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Senior advisers in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump are preparing to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, according to an Associated Press interview with retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg. Kellogg, a special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, said planning continues for talks with Zelenskyy at the annual conference.  Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Kellogg are among those who could participate in the sideline conversations with Ukraine’s president, AP reported.  Trump has been critical about how much the war is costing the U.S. and has said European countries should repay the U.S. for helping Ukraine.  During his campaign, Trump said if he were elected president, he would bring a swift end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, but he did not specify how he would accomplish that.  Recently, he has said that he wants to make a deal with Ukraine to continue U.S. support in exchange for access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals.   On Monday, AP reported the president said there are people currently working on a money-for-minerals-deal with Ukraine.   “We have people over there today who are making a deal that, as we give money, we get minerals and we get oil and we get all sorts of things,” Trump said.  Kellogg told AP that “the economics of that would allow for further support to the Ukrainians.” Meanwhile, Russian drone attacks caused a fire in Kyiv, injured a woman in Sumy and damaged several homes, according to Ukrainian officials.  The Russian military reported downing 15 Ukrainian drones overnight, including seven in the Krasnodar region. Nobody was hurt as a result of the fire in Kyiv, which was sparked in a non-residential building, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Five houses were damaged and a woman was reportedly injured in the northeastern city of Sumy, regional governor Ihor Kalchenko said on Telegram.   Material from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse was used in this report. …

French President Emmanuel Macron wants Europe to become a leader in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, he told a global summit of AI and political leaders in Paris Monday where he announced that France’s private sector has invested nearly $113 billion in French AI. Financial investment is key to achieving the goal of Europe as an AI hub, Macron said in his remarks delivered in English at the Grand Palais. He said the European bloc would also need to “adopt the Notre Dame strategy,” a reference to the lightning swift rebuilding of France’s famed Notre Dame cathedral in five years after a devastating 2019 fire, the result of simplified regulations and adherence to timelines. “We showed the rest of the of the world that when we commit to a clear timeline, we can deliver,” the French leader said. Henna Virkkunen, the European Union’s digital head, indicated that the EU is in agreement with simplifying regulations. The EU approved the AI Act last year, the world’s first extensive set of rules designed to regulate technology. European countries want to ensure that they have a stake in the tech race against an aggressive U.S. and other emerging challengers. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen is scheduled to address the EU’s ability to compete in the tech world Tuesday. Macron’s announcement that the French private sector will invest heavily in AI “reassured” Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, a U.S. company with French co-founders that is a hub for open-source AI, that there will be “ambitious” projects in France, according to Reuters. Sundar Pichai, Google’s head, told the gathering that the shift to AI will be “the biggest of our lifetimes.” However, such a big shift also comes with problems for the AI community. France had wanted the summit to adopt a non-binding text that AI would be inclusive and sustainable. “We have the chance to democratize access [to a new technology] from the start,” Pichai told the summit. Whether the U.S. will agree to that initiative is uncertain, considering the U.S. government’s recent moves to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. U.S. Vice President JD Vance is attending the summit and expected to deliver a speech on Tuesday. Other politicians expected Tuesday at the plenary session are Chinese Vice Premier Zhan Guoqing and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. About 100 politicians are expected. There are also other considerations with a … “France seeks AI boom, urges EU investment in the sector” →

PARIS — In front of political and tech leaders gathered at a summit in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron called for a strategy on Monday to make up for the delay in France and Europe in investing in artificial intelligence (AI) but was faced with a “counter-summit” that pointed out the risks of the technology.  The use of chatbots at work and school is destroying jobs, professions and threatening the acquisition of knowledge, said union representatives gathered at the Theatre de la Concorde located in the Champs-Elysees gardens, less than a kilometer from the venue of the Summit for Action on Artificial Intelligence.  Habib El Kettani, from Solidaires Informatique, a union representing IT workers, described an “automation already underway for about ten years,” which has been reinforced with the arrival of the flagship tool ChatGPT at the end of 2022.  “I have been fighting for ten years to ensure that my job does not become an endangered species,” said Sandrine Larizza, from the CGT union at France Travail, a public service dedicated to the unemployed.  She deplored “a disappearance of social rights that goes hand in hand with the automation of public services,” where the development of AI has served, according to her “to make people work faster to respond less and less to the needs of users, by reducing staff numbers.”  Loss of meaning  “With generative AI, it is no longer the agent who responds by email to the unemployed person but the generative AI that gives the answers with a multitude of discounted job offers in subcontracting,” said Larizza.  This is accompanied by “a destruction of our human capacities to play a social role, a division into micro-tasks on the assembly line and an industrialization of our professions with a loss of meaning,” she said, a few days after the announcement of a partnership between France Travail and the French startup Mistral.  “Around 40 projects” are also being tested “with postal workers,” said Marie Vairon, general secretary of the Sud PTT union of the La Poste and La Banque Postale group.  AI is used “to manage schedules and simplify tasks with a tool tested since 2020 and generalized since 2023,” she said, noting that the results are “not conclusive.”  After the implementation at the postal bank, La Banque Postale, of “Lucy,” a conversational robot handling some “300,000 calls every month,” Vairon is concerned about a “generative AI serving as … “On sidelines of AI Summit in Paris, unions denounce its harmful effects” →

THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS — Judges at the International Criminal Court have officially asked Italy on Monday to explain why the country released a Libyan man suspected of torture, murder and rape rather than sending him to The Hague. Italian police arrested Ossama Anjiem, also known as Ossama al-Masri, last month but rather than extraditing him to the Netherlands, where the ICC is based, sent him back to Libya aboard an Italian military aircraft. “The matter of state’s non-compliance with a request of cooperation for arrest and surrender by the court is before the competent chamber,” the court’s spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah said in a statement. Addressing parliament last week, Italian Justice Minister Carlo Nordio defended the decision to send al-Masri home, claiming the ICC had issued a contradictory and flawed arrest warrant. The court, he said, “realized that an immense mess was made,” he told lawmakers. Al-Masri was arrested in Turin on the ICC warrant on Jan. 19, the day after he arrived in the country from Germany to watch a soccer match. The Italian government has said Rome’s court of appeals ordered him released on Jan. 21 because of a technical problem in the way that the ICC warrant was transmitted, having initially bypassed the Italian justice ministry. The ICC said it does not comment on national judicial proceedings. Al-Masri’s arrest had posed a dilemma for Italy because it has close ties to the internationally recognized government in Tripoli as well as energy interests in the country. According to the arrest warrant, al-Masri heads the Tripoli branch of the Reform and Rehabilitation Institution, a notorious network of detention centers run by the government-backed Special Defense Force, which acts as a military police unit combating high-profile crimes including kidnappings, murders as well as illegal migration. Like many other militias in western Libya, the SDF has been implicated in atrocities in the civil war that followed the overthrow and killing of longtime Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Additionally, any trial in The Hague of al-Masri could bring unwanted attention to Italy’s migration policies and its support of the Libyan coast guard, which it has financed to prevent migrants from leaving. In October, the court unsealed arrest warrants for six men allegedly linked to a brutal Libyan militia blamed for multiple killings and other crimes in a strategically important western town where mass graves were discovered in 2020. …

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — Europe’s Euclid space telescope has detected a rare halo of bright light around a nearby galaxy, astronomers reported Monday. The halo, known as an Einstein ring, encircles a galaxy 590 million light-years away, considered close by cosmic standards.   A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. Astronomers have known about this galaxy for more than a century and so were surprised when Euclid revealed the bright glowing ring, reported in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.   An Einstein ring is light from a much more distant galaxy that bends in such a way as to perfectly encircle a closer object, in this case a well-known galaxy in the constellation Draco.   The faraway galaxy creating the ring is more than 4 billion light-years away. Gravity distorted the light from this more distant galaxy, thus the name honoring Albert Einstein. The process is known as gravitational lensing. “All strong lenses are special, because they’re so rare, and they’re incredibly useful scientifically. This one is particularly special, because it’s so close to Earth and the alignment makes it very beautiful,” lead author Conor O’Riordan of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics said in a statement. Euclid rocketed from Florida in 2023. NASA is taking part in its mission to detect dark energy and dark matter in the universe. …

VOA Russian speaks to Yevgeniya Chirikova, a coordinator of the Activatica initiative that tracked down the Kremlin’s system of mass torture and violence on Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian army. Using the blueprint that Moscow previously used in Chechnya, Activatica says Russian forces kidnap civilians they deem dangerous and put them in illegal detention centers where they are subjected to systematic torture sanctioned by the authorities in Moscow. Click here for the full story in Russian.   …

Bucharest, Romania — Romanian President Klaus Iohannis announced his resignation on Monday following mounting pressure from populist opposition groups, two months after a top court annulled a presidential election in the European Union country. “To spare Romania from this crisis, I am resigning as president of Romania,” he said in an emotional address, adding that he will leave office on Feb. 12. Iohannis, 65, held the presidential role since 2014 and served the maximum of two five-year terms. But his presidency was extended in December after the Constitutional Court canceled the presidential race two days before a Dec. 8 runoff. That came after the far-right populist Calin Georgescu unexpectedly won the first round, after which allegations emerged of Russian interference and electoral violations. Several opposition parties, including the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), the nationalist SOS party and the Party of Young People — but also some members of the reformist Save Romania Union party — sought Iohannis’ ouster through a motion filed to Parliament. Some lawmakers from the governing coalition were also expected to vote in favor. “This is a useless endeavor because, in any case, I will leave office in a few months after the election of the new president,” Iohannis said. “It is an unfounded move because I have never — I repeat, never — violated the constitution. And it is a harmful endeavor because … everyone loses, and no one gains.” He added that the consequences of his ouster would be “long-lasting and highly negative” for Romania, an EU member since 2007, and a NATO member since 2004. “None of our partners will understand why Romania is dismissing its president when the process for electing a new president has already begun,” he said. New dates have been set to rerun the presidential vote with the first round scheduled for May 4. If no candidate obtains more than 50% of the ballot, a runoff would be held two weeks later, on May 18. It is not yet clear whether Georgescu will be able to participate in the new election. After his resignation announcement, clashes broke out between Georgescu supporters and police in front of the government building in the capital, Bucharest. …

PRISTINA, Kosovo — Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s leftwing party won most seats in the weekend parliamentary election but was left without a majority in the house, forcing it to look for an ally to form the next government, according to preliminary results released Monday. The vote on Sunday was key in determining who will lead Kosovo as talks on normalizing ties with rival Serbia remain stalled and foreign funding for one of Europe’s poorest countries is in question. The election marked the first time since independence in 2008 that Kosovo’s parliament completed a full four-year mandate. It was the ninth parliamentary vote in Kosovo since the end of the 1998-1999 war between Serbian government forces and ethnic Albanian separatists that pushed Serbian forces out following a 78-day NATO air campaign. Serbia does not recognize Kosovo’s independence. With 88% of the votes counted, Kurti’s Self-Determination Movement Party, or Vetevendosje!, had won 41.3%, according to the Central Election Commission, the election governing body. The Democratic Party of Kosovo, or PDK, whose main leaders are detained at a Netherlands-based international criminal tribunal in The Hague and accused of war crimes, won 21.8% of the vote. Next, with 17.8% support is the Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK, the oldest party in the country. The LDK lost much of its support after the death in 2006 of its leader, Ibrahim Rugova. The Alliance for Kosovo’s Future of former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj garnered 7.7% of the votes. Still, Kurti was upbeat, though his remarks gave nothing away about who he plans to ask to join his coalition government. “The people won. Vetevendosje! won. We are the winners who will form the next Cabinet,” Kurti told journalists as his supporters took to the streets to celebrate. The commission’s webpage was down temporarily on Sunday as it was overloaded “due to the citizens’ high interest to learn the results,” election body said. Results were collected manually. A preliminary turnout after 92% of the votes counted was 40.6% — about 7% lower than four years ago. The new 120-seat parliament reserves 20 seats for minorities regardless of election results, 10 of them for the Serb minority. Kurti’s new term will face multiple challenges after Washington recently announced it was freezing foreign aid and the European Union, almost two years ago, suspended funding for some projects and initiatives. He also is under pressure to increase public salaries and … “Kosovo prime minister looking for allies for new Cabinet after failing to win parliament majority  “ →

Russian drone attacks caused a fire in Kyiv, injured a woman in Sumy and damaged several homes, according to Ukrainian officials. Meanwhile, the Russian military reported downing 15 Ukrainian drones overnight, including seven in the Krasnodar region. Nobody was hurt as a result of the fire in Kyiv, which was sparked in a non-residential building, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Five houses were damaged and a woman was reportedly injured in the northeastern city of Sumy, regional governor Ihor Kalchenko said on Telegram. While fighting continued, a group of U.S. officials from President Donald Trump’s administration were set to travel to Europe this week for discussions that would include the war in Ukraine. Vice President JD Vance was scheduled to attend an artificial intelligence summit in France before attending the Munich Security Conference with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Munich event, billed as “the world’s leading forum for debating international security policy,” is expected to focus on prospects for peace in Ukraine as well as discussions of other global conflicts. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will visit the headquarters of two military commands, then meet with NATO defense ministers. He’ll also attend a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, where he “will reiterate President Trump’s commitment for a diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine as quickly as possible,” according to the Pentagon. Material from Reuters and Agence France-Presse was used in this report.   …

PARIS — Major world leaders are meeting for an AI summit in Paris, where challenging diplomatic talks are expected as tech titans fight for dominance in the fast-moving technology industry. Heads of state, top government officials, CEOs and scientists from around 100 countries are participating in the two-day international summit from Monday. High-profile attendees include U.S. Vice President JD Vance, on his first overseas trip since taking office, and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing. “We’re living a technology and scientific revolution we’ve rarely seen,” French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday on national television France 2. France and Europe must seize the “opportunity” because AI “will enable us to live better, learn better, work better, care better and it’s up to us to put this artificial intelligence at the service of human beings,” he said. Vance’s debut abroad The summit will give some European leaders a chance to meet Vance for the first time. The 40-year-old vice president was just 18 months into his time as Ohio’s junior senator when Donald Trump picked him as his running mate. Vance was joined by his wife Usha and their three children — Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel — for the trip to Europe. They were greeted on French soil Monday morning by Manuel Valls, the minister for Overseas France, and the U.S. Embassy’s charge d’affaires, David McCawley. On Tuesday, Vance will have a working lunch with Macron, with discussions on Ukraine and the Middle East on the menu. Vance, like President Donald Trump, has questioned U.S. spending on Ukraine and the approach to isolating Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump promised to end the fighting within six months of taking office. Vance will attend later this week the Munich Security Conference, where he may meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Leaders in Europe have been watching carefully Trump’s recent statements on threats to impose tariffs on the European Union, take control of Greenland and his suggestion that Palestinians clear out Gaza once the fighting in the Israel-Hamas conflict ends — an idea that’s been flatly rejected by Arab allies. Fostering AI advances The summit, which gathers major players such as Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, aims at fostering AI advances in sectors like health, education, environment and culture. A global public-private partnership named “Current AI” is to be launched to support large-scale initiatives that serve the general interest. The Paris summit “is the first time we’ll have had … “High-stakes AI summit in Paris: World leaders, tech titans and challenging diplomatic talks” →

PARIS — Nearly all nations missed a UN deadline Monday to submit new targets for slashing carbon emissions, including major economies under pressure to show leadership following the U.S. retreat on climate change. Just 10 of nearly 200 countries required under the Paris Agreement to deliver fresh climate plans by Feb. 10 did so on time, according to a UN database tracking the submissions. Under the climate accord, each country is supposed to provide a steeper headline figure for cutting heat-trapping emissions by 2035, and a detailed blueprint for how to achieve this. Global emissions have been rising but need to almost halve by the end of the decade to limit global warming to levels agreed under the Paris deal. UN climate chief Simon Stiell has called this latest round of national pledges “the most important policy documents of this century.” Yet just a handful of major polluters handed in upgraded targets on time, with China, India and the European Union the biggest names on a lengthy absentee list. Most G20 economies were missing in action with the United States, Britain and Brazil — which is hosting this year’s UN climate summit — the only exceptions. The US pledge is largely symbolic, made before President Donald Trump ordered Washington out of the Paris deal. Accountability measure There is no penalty for submitting late targets, formally titled nationally determined contributions (NDCs). They are not legally binding but act as an accountability measure to ensure governments are taking the threat of climate change seriously. Last week, Stiell said submissions would be needed by September so they could be properly assessed before the UN COP30 climate conference in November. A spokeswoman for the EU said the 27-nation bloc intended to submit its revised targets “well ahead” of the summit in Belem. Analysts say China, the world’s biggest polluter and also its largest investor in renewable energy, is also expected to unveil its much-anticipated climate plan in the second half of the year. The United Arab Emirates, Ecuador, Saint Lucia, New Zealand, Andorra, Switzerland and Uruguay rounded out the list of countries that made Monday’s cut-off. The sluggish response will not ease fears of a possible backslide on climate action as leaders juggle Trump’s return and other competing priorities from budget and security crises to electoral pressure. Ebony Holland from the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development said the US retreat was “clearly a … “Almost all nations miss UN deadline for new climate targets” →

LONDON — The Church of England’s elected governing body will gather Monday at a time of “unprecedented crisis” following a number of sexual abuse scandals. The meeting of the General Synod will see members debate the Makin Review, a damning report which set out a series of failings around a Christian camp leader and serial abuser, John Smyth. On Tuesday, a debate on a new way to handle safeguarding will also be held. The meeting comes a month after the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby stepped down as head of the world’s Anglicans over failures in the Church of England’s handling of the Smyth case. “There’s never been anything like this in our lifetime, because the Church is in an unprecedented crisis,” Synod member Ian Paul told the domestic PA news agency. Paul said “the crisis we’re facing now is a result of gradual erosion over years of trust and confidence and lack of openness, lack of transparency. “And suddenly the rafters, the rotten rafters, break, the roof collapses.” Paul was one of the people behind a petition last year calling on Welby to resign. Welby announced his resignation in November after an independent probe found that he “could and should” have formally reported decades of abuse by Church-linked lawyer Smyth to authorities in 2013. ‘Prolific’ abuser’ Smyth, who organized evangelical summer camps in the 1970s and 1980s, was responsible for “prolific, brutal and horrific” abuse of up to 130 boys and young men, according to the independent Makin Review. It concluded the Church of England — the mother church of Anglicanism — covered up the “traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks,” which occurred in Britain, Zimbabwe and South Africa over several decades. Stephen Cottrell, who became Archbishop of York in 2020, has temporarily replaced Welby while also tainted by scandal himself. In December, the 66-year-old faced calls to stand down over claims he mishandled a sexual abuse case during his time as the Bishop of Chelmsford, in southeastern England. Priest David Tudor remained in his post despite Cottrell knowing that the Church had banned him from being alone with children and had paid compensation to a sexual abuse claimant, the BBC reported. Cottrell has said he is “deeply sorry that we were not able to take action earlier” but defended his actions. In a fresh blow last month, the Bishop of Liverpool, John Perumbalath, said he was stepping down … “UK Anglicans meet after Church of England hit by scandals” →

Climate change is rapidly altering the Arctic region, creating environmental danger, economic opportunity and geopolitical tension as the world’s major powers scramble to control newly accessible shipping lanes and resource deposits. …

Berlin — Europe is prepared to respond “within an hour” if the United States levies tariffs against the European Union, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a pre-election debate with his conservative challenger Friedrich Merz. In the first duel ahead of the Feb. 23 election, Merz portrayed Scholz as a ditherer who had led Germany into economic crisis, while the Social Democrat presented himself as an experienced leader in command of the details. Asked if the EU was ready with a targeted response if the U.S. imposed tariffs, Scholz, well behind Merz in the polls, said, “Yes … We as the European Union can act within an hour.” U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to enact tariffs against the United States’ largest trading partners, accusing them of free-riding on American prosperity. Trade policy is an EU competence, run by the European Commission in Brussels. Trump and the far-right Alternative for Germany, endorsed by his confidante Elon Musk, overshadowed the debate. Merz, far ahead in the polls and the favorite to become Germany’s next chancellor, expressed reluctance to raise taxes or borrow to reach the NATO alliance’s defense spending target of 2% of gross domestic product, far short of the 5% Trump is demanding. When Scholz said that would not be enough, Merz signaled his openness to discuss scrapping Germany’s totemic spending cap — despite a manifesto pledge to keep the constitutional debt braked. The two clashed over the AfD, with Scholz warning that Merz could not be trusted not to govern with the party. Merz ruled that out, blaming what he called Scholz’s “left-wing” policies for fueling the far-right party’s rise to second in the polls. …