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Middle East crisis live: Trump suggests countries in region should sign Abraham accords recognising Israel under any deal

A regional diplomat has told Al Jazeera, “The focus of the [Iranian] delegation’s visit to Doha is on issues relating to the strait of Hormuz and highly enriched uranium.” “The governor of the [Iranian] central bank is part of the delegation to discuss the issue of frozen funds, which is addressed in the [memorandum of understanding] as part of an eventual final deal,” they added. Reuters hears the same, citing an official briefed on the visit. As we’ve been reporting, Iran’s top negotiator and its foreign minister have been in Doha for talks with Qatar’s prime minister on a potential deal with the US to end the war, after Washington and Tehran played down hopes for an imminent breakthrough. US secretary of state Marco Rubio told reporters in New Delhi earlier that the US would give diplomacy every chance to succeed before considering whether to deal with Iran in “another way”. There was a “pretty solid thing on the table in terms of their ability to open up the strait, get the strait open, enter into a very real, significant, time-limited negotiation on the nuclear matter, and hopefully we can pull it off,” he said. In a lengthy post on Truth Social earlier on Monday, Donald Trump said talks with Iran were going “nicely“, but again warned of fresh attacks if they failed. It “will only be a Great Deal for all, or no Deal at all”, he wrote. Reuters reports that Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said in a briefing that conclusions had been reached on many topics but that did not mean the sides were close to agreement. He said earlier that nuclear issues would only be negotiated on if the framework accord is agreed first.

Spread of Ebola in DRC ‘outpacing’ response efforts, warns WHO

The World Health Organization has warned that the Ebola outbreak is outpacing response efforts and countries neighbouring the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are at high risk from the disease. “We are urgently scaling up operations, but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us,” said the WHO’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as he urged neighbouring countries to take immediate action. Addressing an online meeting of the African Union about the outbreak, he also announced there had been 220 suspected deaths so far in the current Ebola outbreak and that he would travel to the DRC on Tuesday with Chikwe Ihekweazu, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies programme. Tedros’s announcement came as attacks by residents on health facilities in Ituri province, the centre of the outbreak, hampered the response. First on Saturday and again on Sunday, residents of Mongbwalu town in the DRC attacked the Mongbwalu general referral hospital. Dr Richard Lokodu, medical director of the facility, told Reuters that 18 Ebola patients had fled on Saturday after “unidentified individuals” burned tents, erected by Médecins Sans Frontières, where patients were being isolated. The hospital came under four waves of attacks on Sunday, he added, by young people mobilised by relatives of a religious leader who died of Ebola. Seven other patients escaped and Congolese police and soldiers had to intervene to restore order. A suspected patient who was in critical condition with haemorrhaging died in the second attack while trying to flee from his bed. The perpetrators of the attacks had wanted the bodies of the Ebola victims released for burial, Lokodu added. In a similar incident, a crowd on Thursday set fire to a treatment centre in Rwampara, near Bunia, after authorities refused to give them the body of a victim they wanted to bury themselves. The burial of bodies, which can be highly contagious, is handled by authorities for containment of the disease, but some families prefer traditional burials, which involve washing and touching the body. In previous outbreaks that has been proved to be a key driver of the spread of the disease. Earlier this month, Tedros declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern” after more than 300 suspected cases and 88 deaths were reported in the DRC and two deaths in neighbouring Uganda. On Monday, Uganda announced two more Ebola cases, taking the total number of confirmed cases in the country to seven. The new cases are both Ugandan health workers in a private health facility in the capital, Kampala, the country’s health ministry said in a statement. The outbreak is caused by the rare Bundibugyo ebolavirus, which has no approved treatment or vaccine. The hotspots are Rwampara, Mongbwalu, Nyankunde and Bunia areas in the north-east DRC province of Ituri, a commercial and migration hub and a gold-rich region where conflict between militias allied to the Hema and the Lendu ethnic groups, who are fighting over land and the mineral, has killed more than 50,000 people since 1999. Cases have also been reported in Butembo and rebel-controlled Goma, both in North Kivu province, and Bukavu city, also rebel-held, in South Kivu province. On Monday, Tedros said containing the outbreak was complicated by Ituri and North Kivu being insecure and the lack of an approved vaccine. Reuters contributed to this report

Iran denies deal with US is imminent despite some progress

Iran has poured cold water on suggestions that a deal with the US is imminent, pointing to the confusion in US positions and Israeli interference as key factors in why a complete agreement is proving difficult to secure. Speaking at the weekly foreign ministry press briefing, Esmail Baghaei, the spokesperson for Iran’s negotiating team, also said future management of the strait of Hormuz was a matter for Oman and Iran to reach agreement on, and that it was not tolls that were being proposed but “fees for navigational services”. Referring to the state of the talks, Baghaei said: “It is correct to say that we have reached a conclusion on a large portion of the issues under discussion. But to say that this means the signing of an agreement is imminent – no one can make such a claim.” He also insisted that a ceasefire in Lebanon had to be included in the memorandum of understanding that would lead to Iran allowing commercial shipping through the strait, and the US lifting its blockade of Iran’s ports. By contrast, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, still held out hope that a deal could be reached on Monday, but there appeared to be a mounting list of unresolved problems in what was intended to be a roadmap to reopening the nuclear talks that Trump abandoned in February in favour of war. Rubio said it took time to receive an answer from the Iranian political system but he emphasised: “Either we will have a good deal or we will deal with this issue in another way, and we prefer to have a good deal.” The US president, Donald Trump, said in a post on Truth Social on Monday that the deal would either be “great and meaningful, or there will be no deal at all”. Trump added that he had asked countries including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey to join the Abraham accords en masse to normalise relations with Israel. He said he spoke on Saturday to the leaders of those countries, as well as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which have already signed the accords, a set of agreements to normalise relations with Israel. “I am mandatorily requesting that all Countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords, and that, if Iran signs its Agreement with me, as President of the United States of America, it would be an Honor to have them also be part of this unparalleled World Coalition,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. He cited “all the work done by the United States to try and pull this very complex puzzle together”. Barbara Leaf, a former US assistant secretary for near east affairs, said: “Suffice to say there are no takers among those who are not part of the Abraham accords to join that agreement. You are not going to get Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to do that. Absolutely not.” She said the proposal had been greeted with “stunned silence” when Trump put it to the regional leaders by phone at the weekend. The Israeli opposition leader, Yair Lapid, suggested the Abraham accords plan would not make the emerging deal any more palatable to Israel, describing the deal as disturbing and bad for the region. He said the Israeli government was at “an all-time low in its ability to influence decisions in Washington”. In his press briefing, Baghaei also said no nuclear issues, such as what to do with the Iranian stockpile of highly enriched uranium, would be tackled in the memorandum except for a commitment to negotiate in the next 60 days. Trump, under mounting pressure from critics inside the Republican party, wants the memorandum to contain a commitment by Iran to dispose of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, even if the precise method is not detailed. In previous rounds of talks with the US, Iran has said it is willing to down-blend the enriched uranium, but it will not permit the transfer of the stockpile to either the US or Russia. It has spoken of suspending domestic enrichment for as long as five years, but not the 20 years sought by the US. Iranian officials also claimed the political outcry about the deal inside the US was placing pressure on Trump to backtrack on plans to release as much as $12bn (£9bb) in frozen Iranian assets held in Qatar. The governor of Iran’s central bank, Abdolnaser Hemmati, travelled to Qatar on Monday. The release of the assets is a central Iranian demand, but has painful parallels for Trump, who lambasted Barack Obama for giving $1.7bn to Iran in cash at the time of the 2015 nuclear deal. Baghaei, referring to the chaos in Washington, said: “You are faced with a wave of dismissals, contradictory statements, opposition from Congress and also opposition from parts of public opinion.” Trump by contrast has dismissed his critics, saying he would not “listen to losers who are critical of something they know nothing about”. The deal contains nothing on Iran’s ballistic missiles or support for its regional proxy groups; as such, it contrasts with Trump’s promise that the war would end with Iran’s complete surrender. Baghaei accused Israel of trying to scupper the deal, saying nothing else should be expected of the Israelis. On the strait of Hormuz, Baghaei said talks were held on Monday between Omani and Iranian officials. He claimed the reason Oman and Iran were trying to establish a reliable and effective mechanism to ensure safe passage in the strait was precisely because “we believe in the use of this international waterway for free trade and safe navigation”. Rejecting claims the Iranian plan amounted to nationalisation of an open waterway, he said that if “navigation services are provided, plus necessary measures to protect the environment of the strait, these require the collection of fees. The term tolls should not be used. We do not charge tolls. I think we should be careful in the choice of words.” European and Gulf states are likely to see this as a distinction without a differences, especially if commercial shipping is in effect required to seek Iran’s navigational services. Inside Iran, many commentators saw the imminent deal as a roadmap to a hostile coexistence aimed at managing the tension, rather than ending it. The sense that the war for now may be reaching its endgame was underlined by reports that Iran’s officials would reconnect Iran to the international internet within a week after a vote by the supreme national security council. Iranian officials, facing soaring inflation of food prices, are nervous about the public reaction once internet controls are lifted. The spate of executions inside Iran continues unabated.

Far-right Elam party inspired by Golden Dawn makes gains in Cyprus election

An anti-immigrant far-right party, inspired by Greece’s defunct neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, made the biggest gains in Sunday’s parliamentary election in Cyprus. Elam, the Greek National People’s Front, which has pushed for the closure of checkpoints on the ethnically split island and is vociferously anti-Turkish, doubled its seats in the 56-member legislature after securing 10.9 % of the vote. “We can say that Elam is the sole winner of Sunday’s election, with a clear victory that gives it an increased say in passing legislation,” the island’s predominant electoral expert Christoforos Christoforou told the Guardian. “It fulfilled its strategic aim of doubling its seats from four to eight and becoming parliament’s third biggest force, displacing Diko [the centrist Democratic party], which had held that position for decades.” In results that will profoundly reshape the political landscape of the EU’s easternmost state, a new party of anti-corruption campaigners and social media influencers also won seats. By contrast, centrist groups, including the veteran leftwing EDEK, which had endorsed the candidacy of the president, Nikos Christodoulides, as an independent in 2023, failed to cross the threshold to enter the house, a historic defeat that could further enhance the influence of Elam. Parliamentary elections have long been seen as a litmus test of voter intentions for the presidency, the seat of executive power in Cyprus. Ahead of the poll, mainstream parties were predicted to be hammered by the anti-systemic protest groups that have appeared amid disillusionment with traditional party politics and an elite tainted by scandal. But while the newly formed anti-corruption Alma and the Direct Democracy Cyprus group of MEP and former YouTuber Fidias Panayiotou made it into parliament for the first time, the establishment parties defied the projections and held their ground. Polling data released by the interior ministry showed the rightwing Disy and communist Akel parties winning 27.2% and 23.8 % of the vote respectively, a small decline for Disy and a 1.4% increase for Akel, with neither party losing a single seat. The showing was interpreted on Monday as a victory for Disy, which aside from emerging as the frontrunner in the poll will be encouraged to field its own candidate when presidential elections are next held in 2028. Christodoulides was a prominent Disy cadre before he broke ranks to run for the presidency. The 52-year-old had hoped he would win its backing when, as is widely expected, he runs for the post a second time. “If Disy doesn’t support Christodoulides’ candidacy, his only chance for re-election, formally or informally, is Elam,” said Prof Hubert Faustmann, who teaches history and political science at the University of Nicosia. “Elam has increased its political significance and he is structurally more dependent on them now … he will have to cater to them.” Christodoulides has long been accused of flirting with Elam, formed initially as an offshoot of Golden Dawn by hardliners who have never renounced the party’s racist ideology. Ministers with sympathetic views have been appointed to his cabinet, with his government priding itself on its tough stance on immigration. Concerns are such that Manfred Weber, who heads the centre-right European People’s party (EPP) in the European parliament, reportedly warned the Cypriot president last month against deepening his ties with the extremists. Weber was quoted in Politis, the well-informed Greek-language daily national newspaper, as telling Christodoulides it would be “impossible for him to continue to be accepted within the European centre-right” if Elam continued to be viewed as his “closest interlocutor”. Unlike Golden Dawn, whose leaders were handed lengthy prison terms for using the organisation to operate a criminal gang that sowed terror on the streets of Greece, Elam has eschewed political violence. “Its mindset is similar to xenophobic, rightwing parties elsewhere, but it is not known for the sort of violence associated with similar groups in Europe,” said Faustmann. “They’re kindergarten fascists.” Christodoulides, whose country currently chairs the EU presidency, has neither openly addressed the issue of an alliance with Elam nor publicly responded to the speculation that reputedly drove Weber to intervene. “The fact is he has never denied or rejected the idea of cooperating with Elam,” said Christoforou, the political analyst. “And on critical issues like migration he has shown he won’t hesitate to take decisions that challenge political correctness. I don’t exclude the possibility that he will openly collaborate with them even if it is his image that has always been his top priority.”

Record May highs sweep across France as extreme heat hits western Europe

More than 20 towns in France have recorded their highest ever May temperatures and the UK set a national heat record amid an extreme early-summer heat event that could see the mercury climb to 40C in parts of Spain by the end of the week. The UK’s Met Office said the country’s all-time record for May was broken when a temperature of 33.5C was recorded at Heathrow near London, with highs of up to 35C expected later on Monday and on Tuesday. Hundreds more May records are likely to be set in France, Spain and the UK, forecasters said, with temperatures exceeding norms by 12 or 13 degrees in what Météo France described as a “premature, remarkable and long” heat episode expected to last several more days. France’s national weather agency said the record temperatures were caused by a heat dome, with hot air from Morocco trapped under an area of high pressure, adding that Europe could expect such events “more and more often, more and more intense, and earlier and earlier”. Models have already estimated that, with the effects of climate breakdown, June heatwaves are now about 10 times more likely in Europe than they were in the preindustrial era, and the same trajectory is becoming visible for May. “This extension of the heatwave season is entirely characteristic of the effects of climate change,” Robert Vautard, a climate researcher, told Agence France-Presse. “Eventually, we will be seeing similar heat events in April and October.” Thirty-one French départements have been placed on high-temperature alert until Tuesday, including eight on level orange, the second-highest, requiring residents to “take precautions”. It was first time the country’s national heat warning system has been activated during May since it was introduced in 2004. Météo France said in a bulletin on Monday that temperatures could climb locally to 36C. “Towns in the west of the country are likely to see temperatures several degrees higher than ever recorded in May,” it said. Among France’s larger cities, Paris hit 32.6C on Sunday and is expected to reach 33C on Monday, while Bordeaux sweltered in 34.2C. The south-western town of Brive-la-Gaillarde registered 35.3C, nearly two degrees hotter than its previous May record. A man died during a 10km running race in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Alfort on Sunday, civil defence services said, reportedly after suffering a heart attack, while 10 more runners had to be taken to hospital in critical condition after the race. Previous May highs were exceeded locally on Sunday all along France’s Atlantic coast at weather stations including St-Nazaire, where 31.8C was recorded on Sunday, Noirmoutier (31.3C) and Brest in Brittany (29C), the national weather agency said. The hot spell in Spain – where temperatures in some southern areas hit 38C over the weekend, between 5C and 10C higher than normal – is also expected to continue through the week, said Rubén del Campo of the state meteorological office Aemet. “The other really notable thing is that the situation is going to last until at least the end of the week. In fact, it could get even hotter on Thursday and Friday, with temperatures of at least 34C across most of the country,” del Campo said. Widespread highs of 36-38C in the Guadiana, Guadalquivir and Ebro valleys are expected between Wednesday and Friday, he added, saying that “in some of those areas, temperatures could reach 40C”. Del Campo also said much of the country could expect so-called “tropical nights”, in which the night-time temperature does not drop below 20C. Parts of the UK could enter a heatwave, with temperatures exceeding 26C to 28C – depending on the location – for three days. In France, night-time temperatures must also stay above a certain level for an official heatwave to be declared.

Shock of Iran war unites Middle East rivals in pushing Trump towards peace

The shock of the Iran war and its fallout has driven rivals in the Middle East to get behind a peace deal, pushing the Trump administration to accept a tentative agreement in the face of furious opposition from Israel and its supporters in Washington. The diplomatic efforts come as the region is reshaping to adapt to diminished US power after Washington’s inability to land a knockout blow on Iran, force the opening of the strait of Hormuz or safeguard its Gulf allies. Tehran has few friends in the region, but the regime’s survival has meant that its neighbours have had to find an accommodation. Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at Kings College London, said the Gulf was shocked at the degree to which Washington protected Israel first against Iranian drones and missiles, despite the trillions of dollars of Gulf investment pouring into the US. “We’re probably seeing the final days of American empire in the Middle East,” he said. “Across the Gulf, there is complete disillusionment with American influence and the ability of America to lead.” The provisional deal was agreed at the end of last week after Pakistani and Qatari officials travelled to Iran in a final push for an outline agreement between Tehran and Washington. In a call with Trump on Saturday, leaders from a group of eight Muslim-majority nations urged him to accept a deal that would end the war, reopen the strait of Hormuz, and relaunch negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme. The same countries lost the argument in Washington to the Benjamin Netanyahu before the war, but now they have managed to outweigh the Israeli prime minister – who spoke to Trump on the same day – with the US president declaring that the deal was “largely negotiated”. Trump said last week that Netanyahu “will do whatever I tell him to do” on Iran. An analysis piece published on Monday in the Times of Israel was headlined: “Israel began the Iran war as a partner of the US — and is ending it on the sidelines”. The United Arab Emirates, which had reportedly urged fellow Gulf countries to join the war against Iran and carried out its own airstrikes, swung behind the peace deal alongside Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt. The regional consensus-building process appeared to repair some of the bitter rivalry for influence between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, with several phone calls between their rulers taking place in recent weeks. The fallout from the war leaves little prospect of more countries joining Trump’s signature Abraham accords to establish better relations between Israel and several Arab states, despite his demand on Monday that all the countries involved in the peace negotiations should do so. When Trump used the conference call on Saturday to urge more countries to sign up, he was reportedly met with silence. Islamabad, which led the mediation efforts, has said that disunity in the Muslim world only plays into the hands of Israel. Masood Khan, a former Pakistani ambassador to the US, said Islamabad’s success had been bringing other countries into the peace process. Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar worked their own channels in support of the effort. “Pakistan could not have taken a solo flight,” he said. “It needed to cover its flanks to make its mediation much more credible.” The US presence in the Middle East, spread across more than a dozen bases, is expected to remain. But countries are reaching out to additional security partners in the region and beyond, with Europe set to take a bigger role. During the war, Pakistan sent troops and fighter jets to defend Saudi Arabia, while Egyptian soldiers and planes were stationed in the UAE, Cairo’s biggest financial backer. There is also talk of striking non-aggression agreements with Iran. Abdul Khaleq Abdullah, a political science professor in the UAE, said his country had wanted to see Iran with no missiles and drones, no proxies and no nuclear activity, but that ultimately proved unattainable. “The UAE is a very pragmatic country,” he said. “Iran remains a big menace, but it is no longer the imperial Iran that we’ve seen over the last 20 years.” He said a new Middle East was emerging with Turkey, Israel and the Gulf states competing to fill the vacuum left by a weakened Tehran. One emerging axis centres on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which signed a mutual defence pact last year. There have been talks to bring Turkey, Qatar and Egypt into that arrangement, which has been called a “Muslim Nato”. On the other side is an alliance between the UAE, India, Israel and the US, known as the I2U2 group. HA Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank in London, said the region had calculated that regime change in Tehran was too risky because it could bring a collapse of the state and chaos, something that only Israel wanted. It had also become clear to Trump that the war would not deliver what he wanted, so the region did not so much persuade him to accept a deal as allowed him to say that he had overwhelming regional support, he said. “This is no longer a defence architecture built solely around the United States. Gulf states are increasingly preparing for the possibility that Washington may not be there when they need it most,” Hellyer said.

Thai rescuers join effort to free seven people trapped in Laos cave

Divers who helped in the dramatic rescue of a young Thai football team in 2018 have joined efforts to free seven people who have been trapped for five days inside a remote, flooded cave in central Laos. The group entered the cave in Xaysomboun province on Wednesday to hunt for wildlife and search for gold, reports suggest. Heavy rain led to landslides, which blocked the cave entrance. Laos’s communist government, which tightly controls the country’s media, could not be reached for comment. Footage released by Thai volunteer rescue groups who have travelled to the site showed personnel crawling and climbing through dark, narrow passageways, parts of which were almost completely inundated with muddy waters. Rescuers said a tunnel leading into the cave was only 60cm tall. Experts outside the cave were focused on pumping water out of the passageways, while those inside were fitting rope for rescuers to follow, said Kengkard Bongkawong, the head of operations for Metta Tham Rescue, a Thai rescue group. “The route is not complicated but the problem is the space. It’s so narrow that we have to crawl and tilt to pass through; also the rocks are really sharp,” Kengkard said. He said rescuers had not received any signs of life but he believed the men were still alive, as a survivor who managed to escape had informed them of a location deeper inside the cave that was above water level. “I’m confident that they are still alive because there is still air in the cave,” said Kengkard, who was part of the diving team in the Tham Luang cave rescue, when 12 young footballers and their coach were brought to safety after more than two weeks in a flooded cave in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province. Rescuers managed to reach a location 40 metres away from the area where they suspected the group may be sheltering but were unable to continue on Sunday night as persistent rains had brought sediment into the passageways, blocking access. Kengkard said: “The gap is only 50cm wide, it’s really small, so we need to clear out the sediment from this spot first. The gap is quite low to crawl through, and we have to tilt to at a 45 degree angle.” Mikko Paasi, a Finnish diver who also worked on the Tham Luang rescue, and Norrased Palasing, a Thai diver, joined rescue workers in Laos on Monday. Rescuers had stayed overnight at the site because reaching the cave complex involved a 5km hike up mountainous terrain, said Jakkrit Taengtang, a Thai rescue technician with the Saithan Saphanboon Foundation, in a Facebook update on Sunday. “The difficulty of this operation depends on the rain … We had to retreat earlier because of the water level rising in the cave,” Jakkrit said. It is not clear if the trapped group were searching for gold ore as part of small-scale artisanal activity or were working for a mining company. Alluvial mining, which includes mining for valuable minerals such as gold, diamonds, and platinum, has boomed in Laos over recent years, with research by the Stimson Center, a US thinktank, suggesting almost 200 such mines opened between 2023 and 2025. Last year the government announced a ban on any new permits for alluvial gold mining due to environmental concerns.

Pope Leo denounces ‘culture of power’ driving rise of AI

Pope Leo has denounced the “culture of power” driving the rapid rise of artificial intelligence while warning that the technology must be subject to the “most rigorous” ethical constraints as it infiltrates everything from work to war. In his encyclical – the first major text on safeguarding humankind of his papacy – he also apologised for the Catholic church’s long delay in condemning slavery, describing it as “a wound in Christian memory”, and spoke of the “new forms of slavery” due to the digital economy. In a break from tradition, Leo, who soon after being elected in May last year said he considered AI to be the biggest threat to humanity today, presented the document himself on Monday during an event at the Vatican. Among those in attendance was Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a US-based AI firm thatis embroiled in a lawsuit with Donald Trump’s administration over the ethics of AI. Encyclicals are one of the highest forms of teaching from a pope to the Catholic church’s 1.4 billion members, and typically outline his priorities while highlighting the major issues in society. In the document, called Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), Leo, who was born in Chicago and is the first US-born pope, referred to “a troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics” and said AI was helping to facilitate the “normalisation of war”. “For this reason, the development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms,” he wrote. Leo urged the “disarming” of AI, while stating that some autonomous weapons systems are “practically beyond any human reach” to control. “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition,” he wrote. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” adding that the technology should be “human-friendly”, accessible to all and opened to discussion and debate. In a passage that appeared to be targeted at Silicon Valley, the pope warned that power over digital systems, infrastructure and data “does not rest with states but with major economic and technological actors”, and that when such power was concentrated “in the hands of the few” it tended to “become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities”. Olah said on Monday that the development of AI cannot be left solely to technology companies, urging greater oversight from religious leaders, governments and civil society. Olah, who was sitting alongside the pope, said there was “a real possibility” that AI would displace human labour “at very large scale”. “If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions,” he said. Companies like his operated “inside a set of incentives and constraints”, such as under strong commercial, geopolitical and personal pressures, that can sometimes conflict with “doing the right thing” for the broader interests of society, therefore making outside scrutiny essential. Leo, whose family history includes both enslaved people and enslavers, wrote on slavery: “It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord … For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon.” Past popes have apologised for Christians’ involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. But no pope has ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologised for, the role that popes themselves played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels”. Alongside two of his cardinals, others at the presentation included the theologians Anna Rowlands and Léocadie Lushombo. Rowlands, professor of Catholic social thought at Durham University, said the encyclical “brings the vision of the Gospel to bear on the cultures of AI”, and in doing so “warns of a growing culture of power that is reshaping work, family, education, and political life”. The Vatican has been seriously engaged on questions surrounding AI for several years now, including having regular dialogues with Microsoft, Google and other big technology firms. The pope said on Monday that the Catholic church wanted to work with AI developers to discuss proper use of the technology. “What Leo has done in this document is put the full weight of his office behind the Catholic church’s efforts to be in dialogue with big tech,” said Christopher White, the author of Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy and a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. “He’s clearly approaching AI from a position of humility and making it clear that the church doesn’t have all of the answers when it comes to what sort of policies are necessary for AI regulation. But he is being clear-eyed that AI development can’t simply be the wild west like some of its advocates would like to see.” In reaction to the encyclical, Christine Allen, CEO and director of the Catholic aid charity Cafod, said the pope’s message spoke of the “inherent dignity of humankind”. “We are not simply instruments of production but living beings, entrusted with a moral compass,” she added. “In a world full of imbalances, we have a duty to use AI responsibly. Today’s message is that it should not be used to further exacerbate inequality and suffering.”