PRISTINA, Kosovo: Kosovo authorities on Friday closed five parallel institutions working with the ethnic Serb minority, a move that was immediately criticized by the United States and could further raise tensions with neighboring Serbia.
Elbert Krasniqi, Kosovo’s minister of local administration, confirmed the closure of five so-called parallel institutions in the north — where most of the ethnic Serb minority lives — writing in a Facebook message that they “violate the Republic of Kosovo’s constitution and laws.”
The US embassy in Kosovo reiterated Friday in a statement Washington’s “concern and disappointment with continuing uncoordinated actions” taken by Pristina “that continue to have a direct and negative effect on members of the ethnic Serb community and other minority communities in Kosovo.”
Serbia continues to assist its Serb minority after Kosovo proclaimed independence in 2008, which Belgrade doesn’t recognize.
Kosovo was a former Serbian province until a 78-day NATO bombing campaign in 1999 ended a war between Serbian government forces and ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, which left about 13,000 dead, mainly ethnic Albanians, and pushed Serbian forces out.
Kosovo-Serbia relationship remains tense and the 13-year-long normalization talks facilitated by the European Union have failed to make progress, especially following a shootout last September between masked Serb gunmen and Kosovo police that left four people dead.
The EU and the US have pressed both sides to implement agreements that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti reached in February and March last year.
Earlier this month Pristina said it would open the bridge on the Ibar River which divides Mitrovica into a Serb-dominated north and ethnic Albanian south. The bridge has been closed to passenger vehicle traffic for more than a decade, with minority ethnic Serbs erecting barricades since 2011 because they say “ethnic cleansing” would be carried out against them if ethnic Albanians could freely travel over the bridge into their part of the city.
Kurti has also been at odds with Western powers over Kosovo’s unilateral closure of six branches of a Serbia-licensed bank in northern Kosovo earlier this year.
Unrest in northern Mitrovica has increased since last year, when the NATO-led international peacekeepers force in Kosovo, known as KFOR, stepped up its numbers and equipment along the Kosovo-Serbia border, including at the bridge in Mitrovica.
The tiny Balkan country will hold parliamentary elections on Feb. 9, a vote that is expected to be a test for Kurti, whose governing party won in a landslide in the 2021.
Kosovo shuts down 5 Serbian governing structures in the north and US reacts with alarm
https://arab.news/wmuhk
Kosovo shuts down 5 Serbian governing structures in the north and US reacts with alarm
South Korean president’s defense team denies insurrection charges: Yonhap
SEOUL: South Korea’s impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol did not commit insurrection but will cooperate with the investigation into his martial law declaration, his defense team said Tuesday, Yonhap news agency reported.
“While we do not consider the insurrection charges to be legally valid, we will comply with the investigation,” his lawyers said, according to Yonhap.
Bomb kills chief of Russian nuclear protection forces in Moscow, media reports say
MOSCOW: A bomb killed a senior Russian general in charge of nuclear protection forces and another man in Moscow on Tuesday, the RT state media group said on Tuesday, citing an unidentified law enforcement source.
Russian media said the that Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, who is chief of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, had been killed on Ryazansky Prospekt.
Russian news Telegram channels also reported that Kirillov had been killed but there was no official confirmation of the killing.
TASS state news agency said two people were killed in an explosion on Moscow’s Ryazansky Prospekt.
A criminal investigation was opened in connection with the death of two men on Ryazansky Prospekt, Russia’s RIA state news agency reported, citing Moscow investigators.
Ryazansky Prospekt is a road that starts some 7 km (4.35 miles) southeast of the Kremlin.
Investigators and forensic experts were working at the scene together with employees of other emergency services, TASS agency reported.
US national security adviser Sullivan says Trump should like ‘burden sharing’ AUKUS deal
SYDNEY: The AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine partnership with Australia will benefit the United States and is the kind of “burden sharing” deal that President-elect Donald Trump has talked about, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.
In an interview with Australia’s Lowy Institute think tank published on Tuesday, Sullivan said he had confidence AUKUS would endure under the Trump presidency, as it enhances US deterrent capability in the Indo-Pacific and has Australia contributing to the US industrial base.
The trilateral AUKUS deal struck in 2021 is Australia’s biggest defense project, with a cost of A$368 billion ($245 billion) by 2055, as Australia buys several Virginia-class submarines from the United States while also building a new class of nuclear-powered submarine in Britain and Australia.
“The United States is benefiting from burden sharing — exactly the kind of thing that Mr.Trump has talked a lot about,” Sullivan said of the AUKUS agreement.
Australia has agreed to invest $3 billion in US shipyards that build the Virginia-class nuclear submarines it will be sold early next decade amid concerns that a backlog of orders could jeopardize the deal.
Australia having conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines enhances America’s deterrent capability in the Indo-Pacific, Sullivan said.
“Australia is directly contributing to the US submarine industrial base so that we can build out this submarine capability, supply Australia in the nearer term with Virginia class submarines and then in the longer term with the AUKUS class submarine,” he added.
Australia’s defense and foreign ministers, meanwhile, met their counterparts in London on Monday to discuss progress on AUKUS for the first time since a change of government in Britain, and ahead of Trump’s inauguration as US president in January.
Britain’s Defense Secretary John Healey said they discussed “the challenge of maintaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, the challenge of China — increasingly active, increasingly assertive in the region — and the vital importance of maintaining both deterrence and freedom of navigation.”
Australia’s Defense Minister Richard Marles said they discussed accelerating the process of bringing Australian companies into the supply chain in Britain for building submarines.
Judge denies Trump’s bid to throw out hush money conviction
- Judge rules Trump’s conviction for falsifying records should stand
- Trump’s lawyers argue case impedes his ability to govern
NEW YORK: A judge on Monday ruled that Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal should stand, rejecting the US president-elect’s argument that a recent Supreme Court ruling nullified the verdict, a court filing showed.
Trump’s lawyers argued that having the case hang over him during his presidency would impede his ability to govern. He was initially scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 26, but Justice Juan Merchan pushed that back indefinitely after Trump defeated Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 election.
In a 41-page decision, Justice Juan Merchan said Trump’s “decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the executive branch.”
Trump’s lawyer did not immedaitely respond to a request for comment.
Prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which brought the case, said there were measures short of the “extreme remedy” of overturning the jury’s verdict that could assuage Trump’s concerns about being distracted by a criminal case while serving as president.
The case stemmed from a $130,000 payment that Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels. The payment was for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she has said she had a decade earlier with Trump, who denies it.
A Manhattan jury in May found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the payment. It was the first time a US president — former or sitting — had been convicted of or charged with a criminal offense.
Trump pleaded not guilty and called the case an attempt by Bragg, a Democrat, to harm his 2024 campaign.
ChatGPT search opens to all users in challenge to Google
- OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT
The San Francisco-based tech firm had beefed up its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities in late October, but made the feature available only to paying subscribers.
The newly public feature enables users to receive “fast, timely answers” with links to relevant web sources — information that previously required using a traditional search engine, the company said.
The upgrade to ChatGPT enables the AI chatbot to provide real-time information from across the web.
“We’re bringing search to all logged-in free users of ChatGPT,” OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said in a video posted at YouTube.
“That means it’ll be available globally on every platform where you use ChatGPT.”
Examples of the new interface demonstrated by OpenAI resembled search results provided by Google and Google Maps, though without the clutter of advertising.
They also appeared similarly to the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more conversational version of Google by featuring the sources it referenced in the answer.
“We’re really just making the ChatGPT experience that you know better with up-to-date information from the web,” ChatGPT Search product lead Adam Fry said in the video.
“We’re rolling this out to hundreds of millions of users, starting today.”
Rather than launching a separate product, OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT.
Users can enable the search feature by default or activate it manually via a web search icon.
Since their launch, data on AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude have been limited by time cutoffs, so the answers they provided were not up-to-date.
In contrast, Google and Microsoft both combine AI-generated answers with web results.
The addition of online search to ChatGPT will raise more questions about the startup’s link to Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor, which is also trying to expand the reach of its Bing search engine against Google.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has set his company on a path to become an Internet powerhouse.
He successfully catapulted the company to a staggering $157 billion valuation in a recent round of fundraising that included Microsoft, Tokyo-based conglomerate SoftBank and AI chipmaker Nvidia as investors.
Enticing new users with search engine capabilities will increase the company’s computing needs and costs, which are enormous.
