one of the survivors in the meeting with the pope, said she had found the Mass, in which Leo referred to abuse without directly apologising for it, troubling and wondered why she had attended.“I do indeed believe there is hope – hope that there can be change and truly listening to us at a deep level, rather than just superficially with beautiful words that are never followed by any real action,” she said.Leo also spoke about the abuse scandals in a closed-door meeting with French bishops on Sept 27, according to a Vatican-provided text.The pope thanked the bishops for the “courageous measures” he said they had taken to confront the scandals and urged them to buttress their safeguarding efforts and “continue on the path undertaken, maintaining the greatest vigilance.”Leo has drawn large crowds on his visit to France. Around 800,000 people came for an outdoor Mass on the Champs-Elysees with the pope in Paris on Sept 26. He has also again urged the world to reconsider the development of artificial intelligence.Leo has previously apologised directly for abuse scandals that have damaged the Church’s credibility across the world. On a trip to Spain in June, he told bishops there that they must listen to survivors and offer them reparations.Bishop Pierre-Antoine Bozo, the spokesperson for the French bishops, said the pope’s desire to have the meeting “shows that we cannot ignore this issue and that it must always remain among our concerns”.The pope’s itinerary in France included six events in Lourdes, a town in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains that attracts some 3 million pilgrims a year for visits to a shrine to the Virgin Mary and purported healing spring waters.The site is also connected to a scandal that has dogged the Vatican in recent years. The shrine’s facade has a series of mosaics by Rev Marko Rupnik, a prominent religious artist with Vatican ties, who has been accused of sexual abuse.Rupnik, accused by more than 20 women, is not known to have commented publicly on the accusations. Five of his alleged victims wrote an open letter to the pope on Sept 24, sharply criticising an ongoing Vatican trial of the cleric.Workers cover a mosaic made by Slovenian priest, Marko Rupnik, displayed on the Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire Basilica in the Sanctuary of Lourdes in Lourdes.The mosaics, stories tall, have been covered for the pope’s visit with large, muted yellow tarps. Arriving for the Mass on Sept 27, Leo was driven in his open-top popemobile near the facade of the shrine and the covered mosaics.The pope, who on Sept 25 sharply reiterated Catholic opposition to assisted dying initiatives two months after France created a legal right to die for those with incurable illnesses, again mentioned the Church’s pro-life stance in Lourdes.Meeting with volunteers who help sick pilgrims hoping to find a miracle in the shrine’s waters, Leo urged them to remember the “profound meaning” of healthcare work.“That is to care for a suffering person, not to eliminate that person,” said the pope. “Medicine must never become the servant of programmed death!” REUTERS

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Al Jazeera

Pubs in Ireland refuse to screen Israel match in protest over Gaza genocide

The Republic of Ireland has been thrust into the global spotlight over two controversial Nations League football games against Israel.On match days, Peadar Browns pub in Dublin’s historic Liberties area is usually jam-packed with football fans piling in to watch the game on various screens.As kickoff approached in the Republic of Ireland’s Nations League game against Israel on Sunday, there was a similarly busy crowd.The pub has made a deliberate decision not to show the game tonight in protest against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.“We committed about a month ago not to show any of the upcoming Nations League fixtures until Ireland made a stand against Israel,” says owner Aidan Brown. “We didn’t show the Kosovo game, and we’ve absolutely no intention of showing the Israel games.”Brown has been compiling a list of venues refusing to screen the match. At his last count, it included 140 pubs and bars in Ireland and abroad. He expected the number had risen before kickoff as tumultuous events within the Ireland team reverberated around the country.Ireland, a staunch and long-standing ally of the Palestinian cause, has been thrust into the global spotlight over whether the team will play the two scheduled games against Israel.Brown compares the atmosphere in Dublin to one of the most enduring sporting dramas in modern Irish history.“I think this is just as big as Saipan and the Roy Keane saga in 2002,” he says.Saipan became a national drama when Ireland captain Roy Keane left the 2002 World Cup squad in Japan after a confrontation with manager Mick McCarthy over training facilities.This time the public debate across the island of Ireland is not about football standards, but moral ones.In Derry, in the north of Ireland, Liam Doherty, another pub owner refusing to show the game, describes a similar sense of mobilisation.“It has to come from the bottom up, and it has to come from a small nation,” says the owner of the Delacroix bar. “I think that we have to be the one that shows that this is just wrong.”Rebecca O’Keeffe, chair of Irish Sport for Palestine, which has led the Stop the Game campaign, says the past week has shown just how far that mobilisation has spread.“It’s a mass movement,” she says. “It’s reached corners of Ireland that maybe wouldn’t have been engaged with this issue before. It’s all people can talk about. We are past the point of symbolic gestures and hollow words.”It’s not unanimous, but Irish public opinion is clearly against tonight’s fixture taking place.A poll of Irish football supporters found 76 percent opposed to the match going ahead. Among athletes, 63 percent of members of the Professional Footballers’ Association of Ireland voted against playing the game.But that groundswell of public sentiment has been ignored by those in charge of the sport in the country, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI).In November, 93 percent of FAI members voted for the association to seek Israel’s suspension from UEFA competitions.Yet when the FAI voted in July on whether the Republic of Ireland should play Israel, it chose to proceed with the fixtures. The motion passed 75 votes to 32, with three abstentions. The FAI cited the consequences non-fulfillment could have for Irish football, such as potential points deductions.Daniel Lambert, the Bohemian FC chief commercial officer who helped propose the original November motion, says the sequence explains much of the anger towards the FAI.“It’s been mishandled from the very first day by the FAI,” he says. “The November vote was a very clear instruction from the membership, but they never really entertained not playing the games.”Lambert argues that the FAI also failed to recognise what it could have gained by taking a stand.“There are huge benefits to not playing,” he says. “Not only would it have the support of the Irish people … this would have enhanced the FAI’s reputation, not damaged it.”Susan Shalabi, vice president of the Palestinian Football Association, believes the buck stops even higher up.“The deeper issue is that the FAI and many others should never have been placed in this position,” she told Al Jazeera. “Had football’s international governing bodies [FIFA and UEFA] consistently applied their own rules, this dilemma would not exist.”Instead, the decision has been left not with the governing bodies, but with the Irish players themselves.Earlier this week, more than 160 Irish sportspeople signed an open letter calling on the squad to boycott the fixtures. Team coach Heimir Hallgrimsson said some players were “really uncomfortable” playing, while midfielder Jason Knight said the games should not be happening.Goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu told his teammates he did not want to play. The players subsequently voted to fulfil the fixture, with reports suggesting eight had voted against playing. Bazunu was the only one who ultimately refused.“To do that on your own in a group of 25 players is staggering courage,” he says. “He’s represented Ireland more than those 24 players ever will. He has the respect of the Irish people forever.”

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Al Jazeera

Bill Gates says AI without regulation is ‘completely irresponsible’

The billionaire cofounder of Microsoft says without restrictions, AI could ‘cause a billion deaths’.Not requiring AI to have safeguards and be subject to outside monitoring is “completely irresponsible” and could lead to global harm to humanity, said tech mogul Bill Gates, in a series of media appearances where the philanthropist weighed in on global discussions concerning how to regulate the technology.“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion of what safeguards and monitoring looks like,” Gates said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, parts of which aired on Sunday.Gates warned that the technology was “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.” Ensuring that did not happen, he said, could be a more difficult task than other existential threats, such as slowing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.The tech pioneer turned philanthropist said he was willing to speak with US President Donald Trump to convey his concerns directly and disagreed with his characterisation of recent warnings over the danger AI posed as a “hoax”.“I hope that, given ⁠⁠my life’s work in the field, my saying how unique and different this is and how concerned I am will add to what he’s hearing from other people,” Gates said in the interview.In recent weeks, the heads of leading AI companies have said publicly that their industry needs frameworks and guardrails to ensure the technology does not outpace human oversight, spin out of control and prove to be catastrophic for the world.“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, told members of the United Nations Security Council last week.But Trump and senior officials in his administration have baulked at imposing regulations on the multi-trillion-dollar industry, which they say is part of a race between the US and China.On Saturday, the day after meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss AI, Trump repeated his scepticism of the warnings and said he would not regulate the industry. He compared the apocalyptic warnings to other issues he is dismissive of, such as climate change and Russian interference in US elections. “It’s just like, everybody’s going to be dead, you’re all supposed to be dead now because of global warming. It’s like Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. All of these different hoaxes,” Trump said.Gates told CNN that the kind of safeguards needed for AI development would not harm the industry.“The amount of slowing down is not going to be that dramatic,” he said. “To have a monitoring or policing layer that says, is this being used for a cyberattack, is this being used for bio-terrorism, that can be done.”The 70-year-old co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 and ran it during an era of widespread consumer adoption of personal computers and later the internet. He became the richest person in the world in 1995, and retained that spot throughout much of the next two decades, before giving much of his wealth away for philanthropic causes and being replaced by a new generation of tech moguls, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.Earlier this month, his philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, said it was committing $1bn to expand AI access in the developing world.

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France 24

France's far right gains ground in indirect Senate elections

Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally and its allies won enough seats in France's Senate to form a parliamentary group in the upper house for the first time in the party's history Sunday, securing 14 seats out of 348. Half the upper house is elected through indirect voting every three years, with senators in the right-wing dominated chamber serving for six years.

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Google News — Technology

Scientists Just Used Solar Panels To Convert Plastic Into Hydrogen Fuel — Here's How

Scientists Just Used Solar Panels To Convert Plastic Into Hydrogen Fuel — Here's How bgr.comA new process turns plastic waste into gasoline and diesel fuel sciencedaily.comScientists Develop Plastic-to-Fuel Process GK TodayOak Ridge National Laboratory turns everyday plastic into usable fuel NewsBytesScientists develop process that turns plastic waste into gasoline and diesel-like fuels ANI News

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