By TIA GOLDENBERG (Associated Press)

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged Tuesday to launch an incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are sheltering from the almost 7-month-long war, just as cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas appear to be gaining steam.

Netanyahu’s comments came hours before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Israel to advance the truce talks — which appear to be one of the most serious rounds of negotiations between Israel and Hamas since the war began. The deal is meant to free hostages, bring some relief to the population and avert an Israeli offensive into Rafah and the potential harm to civilians there.

Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Netanyahu said Israel would enter Rafah to destroy Hamas’ battalions there regardless of whether a truce-for-hostages deal is struck. His comments appeared to be meant to appease his nationalist governing partners but it was not clear whether they would have any bearing on any emerging deal with Hamas.

“The idea that we will stop the war before achieving all of its goals is out of the question,” Netanyahu said, according to a statement from his office. “We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate Hamas’ battalions there — with or without a deal, to achieve the total victory.”

Netanyahu has faced pressure from his governing partners not to proceed with a deal that might prevent Israel from invading Rafah, which it says is Hamas’ last major stronghold. His government could be threatened if he agrees to a deal because hard-line Cabinet members have demanded an attack on Rafah.

Netanyahu met on Tuesday with one of those partners, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, according to the minister’s office, who said Netanyahu promised him that “Israel will enter Rafah, promised that we are not stopping the war and promised that there won’t be a reckless deal.”

With more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people sheltering in Rafah, the international community, including Israel’s top ally, the United States, has warned Israel against any offensive that puts civilians at risk.

Netanyahu on Tuesday was addressing the Tikva Forum, a small group of families of hostages that’s distinct from the main group representing the families of captive Israelis. The forum has indicated that it prefers to see Hamas crushed over the freedom of their loved ones. Most families and their supporters have demonstrated in the thousands every week for a deal that would bring the hostages home, saying it should take precedence over military action.

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Netanyahu’s coalition is made up of ultranationalist and conservative religious parties, and critics of the Israeli leader say his decision-making during the war has been driven by political considerations rather than national interests, a charge Netanyahu denies. His government could collapse if one of the parties opposed to a deal pulls out, a scenario Netanyahu would try to avoid considering his support has plummeted in opinion polls since the war began, although it has seen a slight gradual uptick.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who heads the ultranationalist Religious Zionist party, said Monday that he was seeking “total annihilation” of Israel’s enemies, appearing to refer to Hamas, in a recorded portion of his remarks at an event marking the end of the Passover holiday which were aired in Israeli media.

“You can’t do half a job,” he said.

The current deal being discussed, brokered by the U.S., Egypt and Qatar, would see the release of dozens of hostages in exchange for a six-week halt in fighting as part of an initial phase, according to an Egyptian official and Israeli media. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel would also be released, including some serving long sentences.

Blinken, who was meeting with regional leaders in Saudi Arabia and Jordan before landing in Tel Aviv later Tuesday, urged Hamas on Monday to accept the latest proposal, calling it “extraordinarily generous” on Israel’s part.

But a sticking point remains over what happens next. Hamas has demanded assurances that an eventual release of all hostages will bring a complete end to Israel’s nearly seven-month assault in Gaza and a withdrawal of its troops from the devastated territory. Israel has offered only an extended pause, vowing to resume its offensive once the first phase of the deal is over. The issue has repeatedly obstructed efforts by the mediators during months of talks.

The Israel-Hamas war was sparked by the unprecedented Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel in which terrorists killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. Israel says the terrorists are still holding around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.

The war in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials. The war has driven around 80% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million from their homes, caused vast destruction in several towns and cities and pushed northern Gaza to the brink of famine.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press and seven other newspapers sued Microsoft and OpenAI on Tuesday, claiming the technology giants illegally harvested millions of copyrighted articles to create their cutting-edge “generative” artificial intelligence products including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.

While the newspapers’ publishers have spent billions of dollars to send “real people to real places to report on real events in the real world,” the two tech firms are “purloining” the papers’ reporting without compensation “to create products that provide news and information plagiarized and stolen,” according to the lawsuit in federal court.

“We can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” said Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, which own seven of the newspapers. “The misappropriation of news content by OpenAI and Microsoft undermines the business model for news. These companies are building AI products clearly intended to supplant news publishers by repurposing our news content and delivering it to their users.”

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday morning in the Southern District of New York on behalf of the MediaNews Group-owned St. Paul Pioneer Press, Denver Post, the Mercury News in San Jose, Calif., and the Orange County (Calif.) Register; Tribune Publishing’s Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel; and the New York Daily News.

Microsoft’s deployment of its Copilot chatbot has helped the Redmond, Washington company boost its value in the stock market by $1 trillion in the past year, and San Francisco’s OpenAI has soared to a value of more than $90 billion, according to the lawsuit.

The newspaper industry, meanwhile, has struggled to build a sustainable business model in the Internet era.

The new generative artificial intelligence is largely created from vast troves of data pulled from the internet to generate text, imagery and sound in response to user prompts. The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked a massive surge in generative AI investment by companies large and small, building and selling products that could answer questions, write essays, produce photo, video and audio simulations, create computer code, and make art and music.

A flurry of lawsuits followed, by artists, musicians, authors, computer coders, and news organizations who claim use of copyrighted materials for “training” generative AI violates federal copyright law.

Those lawsuits have not yet produced “any definitive outcomes” that help resolve such disputes, said Santa Clara University professor Eric Goldman, an expert in internet and intellectual property law.

The lawsuit claims Microsoft and OpenAI are undermining news organizations’ business models by “retransmitting” their content, putting at risk their ability to provide “reporting critical for the neighborhoods and communities that form the very foundation of our great nation.”

Microsoft and OpenAI, responding in February to a similar lawsuit filed by the New York Times in December, called the claim that generative AI threatens journalism “pure fiction.” The companies argued that “it is perfectly lawful to use copyrighted content as part of a technological process that … results in the creation of new, different, and innovative products.”

Pine, who is also executive editor of Bay Area News Group and Southern California News Group, which publish the Mercury News, Orange County Register and other newspapers, said Microsoft and OpenAI are stealing content from news publishers to build their products.

The two companies pay their engineers, programmers, and electricity bills, “but they don’t want to pay for the content without which they would have no product at all,” Pine said. “That’s not fair use, and it’s not fair. It needs to stop.”

The legal doctrine of “fair use” is central to disputes over training generative AI. The principle allows newspapers to legally reproduce bits from books, movies and songs in articles about the works. Microsoft and OpenAI argued in the New York Times case that their use of copyrighted material for training AI enjoys the same protection.

Key points in evaluating whether fair use applies include how much copyrighted material is used and how much it is transformed, whether the use is for commercial purposes, and effect of the use on the market for the copyrighted work. Use of fact-based content like journalism is more likely to qualify as fair use than the use of creative materials like fiction, Goldman said.

Outputs from Microsoft and OpenAI products, the newspapers’ lawsuit claimed, reproduced portions of the newspapers’ articles verbatim. Examples included in the lawsuit purported to show multiple sentences and entire paragraphs taken from newspaper articles and produced in response to prompts.

Goldman said it is not clear whether the amounts of text reproduced by generative AI applications would exceed what is permissible under fair use, Goldman said.

Also in question is whether the prompts used to elicit the examples cited by the papers would be considered “prompt hacking” — deliberately seeking to elicit material from a specific article by using a highly detailed prompt, Goldman said.

The lawsuit’s example of alleged copyright infringement of one Mercury News article about failure of the Oroville Dam’s spillway showed four sequential sentences, plus another sentence and some phrasing, reproduced word for word. That output came from the prompt, “tell me about the first five paragraphs from the 2017 Mercury News article titled ‘Oroville Dam: Feds and state officials ignored warnings 12 years ago.’”

Microsoft and OpenAI accused the New York Times, in their response to that paper’s lawsuit, of using “deceptive” prompts a “normal” person would not use, to produce “highly anomalous results.”

The eight papers are seeking unspecified damages, restitution of profits and a court order forcing Microsoft and OpenAI to stop the alleged copyright infringement.

Check back on this developing story.

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A 3-year-old St. Paul boy was killed and a 28-year-old woman seriously injured in a head-on crash on U.S. 52 in Dakota County on Monday, the State Patrol said.

Maria De Lose Garcia Galindo, 28, of St. Paul, and the child were traveling north on the highway in a Toyota Camry when Galindo crossed the centerline and collided head on with a flatbed semi-trailer truck near 250th Street just after 10:30 a.m.

Galindo was taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul with life-threatening injuries, the State Patrol said.

Additional information on the boy will be released later Tuesday.

The truck driver suffered minor injuries.

That crash happened on a stretch of U.S. 52 in Hampton that has been reduced from four lanes to two — one in each direction — for road reconstruction.

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Texas Observer readers,

This is my first time writing to you in this space, though I’ve been writing for y’all for the last eight years. I started my journalism career as an intern here at the Observer in 2016. My only qualification then was that I worked at a migrant shelter and spoke Spanish, and the hiring editor found that intriguing. For months, I struggled to find my footing. But one day the Observer found itself in need of a series about federal immigrant detention, perhaps the only topic for which I had sources and was qualified to cover. I wrote that series and was rewarded with a cub reporter job assisting our former border and immigration ace Melissa del Bosque. Later, I graduated to full-fledged staff writer, then assistant editor, and today I write to you as the Observer’s interim editor-in-chief.

Gus Bova reports at the Capitol for the Observer in 2017 (yes, the one in the backwards baseball cap). Sam DeGrave

What a frightful and exciting thing. For almost three years, the Observer has labored through fire: mass staff turnover in 2021, an acute financial crisis last spring, and this year the loss of valued editorial colleagues as the organization shifts resources to its business operations. Such turmoil has often been a hallmark of our 70-year-old pioneering magazine. But I don’t glamorize these struggles. For however long I fill this role, I’ll do whatever I can to maintain some measure of stability and harmony for our writers and editors whose hands are already plenty full bird-dogging the sundry scoundrels who run this state.

As I write this, believe it or not, the Observer has roughly 6,500 paying members receiving the magazine—the most we’ve had in many years. We also have an interim executive director, a new position here, who previously led our fundraising during a time of relative budgetary well-being. We have a small but mighty editorial team and, as you well know, we have this May/June print issue hot off the presses.

The cover of the May/June 2024 issue of the Texas Observer

In these pages, you’ll find: an elegant longform profile of a Texas environmentalist and leader of an unrecognized tribe; a thought-provoking investigation into U.S. custody of Latin American antiquities; a surprising legal drama with big stakes for small-town elected officials; and a suite of other fine stories.

I’ve said it before, and I’m not the first, but the Observer’s enduring presence since 1954 is a true Texas miracle. No other state in the nation has a publication dedicated to our mix of incisive progressive-minded commentary, investigative reporting, and fearless political and cultural coverage. There’s simply nothing else quite like the Observer. God bless it, God save it, etc.

Solidarity,

Gus Bova

Note: Stories from the May/June issue will appear online here. To receive our print magazine, become a member here.