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An air raid on Beirut left at least 22 people dead and dozens of others wounded after Israeli airstrikes pummeled neighborhoods in Lebanon, according to the Associated Press.

The latest attack, the deadliest one in over a year of war between the embattled countries, further escalated the conflict with Iran-backed Hezbollah militants.

Lebanon’s health ministry told the AP that the air strikes targeted two residential buildings in separate neighborhoods at the same time, demolishing the eight-story building and taking out the lower floors of the other.

The Israeli military told the AP it was investigating the reported strikes. Israeli airstrikes have become more prevalent in Beirut’s tightly packed southern suburbs, where Hezbollah bases a large portion of its operations.

The attack came the same day as Israeli forces fired on United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon and wounded two of them, the AP reported. 

Hezbollah has expanded its rocket fire to more populated areas deeper inside Israel, causing few casualties but interrupting daily life for people in the country. 

The attacks across Israel come as the Jewish nation finds itself embroiled in multiple conflicts with Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Biden spoke on Wednesday to discuss Israel’s anticipated retaliatory attack against Iran following its massive missile strike on Israel last week, reported Israeli news outlets. 

The Biden administration has grown increasingly frustrated with Israel over its withholding of security details and had previously urged it not to launch an incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah over concerns it could prompt a broader regional war. 

The White House has urged Israel not to hit Iranian nuclear or oil facilities and to keep its retaliation ‘proportionate,’ though the administration has not specified what this type of attack would look like. 

Roughly 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon since the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel escalated last month. More than 400,000 people have fled Lebanon into Syria, and roughly 1,400 people have been killed based on numbers provided by the Lebanese Health Ministry and the number of combatants believed to have been killed by Israel. Some 70,000 Israelis have been forced out of the country’s northern communities since the start of the conflict. 

Fox News Digital’s Caitlin McFall and The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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Boeing withdrew a contract offer for 33,000 machinists who have been on strike since mid-September, and said further negotiations “do not make sense at this point.”

The machinists walked off the job on Sept. 13 after overwhelmingly rejecting a tentative labor deal, halting production of most of Boeing’s aircraft, which are made in the Puget Sound area. Boeing later sweetened the offer, increasing pay raises, a ratification bonus and other improvements, which the union turned down, arguing that it was not negotiated.

Talks again broke down this week, meaning the strike will continue. The stoppage will cost Boeing more than $1 billion per month, S&P Global Ratings said Tuesday as it issued a negative outlook for the aerospace giant’s credit ratings.

Stephanie Pope, CEO of Boeing’s commercial aircraft unit, said the company improved contract pay during talks this week but said the union didn’t consider the proposals.

“Instead, the union made non-negotiable demands far in excess of what can be accepted if we are to remain competitive as a business,” Pope said in a staff note.

The union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said Tuesday that Boeing refused to improve wages, retirement plans and vacation or sick leave.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

DETROIT — General Motors will drop the name “Ultium” for its electric vehicle batteries and supporting technologies after spending years promoting the brand as it rethinks its EV and battery operations.

The Detroit automaker confirmed the switch Tuesday ahead of an investor event. Executives used the day to discuss lowering battery costs and tout efforts to diversify battery chemistries.

GM also confirmed it is on pace to produce and wholesale about 200,000 EVs for North America this year, achieving profitability on a production, or contribution-margin basis, by the end of this year.

Aside from EVs, GM touted its lowering capital costs and the company’s flexibility to produce both traditional vehicles with internal combustion engines and EVs. Its commitment to EVs comes amid slower-than-expected adoption of electric vehicles.

Shares of GM were roughly level aside from a roughly 3% increase during the beginning of the event.

The change to Ultium comes after GM spent billions of dollars to develop in-house “Ultium” batteries and technologies that the automaker previously touted as “revolutionary” and the ultimate technologies to be able to build a profitable EV business.

The company said the batteries and the technologies will remain, but the name “Ultium” will not, other than production operations such as its “Ultium Cells” joint venture plants with LG Energy Solution.

“As GM continues to expand its EV business, the company is no longer branding its electric vehicle architecture, battery and cells, or EV components with the Ultium name, starting in North America,” the company said in a statement.

GM has been rethinking its EV battery strategy amid changing market conditions and an influx of new, outside executives, including Tesla veterans JP Clausen, who now leads GM manufacturing, and Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery.

The automaker’s EV sales are growing, but not at the pace the company wanted. It reported a roughly 60% year-over-year increase in EVs during the third quarter, to roughly 32,100 units sold. Still, EVs made up only 4.9% of the company’s total third-quarter sales.

The 200,00 EV target reconfirmed by GM CEO Mary Barra on Tuesday is down from a previous guidance of 200,00 to 250,000 EVs, which had been trimmed from as high as 300,000 units.

GM has already started moving away from its original Ultium pouch cells, produced with LG with nickel manganese cobalt, to other battery types and chemistries.

GM earlier this year announced a more than $3 billion deal to manufacture hard-can batteries, known as prismatic cells, with South Korea’s Samsung SDI, a rival of LG.

“We’re moving from a single-source, single-form factor, single-chemistry to a multi-chemistry, multi-form factor, multi-supplier strategy,” Kelty told The Information in a report published Monday. “What we’re going to do going forward is really optimize for each vehicle.”

The automaker is turning to that optimization strategy after spending millions of dollars in marketing and advertising, including back-to-back years of star-studded Super Bowl ads in 2021 and 2022 for Ultium in vehicles that weren’t available yet for customers to purchase.

GM is rethinking other areas as well. Rory Harvey, GM president of global markets, including North America, in September confirmed to CNBC that the company was completely rethinking its plans for a second all-electric vehicle plant in Orion Township, Michigan — from production down through the entire supply chain.

“We always get lessons. We always get learning,” he said in September. “The reason that we’re doing what we’re doing with Orion is the fact that, you know, if you looked at the original gradient of EV adoption, there’s no doubt that, both in the industry and from ours, it was slightly more aggressive than it is.”

“This gives us the ability to do a stop breath and refocus and say what is appropriate for the customer demands that are out there today?” he said.

GM currently has one plant in the U.S. that exclusively produces EVs, called Factory Zero in Detroit. The Orion plant was expected to be the second by the end of 2024 before the company delayed those plans by at least a year.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

As Hurricane Milton approached landfall in western Florida on Wednesday, the Biden administration warned consumers and businesses of the heightened risk of potential fraud, price gouging and collusion that accompanies major natural disasters.

“Wrongdoers are looking to exploit opportunities and victims of natural disasters for their own personal gain,” U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Gathe Jr. for the Middle District of Louisiana said in a statement.

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan said the FTC is “hearing troubling reports of price gouging for essentials that are necessary for people to get out of harm’s way — from hotels to groceries to gas.”

By noon ET on Wednesday, nearly a quarter of gas stations in Florida were out of gas, according to Patrick De Haan, an oil and gas analyst who tracks pump supply.

“Companies are on notice: do not use the hurricane as an excuse to exploit people through illegal behavior,” said Manish Kumar, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.

Most states have laws intended to curb price gouging, with many of these restrictions tied to declared states of emergency.

Several major airlines and retailers have told CNBC in recent days that they froze prices in advance of the storm.

“Once we have any emergency situation, all of our prices are freeze,” Kelly Mayhall, president of Home Depot’s Southern division told CNBC Wednesday.

Amid a historic hurricane season, the Biden administration cited a number of issues for consumers to be on the lookout for, including fraudulent charities that claim to be soliciting donations for disaster victims, scammers trying to get personal information or money, and exorbitant pricing for necessities.

“Any company or individual that tries to exploit Americans in an emergency should know that the Administration is monitoring for allegations of fraud and price gouging and will hold those taking advantage of the situation accountable,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement on Wednesday.

Hurricane Milton was moving through the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 4 storm early Wednesday afternoon, and was expected to hit the western Florida Gulf Coast sometime between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. ET, according to NBC News meteorologists.

The National Hurricane Center warned that evacuations and other precautions should have been completed by early on Wednesday.

In September, Hurricane Helen caused widespread devastation across the South, killing more than 230 people. North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein has also warned of price gouging in his state.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

TD Bank pleaded guilty Thursday to multiple criminal charges and agreed to pay a whopping $3 billion in fines and other penalties to the Department of Justice and financial regulators for failing to monitor money laundering by drug traffickers and other criminals.

As part of the deal, TD Bank, whose U.S. unit is the 10th-largest American bank by assets, also will have limits to its growth imposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The total assets of TD Bank’s two U.S. banking subsidiaries will be barred from exceeding $434 billion under that restriction.

The restrictions are similar to those imposed by the Federal Reserve on Wells Fargo in 2018 over what the Federal Reserve called “widespread consumer abuses” at that bank.

“By making its services convenient for criminals, TD Bank became one,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday.

“Today, TD Bank also became the largest bank in U.S. history to plead guilty to Bank Secrecy Act program failures, and the first US bank in history to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering,” Garland said.

“TD Bank chose profits over compliance with the law — a decision that is now costing the bank billions of dollars in penalties. Let me be clear: our investigation continues, and no individual involved in TD Bank’s illegal conduct is off limits.”Garland, speaking at a press conference in Washington, D.C., said a monitor would oversee the bank’s compliance with anti-money-laundering practices for three years as part of a settlement with the DOJ, which is receiving $1.8 billion in connection with the bank’s guilty plea in federal court in Newark, New Jersey.

The attorney general said that over a six-year period that ended last October, TD Bank admittedly failed to monitor a stunning $18.3 trillion in customer activity, which allowed three money laundering networks to transfer more than $670 million through accounts at the bank.

At least one of those schemes involved five bank employees, Garland said.

“At various times, high-level executives, including the person who became the bank’s chief anti-money laundering officer, knew there were serious problems with the bank’s anti-money laundering program, but the bank failed to correct them,” the attorney general said.

Garland read reporters details of electronic messages which showed the awareness and concerns bank employees had about suspicious transactions about one individual, known as David, who personally moved more than $470 million in illicit funds through TD Bank branches in the United States.

“In August 2021, a TD Bank store manager emailed another store manager and remarked, quote, ‘You guys really need to shut this down. Lol,’ ” Garland noted.

“In February 2021, one TD Bank store employee saw that David’s network had purchased more than $1 million in official bank checks with cash in a single day,” Garland said. “The employee asked, quote, how is that not money laundering a bank off a back office?′ ”

Another TD Bank “employee responded, quote, ‘Oh, it 100% is,’ ” Garland said.

Garland said the DOJ expected to file other prosecutions in the case.

When asked if that meant charging TD Bank executives, the attorney general said, “My general response to these kind of questions is, we don’t comment on ongoing investigations, but I was indicating that we would expect future cases against individuals.”

As part of Thursday’s settlement, TD Bank, which is the second largest bank in Canada, will pay $1.3 billion to the Treasury Department’s Finacial Crimes Enforcement Network, the largest such penalty ever imposed by FinCEN or Treasury on a depository institution.

FinCEN also has imposed a four-year independent monitorship on TD Bank to oversee required remediation of its practices.

“The vast majority of financial institutions have partnered with FinCEN to protect the integrity of the U.S. financial system,” said Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo. “TD Bank did the opposite.”

“From fentanyl and narcotics trafficking, to terrorist financing and human trafficking, TD Bank’s chronic failures provided fertile ground for a host of illicit activity to penetrate our financial system,” Adeymo said.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May that the DOJ was investigating how Chinese organized crime groups and drug traffickers used TD Bank to launder money derived from the sale of the deadly opiate fentanyl in the United States.

The Federal Reserve Board on Thursday fined TD Bank more than $124 million for violations related to anti-money laundering laws, saying the bank failed to “conduct adequate risk management and oversight of its retail banking operations in the United States, resulting in a U.S. subsidiary being used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in a statement to CNBC blasted Thursday’s deal.

“Big banks treat government fines as the cost of doing business,” Warren said.

“This settlement lets bad bank executives off the hook for allowing TD Bank to be used as a criminal slush fund. The Department of Justice and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency need to do better in enforcing our anti-money laundering laws,” Warren said.

In a statement, TD Bank Group CEO Bharat Masrani said, “We have taken full responsibility for the failures of our U.S. AML program and are making the investments, changes and enhancements required to deliver on our commitments.”

“This is a difficult chapter in our Bank’s history. These failures took place on my watch as CEO and I apologize to all our stakeholders,” Masrani said.

TD Bank shares were down more than 5% on Thursday afternoon.

In September, TD Bank was ordered to pay nearly $28 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for repeatedly furnishing consumer reporting agencies with information about customers that contained numerous errors, and waiting more than a year to fix those mistakes despite knowing about them.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

AMD launched a new artificial-intelligence chip on Thursday that is taking direct aim at Nvidia’s data center graphics processors, known as GPUs.

The Instinct MI325X, as the chip is called, will start production before the end of 2024, AMD said Thursday during an event announcing the new product. If AMD’s AI chips are seen by developers and cloud giants as a close substitute for Nvidia’s products, it could put pricing pressure on Nvidia, which has enjoyed roughly 75% gross margins while its GPUs have been in high demand over the past year.

Advanced generative AI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT requires massive data centers full of GPUs in order to do the necessary processing, which has created demand for more companies to provide AI chips.

In the past few years, Nvidia has dominated the majority of the data center GPU market, but AMD is historically in second place. Now, AMD is aiming to take share from its Silicon Valley rival or at least to capture a big chunk of the market, which it says will be worth $500 billion by 2028.

“AI demand has actually continued to take off and actually exceed expectations. It’s clear that the rate of investment is continuing to grow everywhere,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said at the event.

AMD didn’t reveal new major cloud or internet customers for its Instinct GPUs at the event, but the company has previously disclosed that both Meta and Microsoft buy its AI GPUs and that OpenAI uses them for some applications. The company also did not disclose pricing for the Instinct MI325X, which is typically sold as part of a complete server.

With the launch of the MI325X, AMD is accelerating its product schedule to release new chips on an annual schedule to better compete with Nvidia and take advantage of the boom for AI chips. The new AI chip is the successor to the MI300X, which started shipping late last year. AMD’s 2025 chip will be called MI350, and its 2026 chip will be called MI400, the company said.

The MI325X’s rollout will pit it against Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell chips, which Nvidia has said will start shipping in significant quantities early next year.

A successful launch for AMD’s newest data center GPU could draw interest from investors that are looking for additional companies that are in line to benefit from the AI boom. AMD is only up 20% so far in 2024 while Nvidia’s stock is up over 175%. Most industry estimates say Nvidia has over 90% of the market for data center AI chips.

AMD stock fell 3% during trading on Thursday.

AMD’s biggest obstacle in taking market share is that its rival’s chips use their own programming language, CUDA, which has become standard among AI developers. That essentially locks developers into Nvidia’s ecosystem.

In response, AMD this week said that it has been improving its competing software, called ROCm, so that AI developers can more easily switch more of their AI models over to AMD’s chips, which it calls accelerators.

AMD has framed its AI accelerators as more competitive for use cases where AI models are creating content or making predictions rather than when an AI model is processing terabytes of data to improve. That’s partially due to the advanced memory AMD is using on its chip, it said, which allows it to server Meta’s Llama AI model faster than some Nvidia chips.

“What you see is that MI325 platform delivers up to 40% more inference performance than the H200 on Llama 3.1,” said Su, referring to Meta’s large-language AI model.

While AI accelerators and GPUs have become the most intensely watched part of the semiconductor industry, AMD’s core business has been central processors, or CPUs, that lay at the heart of nearly every server in the world.

AMD’s data center sales during the June quarter more than doubled in the past year to $2.8 billion, with AI chips accounting for only about $1 billion, the company said in July.

AMD takes about 34% of total dollars spent on data center CPUs, the company said. That’s still less than Intel, which remains the boss of the market with its Xeon line of chips. AMD is aiming to change that with a new line of CPUs, called EPYC 5th Gen, that it also announced on Thursday.

Those chips come in a number of different configurations ranging from a low-cost and low-power 8-core chip that costs $527 to 192-core, 500-watt processors intended for supercomputers that cost $14,813 per chip.

The new CPUs are particularly good for feeding data into AI workloads, AMD said. Nearly all GPUs require a CPU on the same system in order to boot up the computer.

“Today’s AI is really about CPU capability, and you see that in data analytics and a lot of those types of applications,” Su said.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has apologized after using an ableist slur to taunt political opponents in parliament.

Albanese was speaking during question time on Tuesday when opposition lawmakers repeatedly interrupted him.

“Have you got Tourette’s or something? You know, you just sit there, babble, babble, babble,” he said, before immediately adding: “I withdraw and apologize.”

Albanese later returned to the chamber to make a more formal apology.

“I made comments that were unkind and hurtful. I knew it was wrong as soon as I made the comment,” he said.

“I apologized and I withdrew as soon as I said it, but it shouldn’t have happened and I also want to apologize to all Australians who suffer from this disability.”

Albanese’s apology came after strong criticism from figures including shadow minister for health and aged care Anne Ruston.

Tourette’s syndrome is a neurological disorder that involves tics that present themselves in various ways, described by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke as “repetitive, stereotyped, involuntary movements and vocalizations.”

“Mocking a disability is no laughing matter,” Ruston wrote in post on X, adding that the comment was “absolutely despicable behaviour” from Albanese.

“Australians living with Tourette’s deserve the PM’s respect, not his ridicule,” she added.

“I’m incredibly disappointed and just gobsmacked somebody that has the national stage would use that platform and Tourette syndrome to make an insult,” she said.

Maysey, who has three children with Tourette’s, said the disability can be socially isolating.

“This shows we have a very long way to go until Tourette syndrome is taken seriously as a condition,” she added.

Singers Lewis Capaldi and Billie Eilish have both spoken about their experiences of living with Tourette’s.

“The worst thing about it is when I’m excited I get it, when I’m stressed I get it, when I’m happy I get it. It happens all the time,” Capaldi said in February 2023.

A few months later, Capaldi announced that he was taking a break from touring due to the impact of Tourette’s

In 2022, Eilish told David Letterman that the condition can be “exhausting.”

This post appeared first on cnn.com

The Italian government is facing a new set of challenges as it prepares to open two migrant processing centers in Albania in October where men rescued at sea en route to Italy will be processed for asylum.

It’s a move which the hard-right administration says will combat human trafficking and allow in only those who have a genuine right to enter the European Union, but which has drawn scorn from human rights groups.

On Friday, the European Court of Justice ruled that the plan to offshore migrants from countries Italy deems “safe” but which the European Union does not, is not legal.

However, the court’s decision is non-binding and Italy and Albania are not prohibited by the ruling from going forward with the plans. The centers – one in the Albanian port city of Shengjin and the other further inland in Gjader – were supposed to open on May 1 after the two nations signed a bilateral agreement last November, but “unforeseen circumstances” including building delays and bureaucracy have repeatedly pushed back the opening.

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said last month: “We will start in October. There’s definitely been a few months of delay, there were some normal checks, in which we discovered, for example, that the ground needed to be reinforced. That’s all, very normal variations during construction.”

In August, the Italian government opened a trial detention center near Agrigento, Sicily, intended to mirror those in Albania by housing men from “safe” countries for fast repatriation. A court in Catania ruled the measure illegal under Italian law, but that ruling was overturned and two Tunisian men were deported without having their asylum requests processed on September 11, Piantedosi said in a post on X.

Seaborne migration on the central Mediterranean route, to Italy and Malta, is down by more than 60% on this time last year, according to Italy’s Interior Ministry and Europe’s Frontex agency. The decrease in the central Mediterranean has meant an increase in migrants trying to make it to Greece and Spain, according to Frontex statistics, and is largely due to clampdowns on NGO rescue ships and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s frequent trips to both Libya and Tunisia to apply pressure to keep migrants from leaving.

The drop in numbers notwithstanding, the Italian government is continuing to pursue an anti-immigration platform, which is widely supported by voters with Meloni enjoying a 44% approval rating, according to an Ipsos poll in September 2024.

Meloni’s so-called “Rome Process,” which she says aims to deter illegal migration and to tackle its root causes, has been of great interest to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who visited the Italian capital in September and pledged €4.75 million to the initiative, her office said.

“We talked about the Italy-Albania agreement, which is a solution that the British government is showing a lot of interest in, and clearly we have offered them all the elements to better understand this mechanism,” Meloni said during a press conference after the bilateral visit.

Meloni said Starmer had expressed interest in using the Albanian centers for migrants crossing the English Channel, but Albanian President Edi Rama told the European Parliament on September 19 that the centers were only open to Italy-bound migrants. “This is an exclusive agreement with Italy because we love everyone, but with Italy we have unconditional love,” Rama said.

Albania lies just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy but is not an EU member state.

In 2023, more than 157,000 people arrived illegally in Italy by boat from Libya and Tunisia, with hundreds known to have died trying, making the issue of sea migration one that all sides of the political spectrum agree must be better managed.

The asylum process is lengthy, meaning many would-be asylum seekers give up and slip into the periphery of Italian society or travel to countries in the north of Europe.

Amnesty International has called the Italy-Albania plan “shameful,” saying intercepted migrants will face a lengthier journey by sea to Albania, a potentially prolonged detention once there, and a likely curtailment of their right to seek asylum.

‘Don’t court the local women’

The centers will house up to 3,800 adult men at a time, who will be guided through the application process for requesting asylum in Italy, the Italian authorities say. If they do not qualify for asylum, they will be deported to “safe” countries, according to the agreement between Italy and Albania.

“We have been told not to be ‘too Italian,’” said the officer, who asked not to give his name since he is not authorized to speak for the unit. “We were given a handbook that outlines how to behave: no nudity, don’t court the local women, and drink coffee sitting down, not standing up at the counter.”

The handbook also describes Albanians as “modest people” and guides the incoming officers on how not to act “superior” to them. Flirting is a no-no. “Avoid courting Albanian women in various contexts and in an extemporaneous manner. It is a conservative society. The man who sees his woman being courted by another man can react badly,” the handbook also warns.

In all, Italy will provide 500 personnel, including police and military officers, health workers, and staff from the Justice Ministry, at an estimated cost of €252 million (about $278 million), according to Meloni. A local restaurateur in Shengjin has even opened the “Trattoria Meloni” to pay homage to the Italian prime minister for the investment in Albania, which has and will continue to benefit the local areas financially.

Additionally, Italy will pay €670 million (about $738 million) over the initial five-year contract for the centers’ operation and also pay for a second perimeter of security to be manned by Albanian guards to make sure none of the asylum seekers can escape. The cost comes to around 7.5% of what Italy currently spends on its migrant reception centers, Meloni said in June, speaking alongside Rama.

‘Clear risk’

The Shengjin port center will at first have just 880 places and is where all arrivals will be processed. Those who qualify to have their asylum claim heard will then move to the center in Gjader, which will open with 144 beds and then be expanded to hold 3,000 people while they await a response to their application from Italy. The complex also has a maximum-security 20-bed prison and emergency medical services.

The agreement states that only migrants from 22 nations considered by Rome to be “safe countries” will be sent to Albania, including men from Bangladesh, currently the fastest growing demographic arriving in Italy by sea, according to Italy’s Interior Ministry.

Other listed “safe countries” include Egypt, Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, citizens of which make up a large portion of arrivals. The European Court of Justice does not consider Tunisia and Egypt completely safe, which is at the crux of last week’s ruling.

Those who are from countries not deemed safe by Rome, such as Afghanistan and Syria, will initially be taken to Albania but later transferred to Italy for processing once their country of origin is confirmed.

The policy of “offshoring” asylum seekers has been heavily criticized by human rights groups.

“There is a clear risk that the operation intends to hide a strategy to create inaccessible reception centers, far from prying eyes and journalistic investigations, and from the nightmare of having to find a place for them in Italy, where no administrator, of any political stripe, can find them,” said Schiavone.

Piantedosi insists the opening of the Albanian centers is meant to act as a deterrent for migrants seeking to be smuggled into Italy. Meloni, who campaigned on a promise to “stop the boats,” has credited her government’s policies on investments in North African countries and punishing NGO migrant rescue vessels for this year’s decrease in arrival numbers.

The United Nations’ International Organization for Migration says that an increase in deaths of migrants at sea and a rise in migrant boats known to have departed from Libya and Tunisia going missing, presumed sunk, have also contributed to a drop in arrivals.

Questions over how to handle the many thousands of migrants who seek to enter Europe each year, often fleeing war, persecution and poverty and traveling in boats that are barely seaworthy, may be focused on border nations like Italy, Greece and Spain, but the ramifications extend beyond these frontline countries.

A group of 15 European countries, led by Denmark and including Italy, has petitioned the European Union to consider finding “new solutions,” like the Italy-Albania agreement, to help deal with irregular migration and “create a fairer, more humane, sustainable and efficient asylum system worldwide.”

This post appeared first on cnn.com

Fay Manners and Michelle Dvorak were perched high on the snowy face of a Himalayan mountain when disaster struck their quest to become the first to summit its peak.

At more than 6,000 meters (about 20,000 feet) above sea level, a falling rock sliced through the rope carrying Manners’ bag, leaving the climbers stranded in the inhospitable wilderness without vital supplies including their tent, stove, food, crampons and ice axes.

“All I can really remember is just seeing the bag go down the mountain and being really shocked, thinking, ‘How has this happened? Like, what’s going on?’”

But for both climbers, their immediate reaction wasn’t fear for their safety or survival – it was devastation that their mission, which required painstaking preparation, training, and altitude acclimatization, was being cut short when they were so close to their goal.

Manners, a Briton living in France, and Dvorak, an American, had been “absolutely desperate” to reach the summit of the unclimbed peak in India’s northern Uttarakhand state.

Their attempt to climb the nearly 7,000-meter Chaukhamba III began on September 27, as they clambered across ice and rock and slept on narrow ledges. The approach to the mountain alone was incredibly tough, Manners said – they had chosen a maze-like route that navigated endless deep crevasses and precarious snow bridges that risked collapsing in warmer weather. It took three attempts before they could even reach the base of the mountain, she said.

“We were near the end of all the difficulties … (we) maybe had one more day to get to the summit, and then we would have been the first to reach this summit,” Manners said. Instead, “our dreams were just falling down the mountain.”

Without their gear, climbing back down and across the crevasses was near-impossible, so they contacted emergency services for help. But the severity of their situation soon became clear when helicopters failed to spot them on the vast mountain face the next morning – and again the following day.

“We searched all day at the coordinates provided to us by the tour company but did not find anything,” he said.

All the while, the climbers had no food besides two energy bars that they “nibbled on,” and no water, since their stove to melt snow had been lost, Manners said.

Even their dehydrated food was no use without the stove. At one point, desperate and dehydrated, they abseiled to a spot with dripping ice and collected a tiny amount of water during the few hours when the sun was out.

And the conditions steadily deteriorated as they faced a snowstorm, hail and even an avalanche. They huddled together in their wet sleeping bag, hair frozen solid, with nighttime temperatures reaching –15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit).

“I was close to hypothermia, I think, and I was shaking so violently through the night that Michelle had to hold my legs to just try and keep me warm,” Manners said. “That sleeping bag saved our lives.”

That’s when they knew they had to act, even if they were weak and disoriented, she said. The next morning, they began abseiling down the mountain through thick fog, knowing the journey back to base camp could be “incredibly dangerous” with high chances of serious injury or falling down a crevasse.

But as they reached the bottom, they glimpsed a group of French mountaineers – a rival team that had also been hoping to reach the summit first. Negi, the information officer, said Indian authorities had reached out to the French team for assistance after being unable to locate Manners and Dvorak.

When Manners realized the French team had been sent to rescue them, “all my emotions came out at once, and I had some tears in my eyes,” she said.

With their help, she and Dvorak trekked to the French base camp, munching on cheese their rescuers had brought from France, she said. The Indian Air Force then airlifted them to a nearby hospital on Sunday, three long days after they were stranded.

Both climbers are uninjured and eager to fly home. And their brush with death hasn’t deterred them from following their dreams, said Manners, who encourages women and girls to pursue the sport. She wants to try the summit again next year – perhaps with the French team who rescued them.

When people look at their experience, she hopes they see two strong women who “got really close to the top,” she said. And when things went awry, they were “still able to survive and manage themselves through that really adverse and terrible situation.”

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A pilot who died when he crashed a helicopter into a hotel in Australia had “significant blood alcohol content” during the unauthorized flight, according to an official report into the incident.

Hundreds of guests and staff were evacuated from the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Cairns in Far North Queensland on August 12, when the aircraft hit the top floor and burst into flames.

At the time, charter company Nautilus Aviation said the pilot was a member of its ground crew who had attended a party the night before the crash to celebrate a promotion.

He wasn’t authorized to fly the aircraft but had access to the helicopter, the keys to which were routinely left inside the aircraft when it was parked inside the hangar.

The report released by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) Thursday found that the pilot “was affected by a significant amount of alcohol” and flew “well below the 1,000 ft (304 meters) allowed for flight over a built-up area.”

Investigators did not reach a conclusion as to why the pilot took the helicopter, or if he did so with the intention of crashing it into a hotel.

“For reasons unknown, pilot actions resulted in a collision with a building while conducting an unauthorised and unnecessary flight, while affected by alcohol, late at night and at low heights over a built-up area, and without night flying endorsements,” the report concluded.

The pilot had been out with friends at various venues around Cairns and was seen consuming alcohol, according to witnesses and security camera footage, the report said.

Cameras also caught the moment he positioned one of Nautilus Aviation’s Robinson R44 Raven II helicopters onto a helipad at Cairns Airport at around 1:30 a.m. local time.

For several minutes, the pilot turned off the helicopter’s cockpit and strobe lights before taking off and heading in the direction of Cairns city center, the report said.

Australian Federal Police and airport safety officers were on duty that night but were not near the hangar. The report found they wouldn’t have seen a helicopter that was operating at night with no lights.

“It was apparent that the pilot was wanting to conceal the departure from the airport from air traffic control and airport staff,” the report said.

There was no cockpit recorder or flight data recorder, but investigators pieced together the aircraft’s movements from its GPS tracker and ground radar data.

The report said the pilot was not authorized to fly the plane and while he had flown a Robinson R44 before, he hadn’t done so at night.

It found the helicopter wasn’t upright when it hit the hotel, but there was also no sign of mechanical failure.

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