The Palestinians vowed on Wednesday to push ahead with plans to seek UN backing as long as talks are off the agenda, prompting US President Barack Obama to warn it would be a “mistake.”
“I strongly believe for the Palestinians to take the United Nations route rather than the path of sitting down and talking with the Israelis is a mistake,” Obama said in London at a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Since the collapse of direct peace talks late last year, the Palestinian leadership has been pursuing a strategy aimed at securing UN recognition of their promised state on 1967 borders, drawing sharp criticism from Israel and Washington.
“The only way we are going to see a Palestinian state is if Israelis and Palestinians agree on a just peace,” Obama said, warning that peace would only work if both sides agreed to a “wrenching compromise.”
Obama’s remarks came after a week of high-level debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has left the prospects of a revival of peace talks more remote than ever.
Earlier on Wednesday, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas said that unless there was a fresh round of peace negotiations, the Palestinians would head to the UN in September in the hope of being accepted as a full member of the world body.
“Our first choice is negotiations, but if there is no progress before September, we will go to the United Nations,” he said in remarks which came a day after Netanyahu had outlined his views on a peace deal with the Palestinians in a speech to the US Congress.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
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