A Russian court has banned the use of Facebook and Instagram after labeling the activities of the apps’ parent company Meta as “extremist,” according to the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.The move came after the Russian prosecutor general’s office appealed to the Moscow court for Meta to be designated an “extremist organization” for allowing users in some countries to call for violence against President Vladimir Putin and Russian soldiers participating in the country’s invasion of Ukraine. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, is not part of the ban. Meta declined to comment on the record.Individuals will not face criminal…
Author: National Tone
Turks are getting ready to vote in critical presidential and parliamentary elections on Sunday, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s public support is put to the test against the backdrop of a severe economic crisis. A six-party main opposition alliance has picked Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), as its candidate. Meanwhile, Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) Party added two conservative parties to its alliance in addition to its two long-term nationalist partners, pulling the coalition further to the far right. The economy has topped the election agenda for many Turks, with a cost-of-living crisis…
Brittney Griner, the American basketball star detained in Moscow on allegations of drug smuggling, will remain in custody for at least two more months, Russian media reported Thursday.”The court granted the request of the investigation and extended the period of detention of the US citizen Griner until May 19,” a Russian court spokesperson told the Kremlin-controlled press agency TASS.The outlet Mash also reported the news, sharing a video on Telegram showing Griner, 31, walking down a hallway with two guards.A person close to the matter told BuzzFeed News Griner was OK and has been meeting regularly with her Russian legal…
Northamptonshire’s Josh Cobb has declared himself “shocked and disappointed” by the club’s decision to oust him as T20 captain in favour of David Willey.Cobb has held the role since 2019 and was set to lead the team in this season’s Vitality Blast until Wednesday’s announcement that England all-rounder Willey had taken the reins. The Steelbacks begin their campaign at home to Worcestershire Rapids on May 24.Willey, who is back for a second stint at the county after returning from Yorkshire, has only just returned from the Indian Premier League.And while Cobb wished him well, he made his unhappiness clear in…
Israel has continued its air attacks on Gaza for a third day in a row, killing at least 27 Palestinians, including five women and five children, as it targeted four leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement (PIJ). Israeli forces killed Ali Ghali, commander of PIJ’s rocket-launch unit, in the latest attack on a building in Gaza’s southern Khan Younis. More than 400 retaliatory rockets have been fired from Gaza towards Israel since Wednesday, with most intercepted by Israeli missile defences. What is the Palestinian Islamic Jihad? The PIJ was founded in 1981 by Palestinian students in Egypt with the…
The best possible future — the one with fewer climate disasters, extinctions, and human suffering — involves limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But for this to happen, a new report warns, greenhouse gas levels must start dropping by 2025.“We are on a fast track to climate disaster,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday while announcing the new report by the United Nation’s preeminent climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.“This is not fiction or exaggeration,” he added. “It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies. We are on a pathway…
The Doha-based network demands accountability for the killing of its journalist on the first anniversary of her death.Al Jazeera Media Network has renewed its demand for accountability in the killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces on the first anniversary of her death. Abu Akleh, a television correspondent with Al Jazeera for 25 years, was shot by Israeli forces on May 11, 2022, while reporting on an Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. Israel initially denied its forces were behind her shooting but later admitted its soldiers “accidentally” hit her but refused to…
Tony Thorne was one of the officers on the Apollo project, advising the team on the task of merging large volumes of data. Thorne, a former counterterrorism officer with the Wales Extremism and Counter Terrorism Unit, said he was shocked by what he saw in Scotland. “We left Scotland with a process that was not complete or adequate in any way,” he said.The key issues highlighted during the test run reemerged right away, according to emails and internal memos from 2014 and 2015 reviewed by BuzzFeed News.Officers described a system that was “crashing routinely” and “timing out after 10 minutes,”…
Moments after Washington Post columnist David Ignatius began an interview with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to commemorate World Press Freedom Day, two polite, determined souls, clad in pink, walked onto the stage, carrying small signs. The man and woman were intent on reminding Ignatius and Blinken and their large audience about the fates of a publisher and a journalist – one jailed, the other murdered – whom, I suspect, the demonstrators knew would be forgotten by the columnist and the diplomat. “Excuse us,” the female protester said, “We can’t use this day without calling for the freedom of…
The problem is that 85 of the 194 countries surveyed by the WHO technical advisory group that came up with the new estimates don’t have good enough death registries for this to be a viable approach. Forty-one of those countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.For these countries, a team led by Jonathan Wakefield, a statistician at the University of Washington in Seattle, used the data from countries with complete death registries to build another statistical model able to predict total COVID deaths in any month from other measures, including temperature, the percentage of COVID tests returning positive, a rating of the…