Trump warns of 'real starvation' in Gaza as aid deliveries pick up
29/07/2025
Israel begins to acknowledge Gaza's need for humanitarian aid under US pressure
29/07/2025
Trump issues new ultimatum calling on Putin to end Ukraine war in '10 or 12 days'
28/07/2025
'There is no alternative to the two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict'
Middle East
28/07/2025
'EU has a lot to lose': US-EU trade deal with Trump counter to 'what EU should be standing for'
Europe
28/07/2025
Rajab's Ramp: A skateboarder's call from a starving Gaza
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Russia: Numerous flights cancelled after massive cyberattack
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Impact of US tariffs varies across European Union
28/07/2025
Trump says many are starving in Gaza, vows to set up food centres
28/07/2025
Thailand and Cambodia agree to ceasefire to end deadly border row
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Euronews
14 minutes ago
- Euronews
Trump tells European leaders he will meet with Putin and Zelenskyy
US President Donald Trump intends to meet face-to-face with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, possibly as early as next week, the New York Times reported on Wednesday quoting two people familiar with the plan. After those talks, Trump will reportedly hold a three-way including himself, Putin and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump announced those plans in a call with Zelenskyy and European leaders on Wednesday evening, sources said. The meetings would include only those three presidents and will not include any European representatives. The European leaders in the call on Wednesday appeared to accept what Trump said, one of the people familiar with the call said. That comes after Zelenskyy said in his nightly address on Wednesday that Russia appeared to be more inclined to a ceasefire after US special envoy Steve Witkoff's visit to Moscow. "The pressure on them works. But the main thing is that they do not deceive us in the details – neither us nor the US," he said. Speaking about Witkoff's talks with Putin in Moscow, Trump called the meeting "highly productive" in a post on his Truth Social platform and claimed that "great progress was made" without going into details. "Everyone agrees this war must come to a close, and we will work towards that in the days and weeks to come. Thank you for your attention to this matter!" he posted. But a White House official quoted by the Reuters news agency said that while the meeting went well and the "Russians are eager to continue engaging," the secondary sanctions Trump had threatened to impose on Russia were still expected to be implemented on Friday. Witkoff in Moscow Earlier on Wednesday, Putin held talks with Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow, days before the White House's revised deadline for Russia to reach a peace deal with Ukraine or potentially face severe economic penalties. Trump's deadline for Putin to make peace in Ukraine ends on Friday, revised down from the initial 50 days he set. Washington has threatened "severe tariffs" and other economic penalties if the fighting doesn't stop. However, Trump himself has doubted the effectiveness of sanctions, saying Sunday that Russia has proven to be "pretty good at avoiding sanctions." The Kremlin has insisted that international sanctions imposed since the full-scale invasion have had a limited impact. But Ukraine maintains sanctions are taking their toll on Moscow's war machine and wants Western allies to ramp them up. Trump has also expressed increasing frustration with Putin over Russia's escalating strikes on civilian areas of Ukraine. The meeting between Putin and Witkoff lasted about three hours. Putin's foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said that Putin and Witkoff had a "useful and constructive conversation" that focused on the Ukrainian war and "prospects for possible development of strategic cooperation between the US and Russia." Before those talks, Witkoff took a walk through Zaryadye Park, close to the Kremlin, with Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian president's envoy for investment and economic cooperation. Dmitriev said later on the social media platform X that 'dialogue will prevail.' Dmitriev played a key role in three rounds of direct talks between delegations from Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul in recent months, as well as discussions between Russian and US officials. Those negotiations made no progress on ending the three-year war following Russia's but did facilitate POW exchanges between the two sides.
France 24
2 hours ago
- France 24
Grok, is that Gaza? AI image checks mislocate news photographs
But when social media users asked Grok where it came from, X boss Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot was certain that the photograph was taken in Yemen nearly seven years ago. The AI bot's untrue response was widely shared online and a left-wing pro-Palestinian French lawmaker, Aymeric Caron, was accused of peddling disinformation on the Israel-Hamas war for posting the photo. At a time when internet users are turning to AI to verify images more and more, the furore shows the risks of trusting tools like Grok, when the technology is far from error-free. Grok said the photo showed Amal Hussain, a seven-year-old Yemeni child, in October 2018. In fact the photo shows nine-year-old Mariam Dawwas in the arms of her mother Modallala in Gaza City on August 2, 2025. Before the war, sparked by Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Mariam weighed 25 kilograms, her mother told AFP. Challenged on its incorrect response, Grok said: "I do not spread fake news; I base my answers on verified sources." The chatbot eventually issued a response that recognised the error -- but in reply to further queries the next day, Grok repeated its claim that the photo was from Yemen. The chatbot has previously issued content that praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and that suggested people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate. Radical right bias Grok's mistakes illustrate the limits of AI tools, whose functions are as impenetrable as "black boxes", said Louis de Diesbach, a researcher in technological ethics. "We don't know exactly why they give this or that reply, nor how they prioritise their sources," said Diesbach, author of a book on AI tools, "Hello ChatGPT". Each AI has biases linked to the information it was trained on and the instructions of its creators, he said. In the researcher's view Grok, made by Musk's xAI start-up, shows "highly pronounced biases which are highly aligned with the ideology" of the South African billionaire, a former confidante of US President Donald Trump and a standard-bearer for the radical right. Asking a chatbot to pinpoint a photo's origin takes it out of its proper role, said Diesbach. "Typically, when you look for the origin of an image, it might say: 'This photo could have been taken in Yemen, could have been taken in Gaza, could have been taken in pretty much any country where there is famine'." AI does not necessarily seek accuracy -- "that's not the goal," the expert said. Another AFP photograph of a starving Gazan child by al-Qattaa, taken in July 2025, had already been wrongly located and dated by Grok to Yemen, 2016. That error led to internet users accusing the French newspaper Liberation, which had published the photo, of manipulation. 'Friendly pathological liar' An AI's bias is linked to the data it is fed and what happens during fine-tuning -- the so-called alignment phase -- which then determines what the model would rate as a good or bad answer. "Just because you explain to it that the answer's wrong doesn't mean it will then give a different one," Diesbach said. "Its training data has not changed and neither has its alignment." Grok is not alone in wrongly identifying images. When AFP asked Mistral AI's Le Chat -- which is in part trained on AFP's articles under an agreement between the French start-up and the news agency -- the bot also misidentified the photo of Mariam Dawwas as being from Yemen. For Diesbach, chatbots must never be used as tools to verify facts. "They are not made to tell the truth," but to "generate content, whether true or false", he said.
LeMonde
4 hours ago
- LeMonde
Trump says Putin-Witkoff talks 'highly productive' but sanctions still due
President Donald Trump on Wednesday, August 6 hailed talks between his envoy and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine as "highly productive," but US officials said sanctions would still be imposed on Moscow's trading partners. Trump, who had boasted he could end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office, has given Russia until Friday to make progress towards peace or face new penalties. US envoy Steve Witkoff met with Putin for what the Kremlin said were "constructive" talks two days ahead of the US deadline for Russia. Trump said on his Truth Social platform that "great progress was made" during the meeting – but minutes later a senior US official said that "secondary sanctions" were still expected to be implemented on Friday. Three rounds of Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul have failed to make headway on a ceasefire, with the two sides far apart in their demands. Russia has escalated drone and missile attacks against its pro-Western neighbor to a record high and accelerated its advance on the ground. "A quite useful and constructive conversation took place," Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov told journalists, including AFP, after the three-hour meeting. Putin and Witkoff exchanged "signals" on their positions, Ushakov said, without elaborating. The Kremlin released a video of Putin shaking hands with Witkoff at the start of the meeting. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said later on Wednesday that he had spoken by phone with Trump after Witkoff visited Moscow. "European leaders were on the call, and I am grateful to each of them for their support," he added on social media, without saying which leaders took part in the call. Sanctions threat The White House has not officially outlined what action it would take against Russia, but Trump has previously threatened to impose "secondary tariffs" targeting Russia's key trade partners, such as China and India. On Wednesday, Trump ordered steeper tariffs on Indian goods over New Delhi's continued purchase of Russian oil. The move would aim to stifle Russian exports, but would risk significant international disruption. Trump said on Tuesday that he would await the outcome of the Moscow talks before ordering any economic sanctions. "We're going to see what happens," he told reporters. "We'll make that determination at that time." Without explicitly naming Trump, the Kremlin on Tuesday slammed "threats" to hike tariffs on Russia's trading partners as "illegitimate."
