BUJUMBURA (Reuters) -East African regional leaders on Saturday renewed their call for an immediate ceasefire by all sides in the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo that pits the country’s military against a rebel group it has accused Rwanda of supporting.

At a summit in Burundi’s capital Bujumbura, the leaders of the regional East African Community (EAC) bloc called for an “immediate ceasefire by all parties,” according to a communique issued at the end of the meeting.

The M23 rebel group has seized large areas of eastern Congo’s North Kivu province in a rapid onslaught since Oct. 20 that has threatened the provincial capital, Goma.

The conflict has inflamed regional tensions with Congo accusing neighbour Rwanda of backing and sponsoring the Tutsi-led rebellion. United Nations experts and Western powers have also accused Rwanda of backing the M23, although Rwanda has denied any involvement.

Saturday’s meeting was the latest diplomatic effort to try to end the insurgency, which has displaced at least 520,000 people since March 2022 in North Kivu, a territory long plagued by conflict.

Earlier this week, Pope Francis visited Congo and called for an end to violence.

Regional leaders had brokered an agreement in November under which the rebels were meant to cease fire and withdraw from recently seized positions by Jan. 15, but that did not happen.

A U.N. internal report said the rebels were flouting the ceasefire and withdrawal terms.

Saturday’s summit was attended by heads of state from Rwanda, Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi and senior officials from the region.

They also demanded the withdrawal of all foreign and armed groups from Congo and asked regional military chiefs to meet within one week and set a timeframe for the withdrawal.

“The summit reiterated its call to all parties to de-escalate tensions,” the communique read.

At the summit Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi warned the commander of an East African regional military force deployed in eastern Congo, Jeff Nyagah, a Kenyan, against showing bias toward the rebels.

“Do not favor the M23. It would be a shame for the population to turn on you,” Tshisekedi is seen telling Nyagah in a video tweeted by his spokeswoman, Tina Salama.

“You came to help us and not to have problems. Pay attention to that. Communicate with the population,” Tshisekedi said.

Kenyan President William Ruto was visible standing nearby as Tshisekedi warned the commander. The EAC agreed on a regional force in April last year to be deployed in eastern Congo to help end decades of bloodshed in the area.

On Jan. 27, M23 rebels took control of the town of Kitshanga in Masisi territory and control of a new road, further isolating the provincial capital Goma.

Ukraine’s military said its forces repelled an attack in the area of Blahodatne in the eastern part of the Donetsk region, while Russia’s Wagner private military group said it took control of the village.

* Russia accused the Ukrainian military of deliberately striking a hospital in a Russian-held area of eastern Ukraine on Saturday in what it said was a war crime that killed 14 people and wounded 24 patients and medical staff. There was no immediate response to the allegations from Ukraine. Reuters was not able to independently verify the report.

* Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described the situation at the front as “extremely acute“, especially in the eastern Donetsk region where Russia is stepping up an offensive.

* Tearful mourners in Kyiv commemorated a British volunteer aid worker, Andrew Bagshaw, killed while attempting a rescue mission from the eastern Ukrainian town of Soledar.

* Russian President Vladimir Putin is open to contacts with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz though has no phone call scheduled with him, a Kremlin spokesman said. Scholz, who last week approved providing Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukrainian forces, was quoted in a published interview as saying he would speak to Putin again but the onus was on the Russian leader to withdraw troops from Ukraine “to end this horrendous, senseless war…”

* Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov will hold a meeting with Lynne Tracy, the new U.S. ambassador, early next week, RIA news agency reported.

* Zelenskiy condemned the idea of neutrality in sports at a time when his country’s athletes fight and die in war, while their Russian counterparts might be allowed to compete.

* Russia said it will not hold annual talks with Japan on renewing a pact that allows Japanese fishermen to operate near disputed islands, saying Japan had taken anti-Russian measures.

* Expedited talks are under way among Ukraine and its allies about its requests for long-range missiles that it says are needed to prevent Russia from destroying its cities, a top aide to President Zelenskiy said.

* German arms-maker Rheinmetall is ready to greatly boost output of tank and artillery munitions to satisfy strong demand in Ukraine and the West, and may start producing HIMARS multiple rocket launchers in Germany, CEO Armin Papperger told Reuters.

* Ukraine has been promised 321 heavy tanks by several countries, its ambassador to France said.

* Poland will send an additional 60 tanks to Ukraine on top of 14 German-made Leopard 2 tanks it has pledged, the Polish prime minister said in an interview with Canadian television.

* Ukraine imposed sanctions on 182 Russian and Belarusian companies, and three individuals, in the latest of a series of steps by Zelenskiy to block their links to his country.

* On a trip to Turkey and the Middle East this week, the U.S. Treasury Department’s top sanctions official will warn countries and businesses that they could lose U.S. market access if they do business with entities subject to U.S. curbs as Washington cracks down on Russian attempts to evade sanctions.

Related Galleries:

Rumours about Oleksiy Reznikov’s future have been circulating for days but he reiterated during a press conference today that the final decision lay with President Zelensky.

Russia’s defence ministry accused Ukraine of preparing to blow up buildings in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk and then accuse Moscow of carrying out war crimes and targeting civilians in a false flag operation.

The defence ministry provided no evidence for the claims, which it outlined in a post shared on social media on Sunday, saying that the alleged attacks would be used by Kyiv to push for Western governments to increase weapons supplies to the country.

Reuters was unable to immediately verify the battlefield claims of either side.

A Russian missile killed at least three when it struck a residential building in the city of Kramatorsk on Thursday, police in Ukraine said. Russia has not publicly commented on that strike.

Moscow has denied targeting civilians throughout what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Kyiv and Western governments say hundreds of civilians have been killed in Russian missile strikes on residential sites across Ukraine since Moscow’s forces invaded last February.

On Sunday, Russia’s defence ministry said Kyiv planned to detonate three medical buildings – dispensaries and a hospital – and “accuse Russia of an allegedly ‘deliberate attack’ on civilian objects”.

“The bombing of the medical institutions will be presented as another ‘atrocity’ of Russian troops, requiring a response from the world community and accelerating the supply of long-range missiles to Kyiv (to be used) for strikes on Russian territory,” the defence ministry said.

There was no immediate response from Kyiv to the claims.

---

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine expects a possible major Russian offensive this month, but Kyiv has the reserves to hold back Moscow’s forces even though the latest Western military supplies will not all arrive in time, Ukraine’s defence minister said on Sunday.

Russia could launch the new attack for “symbolic” reasons around the first anniversary of its invasion, but its resources are not ready from a military point of view, the minister, Oleksii Reznikov, told a news conference.

“Despite everything, we expect a possible Russian offensive in February. This is only from the point of view of symbolism; it’s not logical from a military view. Because not all of their resources are ready. But they’re doing it anyway,” he said.

Russian forces have been making incremental advances in the east as Moscow tries to capture the embattled city of Bakhmut and revive its faltering invasion after a string of battlefield setbacks in the second half of last year.

Reznikov said the offensive would likely be launched in the east – where Russia is trying to capture all the heavily-industrialised Donbas region – or the south where it wants to widen its land corridor to the occupied peninsula of Crimea.

He estimated that Russia had 12,000 troops in Belarusian military bases, a number that would not be enough to launch a significant attack from Belarus into Ukraine’s north, reopening a new front.

The United States and other Western governments have pledged billions of dollars in new military assistance including tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to help Ukraine withstand a new attack as well as to help Kyiv launch a counteroffensive.

“Not all of the Western weaponry will arrive in time. But we are ready. We have created our resources and reserves, which we are able to deploy and with which we are able to hold back the attack,” Reznikov said.

JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Pope Francis made a final appeal for peace in South Sudan on Sunday as he celebrated Mass before tens of thousands of people to close out an unusual mission by Christian religious leaders to nudge forward the country’s recovery from civil war.

On the last day of his African pilgrimage, Francis begged South Sudanese people to lay down their weapons and forgive one another, presiding over Mass at the country’s monument to independence hero John Garang before an estimated 100,000 people, including the country’s political leadership.

“Even if our hearts bleed for the wrongs we have suffered, let us refuse, once and for all, to repay evil with evil,” Francis said. “Let us accept one another and love one another with sincerity and generosity, as God loves us.”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

His message aimed to revive hopes in the world’s youngest country, which gained independence from the majority Muslim Sudan in 2011 but has been beset by civil war and conflict.

Read more: The World Has Forgotten About the Conflict in South Sudan. Enter Pope Francis

President Salva Kiir, his longtime rival Riek Machar and other opposition groups signed a peace agreement in 2018, but the deal’s provisions, including the formation of a national unified army, remain largely unimplemented and fighting has continued to flare.

“We have suffered a lot,” said Natalima Andrea, a 66-year-old mother of seven who wiped a tear from her eye as she waited for Francis’ Mass to begin. “We need a permanent peace now and I hope these prayers would yield to lasting peace.”

The Vatican said more than 100,000 people attended the service, filling the field of the Garang Mausoleum and surrounding roads.

In a bid to spur the process along, Francis was joined on the novel ecumenical peace mission by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the moderator of the Church of Scotland, the Rt. Rev. Iain Greenshields. The aim of the Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian leaders was to push Kiir and Machar to recommit themselves to the 2018 deal.

Welby and Greenshields joined Francis on the altar at Mass on Sunday and were to accompany him on the flight back to Rome.

The three also aimed to put a global spotlight on the plight of the country, oil-rich and yet one of the world’s poorest, where humanitarian needs are soaring for the 2 million people who have been displaced by continued clashes and years of above-average flooding. Watchdogs’ allegations of corruption are also widespread; some South Sudanese upon the pope’s arrival noted that his modest vehicle was overshadowed by local officials’ luxury ones.

During the three-day visit, Francis, Welby and Greenshields sought to draw attention to the plight of South Sudan’s most vulnerable people, the women and children who have borne the brunt of displacement and make up the majority of people living in temporary camps.

They raised in particular the plight of women in a country where sexual violence is rampant, child brides are common and the maternal mortality rate is the highest in the world.

Read more: The Pope Francis Statement That Changed the Church on LGBT Issues

“If we look at South Sudan, I would just use one word: South Sudan is a patriarchal country,” said Elizabeth Nyibol Malou, a lecturer in economics at the Catholic University of South Sudan. Citing cultural norms in which wealth is passed down to male heirs and women are married young for dowries, she said it is a constant struggle to keep girls in school.

Women in South Sudan, she said, “are tired. They are struggling. They are frustrated, and they’re stuck.”

Edmund Yakani, executive director of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, said the visit of the three leaders was an important push to the peace process.

He called it a “critical exposure of our political leaders towards their personal responsibility for making peace and stability prevail in the country.”

___

Trisha Thomas contributed.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

The Arctic air that descended on the Northeast on Saturday brought dangerously cold sub-zero temperatures and wind chills to the region, including a record-setting wind chill of minus 108 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 78 C) on the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire.

Temperatures got so low that authorities in Massachusetts took the unusual step of keeping the South Station transit hub open overnight so homeless people had a safe place to sleep. Several cities in the Northeast set or tied record low temperatures for the date, while the high winds brought down a tree branch on a car in western Massachusetts killing an infant.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“I can’t remember it being this cold, not since 2015,” said Gin Koo, 36, wrapped up in three shirts and a down jacket, as well as a hat and a hood, as he walked his Boston terrier, Bee, in Boston on Saturday morning. Even Bee, wrapped in a doggie coat, shivered. “I wouldn’t go out if I didn’t have to.”

Paul Butler, 45, who has been homeless since he was evicted in December 2021, took shelter in South Station.

“This is the coldest I ever, ever remember, and I worked the door at a bunch of clubs for 15 years,” said the former Marine.

The Arctic air reached the region just as a rapid cyclogenesis developed over Labrador and Newfoundland, churning up powerful winds, meteorologist Donald Dumont at the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine, said Friday, explaining the temperature plunge.

A cyclogenesis refers to an intensification of a cyclone or low-pressure storm system.

Read more: ‘Bomb Cyclone’ and Other Weird Weather Words for Our Climate Change Era

The Mount Washington Observatory at the peak of the Northeast’s highest mountain, famous for its extreme weather conditions, also recorded an actual temperature of minus 47 (minus 44 C), tying an observatory record set in 1934 and a wind gust of 127 mph (204 kmh).

Across the rest of the region, wind chills — the combined effect of wind and cold air on exposed skin — dropped to as low as minus 45 to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 43 to minus 45 C), the National Weather Service reported.

The current method to measure wind chill has been used since 2001.

In Southwick, Massachusetts on Friday the winds brought a tree branch down on a vehicle driven by a 23-year-old Winsted, Connecticut woman, according to the Hampden district attorney’s office. The driver was taken to the hospital with serious injuries, but the infant died, authorities said.

Boston’s Pine Street Inn, the largest provider of homeless services in New England, ramped up outreach to those on the streets, doubling the number of vehicles that could transport people to shelters and opening their lobby to provide extra space.

“On a night like last night, the biggest concern is the people who have compromised judgment,” President and CEO Lyndia Downie said Saturday of people who have substance use disorder or mental illness. “On these cold nights, they are not thinking at 100% of their capacity. Those are the people we are most worried about.”

Read more: Cold Weather Can Be Dangerous for the Human Body. This Winter Worries Experts

The emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital treated several people for hypothermia overnight and a couple were admitted for frostbite.

“The reason that people unfortunately end up with severe frostbite in most cases is just because they don’t have anywhere warm and safe to go,” said Dr. Ali Raja, deputy chair of the emergency department.

Boston; Providence, Rhode Island; Hartford, Connecticut; Worcester, Massachusetts; Albany, New York; and Glens Falls, New York set or matched record low temperatures for Feb. 4, according to the National Weather Service.

The cold curtailed some traditional winter activities. Organizers of an annual ice castle attraction in North Woodstock, New Hampshire shortened the evening visitor schedule for Saturday night.

Erin Trotta of Massachusetts, who had already booked a visit still planned to go, but was taking extra steps to stay warm.

“We are prepared to take on the polar vortex ice castles. … Snow pants, thick winter coats, hand and foot warmers, face masks, the kind where only your eyes are exposed, and good gloves and winter boots. Plan to drink some hot cocoa to keep warm.”

In New York’s Adirondack Mountains, Old Forge recorded a temperature early Saturday of minus 36 degrees (minus 38 C) degrees. Temperatures plunged into the negative teens in dozens of other cities and towns.

Mackenzie Glasser, owner of Ozzie’s Coffee Bar in Old Forge, said frigid temperatures are just part of living in the Adirondacks.

“I even had customers for the first hour that I was open, and I wasn’t expecting that at 7 a.m. So I don’t think it’s keeping too many people away,” she said.

The good news is that the cold air is expected to move out of much of the region by Sunday, when temperatures could rise to the 40s.

___

Michael Hill in Albany, New York, Michael Casey in Boston, and Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire contributed to this story.

In 2023, TIME will once again recognize 100 businesses making an extraordinary impact around the world. Applications for the TIME100 Most Influential Companies of 2023 are open, now through March 1, 2023. Apply here.

(To receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and business decisionmakers, click here.)

Somehow, Mira Murati can forthrightly discuss the dangers of AI while making you feel like it’s all going to be OK.

Murati is chief technology officer at OpenAI, leading the teams behind DALL-E, which uses AI to create artwork based on prompts, and ChatGPT, the wildly popular AI chatbot that can answer complex questions with eerily humanlike skill.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

ChatGPT captured the public imagination upon its release in late November. While some schools are banning it, Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment in the company and Google issued a “code red,” fretting that the technology could disrupt its search business. “As with other revolutions that we’ve gone through, there will be new jobs and some jobs will be lost…” Murati told Trevor Noah last fall of the impact of AI, “but I’m optimistic.”

For most of January, ChatGPT surpassed Bitcoin among popular search terms, according to Google Trends. All the attention has meant the privately held San Francisco–based startup—with 375 employees and little in the way of revenue—now has a valuation of roughly $30 billion. Murati spoke to TIME about ChatGPT’s biggest weakness, the software’s untapped potential, and why it’s time to move toward regulating AI.

First, I want to congratulate you and your team on the recent news that ChatGPT scored a passing grade on a U.S. medical-licensing exam, a Wharton Business School MBA exam, and four major university law-school exams. Does it feel like you have a brilliant child?

We weren’t anticipating this level of excitement from putting our child in the world. We, in fact, even had some trepidation about putting it out there. I’m curious to see the areas where it’ll start generating utility for people and not just novelty and pure curiosity.

I asked ChatGPT for a good question to ask you. Here’s what it said: “What are some of the limitations or challenges you have encountered while working with ChatGPT and how have you overcome them?”

That is a good question. ChatGPT is essentially a large conversational model—a big neural net that’s been trained to predict the next word—and the challenges with it are similar challenges we see with the base large language models: it may make up facts.

In a very confident way too!

Yes. This is actually a core challenge. We picked dialogue specifically because dialogue is a way to interact with a model and give it feedback. If we think that the answer of the model is incorrect, we can say, “Are you sure? I think actually…” And then the model has an opportunity to go back and forth with you, similar to how we would converse with another human.

(For coverage of the future of work, visit TIME.com/charter and sign up for the free Charter newsletter.)

Truly groundbreaking technologies solve a problem. What problem is ChatGPT solving?

Right now, it’s in the research review stage, so I don’t want to speak with high confidence on what problems it is solving. But I think that we can see that it has the potential to really revolutionize the way we learn. People are in classrooms of, say, 30 people. Everyone has different backgrounds, ways of learning, and everyone is getting basically the same curriculum. With tools like ChatGPT, you can endlessly converse with a model to understand a concept in a way that is catered to your level of understanding. It has immense potential to help us with personalized education.

But some schools are banning ChatGPT. Does this surprise you?

When we’re developing these technologies, we’re really pushing toward general intelligence, general capabilities with high reliability—and doing so safely. But when you open it up to as many people as possible with different backgrounds and domain expertise, you’ll definitely get surprised by the kinds of things that they do with the technology, both on the positive front and on the negative front.

A growing number of leaders in the field are warning of the dangers of AI. Do you have any misgivings about the technology?

This is a unique moment in time where we do have agency in how it shapes society. And it goes both ways: the technology shapes us and we shape it. There are a lot of hard problems to figure out. How do you get the model to do the thing that you want it to do, and how you make sure it’s aligned with human intention and ultimately in service of humanity? There are also a ton of questions around societal impact, and there are a lot of ethical and philosophical questions that we need to consider. And it’s important that we bring in different voices, like philosophers, social scientists, artists, and people from the humanities.

What’s the key ethical or philosophical question that we still need to figure out?

[AI] can be misused, or it can be used by bad actors. So, then there are questions about how you govern the use of this technology globally. How do you govern the use of AI in a way that’s aligned with human values?

Do you think these questions should be left to companies like yours, or should governments get involved in creating regulations?

It’s important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that’s controlled and responsible. But we’re a small group of people and we need a ton more input in this system and a lot more input that goes beyond the technologies-—definitely regulators and governments and everyone else.

There’s always a fear that government involvement can slow innovation. You don’t think it’s too early for policymakers and regulators to get involved?

It’s not too early. It’s very important for everyone to start getting involved, given the impact these technologies are going to have.

Mira, can you give me one song or album, one book, and one movie that gives us some insight into who you are and what inspires you?

• Song: Paranoid Android by Radiohead The song is layered and touches on themes related to society on technology. Not most uplifting but beautiful and thought provoking.

• Book: Duino Elegies, a collection of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. I recently received this as a gift and found the depth and beauty of the poems very inspiring.
• Movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey continues to stir my imagination with its imagery and music, especially in the breathtaking sequence where the space shuttle docks accompanied by the waltz of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz, inciting contemplation of the weightlessness of this event and the magnificence of the moment.

This economy—with its mass layoffs, rising prices and higher interest rates—is tough to navigate. TIME’s new advice column, Money Questions, is here to guide you, with expert-backed answers to your most urgent personal finance questions. What’s the best way to prepare for a recession? How will the new student loan plan affect your debt? Is it better to buy or rent a home right now? Our reporters consult with experts who can offer actionable guidance. Share your questions at moneyquestions@time.com.