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WASHINGTON: Most Americans - including 80% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans - think the U.S. should recognize Palestinian statehood, a sign that President Donald Trump's opposition to doing so is out of step with public opinion, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found. The six-day poll, which closed on Monday, found 59% of respondents backed U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state, while 33% were opposed and the rest were unsure or did not answer the question.
About half of Trump's Republicans - 53% - opposed doing so, while 41% of Republicans said they would support the U.S. recognizing a Palestinian state. A growing number of countries - including U.S. allies Britain, Canada, France and Australia - have formally recognized Palestinian statehood in recent weeks, drawing condemnation from Israel, whose founding in 1948 led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and decades of conflict. Israeli bombardments have leveled vast swaths of Palestinian neighborhoods in Gaza following an October 2023 surprise attack by Hamas militants on Israel.
Some 60% of poll respondents said Israel's response in Gaza was excessive, compared to 32% who disagreed.
Trump, who returned to the White House in January, has largely backed Israel in the war and this month brokered a ceasefire, raising hopes that lasting peace could be in reach.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll gave signs the U.S. public was ready to give Trump credit should his plan work. Some 51% of poll respondents agreed with a statement that Trump "deserves significant credit" if peace efforts are successful, compared with 42% who disagreed.
While only one in 20 Democrats approve of Trump's overall performance as president, one in four said he should get significant credit if the peace holds. Success on that front appears far from certain. An explosion of violence over the weekend threatened to derail the week-old truce and U.S. diplomats stepped up pressure on Israel and Hamas to get Trump's plan back on track. Key questions of Hamas disarming, further Israeli troop pullbacks and future governance of the Palestinian enclave remain unresolved.
Trump's approval rating on foreign policy appeared to be on a modest upswing, rising to 38% in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, compared to 33% in a poll conducted earlier this month just ahead of the ceasefire deal. The latest rating was Trump's highest since July.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online and gathered responses from 4,385 people nationwide. It had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

The long road to Palestinian statehood

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PARIS: More than 700 scientists, political figures and celebrities including Prince Harry, Richard Branson and Steve Bannon on Wednesday called for an end to the development of artificial intelligence capable of outsmarting humans.
“The initiative calls for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence until the technology is reliably safe and controllable, and has public buy-in,” according to an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute, a US-based NGO that campaigns against the dangers of AI.
Signatories include the “Godfather of AI” and 2024 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics Geoffrey Hinton; Computer Sciences Professor at the University of California in Berkeley Stuart Russell; and the world’s most-cited AI scientist Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal.
A raft of other public figures have signed: Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, US President Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, and former president Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice.
The initiative is also endorsed by the Vatican’s AI expert Paolo Benanti and celebrities such as Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, and the US singer will.i.am.
Most major AI developers are striving for artificial general intelligence (AGI), a stage where AI would match all human intellectual capabilities, and even superintelligence, which would exceed them.
Speaking at an event organized by the media group Axel Springer in September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company created ChatGPT, said that superintelligence could be achieved within the next five years.
Future of Life Institute President Max Tegmark told AFP that companies should not aim for such an objective without any regulatory framework.
“Many people want powerful AI tools for science, medicine, productivity, and other benefits,” the co-founder of the institute Anthony Aguirre added on Wednesday.
“But the path AI corporations are taking, of racing toward smarter-than-human AI that is designed to replace people, is wildly out of step with what the public wants, scientists think is safe, or religious leaders feel is right.”
The open letter echoes another, published one month ago by AI researchers and sector workers during the United Nations General Assembly, which called for governments “to reach an international agreement on red lines for AI” by the end of 2026.