statement and praise hamas for showing restraint yesterday for having volunteers on the border yesterday that were keeping demonstrators away from that fence and you were mentioning the reopening of both crossings into gaza moments ago what is hamas officially saying about this and whether this is part of a bigger deal going forward look a lot of stuff is coming out here in the local media newspapers that are affiliated with hamas have been giving details about the negotiations what amounts has not really publicly been confirming what is being discussed how most of course has confirmed that those crossings are open but other parts of what is being negotiated really being held back right now when we've spoken to officials here the past few days they have said repeatedly that the ball now is really in israel's court and while they are encouraged and they would like to see a positive outcome they have also said repeatedly that promises are not enough that

they want to make sure that there is a timetable laid out for their demands to be met they would like to deescalate the situation that has been made clear they don't want to see as they've said another war break out but at the same time they want to make sure that there are guarantees in place that whatever israel tells them they will commit to that actually happens at a time that they know when it will happen. soon with an update from gaza thank you voting is underway in turkey's local elections which are being seen as a major test for president. party at least fifty seven million turks are eligible to cast their ballots for more than a thousand mayor is the party has dominated turkish politics for nearly two decades but a weak currency and high inflation could see it lose control of key mayoral seats opposition parties have formed alliances to try to maximize their chance of victory who has more from ankara. turks are voting for the local election however this is

more the local election in turkey because the sphere is like a general election the reason for that is the ruling party and its supporters the nationalist moment party have gathered under an alliance called the people's bloc and they aim to keep preserve their majority in eighty one species across turkey and they want to win in big cities like the stumble is member stuff the reason is that they want to preserve their support base they want to have consultation because turkey is also going to have a general election in two thousand and twenty three especially since because the selection is the first and after the presidential system has been underway since last june it is important mainly for president ads on because if there is an unsuccess in the selection it will open new debates about the legitimacy of the presidential system for him on the other hand the opposition bloc has gathered under an alliance called the nation's block and they only want to win in istanbul and ankara mainly because they want to give

a blow to the ruling party that has been ruling the municipalities the majority of the cities for almost two decades and we have another party in turkey which is the pro core dish h d p they have not focused in the western cities because they decided to support opposition candidates but they focused on their home base southeastern cities however president don has threatened them by saying that even they have candidates are elected they may not be able to go for them in a spell that is for their a legit terrorism links so that's why they're not sure the kurdish parties not sure whether divorce will be counted or not so have gone there are no drilling for oil in the arctic and us drugs rose donald trucks executive order all lawful al it's invalid.

hello again and welcome back well here across parts of china we have seen some colder air and that has meant we've actually sent and snow in some areas i want to take you here today don and take a look at the video that has come out of the area it looks like midwinter in some locations because of the very heavy snow such heavy snow that some of the highways have been close across the city and we've also seen in conjunction with that a lot of dense fog down to about one hundred meters in some areas of course that caused some problems at the airports as well as slowing down the traffic on the highways that were being affected by the snow over the next few days though temperatures are going to be warm across this area but down here across japan it is still quite messy in terms of rain temperatures into the teens but as we go towards tuesday we could see some snow in the higher elevations tokyo still not getting out of the teens actually coming down to about twelve degrees there well cross parts of china we are going to be seeing in terms of rain still some very heavy rain across some areas most of that over here towards the southwest and that is also affecting

parts of north vietnam as well so for annoying it is going to be a rainy day if you twenty five degrees hong kong clouds in your forecast at twenty one and as we go towards tuesday we're going to be seeing some improvement out here towards the east but up towards the north we are expecting to squeeze more heavy rain in your forecast with can see a temperature of fifteen. a three year investigation into the pro-gun lobby i've been in florida has me just got to really kind of. reveal secrets and you were. sitting out there will be people out they get a man and connection some don't want exposed many in legacy media love the last shoot. documents for my al-jazeera investigations how to sell a massacre on al-jazeera.

hello again the top stories on al-jazeera saudi arabia has rejected the u.s. his decision to recognize its really sovereignty over the occupied golan heights. gave the opening speech of the thirtieth arab summit the conflicts in yemen syria and libya are also on the. two main border crossings into gaza are open again for the first time in six days israel lifted restrictions on sunday morning after a weekend of mass protest along the fence dividing gaza and israel turkish president. has offered his condolences offered two people were killed at a polling station in providence and people are voting in local elections along with

as you can see they're being seen as a major test for the president's ruling party. one of algeria's richest men and a close backer of president saddam has been arrested at the border resigned as head of the algerian business leaders forum on thursday had been awarded large public works contracts by the government and help fund because election campaigns well algerians living in france were gathering for a seventh week of anti-government protests i mean as an activist with a particular citizen movement she's also been at previous demonstrations in france but she's speaking to us now via skype from algiers i mean i got to have you with us on al-jazeera france of course home to a large number of algerians just give us an idea of what you saw in france and what impact do you think the protests over there are having on the situation in algeria . well the protests have been going on for seven weeks in france and i'm currently

knowledge air is where it's been going on for six weeks in a row. the protests are not have not depend diminished over time and the message in the diet is for as well as unknowns here is the same we are sovereign we want radical change we want the corrupt regime out and we do not want the same corrupt figures to lead the transition and you can see that it's a new democratic way of expression that the people are using to make themselves heard now for what the military has had to offer recently it's saying that it once basically a constitutional solution to the crisis suggesting implementing an article which will see the president removed at the end of april or he'll step down rather and then elections organized within about four and a half months time how much support does this idea have amongst the protesters. well the protests have a certain limitation they are very efficient at men teen ink pressure and

accelerating time however the limit is that there are still confusion about the means by which to achieve that effectively that democratic transition that is claimed. let us give context the algerian government is nonexistent prime minister did reach has failed to constitute one there is no faith in the constitutional council which is violent and it has always been a tool with a few to seek reduced to missy and it has said nothing in the face of constitutional violation today faced with a gauge. of the army call to apply article one zero two to declare retreat and fit. the protesters the reaction is that well it's not too soon we've known that would have been on foot since two thousand and thirteen so protests which are very wary and wary that maybe this is

a negotiation going on between the traditional power brokers but if there is that going from the protesters who are against what the military has to offer they're demanding full change how are they going to achieve it do they have a plan and also is it realistic to be demanding the removal of the entire political system. well we're the people with algerians have been claiming and what my citizen movement has been claiming is that we need insurance isn't guaranteed that there will be a truly democratic transition and we also need an acceptable roadmap how does that come how that we need to evolve the participation we need the parts of civil society illegitimate and honest representatives chosen by the people if we continue with this same wave of the regime which is everything happens backstage behind the curtain in no. that's not what i want is full of

civilians women and women keep a bowl of leaving the transition effect of what we need today is a mechanism for them to emerge cream a clear framework to tackle the most urgent and most needed structural reforms including constitutional reforms our rights i mean off with thank you for speaking to us from algeria. voting is underway in ukraine in the first round of the country's presidential election thirty nine candidates are in the running including the incumbent has reported shango and the former prime minister yulia timoshenko but it's comedian. who's leading in opinion polls if no candidate gets more than fifty percent of the vote than the top two or go into a second round of voting so no help has more from kiev even though it's going to this is the unexpected from gramma in the race to become ukraine's next president but lauded me as a linsky is an actor and comedian his campaign appearances are stand up comedy act

what he lacks in actual policy or political experience he makes up for with his on screen persona in a popular television series he's a teacher blows the whistle on corruption suddenly finding himself yes president of ukraine that's. great. he's famous. one thing young people see him as an anti establishment outsider figure which they like and responding in a sense that. this is a likeness personality but it seems even he isn't sure if he can be president or not we don't know if we just once believe that he's a better option previous presidents with businessmen politicians and lawyers maybe a comedian can make a difference. in my opinion that many feel the political unknown zelinsky could hardly do worse than the current president petro poroshenko he came to power after russia's annexation of crimea vowing to end the war in the east and sweep away

corruption the billionaire confectionery king here immortalized in bullet casings and his own sweet and chocolate wrappers has bowed to pressure from the international monetary fund raising utility prices that hurt the poor and he's in a circle he's implicated in allegedly corrupt weapons purchases. if you see corruption i think we should talk about this that's why reason all of these. painting this is a conversation viz president bush and the first to fall and if he will be elected for the second time i hope food that will make him to sink a vault what kind of place in the history of once to to get. also in the running after two decades in politics and three years in prison is former prime minister yulia timoshenko many of her supporters at the final rally in central kiev were

bussed in from the countryside drawn by a pledge to consume a gas prices the focus of this election is the economy. promises being made about the war that's the toxic question for all the candidates no one has also no one has . no one wants to take responsibility for five years of war after a people's rebellion against russian influence and corruption and ukraine is a country that seems stuck unsure now which way to turn jonah. anticorruption candidate zuzana couple tova has won slovakia's presidential election making her the country's first female leader. the liberal lawyer who has no previous political experience beat the governing party candidate in a second round runoff vote it's over pro europe and told supporters who saw her victory as a signal for change she'll be sworn in in june to the largely ceremonial position

but. i accept this result with great humbleness and sense of great responsibility i think all of you for being here with me and i promise you that i will be with you let's look for things that connect us let's place to work for a better slovakia all the fights fought for personal gains let's invite other people in pursuit of ideas and values that connected us through the election in bangladesh to owners if it's our blog that caught fire earlier this week i've been arrested and charged with negligence twenty six people died in the blaze and jumped to their deaths from the twenty two story high rise hundreds were treated for the effects of smoke inhalation safety inspectors say the building didn't have extension permits or enough fire exits security forces in venezuela have fired tear gas at demonstrators complaining about power cuts and say the widespread electricity blackouts are making their lives even worse on top of food and medicine shortages and hyperinflation

a rival rally was held by supporters of president nicolas maduro he blames the power cut outages on terrorist attacks at a hydroelectric dam. saudi arabia is being accused of having the phone of jeff bezos the owner of the shopping website amazon and the washington post those hired private investigators after his phone messages were leaked to the national enquirer newspaper his detective said he was targeted by the saudis as they applauded the killing of washington post writer. so the ministers have previously denied any link to the national enquirer is reporting president trump's executive order to allow offshore oil drilling in the arctic ocean has been overturned a federal judge called trump's reversal of an environmental protection policy from the obama era unlawful and invalid the ruling reinstates the drilling ban in much of the arctic ocean rob reynolds has more from washington. federal judge sharon gleason says president donald trump exceeded his constitutional authority when he

issued an executive order back in april of two thousand and seventeen that essentially stripped away all protections against explore ation and oil drilling from a five hundred thousand square kilometers of waters off in the arctic and north atlantic oceans trump has tried repeatedly to roll back environmental protections that were made during the obama administration but he has been unsuccessful in large part because environmentalists as in this case keep taking the administration to court and they keep winning the judge in this case said that once a president applies the designation of a national monument or a protected area under laws that date in some cases back well over one hundred years no future president can reverse those decisions by themselves it has to be

done by an act of congress not simply by an executive order as the president did in this case so the affected areas which are principally off the coast of alaska which will now be protected at least for several years as this case works its way through the court system our home to a number of endangered species including bowhead whales and polar bears. i. tell them again the headlines on al-jazeera saudi arabia's king said a man has rejected the u.s. is the citizen to recognize israeli sovereignty over the occupied golan heights. of the opening speech at the thirtieth arab summit and he also stressed the importance to find a political solution for the conflict in yemen. in the issue we emphasize our support for the u.n.

efforts for reaching a political solution in accordance with the references. we call upon the international community to bind them who is backed by iran to seize their hearts to practice is which led to the suffering. of the yemeni people and threaten the security and stability of the region that the two main border crossings into gaza are open again for the first time in six days israel lifted restrictions on sunday morning after a weekend of mass protests along the fence dividing gaza and israel for palestinian protesters were killed and two hundred forty others injured during the demonstrations the circus president has offered his condolences off the two people were killed at a polling station in my province they're voting in local elections in turkey which are being seen as a major test of president ruling party voting is underway in ukraine in the first

round of the country's presidential election thirty nine candidates are in the running including the incumbent petro poroshenko and former prime minister yulia timoshenko but it's comedian of all the alinsky who is leading in opinion polls anti corruption candidates. slovakia's presidential election making her the country's first female leader the liberal lawyer who has no previous political experience beat the governing party candidates in a second round runoff vote. is pro europe and sole supporters she saw her victory as a signal for change she'll be sworn in in june to the largely ceremonial position. what if algeria's richest man and the close backer president. has been arrested at the tennessean border and had resigned as head of the algerian business leaders forum on thursday had been awarded large public works contracts by the government and helped fund beautifully election campaigns those are the latest headlines on

inside story is coming up next they with us. could robots kill the u.n. and. weapons that can cost without human control so how likely is this and how prepared are we for what could be a lethal development in the intelligence this inside story.

welcome to the program i'm. killer robots well that sounds like the name of a science fiction movie but they could become a reality and soon scientists say artificial intelligence has developed so quickly that we could be seeing weapons that can choose a targets and kill without a human controlling it the u.n. has held five days of talks in geneva on banning what are known as lethal autonomous weapons but the u.s. russia israel and the u.k. are against any restrictions saying these developments could make war safer we'll be bringing our guests and in just a moment but first here's a science and technology editor mariana hond. we have here is our primary test facility on what's driving around twenty four hours a day seven days a week robots room here being tested to deliver discover to do what they programmed

to do. but what you won't find here is a so-called kilogram a fully autonomous weapon designed to hunt and kill without a human involved as far as we know they don't exist yet but canadian company clear path insists killer robots have no place on the battlefield we feel. that there is a a line which is being crossed with this technology we feel that on top of being riskier than anyone actually appreciates right now there is a disconnect from there is an ethical and moral disconnect from. from war we think that these weapon systems are going to be used in all sorts of dangerous ways both by major powers and non-state actors alike i love. the risks of say i'm ashamed killing the wrong person of being hecht of engaging with another machine in a conflict a some of the reasons the company says it took

a stand in two thousand and fourteen and has committed to not knowingly at least create fully autonomous weapons thousands of scientists engineers to companies and out official intelligence experts have done the same but they're not shunning military contracts completely they say a i can be a valuable tool the pentagon just last month called on big companies to help develop its ai capabilities russia and china are already investing in military ai technology i think it really first comes down to the responsibility of every engineering developer to ensure that. the governments around the world are aware of the risks in the use of this technology and that these decisions are being made in a in a rational considered way and then from there perhaps they can start having

conversations about. if their company in particular themselves in particular should work on these this technology to quick is a demanding transparency it's the bosses i knew who had potentially lucrative defense contracts some of them have chosen to leave and wit for companies like cleopatra it all boils down to wanting to know what they create and whether it's technology that could kill all save lives medium hond al-jazeera. and we can now bring in our panel joining us from london as well crossthwaite he's the co-founder of ken's i that's an artificial analysis consultancy company and in oxford on skype mario mario rosaria today oh research fellow at the oxford internet institute and also in london toby cadman an international human rights lawyer and barrister at guernica thirty seven an international law firm welcome to the program

i am going to start with you mr de o. and i ask you why is there so much concern about these lethal automated weapons why has it come to to this where the united nations is speaking are there is a conversation about bending. rather the conversation as being i don't. use of autonomous systems in conflict or in not going about the field is something that is being constantly evolving for the past two decades at the moment a discussion has gained much more momentum because we are the point in which we start seeing here i though being quite fast and become a successful it is the moment and it is a chance this thing i want to start the use of on the systems and. weapons systems on the battlefield the question is that those who were planning to

this machines in the bought a feel thing that what is going to have strategy is going to help save the life of the soldiers of the army or is the plight of those machines but there is also be important question to be address which is whether a machine should be left in charge of designing whether to keep a human being or not which is a fundamentally ethical question should never be the case that human life is taken by a machine was designed to set the side of the tunnel to go their way and this question opens up as you say as people who say it kind of warms because there are a lot of other issues having to do it to the principal of human dignity the right to live by those specific questions which afterward are to do with just were cheering and is about the principle of distinction proportionality attributions been submitted so basically we see a new development in the no g. which could facilitate war riding. my horse riding to a much more mythical level the receipts obama. people are

starting to have this is fashion's ok well crossfade how far are we from seeing machines being able to make decisions our target humans and kill them without human control behind them as that's the direction we're heading. well targeting human beings to kill them automatically is something that we are already seeing an already able to do there's already automatic weapons like the phallic system on ships which enables automatically to shoot down incoming missiles or threats to that ship and that's been in deployment since the one nine hundred eighty s. so we are already seeing weapons which are being able to automatically operate themselves albeit that that's done under the control of a human operator so that come that human operator has to operate the machine turn it on and switch it to automatic mode so we're already seeing weapons systems like this that are already in deployment what we're talking about here i think where the

hype has around as is that we're looking at weapons systems which are making the decision to kill now that's a very different principle and that's sort of giving autonomy to machines in the sense that they're making the thought process behind whether it's viable to kill a person or not and i think that we're very far away from it decades if not longer because to him a shame intelligence is not ready at that stage machine intelligence is being deployed into weapon systems in a smaller scale where it's being used in a very targeted way whether it's target acquisition whether that's using convolutional neural networks to visually identify targets which is something that project maven sought to do with google last year with the with the u.s. government but overarching leigh it's a different question between automatic machines that can kill and machines that can choose to kill and that's something that should not be conflated and something which i think we are at risk of conflating and i think that that's the position of

many governments around the world that we conflate those two are arguments up between automatic weapons the designed to target and the parameters set by human beings on the one hand and on the other hand machines that are making the decision to kill off their own back. so we can let me bring you in on the how far or how closely does the current do the current regulations we have right now the current principles of law of armed conflict international humanitarian law how how acquits are they currently to deal with the issue of automated weapons or lethal automated weapons where these machines or so-called robots are doing the killing or perhaps even in the decision process of who should be targeted. i can as i speak as already sent in a speaker who was referring to questions such as proportionality. there are

obviously a number of legal principles when a military. action is carried out there are certain things that we need to look at as to whether it was a military target whether the civilian casualties has been minimized but in whether we can say it was proportional so if there are already existing rules as to determining whether a military campaign constitutes a crime i'm i'm going to actual law. i think what's what's interesting is certainly the position that the united kingdom has taken in the current debate which is going on of the u.n. is that they are not at the stage where there is no human to human element in the carrying out an attack so there is always going to be a level of responsibility i think as with many things that we're looking at currently around the world it's not

a question of whether the law is not in step with it with technology is whether there is a collective accountability mechanism to in course those rules you know we have courts have the querist different. jurisdictions there and the international and domestic level where individuals can be held accountable if if we can say that it is not in accordance with international humanitarian law the difficulty is holding accountable drone attacks as we move forward with less human control but it's still going to be. an element of holding individuals responsible and as we've had when we are far away from the stage where machines are actually making the decision to to attack but again i still think that the law. institution to hold individual parent well we're just we're just not we don't have the institutions necessary jurisdiction holding the parent at all times mr day or says we've heard there from

both gentlemen we are far away from machines actually making decisions on who to attack our target the law currently is sufficient to deal with that so why would you say you are so concerned now answer the first point i want to make that is that five ten years is not really so high or way especially when we're thinking about this is governance regulations five years ten years is a much a short for. you even if what we want to set that their knowledge at the moment is not a we're to make decision as to whether to kill or not a human being so i'm concerned because five ten years maybe just just right the amount of time just the right amount of time to make progress your nation's appropriate policy. there are two more points i want to make one is that the father machine can kill that can not just to kill.