World News

Swedish human rights activist Anna Ardin is glad Julian Assange is free.

But the claims she has made about him suggest she would have every reason not to wish him well.

Ardin is fiercely proud of Assange's work for WikiLeaks, and insists that it should never have landed him behind bars.

“We have the right to know about the wars that are fought in our name,” she says.

Speaking to Ardin over Zoom in Stockholm, it quickly becomes clear that she has no problem keeping what she sees as the two Assanges apart in her head - the visionary activist and the man who she says does not treat women well.

She is at pains to describe him neither as a hero nor a monster, but a complicated man.

Brazil’s ministry of foreign affairs has been forced to apologise to the embassies of Canada, Gabon and Burkina Faso after three diplomats’ teenage children – all of whom are Black – were searched at gunpoint by police officers.

The incident emerged when the mother of a Brazilian boy in the group posted a security camera video online, prompting outrage – but also a weary recognition that such experiences are all too typical for Black youths in Rio de Janeiro.

The three diplomats’ children were in Rio for a five-day holiday with a white Brazilian friend, celebrating the end of the school year. All attend the same school in Brasília, where they live. It was their first trip without their parents.

Late Wednesday, they were returning from a day at the beach and were about to enter a building in the wealthy neighbourhood of Ipanema when a military police patrol car drew up. Two officers jumped out, ordered the boys to face the wall and searched them at gunpoint.

Two months ago, before Israeli troops invaded Rafah, the city sheltered most of Gaza’s more than 2 million people. Today it is a dust-covered ghost town.

Abandoned, bullet-ridden apartment buildings have blasted out walls and shattered windows. Bedrooms and kitchens are visible from roads dotted with rubble piles that tower over the Israeli military vehicles passing by. Very few civilians remain.

Israel says it has nearly defeated Hamas forces in Rafah — an area identified earlier this year as the militant group’s’ last stronghold in Gaza.

The Israeli military invited reporters into Rafah on Wednesday, the first time international media visited Gaza’s southernmost city since it was invaded May 6. Israel has barred international journalists from entering Gaza independently since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 that sparked the war.

At least 16 Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli attack on a United Nations-run school sheltering displaced people in the Gaza Strip, the Gaza Government Media Office said, as Israel continues to pound the besieged coastal territory.

Videos taken at the scene of the attack on the UNRWA school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat showed twisted metal at the collapsed building. A young boy could be seen sifting through pools of blood on the ground.

Footage shot at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir el-Balah and verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad agency also showed children and young people being rushed from ambulances.

They included a girl with a bandaged arm, another with a bloodied face and a boy bandage across his head. Emergency workers also tried to cover two bodies as they were quickly brought into the medical complex.

Mercy craned forward, took a deep breath and loaded another task on her computer. One after another, disturbing images and videos appeared on her screen. As a Meta content moderator working at an outsourced office in Nairobi, Mercy was expected to action one “ticket” every 55 seconds during her 10-hour shift. This particular video was of a fatal car crash. Someone had filmed the scene and uploaded it to Facebook, where it had been flagged by a user. Mercy’s job was to determine whether it had breached any of the company’s guidelines that prohibit particularly violent or graphic content. She looked closer at the video as the person filming zoomed in on the crash. She began to recognise one of the faces on the screen just before it snapped into focus: the victim was her grandfather.

New tickets appeared on the screen: her grandfather again, the same crash over and over. Not only the same video shared by others, but new videos from different angles. Pictures of the car; pictures of the dead; descriptions of the scene. She began to recognise everything now. Her neighbourhood, around sunset, only a couple of hours ago – a familiar street she had walked along many times. Four people had died. Her shift seemed endless.

We spoke with dozens of workers just like Mercy at three data annotation and content moderation centres run by one company across Kenya and Uganda. Content moderators are the workers who trawl, manually, through social media posts to remove toxic content and flag violations of the company’s policies. Data annotators label data with relevant tags to make it legible for use by computer algorithms. Behind the scenes, these two types of “data work” make our digital lives possible. Mercy’s story was a particularly upsetting case, but by no means extraordinary. The demands of the job are intense.

BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO leaders plan to pledge next week to keep pouring arms and ammunition into Ukraine at current levels for at least another year, hoping to reassure the war-ravaged country of their ongoing support and show Russian President Vladimir Putin that they will not walk away.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his counterparts meet in Washington for a three-day summit beginning Tuesday to mark the military alliance’s 75th anniversary as Russian troops press their advantage along Ukraine’s eastern front in the third year of the war.

Speaking to reporters Friday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said NATO’s 32 member countries have been spending around 40 billion euros ($43 billion) each year on military equipment for Ukraine since the war began in February 2022 and that this should be “a minimum baseline” going forward.

“I expect allies will decide at the summit to sustain this level within the next year,” Stoltenberg said. He said the amount would be shared among nations based on their economic growth and that the leaders will review the figure when they meet again in 2025.

NATO is desperate to do more for Ukraine but is struggling to find new ways. Already, NATO allies provide 99% of the military support it gets. Soon, the alliance will manage equipment deliveries. But two red lines remain: no NATO membership until the war is over, and no NATO boots on the ground there.

At their last summit, NATO leaders agreed to fast-track Ukraine’s membership process — although the country is unlikely to join for many years — and set up a high-level body for emergency consultations. Several countries promised more military equipment.

SAO PAULO (AP) — The indictment of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for money laundering and criminal association in connection with undeclared diamonds from Saudi Arabia marked the far-right leader’s second formal accusation, with more potentially in store.

The indictment on Thursday by Federal Police, confirmed by two officials with knowledge of the case, followed another formal accusation in March against Bolsonaro, for allegedly falsifying his COVID-19 vaccination certificate. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Once Brazil’s Supreme Court receives the police report with the latest indictment, the country’s prosecutor-general, Paulo Gonet, will analyze it and decide whether to shelve it, ask for additional police investigation or file charges and force Bolsonaro to stand trial.

It’s still early to say how likely the last option is, but the police indictment already marked a turning point in the case, said legal expert Renato Stanziola Vieira, president of the Brazilian Institute of Criminal Sciences.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — In parts of Afghanistan where there are no street names or house numbers, utility companies and their customers have adopted a creative approach for connecting. They use mosques as drop points for bills and cash, a “pay and pray” system.

Now the national postal service wants to phase this out by putting mailboxes on every street across the country, part of a plan to modernize a service long challenged by bureaucracy and war.

The lofty aspirations include introducing access to shopping via e-commerce sites and issuing debit cards for online purchases. It will be a leap in a country where most of the population is unbanked, air cargo is in its infancy and international courier companies don’t deliver even to the capital, Kabul.

The changes mean Afghans will pay higher service fees, a challenge as more than half the population already relies on humanitarian aid to survive.

The Afghan Post, like much of the country, still does everything on paper. “Nobody uses email,” said its business development director, Zabihullah Omar. “Afghanistan is a member of the Universal Postal Union, but when we compare ourselves to other countries it is at a low level and in the early stages.” . . Post offices in Afghanistan are vital for women wanting to access services or products they would otherwise be denied, since they are often barred from entering ministries or other official premises.

But the spectre of the Taliban’s edicts targeting women and girls also looms at the Afghan Post.

At the entrance to the main Kabul branch, a sign tells women to correctly wear hijab, or the Islamic headscarf. One picture shows a woman with a red cross over her visible face. The other has a green check mark over the face because only her eyes are seen.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A man who stabbed South Korea’s opposition leader in the neck earlier this year was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Friday, court officials said.

The knife-wielding man attacked Lee Jae-myung, head of the liberal Democratic Party, South Korea’s biggest political party, in January after approaching him asking for his autograph at an event in the southeastern city of Busan. After being detained by police, he told investigators that he wanted to kill Lee to prevent him from becoming South Korea’s president.

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — A plan to stage a coup against Bolivia’s president was not what Gen. Tomás Peña y Lillo was expecting when he entered the military headquarters in La Paz last Wednesday.

The leader of Bolivia’s retired service members said he was surprised to get a call that morning from army chief Gen. Juan José Zúñiga with a request to report for talks about how to advocate for imprisoned soldiers.

It was a coveted meeting, so he rushed over to find Zúñiga surrounded by officers asking for their help in “defending democracy.” Peña y Lillo claims he demurred, but tanks were already rumbling out of the barracks toward the presidential palace.

“It’s a tragicomedy,” Peña y Lillo, now a fugitive wanted for his participation in the alleged coup attempt, told The Associated Press by phone from an undisclosed location.

Like many Bolivians, he said he struggled to piece the story together, recalling how “there had been a lot of talk in the military that (Bolivian President Luis) Arce would hand the government over to Zúñiga” as protests roiled the country over shortages of dollars and fuel.

The retired general’s comments mark another surreal turn in the nation’s efforts to establish the facts of what happened on June 26, when military forces stormed downtown La Paz, stunning the country and spinning off waves of rumors from the mundane to the absurd.

A week after the purported rebellion roiled the South American country that has seen no fewer than 190 coups since its independence in 1825, Bolivians who thought they’d seen it all say they’ve never been more confused.

“This is so strange, so unbelievable,” said Marcia Tiñini, a 58-year-old teacher in La Paz. “First I believed the government and felt solidarity, but now I don’t know what to say.”

BANGKOK (AP) — New fighting has broken out in northeastern Myanmar, bringing an end to a Chinese-brokered cease-fire and putting pressure on the military regime as it faces attacks from resistance forces on multiple fronts in the country’s civil war.

The Ta’ang National Liberation Army, one of three powerful militias that launched a surprise joint offensive last October, renewed its attacks on regime positions last week in northeastern Shan state, which borders China, Laos and Thailand, and the neighboring Mandalay region with the support of local forces there.

Since then, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army has joined in, and by Friday, combined forces from the two allied militias had reportedly encircled the strategically important city of Lashio, headquarters of the regime’s northeastern military command.

This is the next phase of October’s “1027” offensive, said Lway Yay Oo, spokesperson for the TNLA, which last week said the military provoked retaliation with artillery and airstrikes despite the cease-fire.

“In phase two, our number one aim is the eradication of the military dictatorship, and number two is the protection and safety of local people,” she said.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17680912