Category: Associated Press

NAHARIYA, Israel — Israel said Sunday its military was conducting a “large-scale operation” to locate the last hostage in Gaza, as Washington and other mediators pressure Israel and Hamas to move into the next phase of their ceasefire.

The statement came as Israel’s cabinet met to discuss the possibility of opening Gaza’s key Rafah border crossing with Egypt, and a day after top U.S. envoys met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about next steps.

The return of the body of the remaining hostage, Ran Gvili, has been widely seen as removing the remaining obstacle to moving ahead with opening the Rafah crossing, which would signal the ceasefire’s second phase.

The return of all remaining hostages, alive or dead, has been a central part of the first phase of the ceasefire that took effect on Oct. 10. Before Sunday, the previous hostage was recovered in early December.

While Israel has carried out search efforts before for Gvili, more detail than usual was released about this one. Israel’s military said it was searching a cemetery in northern Gaza near the Yellow Line, which marks off Israeli-controlled parts of the territory.

Separately, an Israeli military official said Gvili may have been buried in the Shujaiyya–Daraj Tuffah area, and that rabbis and dental experts were on the ground with specialized search teams. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing an operation still underway.

Gvili’s family has urged Netanyahu’s government not to enter the ceasefire’s second phase until his remains are returned.

But pressure has been building, and the Trump administration has already declared in recent days that the second phase is underway.

Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of dragging its feet in the recovery of the final hostage. Hamas in a statement Sunday said it had provided all the information it had about Gvili’s remains, and accused Israel of obstructing efforts to search for them in areas of Gaza under Israeli military control.

LONDON — No more fawning praise. No more polite workarounds and old-style diplomacy. And no one is calling Donald Trump “daddy” now.

European leaders who scrambled for a year to figure out how to deal with an emboldened American president in his second term edged closer to saying “no,” or something diplomatically like it, to his disregard for international law and his demands for their territory. Trump’s vow to take over Greenland, and punish any country that resists, seems to have been the crucible.

“Red lines” were deemed to have been crossed this year when Trump abruptly revived his demand that the United States “absolutely” must rule Greenland, the semiautonomous region that is part of NATO ally Denmark. That pushed even the most mild-mannered diplomats to issue sharp warnings against Trump, whom they had flattered with royal treatment and fawning praise.

“Britain will not yield” its support for Greenland’s sovereignty, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said. Several of the continent’s leaders said “Europe will not be blackmailed” over Greenland.

“Threats have no place among allies,” said Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

The tough diplomatic talk around the showdown last week in Davos, Switzerland, was not the only factor pressuring Trump. U.S. congressional elections are approaching in November amid a sinking stock market and wilting approval ratings. European leaders also are not the first to stand in Trump’s way during his second term — see Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

But the dramatic turnabout among Europe’s elite, from “appeasing” Trump to defying him, offers clues in the ongoing effort among some nations of how to say “no” to a president who hates hearing it and is known to retaliate.

“We want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it,” Trump told his audience at the World Economic Forum. “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember.”

Lesson 1: Speak as one

In recent days, Europe offered abundant refusals to go along with Trump, from his Greenland demand and joining his new Board of Peace and even to what Canada’s Mark Carney called the “fiction” that the alliance functions for the benefit of any country more than the most powerful. The moment marked a unity among European leaders that they had struggled to achieve for a year.

“When Europe is not divided, when we stand together and when we are clear and strong also in our willingness to stand up for ourselves, then the results will show,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said. “I think we have learned something.”

Federiksen herself exemplified the learning curve. A year ago, she and other leaders were on their heels and mostly responding to the Trump administration. She found it necessary to tell reporters in February 2025, “We are not a bad ally,” after Vice President JD Vance had said Denmark was “not being a good ally.”

Trump is transactional. He has little use for diplomacy and no “need (for) international law,” he told the New York Times this month. Therein lay the disconnect between typically collaborative European leaders and the Republican president when he blazed back into the White House saying he wanted the U.S. to take over Greenland, Panama, and perhaps even Canada.

“In Trump’s first term, Europe didn’t know what to expect and tried to deal with him by using the old rules of diplomacy, with the expectation that, if they kept talking to him in measured terms, that he would change his behavior and move into the club,” said Mark Shanahan, associate professor of political engagement at the University of Surrey.

“It’s very hard for other leaders who deal with each other through the niceties of a rules-based system and diplomatic conversation,” Shanahan said. ”It is hard for them to change.”

Five months after Trump’s inauguration last year, with his Greenland threat in the air, European leaders had gotten their heads around Trump management enough to pull off a meeting of NATO nations in the Netherlands. NATO members agreed to contribute more and widely gave Trump credit for forcing them to modernize.

Secretary-General Mark Rutte, known as the coalition’s “Trump whisperer,” likened the president’s role quieting the Iran-Israel war to a “daddy” intervening in a schoolyard brawl.

Lesson 2: Consider saying no — and make choices accordingly

Traditional diplomacy exists to preserve possibilities of working together. That often means avoiding saying a flat “no” if possible. But Trump’s Greenland gambit was so stark a threat from one NATO member to another that Greenland’s prime minister actually said the word.

“Enough,” Jens-Frederik Nielsen said in a statement shortly after Trump’s remarks Jan. 5. “No more pressure. No more hints. No more fantasies about annexation.”

That played a part in setting the tone. Denmark’s leader said any such invasion of Greenland would mark the end of NATO and urged alliance members to take the threat seriously.

They did, issuing statement after statement rejecting the renewed threat. Trump responded last weekend from his golf course in Florida with a threat to charge a 10% import tax within a month on goods from eight European nations — Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. The rate, he wrote, would climb to 25% on June 1 if no deal was in place for “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland” by the United States.

Lesson 3: Reject Trump’s big-power paradigm

Trump’s fighting words lit a fire among leaders arriving in Davos. But they seemed to recognize, too, that the wider Trump world left him vulnerable.

“Trump was in a fairly weak position because he has a lot of other looming problems going on,” domestically, including an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision on his tariffs and a backlash to immigration raids in Minnesota, said Duncan Snidal, professor emeritus of international relations at Oxford University and the University of Chicago.

Canada’s Carney said no by reframing the question not as being about Greenland, but about whether it was time for European countries to build power together against a “bully” — and his answer was yes.

Without naming the U.S. or Trump, Carney spoke bluntly: Europe, he said, should reject the big power’s “coercion” and “exploitation.” It was time to accept, he said, that a “rupture” in the alliance, not a transition, had occurred.

Unsaid, Snidel pointed out, was that the rupture was very new, and though it might be difficult to repair in the future, doing so under adjusted rules remains in U.S. and European interests beyond Trump’s presidency. “It’s too good a deal for all of them not to,” Snidel said.

Lesson 4: Exercise caution

Before Trump stepped away from the podium in Davos, he had begun to back down.

He canceled his threat to use “force” to take over Greenland. Not long after, he reversed himself fully, announcing “the framework” for a deal that would make his tariff threat unnecessary.

Trump told Fox Business that “we’re going to have total access to Greenland,” under the “framework,” without divulging what that might mean.

Frederiksen hit the warning button again. In a statement, she said, “We cannot negotiate on our sovereignty.”

In other words: “No.”

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iranian authorities unveiled a new mural on a giant billboard in a central Tehran square on Sunday with a direct warning to the United States to not attempt a military strike on the country, as U.S. warships head to the region.

The image shows a bird’s-eye view of an aircraft carrier with damaged and exploding fighter planes on its flight deck. The deck is strewn with bodies and streaked with blood that trails into the water behind the ship to form a pattern reminiscent of the stripes of the American flag. A slogan is emblazoned across one corner: “If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind.”

The unveiling of the mural in Enghelab Square comes as the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and accompanying warships move toward the region. U.S. President Donald Trump has said the ships are being moved “just in case” he decides to take action.

“We have a massive fleet heading in that direction and maybe we won’t have to use it,” Trump said Thursday.

Enghelab Square is used for gatherings called by the state and authorities change its mural based on national occasions. On Saturday, the commander of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard warned that his force is “more ready than ever, finger on the trigger.”

Tension between the U.S. and Iran has spiked in the wake of a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests that saw thousands of people killed and tens of thousands arrested. Trump had threatened military action if Iran continued to kill peaceful protesters or carried out mass executions of those detained.

There have been no further protests for days and Trump claimed recently that Tehran had halted the planned execution of about 800 arrested protesters — a claim Iran’s top prosecutor called “completely false.”

But Trump has indicated he is keeping his options open, saying on Thursday that any military action would make last June’s U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites “look like peanuts.”

U.S. Central Command said on social media that its Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle now has a presence in the Middle East, noting the fighter jet “enhances combat readiness and promotes regional security and stability.”

Similarly, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said Thursday that it deployed its Typhoon fighter jets to Qatar “in a defensive capacity.”

The protests in Iran began on Dec. 28, sparked by the fall of the Iranian currency, the rial, and quickly spread across the country. They were met by a violent crackdown by Iran’s theocracy, which does not tolerate dissent.

The death toll reported by activists has continued to rise since the end of the demonstrations, as information trickles out despite a more than two-week internet blackout — the most comprehensive in Iran’s history.

The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency on Sunday put the death toll at 5,529, with the number expected to increase. It says more than 41,200 people have been arrested.

The group’s figures have been accurate in previous unrest and rely on a network of activists in Iran to verify deaths. That death toll exceeds that of any other round of protest or unrest there in decades, and recalls the chaos surrounding Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Associated Press has not been able to independently verify the toll.

Iran’s government has put the death toll at a far lower 3,117, saying 2,427 were civilians and security forces, and labeled the rest “terrorists.” In the past, Iran’s theocracy has undercounted or not reported fatalities from unrest.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that a U.S. security guarantees document for Ukraine is “100% ready” after two days of talks involving representatives from Ukraine, the U.S., and Russia.

Speaking to journalists in Vilnius during a visit to Lithuania, Zelensky said Ukraine is waiting for its partners to set a signing date, after which the document would go to the U.S. Congress and Ukrainian parliament for ratification.

Zelensky also emphasized Ukraine’s push for European Union membership by 2027, calling it an “economic security guarantee.”

The Ukrainian leader described the talks in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, as likely the first trilateral format in “quite a long while” that included not only diplomats but military representatives from all three sides. The talks, which began on Friday and continued Saturday, were the latest aiming to end Russia’s nearly four-year full-scale invasion.

Zelensky acknowledged fundamental differences between Ukrainian and Russian positions, reaffirming territorial issues as a major sticking point.

“Our position regarding our territory — Ukraine’s territorial integrity — must be respected,” he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed a Ukraine settlement with U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner during marathon talks late Thursday. The Kremlin insisted that to reach a peace deal, Kyiv must withdraw its troops from the areas in the east that Russia illegally annexed but has not fully captured.

Zelensky said the U.S. is trying to find a compromise, but that “all sides must be ready for compromise.”

Negotiators will return to the UAE on Feb. 1 for the next round of talks, according to a U.S. official. The recent talks covered a broad range of military and economic matters and included the possibility of a ceasefire before a deal, the official said. There was not yet an agreement on a final framework for oversight and operation of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is occupied by Russia and is the largest in Europe.

A massive winter storm dumped sleet, freezing rain, and snow across much of the U.S. on Sunday, bringing subzero temperatures and paralyzing air and road traffic. Power lines were draped in ice, and hundreds of thousands of people in the Southeast were left without electricity.

The ice and snowfall were expected to continue into Monday in much of the country, followed by very low temperatures, which could cause “dangerous travel and infrastructure impacts” to linger for several days, the National Weather Service said.

Heavy snow was forecast from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast, while “catastrophic ice accumulation” threatened from the Lower Mississippi Valley to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast.

“It is a unique storm in the sense that it is so widespread,” weather service meteorologist Allison Santorelli said in a phone interview. “It was affecting areas all the way from New Mexico, Texas, all the way into New England, so we’re talking like a 2,000-mile spread.”

President Donald Trump had approved emergency declarations for at least a dozen states by Saturday, with more expected to come. The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepositioned commodities, staff, and search and rescue teams in numerous states, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the state was bracing for the longest cold stretch and highest snow totals it has seen in years. Communities near the Canadian border have already seen record-breaking subzero temperatures, with Watertown registering minus 34 degrees Fahrenheit and Copenhagen minus 49 F, she said.

“An Arctic siege has taken over our state,” Hochul said. “It is brutal, it is bone chilling, and it is dangerous.”

Storm knocks out power and snarls flights

As of Sunday morning, about 213 million people were under some sort of winter weather warning, Santorelli said. The number of customers without power topped 900,000, according to poweroutage.us, and the number was rising.

Tennessee was hardest hit with nearly 325,000 customers out, and Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi all had more than 100,000 customers in the dark. Tens of thousands of homes and businesses were without power in Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and West Virginia.

Some 11,000 flights had already been canceled Sunday and more than 13,000 have been delayed, according to the flight tracker flightaware.com. Airports in Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, North Carolina, New York, and New Jersey were hit especially hard.

At Philadelphia International Airport, inside displays registered scores of canceled flights and few vehicles could be seen arriving Sunday morning. At Reagan National in Washington, virtually all flights were canceled.

Bitter cold makes things worse

Even once the ice and snow stop falling, the danger will continue, Santorelli warned.

“Behind the storm it’s just going to get bitterly cold across basically the entirety of the eastern two-thirds of the nation, east of the Rockies,” she said. That means the ice and snow won’t melt as fast, which could hinder some efforts to restore power and other infrastructure.

Along the Gulf Coast, temperatures were balmy Sunday, hitting the high 60s and low 70s, but thermometers were expected to drop into the high 20s and low 30s there by Monday morning. The National Weather Service warned of damaging winds and a slight risk of severe storms and possibly even a brief tornado.

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at least five people died as temperatures plunged Saturday before the snows arrived in earnest.

“While it’s still too early to determine the causes of death, it is a reminder that every year New Yorkers succumb to the cold,” he wrote on X.

The Democrat also announced that Monday would be a remote learning day for students in the nation’s largest school system. Other officials across the affected areas also announced that school would be canceled or held remotely Monday.

Coping with the storm

In Corinth, Miss., where power outages were widespread, Caterpillar told employees at its remanufacturing site to stay home Monday and Tuesday.

“May God have mercy on Corinth, MS! … The sound of the trees snapping, exploding & falling through the night have been unnerving to say the least,” resident Kathy Ragan said on Facebook.

University of Georgia sophomore Eden England said there was a thin layer of ice on the ground of the campus in Athens and a mist fell as she walked with friends from the campus dining hall to her residence hall.

“It is definitely a little deserted but plenty of people chose to stay on campus,” England said.

Recovery could take a while

Nashville and the surrounding area saw ice accumulations of half an inch or more, with icicles hanging from power lines and overburdened tree limbs crashing to the ground.

In Oxford, Miss., police on Sunday morning used social media to tell residents to stay home as the danger of being outside was too great. Local utility crews were also pulled from their jobs during the overnight hours.

“Due to life-threatening conditions, Oxford Utilities has made the difficult decision to pull our crews off the road for the night,” the utility company posted on Facebook early Sunday. “Trees are actively snapping and falling around our linemen while they are in the bucket trucks.”

Tippah Electric Power in Mississippi said there was “catastrophic damage” and that it could be “weeks instead of days” to restore everyone.

The Tennessee Valley Authority provides power to some utilities across the region, and spokesperson Scott Brooks said the bulk power system remains stable but overnight icing had caused power interruptions in north Mississippi, north Alabama, southern middle Tennessee, and the Knoxville, Tenn., area.

Icy roads made travel dangerous in north Georgia, where the Cherokee County Sheriff’s office posted on Facebook, “You know it’s bad when Waffle House is closed!!!” along with a photo of a shuttered restaurant. Whether the chain’s restaurants are open — known as the Waffle House Index — has become an informal way to gauge the severity of weather disasters across the South.