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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.

In Brussels, NATO officials have devised a plan to lock in long-term military support for Ukraine so that a possible Trump administration can’t get in the way.

In Ankara, Turkish officials have reviewed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy road map for clues into Donald Trump’s designs on Syria.

In Atlanta, Austin and Lincoln, Nebraska, top ministers from Germany and Canada have met with Republican governors to shore up relations on the American right.

And in Washington, Trump’s return is the dominant topic at monthly breakfast meetings of ambassadors from European countries. At one of those meetings, the top envoy from one country asked his colleagues whether they were engaged in a fool’s errand.

“Can we really prepare for Trump?” this person asked, according to another top diplomat. “Or do we rather have to wait and see what the new reality would look like?”

President Joe Biden could make a decision within days whether to remain a candidate for reelection, said Hawaii’s governor who participated in a recent meeting with Biden and other Democratic governors and whose family has known the president for years.

And if Biden decides not to run, Hawaii Gov. Josh Green told The Associated Press on Saturday that he believes the president will designate Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him on the ticket.

Green, who was a physician on Hawaii’s Big Island before he was elected governor, said everyone has parents or grandparents who have moments that aren’t that great or pauses in their ability to express themselves clearly. But, he added, they aren’t discarded because of their experience, wisdom and their role in the family.

Green was quick to point out that Trump is only three years younger than Biden and both will have bad days going forward. But he argued that temperament is more important than age.

“For God’s sake, these two guys have to hold the nuclear codes,” Green said. “I don’t want someone who tweets in the middle of the night and rages at other countries. That is not good. That’s not the problem we have with President Biden.”

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.

Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington DC neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.

The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.

According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.

The visit took place at the White House residence clinic on 17 January. Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.

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.

The high court’s ruling is already having a ripple effect on cities across the country, which have been emboldened to take harsher measures to clear out homeless camps that have grown in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Many US cities have been wrestling with how to combat the growing crisis. The issue has been at the heart of recent election cycles on the West Coast, where officials have poured record amounts of money into creating shelters and building affordable housing.

Leaders face mounting pressure as long-term solutions - from housing and shelters to voluntary treatment services and eviction help - take time.

“It’s not easy and it will take a time to put into place solutions that work, so there’s a little bit of political theatre going on here," Scout Katovich, an attorney who focuses on these issues for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told the BBC.

"Politicians want to be able to say they’re doing something,”

Elon Musk wants to dismiss a lawsuit by former Twitter shareholders who said he waited too long in early 2022 to reveal his large ownership stake in the social media company, saying "all indications" show his delay was a mistake.

In a late Wednesday night filing in Manhattan federal court, Musk called it implausible to believe he wanted to defraud shareholders who didn't know he had taken a 9.2% Twitter stake, and missed out on big gains because they sold their own stock.

Investors in the proposed class action said Musk and his wealth manager Jared Birchall knew a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule required Musk to disclose by March 24, 2022 he had bought 5% of Twitter, yet waited another 11 days.

The investors said this let Musk buy more shares at cheap prices, saving more than $200 million. Twitter, now known as X, rose 27% on April 4, 2022 after Musk revealed his 9.2% stake.

Patients with type 2 diabetes taking GLP-1 treatments, which include Ozempic, have a lower chance of developing 10 types of obesity-related cancers than those taking insulin and other diabetes drugs, according to a study published on Friday.

GLP-1 treatments for type 2 diabetes have been on the market for nearly 20 years. The newer generation - such as Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Eli Lilly's Mounjaro - are far more effective at controlling blood sugar levels and inducing weight loss. Ozempic was the first of the newer generation in the class to be approved, in 2017.

In the study published on Friday in medical journal JAMA Network Open, researchers examined the medical records of 1.6 million patients with type 2 diabetes who had no prior history of 13 types of obesity-related cancers including gallbladder cancer and kidney cancer.

The study found that the patients treated with a GLP-1 therapy instead of insulin "had a significant risk reduction" in 10 of those cancers.

In the devastated eastern Ukrainian town of Toretsk, time is running out for anyone wanting to leave.

Russian forces are advancing slowly but surely, pummelling the town night and day with rockets, artillery fire and air attacks, part of a broad advance in the Donetsk region that Ukraine has been unable to stop.

In a residential courtyard a group of mainly elderly residents gather to listen to Ivan, a police officer in camouflage fatigues who is trying to convince them to leave Toretsk with his evacuation team.

Hundreds of officers like him and Ukrainian volunteers are trying to do the same in towns and villages along the frontline before they are reduced to rubble and subsumed into territory held by the Russians.

"Are you all staying?" he asked, speaking firmly and quickly. "Can you not see how the situation is changing? If you think you will sit it out - this is not going to happen."

The controversial social media influencer Andrew Tate will be allowed to leave Romania while awaiting trial on charges of human trafficking, a court has ruled.

Tate, 37, had been banned from leaving the country but will now be permitted to travel within the EU without restrictions while awaiting the trial.

The self-professed “misogynist influencer” was indicted in June 2023 along with his brother, Tristan, and two Romanian female suspects for alleged human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women, allegations they have all denied.