The Israeli government has drawn up a new deal for the release of dozens of hostages from Gaza, according to an official with direct knowledge of the matter.

The proposal comes after the latest rounds of talks between U.S., Israeli and Qatari officials. CIA Director Bill Burns, Mossad chief David Barnea and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani met in Warsaw on Monday to discuss the potential for a new hostage deal. Israel, which does not negotiate directly with Hamas, presented the agreement via Qatar.

The pact calls for a pause in fighting for up to a week and the release of 40 hostages, including many of the women and children Hamas had previously agreed to release, as well as hostages who require medical attention, according to the official. It also would allow for the flow of additional humanitarian aid into Gaza.

The official stressed that talks are ongoing, and a deal has yet to be officially reached. Axios was first to report about the Israeli proposal. Representatives of the Israeli government declined to comment.

If all sides sign on to the deal, it would mark the first such accord since Nov. 22 when Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire and the release of 150 Palestinian prisoners for 50 hostages. The hostages were seized Oct. 7 during an incursion by Hamas.

So far, more than 100 hostages have been released from Gaza, including two Americans. National security council spokesperson John Kirby said Tuesday that the administration believes there are eight remaining American hostages left in Gaza. However, it is unclear if Hamas is holding all of them. Officials have said in recent weeks that they are still working to determine the whereabouts of all of the hostages, whether they are alive and if other groups other than Hamas are hiding them.

Of particular concern to U.S. and Israeli officials alike is the fate of dozens of women and children hostages. Under a previous deal, Hamas failed to provide a list of the women and children it was expected to release, prompting the end of negotiations and the resumption of fighting.

Since then, officials have grown increasingly concerned about those women and children. Biden administration officials, without presenting evidence, have alleged publicly that Hamas is sexually abusing the female hostages and that the group refuses to release them in fear they would detail those war crimes to the world.

The talks in Warsaw come just days after Israel admitted to accidentally killing three Israeli hostages.

PROCTOR, Minn. — The Proctor School District and the family of a former football player have reached a settlement in the federal lawsuit stemming from a 2021 incident in the football locker room.

The parties reached an agreement in October, court documents show, that avoids a trial and allows the defendants — which included the Duluth-area school district, former coach Derek Parendo, former Superintendent John Engelking and several assistant coaches — to admit no wrongdoing.

The financial terms of the settlement are confidential, according to the documents, but stipulate that the victim will receive an initial payout of 13% of the settlement. After that, they will receive equal monthly payments for the next 10 years, with the remainder of the balance disbursed at the end of that period.

The victim’s parents, whom the Duluth News Tribune hasn’t named in keeping with its policy of withholding the identity of sexual assault victims, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the victim in August 2022 following a 2021 incident that rocked the Proctor community.

The lawsuit centered on an incident on Sept. 6, 2021, that resulted in the cancellation of the football season, a sexual assault conviction for former Proctor player Alec Baney and the resignation of Parendo. Baney, who was 17 at the time, was accused of sexually assaulting the victim with a toilet plunger after practice that day, with several other teammates reportedly holding down the victim while the assault took place.

Baney was sentenced in June to supervised probation until his 21st birthday after pleading guilty in juvenile court to felony third-degree criminal sexual conduct.

The suit alleged that “prior to, and during” Parendo’s time as coach, there was a “prevalent practice” of hazing rituals involving a toilet plunger. The practice included using the rubber portion to touch a victim’s genital area, the complaint said. Another practice included “urinating into the concave portion” of the plunger, suctioning it to the ceiling and asking an unsuspecting player to pull it down, the lawsuit claims.

The practice was brought to the attention of the district, Engelking, the activities director and guidance counselors “on multiple occasions over the course of many years,” according to the complaint.

The district allegedly instructed Parendo before the 2021 season to remove the plunger from the locker room and advise the team that hazing would not be tolerated.

The district and Parendo did not take “adequate measures” to remove the plunger from the locker room, the complaint said, and to ensure that hazing activities ceased.

The suit acknowledges Parendo was not at the Sept. 6 practice and that it was conducted by his assistants.

After the weather ended the practice early, the assistants did not remain at the facility while the players changed. After a brief chase, the victim was tackled and held down by several players while another sexually assaulted them with the plunger, the complaint said.

The assault was “offensive, unwanted and interfered with” the victim’s educational environment and the educational opportunities provided by the district.

The complaint also alleges that all the defendants “condoned student-on-student sexual and physical” harassment by downplaying the incidents and failing to educate staff and student-athletes about the dangers of hazing.

The victim “suffered embarrassment, humiliation, fear of retaliation, intimidation, breach of trust, anxiety, depression, pain and suffering,” according to the complaint.

The Proctor School District and attorneys for the victim’s family did not immediately respond to the News Tribune’s requests for comment.

Days before Sam Altman was fired — and then rehired — as CEO of OpenAI, researchers at the company wrote a letter to its board of directors warning that a major new discovery could threaten humanity. We don’t know more about the details of that breakthrough or its precise role in the soap opera that’s consumed the tech world in recent weeks, but we do know that artificial intelligence is advancing at a rapid pace, and our public policy to regulate it is moving at the speed of Washington.

We’re sorry, Dave. We’re afraid we can’t have that.

What can AI already do? As anyone who’s fiddled with ChatGPT knows, it can write reasonably credible, fact-based essays about fairly complicated questions, and fiction and poetry to boot. It can write computer code. It can transcribe speech and summarize long texts with remarkable accuracy. It can generate photorealistic or stylized images of just about anything. It can aid in the discovery of new medicines. It can take a picture or two of a human face at any age and identify it, almost instantly. It can listen to a person for just a few seconds and then spoof his or her voice.

Naysayers are quick to point out the many failures and fumbles and foibles, all the ways in which the tech is not yet ready for deployment. And it’s true; every algorithm makes mistakes, and some make a lot. One AI-enabled innovation, the self-driving car, has been just around the corner for many years now — because the task has proven much more complex than initially thought. (Even still, it’s worth pointing out that autonomous vehicles have made major strides.)

The unavoidable fact is that human beings have developed and are refining a technology with remarkable capabilities. There’s tremendous good AI can do today and tomorrow, from identifying students in need of additional support services, to helping radiologists detect cancerous growths, to supercharging drug development, to helping blind people make sense of what’s in front of them, to quickly scoping out damage in disaster zones.

But like any technology, it can do serious damage as well. Those voice-spoofing capabilities are already being used to steal money. Artists are seeing their creativity exploited and new paintings or songs generated from copyrighted work without their permission. Deepfaked vidoes that, to the naked eye, are indistinguishable from real ones can throw fuel on fires of disinformation — or create nonconsensual pornography. And while well-designed, properly applied AI can help identify and combat human bias, poorly designed algorithms can enable mass bias in hiring, criminal justice and other realms.

It is the job of the federal government to prevent foreseeable AI abuses before they happen and design smart penalties for inevitable bad uses, all while ensuring that the are few if any constraints to AI’s many beneficial applications.

The White House has released an organically intelligent framework for what sorts of safeguards are needed, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has led the way. The billionaires who increasingly control this corner of the economy can’t be trusted to regulate themselves. The tech-challenged men and women who play the biggest role writing our laws have their own ineptitudes and blind spots, but they’re the only representatives we’ve got.

— The New York Daily News

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson lit into Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ allies during Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, calling “the people who represent him online” the “nastiest, the stupidest, and the most zero-sum people” he has ever seen.

One of those people — Christina Pushaw, the Republican presidential hopeful’s director of rapid response — appeared to hit back Tuesday, dragging the Trump campaign in the process.

“Hearing that some people find the rhetoric from DeSantis spokespeople vile and appalling,” Pushaw wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “I guess we should do better and rise to the refined level of Team Trump, by calling opponents’ wives the c-word and accusing cancer survivors of faking it.”

A spokesperson for DeSantis’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Carlson’s remarks.

Carlson has publicly backed former President Donald Trump in his bid to retake the White House, and his name has been floated as a possible vice presidential pick despite the revelation that he and other Fox hosts had privately bashed Trump during the 2020 election cycle.

Carlson did say on Monday that he liked DeSantis — just not his people.

Tim Pool, a conservative podcast host, agreed. “Ron should have fired the people running his campaign a long time ago,” Pool said during the Monday event. “Politically, and policy wise, we love Ron DeSantis. He’s done an amazing job. But his campaign is a train wreck.”