Latest news with #Feldstein
Winnipeg Free Press
6 days ago
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
Former Netanyahu aide could face charges in security leak case
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's attorney general said Sunday a close adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been advised that he could face criminal prosecution on allegations of providing secret information with the intent of harming the country's security. The development involving a central figure in what is popularly known in Israel as Qatargate comes after police earlier this year arrested the adviser, Jonatan Urich, and former spokesman Eli Feldstein on suspicion of accepting money from Qatar to promote a positive image of the Gulf Arab state in Israel. Feldstein also has been indicted in a separate case involving the leak of classified information to a German tabloid — and Sunday's statement says Urich could face criminal prosecution in that case. The attorney general's statement said Urich is accused of working with Feldstein to share 'highly classified' Israeli military information and said the release 'was intended, among other things, to influence public awareness regarding the prime minister and to shift the discourse' following the killing of six hostages in Gaza in August of last year. The statement says the criminal prosecution of Urich is subject to a hearing but does not say when that will occur. There was no immediate public reaction from the office of Netanyahu, which has been ensnared in scandal while the prime minister continues to face pressure from the Israeli public over the 21-month war in Gaza. In the Qatargate case, Urich and Feldstein were arrested earlier this year on suspicion of accepting money from Qatar — a country that many Israelis view as a patron of Hamas — to promote it in Israel. Qatar is a key mediator in the indirect ceasefire negotiations for Gaza and denies backing the militant group. Netanyahu has given a statement to police on the Qatargate matter but is not a suspect in the case, which he says is baseless and meant to topple his rule. Separately, Netanyahu is the subject of a long-running corruption trial.
Miami Herald
20-06-2025
- Miami Herald
AI skeptic creates chatbot to help teachers design classes
AI skeptic creates chatbot to help teachers design classes While many educators spent the past two years fretting that artificial intelligence is killing student writing, upending person-to-person tutoring and generally wreaking havoc on scholastic inquiry, the well-known thinker and ed tech expert Michael Feldstein has been quietly exploring something completely different. For more than a year, he has led an open-source project with a group of about 70 educators online to build what's essentially a chat bot with one job: to guide teachers, step-by-step, through the process of designing their own courses-a privilege previously reserved for just a few instructors at elite institutions. The experimental software, dubbed the AI Learning Design Assistant, or ALDA, has yet to hit the market. But when it does, Feldstein said, it will be free. With any luck, it could mark a new era, offering teachers at all levels an easy way to design their own homegrown coursework, assessments and even curricula at a fraction of the cost demanded by commercial publishers. Feldstein has worked primarily with college instructors, and his work is widely applicable in higher ed. But it's got potential in K-12 education as well. He's pushing to democratize instructional design, a little-known academic field in which professional designers build courses by working backwards: They interview teachers to help them drill down to what's important, then create courses based on the findings, The 74 says. When it's ready, he said, ALDA could well shake up the teaching profession, making off-the-shelf AI behave like a personal instructional designer for virtually every teacher who wants one. And for the record, Feldstein said, there's an acute shortage of such designers, so this particular iteration of AI likely won't put anyone out of a job. 'What is this good for?' Feldstein is well-known in the ed tech community, having worked over the years at Oracle, Cengage Learning and elsewhere. A one-time assistant director of the State University of New York's Learning Network, he has more recently garnered a wide audience with his e-literate blog-required reading for college instructors and ed tech experts. Over the past few years, Feldstein has likened tools such as ChatGPT and AI image generators like Midjourney to "toys in both good and bad ways." They invite people to play and give players the ability to explore what's basically cutting-edge AI. "It's fun. And, like all good games, you learn by playing," he wrote recently. But he cautions that when they're asked to do something specific, they "tend to do weird things" such as return strange results and, on occasion, hallucinate. As a longtime observer of ed tech, Feldstein's approach has always been to step back and ask: What is this good for? "AI is interesting because there are many possible answers, and those answers change on a monthly basis as the capabilities change," he said. That makes the question harder to answer. Nevertheless, we need to answer it." ALDA's focus, he said, has always been on helping participants think more deeply about what teachers do: The AI probes students to find out what they know, then fills in the gaps. "As an educator, if I ask you a question, I'm trying to understand if you know something," he said. "So my question is directly related to a learning objective." By training, teachers naturally modify their questions to help figure out if students have misconceptions. They circle around the topic, offering clues, hints and feedback to help students home in on what they know. But they don't simply give away the answer. Over the course of the year, he and colleagues have broken down the various aspects of their work, including what they'd outsource if they had an assistant or "junior learning designer" at their side. The AI starts simply, asking "Who are your students? What is your course about? What are the learning goals? What's your teaching style?" It moves on from there: "What are the learning objectives for this lesson? How do you know when students have achieved those objectives? What are some common misconceptions they have?" Eventually teachers can begin designing the course and its assessments with a clear focus on goals and, in the end, their own creativity. Feldstein holds decidedly modest goals for the project. "The idea that we're going to somehow invent a better AI model than these companies that are spending billions of dollars is crazy," Feldstein said. But making course design accessible "is very doable and very useful." He has intentionally brought together a diverse group of instructors that includes both heavy AI users and skeptics. Among them: Paul Wilson, a longtime professor of religion and philosophy at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Though Wilson has taught there for 32 years, he has dabbled in AI over the past few years as it reared its head in classes, assignments and faculty meetings. He came away from Feldstein's sessions over the past few months with the outlines of not one but two courses: a world religion survey, which he designed last summer, and a course in pastoral care. The latter, he said, is a "specialty class" for ministers-in-training who are getting their first taste of interacting with congregation members. "They're doing field work," he said, "and this particular class is going to cover the functions they would have if they were serving in pastoral ministry." The course will cover everything from the business of running a congregation to the teaching and counseling duties of a pastor and the "prophetic" role-preaching and teaching the Bible, shepherding the congregation and offering spiritual guidance. Wilson said the AI let him tweak the course design in response to test users' suggestions. "By the end, my experience was that I was working with something valuable," he said. He is offering the class this semester. "I got a very good course design, with all the parameters that I was looking for," he said. Geneva Dampare, director of strategy and operations at the United Negro College Fund, said the organization invited six instructors from five HBCUs to Feldstein's workshop. Dampare, who has an instructional design background, joined as well. Many faculty at these institutions, she said, don't see AI as the menace that other instructors do. For them, it's a kind of equalizer at colleges that don't typically offer a perk like instructional designers. But by the end of the process last November, Dampare said, many instructors "could comfortably speak about AI, speak about how they are integrating the ALDA tool into the curriculum development that they're doing for next semester or future semesters." This story was produced by The 74 and reviewed and distributed by Stacker. © Stacker Media, LLC.
The Independent
18-04-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
A crisis at the Jewish Chronicle shows the toothlessness of the press watchdog
In Tel Aviv, a festering scandal reaches the top of Israeli society. In London, a shrug of a regulator's shoulders. Welcome to the latest twist in the baffling story of the Jewish Chronicle. You may remember the origins of the mystery: a fake story from a dodgy source published by the JC last September. The article, under the byline of Elon Perry, echoed the talking points of Israel 's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was alleged to be based on documents uncovered in the Gaza Strip. It all turned out to be rubbish. After Israeli journalists exposed the nonsense, the JC announced an inquiry. The very next day – September 13 – the paper concluded its 'thorough investigation'. A two paragraph statement offered no explanation of how it had come to publish such manipulated tosh but assured readers that the paper 'maintains the highest journalistic standards.' Phew. Just imagine if it didn't. The statement said it had removed the story from its website because the paper was not satisfied with some of the claims Perry had made about his background. It did not address the more pertinent question of whether or not the story was true. It wasn't. Three months later, the editor, Jake Wallis Simons, announced that he would be stepping down to write a book. Did the owner of the JC decide that heads must roll? Who's to say, since we are not allowed to know who the ultimate owner of the JC is. It was rescued from almost inevitable insolvency by a consortium led by BBC director Sir Robbie Gibb. But who actually stumped up the £3.5m to keep the title afloat, and why, remains a riddle. The 'leak' to the JC was suspiciously like an equally ropey story planted on the German tabloid Bild. The two events piqued the interest of the Israeli security service, Shin Bet. It didn't take long for them to arrest Eli Feldstein, a spokesman for Netanyahu, who had previously worked for the far-right Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli censorship laws prevent us from knowing all the details, but it has been reported that Feldstein is one of five people arrested in connection with the alleged leaking of documents which – hostage relatives claim – may have undermined a ceasefire and the release of hostages. Feldstein has reportedly argued that he was acting on orders from his superiors and has been made a scapegoat. Benny Gantz, who until recently was in Netanyahu's war cabinet, said that if sensitive security information was used for a "political survival campaign', it would not only be a criminal offence, but "a crime against the nation". The revelations also led to intense criticism from the families of the hostages, who said it implied an active campaign to discredit them, calling it "a moral low that has no depth. This is a fatal injury to the remnants of trust between the government and its citizens." The seven-month Shin Bet investigation has widened into an apparently interlinked scandal, dubbed Qatargate, which threatens to bring down Netanyahu. The prime minister has duly sacked Ronen Bar, the head of the agency investigating him. The story is, in other words, complex, extremely murky and explosive. Now consider the response of IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, which was set up after the Leveson Inquiry and is supposed to monitor standards in the newspapers it regulates. The body, chaired by a former Conservative peer, Lord Faulks, has been monitoring the JC for some time due to the significant number of complaints about the paper dating back to 2019. In 2022, he refused to launch a standards inquiry, arguing a) that the paper had a new owner and b) that the staff had undergone IPSO training. It is not clear that Lord Faulks had any idea who the owner was. Fast-forward to 2025. Once again, IPSO has considered investigating the JC but, once again, decided against it. The JC apparently told IPSO's top sleuths that the explanation for its catastrophic mistake was 'unexpected staff absences.' After talking to JC staff, IPSO felt it had a 'good understanding of what had occurred and why.' It does not let us into the secret. It noted that – as in 2022 – JC staff had agreed to more IPSO training – yes, even more IPSO training. Perhaps including how to make better staff rotas. Nothing to see here, move along now. The Leveson Inquiry sat for 100 days, produced a report of around 2000 pages and cost around £5m. A new regulator, IPSO, was the main outcome – a body with supposedly more bite than its toothless predecessor, the Press Complaints Commission, and the power to launch investigations where there are patterns of editorial concern. It can theoretically fine publishers up to £1m. In fact, in its 10 years of existence, it has launched no standards investigations and fined no one. You would not guess from IPSO's most recent statement that the successful mission to plant a story in the JC appears to have owed more to black ops than rota mishaps. Indeed, there is nothing at all about the massive Shin Bet inquiry into the affair, or the political background in Israel. In deciding not to launch a standards inquiry into the paper in 2022 Lord Faulks took great comfort from the new ownership of the JC. Does he have any idea who they are? If so, should he not tell us? If not, why should he place any trust in them? Did Jake Wallis Simons jump, or was he pushed? If Lord Faulks has asked, he does not tell us. Who appointed the new editor, Daniel Schwammenthal? Companies House tells us that the two current directors are [Lord] Ian Austin, a former Labour MP and Jonathan Kandel, a 'senior tax consultant.' Was it them? Or the owner? Do Messrs Austin and Kandel have overall editorial control? If not, who does? The IPSO report suggests neither man was spoken to. Did anyone speak to Robbie Gibb, who quit shortly before the fabricated report was published? Lord Austin takes a keen interest in the BBC's coverage of Israel, recently demanding that executives who oversaw a recent much-criticised Gaza programme 'should be sacked for the very serious professional and moral failings.' But of the professional and moral failings of the JC he has to date said nothing. Did Lord Faulks's team of investigators speak to any of the four distinguished columnists – David Baddiel, Jonathan Freedland, David Aaronovitch and Hadley Freeman – who refused to go on writing for the paper after the Elon Perry debacle? Their concerns about the standards at the paper went far beyond one dud article. What about speaking to another contributor (for more than 50 years), Professor Colin Schindler, who also decided he could no longer write for the paper after discovering a 'darker side' to the fabricated story? He wrote: 'This whole sorry affair reflected the JC's unquestioning willingness to accept anything that chimed with its sensationalist agenda.' At the time he quit, Freedland wrote: 'The latest scandal brings great disgrace on the paper – publishing fabricated stories and showing only the thinnest form of contrition – but it is only the latest. Too often, the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic.' In his letter to Wallis Simons he added: 'The problem in this case is that there can be no real accountability because the JC is owned by a person or people who refuse to reveal themselves. As you know, I and others have long urged transparency, making that case to you privately – but nothing has happened.' And now nothing has happened all over again. There is still no real accountability. Looks like Lord Leveson was wasting his time.
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What is the 'Qatargate' scandal roiling Israel?
Israel has been gripped by allegations linking aides of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to financing from Qatar, which hosts Hamas leaders and helped broker the release of hostages from Gaza. Dubbed "Qatargate" by Israeli media, the reports that sparked the investigation claimed that some of the people closest to Netanyahu were recruited to promote the image of Qatar, an enemy state, in Israel. - What do we know? - At least two of Netanyahu's aides are suspected of receiving payments from the Qatari government to promote Doha's interests in Israel. With the investigation ongoing, some details in the investigation remain unclear. Allegations of ties between members of Netanyahu's close circle and the Qatari government have swirled in the Israeli press since mid-2024. The affair ramped up Monday when two aides, one current and one former, were arrested and Netanyahu was called in for questioning in a probe he slammed as a "political witch hunt". Though the Israeli leader is not a suspect, he is separately on trial over corruption and breach of trust allegations. "They are holding Yonatan Urich and Eli Feldstein hostage," Netanyahu said in an angry video post after being questioned. An Israeli court on Tuesday extended the detention of the two aides for an additional three days, until Thursday. Qatari officials did not immediately respond for comment when contacted by AFP. - Who are the suspects? - Yonatan Urich, who has been working closely with Netanyahu for most of the past decade, started out as the social media manager for the prime minister's Likud party. Urich also co-owns a media consulting firm called Perception with Yisrael Einhorn, who has also worked with Netanyahu. It is not the first time influential Israeli figures have been accused of receiving payments from Qatar. According to Israeli media reports, Perception was reportedly hired to improve Qatar's image ahead of the 2022 World Cup, though Urich and the firm denied the claims at the time. Eli Feldstein is already under investigation for leaking classified documents to journalists during the short time he worked unofficially as the prime minister's military affairs spokesman. According to reports, Netanyahu was seeking to offer Feldstein a more permanent role but after failing to receive the necessary security clearance, he remained an external contractor. Last month, an investigation by Israel's Channel 12 alleged that while working for Netanyahu, Feldstein received a salary from Jay Footlik, a known US lobbyist for Qatar. Further reports on Monday said that Feldstein promoted Qatar to Israeli journalists and arranged trips for them to Doha. Footlik owns a consulting firm, Third Circle Inc., registered under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as working for Qatar. An Israeli court on Tuesday said suspicions were related to Third Circle and funds aimed at "projecting a positive image of Qatar" in relation to its role as a mediator for a truce and hostage release agreement in Gaza. A final name that has been linked to the affair is Israeli businessman Gil Birger, who this month told Israel's state broadcaster that he had been asked by Footlik to pay Feldstein through his company. - What's the significance? - Jonathan Rynhold, head of political studies at Bar-Ilan University, told AFP that the affair "ties all bad things relating to Netanyahu together in one package." "This links Netanyahu directly to the policy of appeasing Hamas," Rynhold said, referring to Israel allowing Qatar to send millions of dollars in cash into Gaza that many now believe strengthened Hamas and enabled it to conduct its October 7, 2023 attack. Qatar has previously rejected the claims as false, saying they were driven by internal Israeli politics. Still, the affair has piled more pressure on Netanyahu, who has clashed with the judiciary over his bid to sack Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet domestic security agency. Bar's relationship with the Netanyahu government soured after he blamed the executive for the security fiasco of Hamas's October 2023 attack, and crucially, following a Shin Bet probe into Qatargate. - What next for Netanyahu? - It is unclear how Netanyahu will manage the fallout from the affair. "It is too early to say how it will develop," said Professor Gideon Rahat of the Hebrew University. "Will he need to sacrifice these two people? If he sacrifices them, will they open their mouths?" Rahat said. For now, he is fighting back and "framing it as though the secret service is after him because he wants to kick out the head of the secret service", Rahat added. "In a normal country, if the prime minister had spies in his office, he would resign, but we are not in normal times." reg/acc/ser
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Netanyahu accuses Israeli police of trying to 'topple' his government
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Israeli police of trying to "topple" his government over what he believes is a "political witch hunt." In a video statement released on Monday, Netanyahu claimed the police had no evidence against the two aides who were arrested. Netanyahu was summoned on Monday to testify as part of an ongoing investigation into alleged financial ties between his office and Qatar. The prime minister claimed that he was questioned for an hour before he demanded to see evidence. He said there was nothing. Netanyahu Seeks To Fire Top Security Official Amid Internal Power Struggle Eli Feldstein and Yonatan Urich, the aides Netanyahu named in the video, were allegedly arrested on Monday in connection with the investigation. According to reports, Feldstein – a former member of Netanyahu's team – is suspected of passing messages to journalists on behalf of Qatar while working in the prime minister's office. The messages Feldstein is accused of sending to the media allegedly pertained to Qatar's role in negotiating the return of Israeli hostages, among other things, Israel HaYom reported. However, the case remains under a gag order, so charges against Feldstein and Urich have not been officially released. The Washington Post reported, citing Israeli media, that Urich and Feldstein are accused of contact with a foreign agent, bribery and fraud. Read On The Fox News App Netanyahu To Testify In Corruption Trial Amid Multiple Conflicts The Jerusalem Post confirmed on Tuesday that its editor-in-chief, Zivka Klein, was questioned by police in connection with the Qatar probe. Klein has previously denied having a connection with Feldstein after an Israeli outlet reported that the former Netanyahu aide arranged a trip to Qatar for the journalist. Netanyahu says the probe, often referred to as "Qatargate," is intended to stop him from firing Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, who heads the Israeli equivalent of the FBI. Last month, Netanyahu announced that he would seek to oust Bar over alleged "ongoing distrust." However, some suspect that it is related to the Shin Bet's assessment of Oct. 7, which "pointed to a policy led by the government, and the person who has headed it, for years, with emphasis on the year preceding the massacre," the Times of Israel reported. Bar slammed Netanyahu's "expectation of a duty of personal loyalty, the purpose of which contradicts the public interest, is a fundamentally illegitimate expectation," according to the Times of Israel. Israel's High Court froze Bar's removal, which was set for April 8, but allowed Netanyahu to interview potential replacements. Netanyahu's office announced on Monday that he had tapped a former Israeli Navy commander, Vice Adm. Eli Sharvit, to replace Bar. "Sharvit served in the IDF for 36 years, including five years as commander of the Israel Navy. In that position, he led the force building of the maritime defense of the territorial waters and conducted complex operations against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran," Netanyahu's office tweeted. Fox News Digital's Alex Nitzberg and Yonat Friling contributed to this article source: Netanyahu accuses Israeli police of trying to 'topple' his government
