An Iraqi man who carried out several Quran burnings in Sweden has been killed in a shooting near Stockholm, authorities said Thursday.
Salwan Momika, 38, staged several burnings and desecrations of Islam's holy book in Sweden in 2023. Videos of the Quran burnings got worldwide publicity and raised anger and criticism in several Muslim nations, leading to riots and unrest in many places.
The Stockholm District Court said a verdict scheduled Thursday in a trial in which Momika was a defendant was postponed because one of the defendants had died. A judge at the court, Göran Lundahl, confirmed that the deceased was Momika. He said he didn't have any information on when or how Momika died.
Police said they were alerted to a shooting Wednesday night at an apartment building in Sodertalje, near Stockholm, and found a man with gunshot wounds who later died.
Broadcaster SVT reported that the victim was Momika.
Prosecutors said five people were arrested overnight on suspicion of murder. They said all were adults but gave no further details.
Prosecutor Rasmus Öman said the investigation is still in its early stages and that the suspects and others still have to be questioned.
Momika came to Sweden from Iraq in 2018 and was granted a three-year residence permit in 2021, according to SVT.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Sweden's security service was involved because "there is obviously a risk that there is a connection to a foreign power," Swedish news agency TT reported.
Momika argued that his protests targeted the religion of Islam, not Muslim people. He said he wanted to protect Sweden’s population from the messages of the Quran. Swedish police allowed his demonstrations, citing freedom of speech, while filing charges against him.
Last March, he was arrested in neighboring Norway after stating that he would seek asylum there, and was sent back to Sweden, TT reported.
Momika and a co-defendant were charged in August with incitement to hatred because of statements they made in connection with the Quran burnings. A verdict was supposed to be handed down on Thursday morning.
Authorities in the eastern Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis said Thursday they are investigating the circumstances that led to the discovery of at least 19 bodies found drifting at sea.
At around 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday the St. Kitts and Nevis Coast Guard responded to a report of a drifting vessel off the coast of Nevis. The partially submerged boat contained decomposed human remains. It was towed to St. Kitts, where police and medical officials are conducting investigations.
"It was a fishing vessel, which is not typically found in the Caribbean," Police Commissioner James Sutton told The Associated Press. "We are not certain, but we believe that this vessel originated off the West African coast."
Sutton said officials now face the difficult task of determining the exact number of bodies and identifying them. The advanced state of decomposition, he said, has made it difficult.
This is the first such discovery in recent memory in the twin-island nation.
Belarus' authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko extended his more than three decades in power in an orchestrated weekend election that the opposition and the European Union rejected as a farce.
The Central Election Commission declared early Monday that Lukashenko won the election with nearly 87% of the vote after a campaign in which four token challengers all praised his rule.
Members of the country's political opposition, many of whom are imprisoned or exiled abroad by Lukashenko's unrelenting crackdown on dissent and free speech, called the election a sham — much like the last one in 2020 that triggered months of protests that were unprecedented in the history of the country of 9 million people.
Since then, more than 65,000 people were arrested and thousands beaten, with the crackdown bringing condemnation and sanctions from the West.
The EU rejected Sunday's vote as illegitimate and threatened new sanctions.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the election offered no choice to voters, marking "a bitter day for all those who long for freedom and democracy."
"Instead of free and fair elections and a life without fear and arbitrariness, they experience daily oppression, repression and human rights violations," she said in a post on X.
Lukashenko has been in power since 1994 and has ruled the country with an iron fist. He has relied on subsidies and political support from Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself in office for a quarter-century, a relationship that helped him survive the 2020 protests.
Lukashenko allowed Moscow to use the country’s territory to invade Ukraine in 2022 and later hosted some of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons.
Putin called Lukashenko on Monday to congratulate him on his "convincing victory." Chinese President Xi Jinping also sent congratulations.
Some observers believe Lukashenko feared a repeat of those mass demonstrations amid economic troubles and the fighting in Ukraine, and so scheduled the vote in January, when few would want to fill the streets again, rather than hold it in August.
Leading opponents have fled abroad or were thrown in prison. Activists say the country holds nearly 1,300 political prisoners, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, founder of the Viasna Human Rights Center.
Since July, Lukashenko has pardoned more than 250 people. At the same time, authorities have sought to uproot dissent by arresting hundreds more in raids targeting relatives and friends of political prisoners.
Opposition leader-in-exile Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who fled Belarus under government pressure after challenging Lukashenko in 2020, denounced the election as a "senseless farce" and urged voters to cross off everyone listed on the ballot.
Colombia’s president issued a decree Friday giving him emergency powers to restore order in a coca-growing region bordering Venezuela that has been wracked in recent days by a deadly turf war among dissident rebel groups.
President Gustavo Petro's decree, which can be extended, gives him 90 days to impose curfews, restrict traffic and take other steps that would normally violate Colombians' civil rights or require congressional approval.
It is the first time in more than a decade that a Colombian president has used such an extreme measure and underscores the seriousness of the current conflict in a country that for decades was paralyzed by political violence.
However, it applies only to the rural Catatumbo region near the border with Venezuela, where the Colombian state has struggled for decades to gain a foothold. In the past week, at least 80 people have been killed and an estimated 36,000 more displaced as fighting intensifies between the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and holdouts from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Petro's conservative opponents have criticized the move, accusing the former guerrilla of riding roughshod over the constitution. But some activists have celebrated it, saying they are hopeful the move translates into better infrastructure, health care and schools in the traditionally lawless region.
"Why are the armed groups here? Because the last government hasn't made investments. They've abandoned us," Jaime Botero, an activist in the town of Tibu, told The Associated Press.
Earlier this week Petro reactivated arrest orders against 31 top ELN commanders that had been suspended as part of an effort to woo the the Cuban revolution-inspired insurgency into a peace deal to end its 60 year war against the state. Petro also suspended all peace talks, which have advanced slowly since he took office in 2022.
The ELN has traditionally dominated in Catatumbo but has been losing ground to holdouts from the FARC, a guerrilla group that largely disbanded after signing a peace deal in 2016 with the government.
The current conflict is spilling across the border into Venezuela, where some of those fleeing the violence have sought refuge.
The current whereabouts of the ELN peace negotiators is unknown. But Cuba's government this week said they are not there, leading some to speculate they may be hiding in Venezuela, which is one of the sponsors of Petro's peace initiative with the ELN.
Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen on Sunday announced that he would meet with far-right politician Herbert Kickl as speculation grows that he will ask the Freedom Party leader to form a government.
Van der Bellen made the announcement after meeting with Chancellor Karl Nehammer and others at his presidential palace. Nehammer has announced his intention to resign after coalition talks between his conservative Austrian People's Party and the center-left Social Democrats collapsed over the budget.
Nehammer has ruled out working with Kickl, but others within his party are less adamant. Earlier Sunday, the People's Party nominated its general secretary, Christian Stocker, as interim leader, but the president said Nehammer would remain chancellor for now.
Van der Bellen said that he had spent several hours talking to key officials, after which he got the impression that "the voices within the People's Party who exclude working with the Freedom Party under its leader Herbert Kickl have become quieter."
The president said that this development has "potentially opened a new path," which has prompted him to invite Kickl for a meeting on Monday morning.
Kickl's Freedom Party topped the polls in the autumn's national election with 29.2% of the vote, but Van der Bellen tasked Nehammer with putting together a new government because no other party was willing to work with Kickl.
That decision drew heavy criticism from the Freedom Party and its supporters, with Kickl saying in October that it was "not right and not logical" that he did not get a mandate to form a government.
"We are not responsible for the wasted time, the chaotic situation and the enormous breach of trust that has emerged," Kickl said Sunday afternoon on social media. "On the contrary: It is clear that the Freedom Party has been and continues to be the only stable factor in Austrian politics."
Stocker addressed reporters on Sunday afternoon and confirmed that he had been appointed "unanimously" by his party to serve as interim leader. "I am very honored and happy," he said.
He also welcomed the decision by the president to meet with Kickl and said that he now expects that the leader of the party that emerged as the clear winner from the last election would be tasked with forming a government.
"If we are invited to negotiations to form a government, we will accept this invitation," Stocker added.
In the past, Stocker has criticized Kickl, calling him a "security risk" for the country.
In its election program titled "Fortress Austria," the Freedom Party calls for "remigration of uninvited foreigners," for achieving a more "homogeneous" nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.
The Freedom Party also calls for an end to sanctions against Russia, is highly critical of Western military aid to Ukraine and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defense project launched by Germany. The Freedom Party has also signed a friendship agreement in 2016 with Putin’s United Russia Party that it now claims has expired.
Kickl has criticized "elites" in Brussels and called for some powers to be brought back from the European Union to Austria.
Austria was thrown into political turmoil on Friday after the liberal party Neos pulled out of coalition talks with the the People's Party and the Social Democrats. On Saturday the two remaining parties, who have only a one-seat majority in Parliament, made another attempt to form a government — but that also ended in failure after a few hours, with negotiators saying they were unable to agree on how to repair the budget deficit.
Warren Upton, the oldest living survivor of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the last remaining survivor of the USS Utah, has died. He was 105.
Upton died Wednesday at a hospital in Los Gatos, California, after suffering a bout of pneumonia, said Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors.
The Utah, a battleship, was moored at Pearl Harbor when Japanese planes began bombing the Hawaii naval base in the early hours of Dec. 7, 1941, in an attack that propelled the U.S. into World War II.
Upton told The Associated Press in 2020 that he had been getting ready to shave when he felt the first torpedo hit the Utah. He recalled that no one on board knew what made the ship shake. Then, the second torpedo hit and the ship began to list and capsize.
The then-22-year-old swam ashore to Ford Island, where he jumped in a trench to avoid Japanese planes strafing the area. He stayed for about 30 minutes until a truck came and took him to safety.
Upton said he didn't mind talking about what happened during the attack. Instead, what upset him was that he kept losing shipmates over the years. By 2020, there were only three crew members of the Utah still alive, including himself.
There were an estimated 87,000 military personnel on Oahu on the day of the attack, according to military historian J. Michael Wenger. After Upton's death, only 15 are still alive.
Road crews were repairing a short stretch of Interstate 80 in northern New Jersey on Friday where a sinkhole forced the eastbound lanes to shut down, but it was still unknown when they will reopen.
The highway's guardrail still hung suspended in the air across the gaping 40-foot-wide (12-meter) hole, which opened up when an abandoned mine collapsed under the highway's right shoulder Thursday morning, according to the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
The sinkhole has forced motorists to take a short detour near Wharton, which is about 40 miles (64 kilometers) west of New York City.
Crews have stabilized the area and started excavating. They will work around the clock to the repair the roadway, the highway department said Friday.
The timing of when the eastbound lanes will upon depends on how extensive the repairs will be and the upcoming weather, the department said. Drivers should continue to expect delays and use alternate routes.
After a nearly weeklong search, Athena found her way home to her Florida family in time for Christmas Eve and even rang the doorbell.
Athena, a 4-year-old German Shepherd and Husky mix, escaped her home in Green Cove Springs, Florida, on Dec. 15, prompting a search among the community and nearby towns for her. Her owner, Brooke Comer, said her family left for church that day and got a message from her neighbor with a picture of Athena outside the house.
Comer panicked. Her family rushed home to find her collar in the crate and no visible opening Athena could have gotten out from. How she escaped remains a mystery.
The next week's events continued to be an "unbelievable" story for Comer, where neighbors and community members from nearby towns would contact her from her missing dog ads and send any footage or photos where they may have spotted Athena. Based on all the alerts Comer got, it looked like Athena made a nearly 20-mile (32-kilometer) roundtrip while she was missing.
At every alert, Comer and her family would go to the spot within minutes and search for Athena — to no avail.
"She was the hide-and-seek all time grand champion," Comer said. "With every sighting my heart jumped, and it honestly was excitement and then your heart's crushed because we were always one step behind."
The entire search was a terrifying and scary experience for Comer, who was worried about where her already skittish dog could have gone or could have encountered. That was until 2:30 a.m. Christmas Eve, when she got a Ring video notification from her doorbell and her other dog began barking.
"I was kind of like in a daze, and the dog was barking, and as soon as I heard that ring, I looked at my phone and you could see in the video it was Athena and she was jumping at the door, ringing the doorbell," Comer said.
As soon as Comer opened the door, Athena bolted inside and went to go lick her son's face, who was on the couch half-asleep. After that, she immediately grabbed her ball to play and shortly went to her cage to go back to sleep.
Comer said the experience gave so much hope because of the neighbors and the large community looking for Athena for the past week. The next plan was to get Athena a full exam, flea and tick treatments and a microchip.
Planet Earth is parting company with an asteroid that’s been tagging along as a "mini moon" for the past two months.
The harmless space rock will peel away on Monday, overcome by the stronger tug of the sun’s gravity. But it will zip closer for a quick visit in January.
NASA will use a radar antenna to observe the 33-foot asteroid then. That should deepen scientists’ understanding of the object known as 2024 PT5, quite possibly a boulder that was blasted off the moon by an impacting, crater-forming asteroid.
While not technically a moon — NASA stresses it was never captured by Earth’s gravity and fully in orbit — it’s "an interesting object" worthy of study.
The astrophysicist brothers who identified the asteroid’s "mini moon behavior," Raul and Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of Complutense University of Madrid, have collaborated with telescopes in the Canary Islands for hundreds of observations so far.
Currently more than 2 million miles away, the object is too small and faint to see without a powerful telescope. It will pass as close as 1.1 million miles of Earth in January, maintaining a safe distance before it zooms farther into the solar system while orbiting the sun, not to return until 2055. That’s almost five times farther than the moon.
First spotted in August, the asteroid began its semi jog around Earth in late September, after coming under the grips of Earth’s gravity and following a horseshoe-shaped path.
By the time it returns next year, it will be moving too fast — more than double its speed from September — to hang around, said Raul de la Fuente Marcos.
NASA will track the asteroid for more than a week in January using the Goldstone solar system radar antenna in California’s Mojave Desert, part of the Deep Space Network.
Current data suggest that during its 2055 visit, the sun-circling asteroid will once again make a temporary and partial lap around Earth.
A NASA spacecraft is ready to set sail for Jupiter and its moon Europa, one of the best bets for finding life beyond Earth.
Europa Clipper will peer beneath the moon’s icy crust where an ocean is thought to be sloshing fairly close to the surface. It won’t search for life, but rather determine whether conditions there could support it. Another mission would be needed to flush out any microorganisms lurking there.
"It’s a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today — right now," said program scientist Curt Niebur.
Its massive solar panels make Clipper the biggest craft built by NASA to investigate another planet. It will take 5 1/2 years to reach Jupiter and will sneak within 16 miles of Europa's surface — considerably closer than any other spacecraft.
Liftoff is targeted for this month aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Mission cost: $5.2 billion.
One of Jupiter’s 95 known moons, Europa is almost the size of our own moon. It's encased in an ice sheet estimated to be 10 miles to 15 miles or more thick. Scientists believe this frozen crust hides an ocean that could be 80 miles or more deep. The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted what appear to be geysers erupting from the surface. Discovered by Galileo in 1610, Europa is one of the four so-called Galilean moons of Jupiter, along with Ganymede, Io and Callisto.
What type of life might Europa harbor? Besides water, organic compounds are needed for life as we know it, plus an energy source. In Europa’s case that could be thermal vents on the ocean floor. Deputy project scientist Bonnie Buratti imagines any life would be primitive like the bacterial life that originated in Earth’s deep ocean vents. "We will not know from this mission because we can’t see that deep," she said. Unlike missions to Mars where habitability is one of many questions, Clipper’s sole job is to establish whether the moon could support life in its ocean or possibly in any pockets of water in the ice.
When its solar wings and antennas are unfurled, Clipper is about the size of a basketball court — more than 100 feet end to end — and weighs nearly 13,000 pounds. The supersized solar panels are needed because of Jupiter’s distance from the sun. The main body — about the size of a camper — is packed with nine science instruments, including radar that will penetrate the ice, cameras that will map virtually the entire moon and tools to tease out the contents of Europa’s surface and tenuous atmosphere. The name hearkens to the swift sailing ships of centuries past.
The roundabout trip to Jupiter will span 1.8 billion miles. For extra oomph, the spacecraft will swing past Mars early next year and then Earth in late 2026. It arrives at Jupiter in 2030 and begins science work the next year. While orbiting Jupiter, it will cross paths with Europa 49 times. The mission ends in 2034 with a planned crash into Ganymede — Jupiter’s biggest moon and the solar system's too.
There’s more radiation around Jupiter than anywhere else in our solar system, besides the sun. Europa passes through Jupiter’s bands of radiation as it orbits the gas giant, making it especially menacing for spacecraft. That’s why Clipper’s electronics are inside a vault with dense aluminum and zinc walls. All this radiation would nix any life on Europa’s surface. But it could break down water molecules and, perhaps, release oxygen all the way down into the ocean that could possibly fuel sea life.
Earlier this year, NASA was in a panic that the spacecraft's many transistors might not withstand the intense radiation. But after months of analysis, engineers concluded the mission could proceed as planned.
NASA’s twin Pioneer spacecraft and then two Voyagers swept past Jupiter in the 1970s. The Voyagers provided the first detailed photos of Europa but from quite a distance. NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had repeated flybys of the moon during the 1990s, passing as close as 124 miles. Still in action around Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has added to Europa’s photo album. Arriving at Jupiter a year after Clipper will be the European Space Agency’s Juice spacecraft, launched last year.
Like Europa, Jupiter’s jumbo moon Ganymede is thought to host an underground ocean. But its frozen shell is much thicker — possibly 100 miles thick — making it tougher to probe the environment below. Callisto’s ice sheet may be even thicker, possibly hiding an ocean. Saturn’s moon Enceladus has geysers shooting up, but it’s much farther than Jupiter. Ditto for Saturn’s moon Titan, also suspected of having a subterranean sea. While no ocean worlds have been confirmed beyond our solar system, scientists believe they’re out there — and may even be relatively common.
Like many robotic explorers before it, Clipper bears messages from Earth. Attached to the electronics vault is a triangular metal plate. On one side is a design labeled "water words" with representations of the word for water in 104 languages. On the opposite side: a poem about the moon by U.S. poet laureate Ada Limon and a silicon chip containing the names of 2.6 million people who signed up to vicariously ride along.
Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity.
Hinton, who is known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.
"These two gentlemen were really the pioneers," said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce. "They ... did the fundamental work, based on physical understanding which has led to the revolution we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence."
The artificial neural networks — interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain — the researchers pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and "have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation," said Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the groundwork for Hinton's, told The Associated Press Tuesday, "I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had."
Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a "huge influence" on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.
"It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution," he said in an open call with reporters and officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
"Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects," Hinton said.
"But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control."
The Nobel committee also mentioned fears about the possible flipside.
Moons said that while it has "enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind."
Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create.
"I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control," Hinton said.
For his part, Hopfield, who signed early petitions by researchers calling for strong control of the technology, compared the risks and benefits of machine learning to work on viruses and nuclear energy, capable of helping and harming society.
Neither winner was home when they received the news. Hopfield, who was staying with his wife at a cottage in Hampshire, England, said that after grabbing coffee and getting his flu shot, he opened his computer to a flurry of activity.
"I’ve never seen that many emails in my life," he said. A bottle of champagne and bowl of soup were waiting on his desk for him, he added, but he doubted there were any fellow physicists in town to join the celebration.
Hinton said he was shocked at the honor.
"I’m flabbergasted. I had no idea this would happen," he said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone. He said he was at a cheap hotel with no internet.
Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique in the 1980s known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to "learn" by fine-tuning errors until they disappear. It’s similar to the way a student learns from a teacher, with an initial solution graded and flaws identified and returned to be fixed and repaired. This process continues until the answer matches the network’s version of reality.
His team at the University of Toronto later wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats and was "a very, very significant moment in hindsight and in the course of AI history," said Stanford University computer scientist and ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li.
"Many people consider that the birth of modern AI," she said.
Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.
"For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense," Hinton told told the AP in 2019. "They thought we were very misguided and what we were doing was a very surprising thing for apparently intelligent people to waste their time on."
"My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what are doing is silly."
And Hinton himself uses machine learning in his daily life, he said.
"Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT-4," Hinton said at the Nobel announcement. "I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything it's a not-very-good expert. And that’s very useful."
Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.
"What fascinates me most is still this question of how mind comes from machine," Hopfield said in a video posted online by The Franklin Institute after it awarded him a physics prize in 2019.
Hinton used Hopfield's network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method, known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee said can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data.
Bengio, who was mentored by Hinton and "profoundly shaped" by Hopfield’s thinking, told the AP that the winners both "saw something that was not obvious: Connections between physics and learning in neural networks, which has been the basis of modern AI."
He said he was "really delighted" that they won the prize. "It’s great for the field. It’s great for recognizing that history."
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.
The prize carries a cash award of $1 million from a bequest left by the award's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
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