By GLENN GAMBOA

The first foreign trip Joel Holsinger took in 2019 after joining the board of directors at the global health nonprofit PATH convinced him that he needed to do more to raise money for charities.

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The investment manager, who is now also a partner and co-head of alternative credit at Ares Management Corp., saw firsthand how a tuberculosis prevention program was helping residents of Dharavi, India’s largest slum. He also saw that the main hurdle to expanding the program’s success was simply a lack of funding.

“I wanted to do something that has purpose,” Holsinger told The Associated Press. “I wanted a charitable tie-in to whatever I do.”

Shortly after returning from India, Holsinger created a new line of investment funds where Ares Management would donate at least 5% of its performance fee, also known as the “promote,” to charities. The first two funds of the resulting Pathfinder family of funds alone have raised more than $10 billion in investments and, as of June, pledged more than $40 million to charity.

Holsinger wanted to expand the model further. On Wednesday, he announced Promote Giving, a new initiative to encourage other investment managers to use the model, which launches with funds from nine firms, including Ares Management, Pantheon and Pretium. The funds that are now part of Promote Giving represent about $35 billion in assets and could result in charitable donations of up to $250 million over the next 10 years.

Unlike broader models like ESG investing, where environmental, social and governance factors are taken into account when making business decisions, or impact investing, where investors seek a social return along with a financial one, Promote Giving seeks to maximize the return on investment, Holsinger said. The donation only comes after investors receive their promised return and only from the manager’s fees.

“We’re not doing anything that looks at lower returns,” Holsinger said. “It’s basically just a dual mandate: If we do good on returns for our institutional investors, we will also drive returns that go directly to charity.”

Charities, especially those who do international work, are in the midst of a difficult funding landscape. The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and massive cuts to foreign aid this year have affected nearly all nonprofits in some way. Those nonprofits who don’t normally receive funding from the U.S. government still face increased competition for grants from organizations who saw their funding cut.

Kammerle Schneider, PATH’s chief global health programs officer, said this year has shown how fragile public health systems are and has reinforced the need for “agile catalytic capital” that Promote Giving could provide.

“There is nothing that is going to replace U.S. government funding,” said Schneider, adding that the launch of Promote Giving offers hope that new private donors may step in to help offer solutions to specific public health problems. “I think it comes at a time where we really need to look at the overall architecture of how we’re doing this and how we could be doing it better with less.”

Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, which offers free learning resources for teachers and students, says the structure of Promote Giving could provide nonprofits stable income over several years that would allow them to spend less time fundraising and more time on their charitable work.

“It’s actually been hard for us to raise the philanthropy needed for us to have the maximum impact globally,” said Khan. While Khan Academy has the knowledge base to expand rapidly around the world and numerous countries have shown interest, Khan said the nonprofit lacks enough resources to do the expensive work of software development, localization and building infrastructure in every country.

Khan hopes Promote Giving can grow into a major funder that could help with those costs. “We would be able to build that infrastructure so that we can literally educate anyone in the world,” he said.

Holsinger hopes for that kind of growth as well. He envisions investment managers signing on to Promote Giving the way billionaires pledge to give away half their wealth through the Giving Pledge and he hopes other industries will develop their own mechanisms to make charitable donations part of their business models.

Kate Stobbe, director of corporate insights at Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose, a coalition that advises companies on sustainability and corporate responsibility issues, said their research shows that companies that establish mission statements that include reasons for existing beyond simply profit generation have higher revenue growth and provide a higher return on investment.

Having a common purpose increases workers’ engagement and productivity, while also helping companies with recruitment and retention, said Stobbe, who said CECP will release a report that documents those findings based on 20 years of data later this week. “Having initiatives around corporate purpose help employees feel a connection to something bigger,” she said. “It really does contribute to that bottom line.”

That kind of win-win is what Holsinger hopes to create with Promote Giving. He said many of the world’s problems don’t lack solutions. They lack enough capital to pay for the solutions.

“We just need to drive more capital to these nonprofits and to these charities that are doing amazing work every day,” he said. “We’re trying to build that model that drives impact through charitable dollars.”

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

By WAFAA SHURAFA, Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Hamas moved Friday to shore up its brittle ceasefire agreement with Israel by reaffirming its commitment to the terms of the deal, including a pledge to hand over the remains of all dead Israeli hostages.

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The group’s statement released in the early hours Friday follows a dire warning from U.S. President Donald Trump that he would green-light Israel to resume the war if Hamas doesn’t live up to its end of the deal and return all of the hostages’ bodies.

Hamas, however, maintains that some bodies were buried in tunnels that were later destroyed by Israel, and heavy machinery is required to dig through rubble to retrieve them.

The group also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his call to cut aid to Gaza, saying it was an attempt to manipulate humanitarian needs “for political gains.”

In a follow-up statement Friday, Hamas urged mediators to increase the flow of aid into Gaza, expedite the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and start the reconstruction process, especially for homes, hospitals and schools. It also called for work to “start immediately” on setting up a committee of independents who will run the Gaza Strip and for Israeli troops to continue pulling back from agreed-upon areas.

The ceasefire plan introduced by Trump had called for all hostages — living and dead — to be handed over by a deadline that expired Monday. But under the deal, if that didn’t happen, Hamas was to share information about deceased hostages and try to hand them over as soon as possible.

Netanyahu has said that Israel “will not compromise” and demanded that Hamas fulfill the requirements laid out in the ceasefire deal about the return of hostages’ bodies.

Obstacles to retrieving bodies

Hamas has assured the U.S. through intermediaries that it’s working to return dead hostages. American officials say retrieval of the bodies is hampered by the scope of the devastation, coupled with the presence of dangerous, unexploded ordnance.

The group has also told mediators that some bodies are in areas controlled by Israeli troops. Hamas crews were seen Friday in Hamad City, near Khan Younis, searching for the bodies of hostages.

On Wednesday, Israel received the remains of two more hostages shortly after its military said that one of eight bodies previously handed over wasn’t that of a hostage. Israel is waiting for the bodies of 28 hostages to be returned.

Hamas released all 20 living Israeli hostages on Monday. In exchange, Israel freed around 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

Israel has also returned to Gaza the bodies of 90 Palestinians for burial. Israel is expected to turn over more bodies, though officials have not said how many are in its custody or how many will be returned. It is unclear whether the remains belong to Palestinians who died in Israeli custody or were taken from Gaza by Israeli troops. Throughout the war, Israel’s military has exhumed bodies as part of its search for the remains of hostages.

A Palestinian forensics team examining the remains said some of the bodies showed signs of mistreatment.

The fighting has killed nearly 68,000 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government in Gaza. The ministry maintains detailed casualty records that are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts.

Thousands more people are missing, according to the Red Cross and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

France says international force for Gaza is in the pipeline

Meanwhile, France said it’s working with its ″British and American partners″ to propose a U.N. resolution in the coming days that would provide a framework for the international force for Gaza.

French Foreign Ministry spokesman Pascal Confavreux told a news conference Thursday that Arab countries are “very insistent” on having a U.N. mandate for this force.

″This resolution would allow a framework for the deployment of this mission, in support … of Palestinian security forces, who are in the process of evaluating what they will need and what they are capable of doing,″ he said.

He wouldn’t say whether France could eventually take part or what its role would be. ″First the mandate,″ he said, followed by which countries will be involved, and then specifics about who is providing what, which could include equipment, training, money.

Confavreux said aid, reconstruction and security efforts should be centralized within the U.N. system.

Killings in Gaza fray nerves

Hamas was also put on the defensive after Trump warned that “we will have no choice but to go in and kill them ” if the group didn’t cease killings of rival factions inside Gaza.

Trump said it won’t be U.S. forces that will mete out any punishment but “people very close, very nearby that will go in and they’ll do the trick very easily, but under our auspices.”

The president did not specify if he was speaking of Israel, but action by Israeli forces could risk violating terms of the ceasefire agreement.

A Hamas official Thursday defended the killings of alleged gang members that the group carried out in Gaza since Monday.

Speaking in Beirut, Hamas’ political representative in Lebanon Ahmed Abdul-Hadi said the individuals who were killed “caused death and corruption in Gaza and killed displaced persons and aid seekers.”

Hadi said the decision to sentence them to death had come from the “judiciary,” apparently referring to tribal customary judicial procedures. There are no functioning formal courts in the war-battered enclave.

“This was done by a Palestinian national and tribal consensus,” he said. “I mean, their clan agreed to this and not just Hamas.”

Wait for a large infusion of aid into Gaza goes on

The U.N. said the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza remains constrained because of continued closures of crossings and restrictions on aid groups.

According to the U.N. dashboard that monitors the movement of aid trucks into Gaza, only 339 trucks reached the territory and were offloaded for distribution since the ceasefire began on Oct. 10. Under the ceasefire agreement, 600 aid trucks would be allowed to enter Gaza daily.

The U.N. figures varied widely from those provided by COGAT, an Israeli defense body overseeing humanitarian aid in Gaza. A spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said COGAT had reported 950 trucks crossing on Thursday and 716 on Wednesday. Crossings were closed on Monday and Tuesday for the exchange of hostages and prisoners and for a Jewish holiday.

U.N. aid chief Tom Fletcher said rapid and unimpeded access, sustained fuel entry, restored infrastructure, protection of aid workers, and adequate funding are needed for the U.N.’s 60-day aid delivery plan to work.

Currently, only 15 humanitarian organizations are authorized by Israel to deliver aid into Gaza.

Gaza’s truck drivers’ association, which organizes pickups of aid from the Gaza side of the border after Israeli inspection, said there has been no significant ramping up of supplies arriving since the ceasefire. But it cited improved security that has prevented looting or gangs intercepting aid convoys.

“There is no breakthrough,” said Nahed Sheheiber, the head of Gaza’s private truckers’ union. “There is no improvement except in one thing, the security of trucks that enables them to reach the warehouses.”

Only 70 trucks entered Gaza on Thursday, Sheheiber said, adding that the wait time for truck inspections and coordination is still long.

Since the beginning of the ceasefire, at least nine humanitarian organizations have gradually resumed services in Gaza City and parts of northern Gaza for displaced families and returnees, according to the U.N. humanitarian affairs report released Thursday.

Associated Press writer Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.

PRESTON, Minn. — The father of two children who were killed when Samantha Jo Petersen slammed the SUV she was driving into the Amish buggy they were in says he thought he did enough to keep his children safe.

He personally trained one of the gentlest ponies he could find and installed a slow-moving vehicle sign and reflective pole on the vehicle.

“I had not considered other people and their decision-making,” he said in a written statement to Fillmore County District Court as Judge Jeremy Clinefelter weighed the punishment for Petersen, who plotted with her identical twin sister to take responsibility for the crash two years ago in southeastern Minnesota.

Samantha Jo Petersen. (Courtesy photo via Forum News Service)

Clinefelter sentenced Petersen to four years in prison for her conviction of criminal vehicular homicide. The term will be served concurrently with a 23-month sentence for another count of criminal vehicular operation.

Petersen, 37, of Wabasha, pleaded guilty to the two counts in July. In the plea, she admitted to being high on methamphetamine when she struck a two-wheeled horse-drawn buggy at 8:25 a.m. on Sept. 25, 2023, on Fillmore County Road 1 near the intersection with County Road 102.

Two children and a pony pulling the buggy were killed in the crash. Two more children were injured.

Petersen initially faced 21 charges in the incident, including charges relating to having her sister take responsibility for the crash.

Before Clinefelter pronounced the sentence, written statements by the four children’s parents were read to the court.

The mother of the children described a routine morning of seeing her kids off to school, preparing for a horse sale and a visitor who was coming to purchase some eggs produced by their chickens at their rural Fillmore County home. Someone pulled into their driveway in a red truck.

“I saw right away something terrible had happened,” the woman wrote.

She recalled arriving at the scene of the crash and seeing one of her daughters sitting up, injured but dazed, her son lying on the gravel shoulder groaning and coming to, and her two other daughters lying in a ditch next to the road.

One of them was already gone, she recalled.

“I saw that life had fled,” she wrote.

Passers-by were performing CPR on another whose face “looked deathly gray,” she recalled.

From the scene, Petersen was using her phone to ask her identical twin sister, Sarah Beth Petersen, to come take responsibility for the crash.

Clinefelter said that was one of the reasons he imposed a prison sentence instead of probation, as Petersen’s attorney, Carson Heefner, asked.

“It was all about you,” Clinefelter said of Petersen’s actions and deception. “At the time children were literally dying in a ditch.”

Both parents wrote that their pain and loss are “indescribable.” Their youngest was always moving and talking. Seeing her “still form” in a coffin was unnatural, the mother wrote.

“Had she been alive, she wouldn’t have been able to be still that long,” the father wrote.

The surviving children are changed, with one boy enduring a prolonged hospital stay to recover from a traumatic brain injury.

Petersen cried as she read from a written statement apologizing for causing the “unthinkable void” in the family’s life. She noted her work getting and staying sober since being charged in the crash.

“My addiction took a lot from me, but it took your whole world from you,” Petersen said.

Clinefelter said the prison sentence doesn’t preclude Petersen from continuing to work on her sobriety.

Petersen was ordered to serve two years, eight months of the sentence in custody and could qualify for early release and serve the final year and four months of the sentence on supervised release with good behavior.

Sarah Petersen, of Kellogg, was sentenced in March to 90 days in jail under work release for lying to investigators.

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By MATT O’BRIEN, Associated Press Technology Writer

ChatGPT will be able to have kinkier conversations after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the artificial intelligence company will soon allow its chatbot to engage in “erotica for verified adults.”

OpenAI won’t be the first to try to profit from sexualized AI. Sexual content was a top draw for AI tools almost as soon as the boom in AI-generated imagery and words erupted in 2022.

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But the companies that were early to embrace mature AI also encountered legal and societal minefields and harmful abuse as a growing number of people have turned to the technology for companionship or titillation.

Will a sexier ChatGPT be different? After three years of largely banning mature content, Altman said Wednesday that his company is “not the elected moral police of the world” and ready to allow “more user freedom for adults” at the same time as it sets new limits for teens.

“In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here,” Altman wrote on social media platform X, whose owner, Elon Musk, has also introduced an animated AI character that flirts with paid subscribers.

For now, unlike Musk’s Grok chatbot, paid subscriptions to ChatGPT are mostly pitched for professional use. But letting the chatbot become a friend or romantic partner could be another way for the world’s most valuable startup, which is losing more money than it makes, to turn a profit that could justify its $500 billion valuation.

“They’re not really earning much through subscriptions so having erotic content will bring them quick money,” said Zilan Qian, a fellow at Oxford University’s China Policy Lab who has studied the popularity of dating-based chatbots in the U.S. and China.

There are already about 29 million active users of AI chatbots designed specifically for romantic or sexual bonding, and that’s not counting people who use conventional chatbots in that way, according to research published by Qian earlier this month.

It also doesn’t include users of Character.AI, which is fighting a lawsuit that alleges a chatbot modeled after “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen formed a sexually abusive relationship with a 14-year-old boy and pushed him to kill himself. OpenAI is facing a lawsuit from the family of a 16-year-old ChatGPT user who died by suicide in April.

Qian said she worries about the toll on real-world relationships when mainstream chatbots, already prone to sycophancy, are primed for 24-hour availability serving sexually explicit content.

“ChatGPT has voice chat versions. I would expect that in the future, if they were to go down this way — voice, text, visual — it’s all there,” she said.

Humans who fall in love with human-like machines have long been a literary cautionary tale, from popular science fiction of the last century to the ancient Greek legend of Pygmalion, obsessed with a woman he sculpted from ivory. Creating such a machine would seem like an unusual detour for OpenAI, founded a decade ago as a nonprofit dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI.

Altman said on a podcast in August that OpenAI has tried to resist the temptation to introduce products that could “juice growth or revenue” but be “very misaligned” with its long-term mission. Asked for a specific example, he gave one: “Well, we haven’t put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet.”

Idaho-based startup Civitai, a platform for AI-generated art, learned the hard way that making money off mature AI won’t be an easy path.

“When we launched the site, it was an intentional choice to allow mature content,” said Justin Maier, the company’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview last year.

Backed by the prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has also invested in OpenAI, the Idaho startup was one of several that tried to capitalize on the sudden popularity of tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney that enabled people to type a description and conjure up almost any kind of image. Part of Stable Diffusion’s initial popularity was the ease with which it could generate a new kind of synthetic and highly customized pornography.

“What we had seen was that there was a lot of interest in mature content,” Maier said. Training these AI systems, known as models, on “mature themes actually made it so that these models were more capable of human anatomy and resulted in actually better models,” he said.

“We didn’t want to prevent the kind of growth that actually increased everything for the entire community, whether you were interested in mature content or Pixar,” Maier said. “So we allowed it early on and have always kind of had this battle of making it so that we can keep things filtered and safe, if that’s not what you’re interested in. We wanted to ultimately give the control to the user to decide what they would see on the site and what their experience would be.”

That also invited abuse. Civitai last year implemented new measures to detect and remove sexual images depicting children, but it remained a hub for AI-generated pornography, including fake images of celebrities. Confronting increasing pressure, including from payment processors and a new law against nonconsensual images signed by President Donald Trump, Civitai earlier this year blocked users from creating deepfake images of real people. Engagement dropped.

Another company that hasn’t shied away from mature content is Baltimore-based Nomi, though its founder and CEO Alex Cardinell said its companion chatbots are “strictly” for users over 18 and were never marketed to kids. They are also not designed for sex, though Cardinell said in an interview earlier this year that people who build platonic relationships with their chatbot might find it veering into a romantic one.

“It’s kind of very user-dependent for where they’re kind of missing the human gap in their life. And I think that’s different for everyone,” he said.

He declined to guess how many Nomi users are having erotic conversations with the chatbot, comparing it to real-life partners who might do “mature content things” for some part of their lives but “all sorts of other stuff together as well.”

“We’re not monitoring user conversations like that,” Cardinell said.