Netanyahu backs off
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would delay his government’s contentious plans to overhaul Israel’s judiciary, after days of massive street protests, counter-protests and strikes that halted some health services and blocked flights from leaving Israel’s main airport. Follow live updates.
Netanyahu’s reversal came after the head of a powerful far-right political party, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said he was open to postponing the vote, giving Netanyahu room to step back. His concession is an attempt to de-escalate the civil unrest, but he risks destabilizing the government. Many of his hard-right coalition partners had resisted any suggestion of a delayed vote.
“When there is a possibility of preventing a civil war through dialogue, I, as the prime minister, take a time out for dialogue,” Netanyahu said in a speech announcing the delay.
It was unclear whether the delay would calm the protests. Israel’s main labor union called off a general strike after the announcement, but one protest group said it would keep demonstrating until the proposal was shelved.
A former Taiwanese president’s historic visit
Taiwan’s former president, Ma Ying-jeou, landed in China on Monday, in the first visit to the country by any sitting or former Taiwanese leader since the end of China’s civil war in 1949.
The 12-day visit is unofficial, but it is likely to be watched for how Beijing might seek to influence Taiwan ahead of the island democracy’s presidential election in January. Ma’s trip overlaps with a visit to Central America and the U.S. by Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, and highlights key differences between their parties.
Tsai, of the Democratic Progressive Party, has strengthened U.S.-Taiwan ties during her eight years in office, while Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party, also called the Kuomintang, bills itself as better able to deal with Beijing.
Analysis: Beijing’s cultivation of a relationship with the Kuomintang, once the mortal enemy of Mao Zedong’s Communists, is a concession that China must make to Taiwan’s democracy, a political scientist at the Australian National University told The Times.
U.S. interests in Africa
Vice President Kamala Harris has begun a weeklong tour of Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia. Her visit is a step toward revitalizing the relationship between the U.S. and its African allies, which has flagged amid China’s growing influence in the region.
Harris, the highest-ranking Biden administration official to visit Africa, will aim to reassure U.S. allies in the region that Washington is focused on fostering innovation and economic growth as well as addressing corruption, violence and human rights issues.
Some African leaders have insisted that they do not just want lectures on democracy from Western leaders, but also more economic partnership, preferential trade agreements and access to finance at fair rates. Harris is expected to make several announcements on American public- and private-sector commitments.
China’s approach: In contrast to Washington, Beijing pays assiduous diplomatic attention to even small African nations. The countries Harris is visiting count China among their top trade partners, far ahead of the U.S. Some nations, including Zambia, have also borrowed more money from China than they can likely repay.
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Welcome to A.I. boot camp
We have a new pop-up newsletter that will teach you everything you need to know about artificial intelligence in just five days. Sign up here.
The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in the 1950s, as academics set out to build a machine with the capabilities of a human brain, and it gets tossed around a lot to describe anything that seems vaguely futuristic. But progress on the technology was relatively slow until around 2012, when a single idea shifted the entire field.
It was called a neural network — a mathematical system that learns skills by finding statistical patterns in enormous amounts of data. It allowed services like Siri and Alexa to understand speech, identify people and translate dozens of languages.
Then, around 2018, companies like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI began building neural networks that were trained on large language models, vast amounts of text from the internet.
Somewhat to the surprise of experts, these systems learned to write unique prose and computer code, laying the foundations for ChatGPT and other chatbots, which are poised to dramatically change our everyday lives. In our On Tech: A.I. pop-up newsletter, Kevin Roose and Cade Metz will walk you through the future.
Related: Scientists are discussing if A.I. chatbots have developed theory of mind.
