The holiday season is six months away, but the nonprofit Coated in Love is already preparing for “3000 Acts of Kindness,” an annual event in December at the Minneapolis Convention Center where people experiencing homelessness can receive food, clothing and access to social services.

On Friday at Dual Citizen Brewing Company in St. Paul, volunteers from 100 Year Manifesto worked together to make 100 blankets in two hours for “3000 Acts of Kindness.” Danielle Igbanugo, founder of Coated in Love, said about 25 people attended the event.

“You can bring your kids, bring your friends and just do good for somebody that you might not ever meet,” Mick White, founder of 100 Year Manifesto, said.

Coated in Love is expecting 4,000 guests to attend this year’s “3000 Acts of Kindness.” Their goal is to have 4,000 of each provided item, including coats, mittens and backpacks. Services such as haircuts, Chick-fil-A meals and mental health resources will also be available.

Igbanugo said one of her biggest joys is seeing former guests who have experienced homelessness return to the “3000 Acts of Kindness” event as volunteers.

“It makes me want to cry because I just love that they give back,” Igbanugo said. “They come back and understand that there are people who are in the same situation.”

The organizations are planning on having another blanket-making event in July. Igbanugo said the event information will be posted on Coated in Love’s website at Coatedinlove.org.

People can get involved by donating money or signing up on the Coated in Love website to sort donations or volunteer at the event in December.

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By FARNOUSH AMIRI and SARAH EL DEEB

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — When Ellie, a British-Iranian living in the United Kingdom, tried to call her mother in Tehran, a robotic female voice answered instead.

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“Alo? Alo?” the voice said, then asked in English: “Who is calling?” A few seconds passed.

“I can’t heard you,” the voice continued, its English imperfect. “Who you want to speak with? I’m Alyssia. Do you remember me? I think I don’t know who are you.”

Ellie, 44, is one of nine Iranians living abroad — including in the U.K and U.S. — who said they have gotten strange, robotic voices when they attempted to call their loved ones in Iran since Israel launched airstrikes on the country a week ago.

They told their stories to The Associated Press on the condition they remain anonymous or that only their first names or initials be used out of fear of endangering their families.

Five experts with whom the AP shared recordings said it could be low-tech artificial intelligence, a chatbot or a pre-recorded message to which calls from abroad were diverted.

It remains unclear who is behind the operation, though four of the experts believed it was likely to be the Iranian government while the fifth saw Israel as more likely.

The messages are deeply eerie and disconcerting for Iranians in the diaspora struggling to contact their families as Israel’s offensive targeting Iranian nuclear and military sites pounds Tehran and other cities. Iran has retaliated with hundreds of missiles and drones, and the government has imposed a widespread internet blackout it says is to protect the country.

That has blocked average Iranians from getting information from the outside world, and their relatives from being able to reach them.

“I don’t know why they’re doing this,” said Ellie, whose mother is diabetic, low on insulin and trapped on the outskirts of Tehran. She wants her mother to evacuate the city but cannot communicate that to her.

A request for comment sent to the Iranian mission to the U.N. was not immediately answered.

Some of the messages are bizarre

Most of the voices speak in English, though at least one spoke Farsi. If the caller tries to talk to it, the voice just continues with its message.

A 30-year-old women living in New York, who heard the same message Ellie did, called it “psychological warfare.”

“Calling your mom and expecting to hear her voice and hearing an AI voice is one of the most scary things I’ve ever experienced,” she said. “I can feel it in my body.”

And the messages can be bizarre. One woman living in the U.K. desperately called her mom and instead got a voice offering platitudes.

“Thank you for taking the time to listen,” it said, in a recording that she shared with the AP. “Today, I’d like to share some thoughts with you and share a few things that might resonate in our daily lives. Life is full of unexpected surprises, and these surprises can sometimes bring joy while at other times they challenge us.”

A man flashes a victory sign while riding his motorbike past an anti-Israeli banner depicting Iranian soldiers heading to attack Israeli territory, at Islamic Revolution Square in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, June 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Not all Iranians abroad encounter the robotic voice. Some said when they try to call family, the phone just rings and rings.

It’s not clear who is behind this — or what the goal is

Colin Crowell, a former vice president for Twitter’s global policy, said it appeared that Iranian phone companies were diverting the calls to a default message system that does not allow calls to be completed.

Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity expert based in the U.S., agreed and said the recordings appeared to be a government measure to thwart hackers, though there was no hard evidence.

He said that in the first two days of Israel’s campaign, mass voice and text messages were sent to Iranian phones urging the public to gear up for “emergency conditions.” They aimed to spread panic — similar to mass calls that government opponents made into Iran during the war with Iraq in the 1980s.

The voice messages trying to calm people “fit the pattern of the Iranian government and how in the past it handled emergency situations,” said Rashidi, the director of Texas-based Miaan, a group that reports on digital rights in the Middle East.

Mobile phones and landlines ultimately are overseen by Iran’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technology. But the country’s intelligence services have long been believed to be monitoring conversations.

“It would be hard for anybody else to hack. Of course, it is possible it is Israeli. But I don’t think they have an incentive to do this,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, a tech entrepreneur and internet freedom activist.

Marwa Fatafta, Berlin-based policy and advocacy director for digital rights group Access Now, suggested it could be “a form of psychological warfare by the Israelis.” She said it fits a past pattern by Israel of using extensive direct messaging to Lebanese and Palestinians during campaigns in Gaza and against Hezbollah.

The messages, she said, appear aimed at “tormenting” already anxious Iranians abroad.

Shops remain shuttered Tehran’s historic Grand Bazaar, Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

When contacted with requests for comment, the Israeli military declined and the prime minister’s office did not respond.

Trying new ways to contact relatives

Ellie is one of a lucky few who found a way to reach relatives since the blackout. She knows someone who lives on the Iran-Turkey border and has two phones — one with a Turkish SIM card and one with an Iranian SIM.

He calls Ellie’s mother with the Iranian phone — since people inside the country are still able to call one another — and presses it to the Turkish phone, where Ellie’s on the line. The two are able to speak.

“The last time we spoke to her, we told her about the AI voice that is answering all her calls,” said Ellie. “She was shocked. She said her phone hasn’t rung at all.”

Elon Musk said he has activated his satellite internet provider Starlink in Iran, where a small number of people are believed to have the system, even though it is illegal. Authorities are urging the public to turn in neighbors with the devices as part of an ongoing spy hunt. Others have illegal satellite dishes, granting them access to international news.

The messages are making relatives feel helpless

M., a woman in the U.K., has been trying to reach her mother-in-law, who is immobile and lives in Tehran’s northeast, which has been pummeled by Israeli bombardment throughout the week.

When she last spoke to her family in Iran, they were mulling whether she should evacuate from the city. Then the blackout was imposed, and they lost contact. Since then she has heard through a relative that the woman was in the ICU with respiratory problems.

When she calls, she gets the same bizarre message as the woman in the U.K., a lengthy mantra.

“Close your eyes and picture yourself in a place that brings you peace and happiness,” it says. “Maybe you are walking through a serene forest, listening to the rustle of leaves and birds chirping. Or you’re by the seashore, hearing the calming sound of waves crashing on the sand.”

The only feeling the message does instill in her, she said, is “helplessness.”

El Deeb reported from Beirut

By KELVIN CHAN

LONDON (AP) — Music streaming service Deezer said Friday that it will start flagging albums with AI-generated songs, part of its fight against streaming fraudsters.

Deezer, based in Paris, is grappling with a surge in music on its platform created using artificial intelligence tools it says are being wielded to earn royalties fraudulently.

The app will display an on-screen label warning about “AI-generated content” and notify listeners that some tracks on an album were created with song generators.

Deezer is a small player in music streaming, which is dominated by Spotify, Amazon and Apple, but the company said AI-generated music is an “industry-wide issue.” It’s committed to “safeguarding the rights of artists and songwriters at a time where copyright law is being put into question in favor of training AI models,” CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a press release.

Deezer’s move underscores the disruption caused by generative AI systems, which are trained on the contents of the internet including text, images and audio available online. AI companies are facing a slew of lawsuits challenging their practice of scraping the web for such training data without paying for it.

According to an AI song detection tool that Deezer rolled out this year, 18% of songs uploaded to its platform each day, or about 20,000 tracks, are now completely AI generated. Just three months earlier, that number was 10%, Lanternier said in a recent interview.

AI has many benefits but it also “creates a lot of questions” for the music industry, Lanternier told The Associated Press. Using AI to make music is fine as long as there’s an artist behind it but the problem arises when anyone, or even a bot, can use it to make music, he said.

Music fraudsters “create tons of songs. They upload, they try to get on playlists or recommendations, and as a result they gather royalties,” he said.

Musicians can’t upload music directly to Deezer or rival platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. Music labels or digital distribution platforms can do it for artists they have contracts with, while anyone else can use a “self service” distribution company.

Fully AI-generated music still accounts for only about 0.5% of total streams on Deezer. But the company said it’s “evident” that fraud is “the primary purpose” for these songs because it suspects that as many as seven in 10 listens of an AI song are done by streaming “farms” or bots, instead of humans.

Any AI songs used for “stream manipulation” will be cut off from royalty payments, Deezer said.

AI has been a hot topic in the music industry, with debates swirling around its creative possibilities as well as concerns about its legality.

Two of the most popular AI song generators, Suno and Udio, are being sued by record companies for copyright infringement, and face allegations they exploited recorded works of artists from Chuck Berry to Mariah Carey.

Gema, a German royalty-collection group, is suing Suno in a similar case filed in Munich, accusing the service of generating songs that are “confusingly similar” to original versions by artists it represents, including “Forever Young” by Alphaville, “Daddy Cool” by Boney M and Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5.”

Major record labels are reportedly negotiating with Suno and Udio for compensation, according to news reports earlier this month.

To detect songs for tagging, Lanternier says Deezer uses the same generators used to create songs to analyze their output.

“We identify patterns because the song creates such a complex signal. There is lots of information in the song,” Lanternier said.

The AI music generators seem to be unable to produce songs without subtle but recognizable patterns, which change constantly.

“So you have to update your tool every day,” Lanternier said. “So we keep generating songs to learn, to teach our algorithm. So we’re fighting AI with AI.”

Fraudsters can earn big money through streaming. Lanternier pointed to a criminal case last year in the U.S., which authorities said was the first ever involving artificially inflated music streaming. Prosecutors charged a man with wire fraud conspiracy, accusing him of generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and using bots to automatically stream them billions of times, earning at least $10 million.

By WILL WEISSERT

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday that his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was “wrong” when she previously said that the U.S. believed Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon, and he suggested that it would be “very hard to stop” Israel’s strikes on Iran in order to negotiate a possible ceasefire.

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Trump has recently taken a more aggressive public stance toward Tehran as he’s sought more time to weigh whether to attack Iran by striking its well-defended Fordo uranium enrichment facility. Buried under a mountain, the facility is believed to be out of the reach of all but America’s “bunker-buster” bombs.

After landing in New Jersey for an evening fundraiser for his super political action committee, Trump was asked about Gabbard’s comments to Congress in March that U.S. spy agencies believed that Iran wasn’t working on nuclear warheads. The president responded, “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong. Who in the intelligence community said that?”

Informed that it had been Gabbard, Trump said, “She’s wrong.”

In a subsequent post on X, Gabbard said her testimony was taken out of context “as a way to manufacture division.”

“America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly,” she wrote. “President Trump has been clear that can’t happen, and I agree.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard leaves U.S. Capitol after a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on Monday, June. 16, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

Still, disavowing Gabbard’s previous assessment came a day after the White House said Trump would decide within two weeks whether the U.S. military would get directly involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran. It said seeking additional time was “based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future.”

But on Friday, Trump himself seemed to cast doubts on the possibility of talks leading to a pause in fighting between Israel and Iran. He said that, while he might support a ceasefire, Israel’s strikes on Iran could be “very hard to stop.”

Asked about Iran suggesting that, if the U.S. was serious about furthering negotiations, it could call on Israel to stop its strikes, Trump responded, “I think it’s very hard to make that request right now.”

“If somebody is winning, it’s a little bit harder to do than if somebody is losing,” Trump said. “But we’re ready, willing and able, and we’ve been speaking to Iran, and we’ll see what happens.”

The president later added, “It’s very hard to stop when you look at it.”

“Israel’s doing well in terms of war. And, I think, you would say that Iran is doing less well. It’s a little bit hard to get somebody to stop,” Trump said.

Trump campaigned on decrying “endless wars” and has vowed to be an international peacemaker. That’s led some, even among conservatives, to point to Trump’s past criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq beginning in 2003 as being at odds with his more aggressive stance toward Iran now.

Trump suggested the two situations were very different, though.

“There were no weapons of mass destruction. I never thought there were. And that was somewhat pre-nuclear. You know, it was, it was a nuclear age, but nothing like it is today,” Trump said of his past criticism of the administration of President George W. Bush.

He added of Iran’s current nuclear program, “It looked like I’m right about the material that they’ve gathered already. It’s a tremendous amount of material.”

Trump also cast doubts on Iran’s developing nuclear capabilities for civilian pursuits, like power generation.

“You’re sitting on one of the largest oil piles anywhere in the world,” he said. “It’s a little bit hard to see why you’d need that.”