Україна та країни Заходу, як і низка інших країн світу, заявили про невизнання псевдореферендумів, влаштованих РФ у чотирьох областях України на захоплених російськими військами територіях
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With roosters crowing in the background as he speaks from the crowded refugee camp in Bangladesh that’s been his home since 2017, Maung Sawyeddollah, 21, describes what happened when violent hate speech and disinformation targeting the Rohingya minority in Myanmar began to spread on Facebook.
“We were good with most of the people there. But some very narrow minded and very nationalist types escalated hate against Rohingya on Facebook,” he said. “And the people who were good, in close communication with Rohingya. changed their mind against Rohingya and it turned to hate.”
For years, Facebook, now called Meta Platforms Inc., pushed the narrative that it was a neutral platform in Myanmar that was misused by malicious people, and that despite its efforts to remove violent and hateful material, it unfortunately fell short. That narrative echoes its response to the role it has played in other conflicts around the world, whether the 2020 election in the U.S. or hate speech in India.
But a new and comprehensive report by Amnesty International states that Facebook’s preferred narrative is false. The platform, Amnesty says, wasn’t merely a passive site with insufficient content moderation. Instead, Meta’s algorithms “proactively amplified and promoted content” on Facebook, which incited violent hatred against the Rohingya beginning as early as 2012.
Despite years of warnings, Amnesty found, the company not only failed to remove violent hate speech and disinformation against the Rohingya, it actively spread and amplified it until it culminated in the 2017 massacre. The timing coincided with the rising popularity of Facebook in Myanmar, where for many people it served as their only connection to the online world. That effectively made Facebook the internet for a vast number of Myanmar’s population.
More than 700,000 Rohingya fled into neighboring Bangladesh that year. Myanmar security forces were accused of mass rapes, killings and torching thousands of homes owned by Rohingya.
“Meta — through its dangerous algorithms and its relentless pursuit of profit — substantially contributed to the serious human rights violations perpetrated against the Rohingya,” the report says.
A spokesperson for Meta declined to answer questions about the Amnesty report. In a statement, the company said it “stands in solidarity with the international community and supports efforts to hold the Tatmadaw accountable for its crimes against the Rohingya people.”
“Our safety and integrity work in Myanmar remains guided by feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions, including the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar; the Human Rights Impact Assessment we commissioned in 2018; as well as our ongoing human rights risk management,” Rafael Frankel, director of public policy for emerging markets, Meta Asia-Pacific, said in a statement.
Like Sawyeddollah, who is quoted in the Amnesty report and spoke with the AP on Tuesday, most of the people who fled Myanmar — about 80% of the Rohingya living in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine at the time — are still staying in refugee camps. And they are asking Meta to pay reparations for its role in the violent repression of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, which the U.S. declared a genocide earlier this year.
Amnesty’s report, out Wednesday, is based on interviews with Rohingya refugees, former Meta staff, academics, activists and others. It also relied on documents disclosed to Congress last year by whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist. It notes that digital rights activists say Meta has improved its civil society engagement and some aspects of its content moderation practices in Myanmar in recent years. In January 2021, after a violent coup overthrew the government, it banned the country’s military from its platform.
But critics, including some of Facebook’s own employees, have long maintained such an approach will never truly work. It means Meta is playing whack-a-mole trying to remove harmful material while its algorithms designed to push “engaging” content that’s more likely to get people riled up essentially work against it.
“These algorithms are really dangerous to our human rights. And what happened to the Rohingya and Facebook’s role in that specific conflict risks happening again, in many different contexts across the world,” said Pat de Brún, researcher and adviser on artificial intelligence and human rights at Amnesty.
“The company has shown itself completely unwilling or incapable of resolving the root causes of its human rights impact.”
After the U.N.’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar highlighted the “significant” role Facebook played in the atrocities perpetrated against the Rohingya, Meta admitted in 2018 that “we weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.”
In the following years, the company “touted certain improvements in its community engagement and content moderation practices in Myanmar,” Amnesty said, adding that its report “finds that these measures have proven wholly inadequate.”
In 2020, for instance, three years after the violence in Myanmar killed thousands of Rohingya Muslims and displaced 700,000 more, Facebook investigated how a video by a leading anti-Rohingya hate figure, U Wirathu, was circulating on its site.
The probe revealed that over 70% of the video’s views came from “chaining” — that is, it was suggested to people who played a different video, showing what’s “up next.” Facebook users were not seeking out or searching for the video, but had it fed to them by the platform’s algorithms.
Wirathu had been banned from Facebook since 2018.
“Even a well-resourced approach to content moderation, in isolation, would likely not have sufficed to prevent and mitigate these algorithmic harms. This is because content moderation fails to address the root cause of Meta’s algorithmic amplification of harmful content,” Amnesty’s report says.
The Rohingya refugees are seeking unspecified reparations from the Menlo Park, California-based social media giant for its role in perpetuating genocide. Meta, which is the subject of twin lawsuits in the U.S. and the U.K. seeking $150 billion for Rohingya refugees, has so far refused.
“We believe that the genocide against Rohingya was possible only because of Facebook,” Sawyeddollah said. “They communicated with each other to spread hate, they organized campaigns through Facebook. But Facebook was silent.”
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Майно та приміщення військкомату не постраждали
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«Україна має повне право й надалі захищати свій суверенітет і свою територіальну цілісність. США ніколи не визнають спроби Росії анексувати частину України»
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Через черги на кордонах багато хто залишає в Росії свої автомобілі. Голова Держдуми запропонував передавати їх сім’ям військових. «Так буде правильно», – заявив він
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Обидві сторони знову звинуватили одна одну в початку обстрілів на кордоні
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A renewable energy plant being commissioned in Oregon on Wednesday that combines solar power, wind power and massive batteries to store the energy generated there is the first utility-scale plant of its kind in North America.
The project, which will generate enough electricity to power a small city at maximum output, addresses a key challenge facing the utility industry as the U.S. transitions away from fossil fuels and increasingly turns to solar and wind farms for power. Wind and solar are clean sources of power, but utilities have been forced to fill in gaps when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining with fossil fuels like coal or natural gas.
At the Oregon plant, massive lithium batteries will store up to 120 megawatt-hours of power generated by the 300-megawatt wind farms and 50-megawatt solar farm so it can be released to the electric grid on demand. At maximum output, the facility will produce more than half of the power that was generated by Oregon’s last coal plant, which was demolished earlier this month.
On-site battery storage isn’t new, and interest in solar-plus-battery projects in particular has soared in the U.S. in recent years due to robust tax credits and incentives and the falling price of batteries. The Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility in Oregon, however, is the first in the U.S. to combine integrated wind, solar and battery storage at such a large scale in one location, giving it even more flexibility to generate continuous output without relying on fossil fuels to fill in the gaps.
The project is “getting closer and closer to having something with a very stable output profile that we traditionally think of being what’s capable with a fuel-based generation power plant,” said Jason Burwen, vice president of energy storage at the American Clean Power Association, an advocacy group for the clean power industry.
“If the solar is chugging along and cloud cover comes over, the battery can kick in and make sure that the output is uninterrupted. As the sun goes down and the wind comes online, the battery can make sure that that’s very smooth so that it doesn’t, to the grid operator, look like anything unusual.”
The plant located in a remote expanse three hours east of Portland is a partnership between NextEra Energy Resources and Portland General Electric, a public utility required to reduce carbon emissions by 100% by 2040 under an Oregon climate law passed last year, one of the most ambitious in the nation.
PGE’s customers are also demanding green power — nearly a quarter-million customers receive only renewable energy — and the Wheatridge project is “key to that decarbonization strategy,” said Kristen Sheeran, PGE’s director of sustainability strategy and resource planning.
Under the partnership, PGE owns one-third of the wind output and purchases all the facility’s power for its renewable energy portfolio. NextEra, which developed the site and operates it, owns two-thirds of the wind output and all of the solar output and storage.
“The mere fact that many other customers are looking at these types of facilities gives you a hint at what we think could be possible,” said David Lawlor, NextEra’s director of business development for the Pacific Northwest. “Definitely customers want firmer generation, starting with the battery storage in the back.”
Large-scale energy storage is critical as the U.S. shifts to more variable power sources like wind and solar, and Americans can expect to see similar projects across the country as that trend accelerates. National Renewable Energy Laboratory models show U.S. storage capacity may rise fivefold by 2050, yet experts say even this won’t be enough to prevent extremely disruptive climate change.
Batteries aren’t the only solution that the clean energy industry is trying out. Pumped storage generates power by sending huge volumes of water downhill through turbines and others are experimenting with forcing water underground and holding it there before releasing it to power turbines.
But interest in batteries for clean energy storage has grown dramatically in recent years at the same time that the cost of batteries is falling and the technology itself is improving, boosting interest in hybrid plants, experts say.
Generating capacity from hybrid plants increased 133% between 2020 and 2021 and by the end of last year, there were nearly 8,000 megawatts of wind or solar generation connected to storage, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is managed by the University of California.
The vast majority of such projects are solar power with battery storage, largely because of tax credits, but projects in the pipeline include offshore wind-plus-battery, hydroelectric-plus-battery and at least nine facilities like the one in Oregon that will combine solar, wind and storage. Projects in the pipeline between 2023 and 2025 include ones in Washington, California, Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois and Oregon, according to Berkeley Lab.
Many researchers and pilots are working on alternatives to lithium ion batteries, however, largely because their intrinsic chemistry limits them to around four hours of storage and a longer duration would be more useful.
“There is no silver bullet. There’s no model or prototype that’s going to meet that entire need … but wind and solar will certainly be in the mix,” said PGE’s Sheeran.
“This model can become a tool for decarbonization across the West as the whole country is driving toward very ambitious climate reduction goals.”
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«Не думаю, що Лукашенко ухвалить таке рішення. Але якщо з боку Білорусі йтимуть війська, як це було 24 лютого, вони отримають таку відповідь, на яку не розраховували»
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Private American pilots with a group called “Ukraine Air Rescue” are working to get supplies into Ukraine. VOA Russian met some of them and has the story. VOA footage by David Gogokhia.
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Україна також просить Канаду надати спеціалізовані автомобілі для розмінування деокупованих територій
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Armenia and Azerbaijan accused each other on Wednesday of violating a cease-fire agreement that ended two days of warfare this month – the second such violation in five days.
Azerbaijan’s defense ministry said that at about 6 p.m. (1400 GMT), Armenian units had started firing at Azerbaijani positions in the Kalbajar region, wounding one serviceman, and that Azerbaijani forces had taken “retaliatory measures.”
The Armenian defense ministry gave an opposite account, tweeting that Azerbaijani forces had fired towards Armenian positions near the common border using mortars and large-caliber weapons, and that the Armenian side had retaliated.
After border clashes two weeks ago that killed almost 200 soldiers, the worst bout of fighting since a six-week war between the two ex-Soviet countries in late 2020, the two sides agreed to a cease-fire deal brokered by Russia.
Armenia said then that Azerbaijan had attacked its territory and seized settlements inside its borders; Azerbaijan said it was responding to “provocations” from the Armenian side.
Last Friday, both sides accused each other of breaching the truce by firing across the border.
The fighting is linked to decades-old hostilities over control of the mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh region, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but until 2020 largely controlled by the majority ethnic Armenian population.
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21 вересня президент Росії Володимир Путін оголосив про «часткову мобілізацію»
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«Це терористичний акт, який росіяни зробили навмисне»
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Україна не припиняє працювати над обмінами полонених із РФ, переговори щодо обміну «всіх на всіх» тривають, заявив начальник Головного управління розвідки Міністерства оборони Кирило Буданов на зустрічі з представниками сімей українських військовополонених.
«Також відбувається робота з окремих обмінів. Це тривалий та виснажливий процес. Приміром, обмін 21 вересня, під час якого було звільнено 215 оборонців, готувався понад два місяці», – повідомляє Координаційний штаб з питань поводження з військовополоненими з посиланням на Буданова.
Буданов запевнив, що всіх, хто повертається з полону, держава забезпечує необхідним, в тому числі лікуванням і реабілітацією.
У Координаційному штабі кажуть, що триває робота над створенням карток військовополонених – особистих сторінок, на яких родичам буде легше відстежувати всі зміни статусу військовополоненого.
У ніч на 22 вересня стало відомо про обмін полоненими між Україною та РФ. Україна повернула з російського полону 215 військових, 108 з них – бійці полку «Азов». Київ віддав Москві кума Володимира Путіна Віктора Медведчука і ще 55 російських полонених.
Координаційний штаб із питань поводження з військовополоненими наголосив, що цей обмін є найбільшим від 24 лютого.
Віцепрем’єрка, міністерка з питань реінтеграції тимчасово окупованих територій Ірина Верещук в інтерв’ю BBC News Україна повідомила, що в російському полоні залишаються 2,5 тисячі українців, серед яких – «дуже багато жінок».
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«Ці спроби анексії українських територій є неприйнятними»
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The U.N. human rights office is calling for the release of Russians arrested for protesting President Vladimir Putin’s draft to build up Russia’s fighting capacity in Ukraine.
Nearly 2,400 demonstrators reportedly have been arrested in various locations across Russia following President Vladimir Putin’s declaration last Wednesday of a partial mobilization of troops to join the invasion of Ukraine.
His call up of 300,000 reservists to strengthen Russia’s battle-weary army in Ukraine has triggered mass anti-war protests. U.N. human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani says clashes have erupted between demonstrators and police in some instances, but most protests have been peaceful.
“While the majority of the protests are reported to have been peaceful, military and administrative buildings, including enlistment offices, have been attacked in several regions,” said Shamdasani. “We stress that arresting people solely for exercising their rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression constitutes an arbitrary deprivation of liberty.”
She says it is unclear how many people remain in detention.
Fear of being called up for service has sent thousands of people fleeing to other countries in hopes of avoiding the draft. Shamdasani says it is heartbreaking to see so many people resorting to such desperate measures in the context of what she calls an unnecessary war.
“What international human rights law does insist on is that where people wish to object to participation in hostilities or where they wish to declare a conscientious objection, this needs to be taken into account, this needs to be respected by the authorities.”
She says information needs to be provided to people who are hesitant about going to war, so they know how to raise a conscientious objection to participation.
Shamdasani notes there has been an acknowledgement on the part of Russian authorities that, in some cases, people have been asked to mobilize by mistake. She says she believes a hot line has been set up to deal with those cases.
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The U.S. State Department expressed concern Wednesday that Americans with dual citizenship with Russia could be conscripted by Moscow to help fight its war against Ukraine.
“Russia may refuse to acknowledge dual nationals’ U.S. citizenship, deny their access to U.S. consular assistance, prevent their departure from Russia, and conscript dual nationals for military service,” the State Department said in a statement.
It said more broadly that U.S. citizens should not travel to Russia and that anyone there now “should depart Russia immediately while limited commercial travel options remain.”
The State Department said flights out of Russia “are extremely limited at present and are often unavailable on short notice. Overland routes by car and bus are still open.”
But it said U.S. travelers in Russia or Americans living there who are planning to leave “should make independent arrangements as soon as possible. The U.S. Embassy has severe limitations on its ability to assist U.S. citizens, and conditions, including transportation options, may suddenly become even more limited.”
In addition, the State Department warned Americans “that the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression are not guaranteed in Russia. Avoid all political or social protests and do not photograph security personnel at these events. Russian authorities have arrested U.S. citizens who have participated in demonstrations.”
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Після вибухів на газопроводах у Кремлі заявили, що ситуація потребує «діалогу»
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«Святість церкви не може бути прикриттям щодо антигуманної політики. Естонська Республіка непримиренна у цьому питанні»
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«Це чергове порушення суверенітету та територіальної цілісності України на тлі системних порушень прав людини»
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European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Wednesday that all indications are that leaks from two Nord Stream natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea “are the result of a deliberate act.”
“We will support any investigation aimed at getting full clarity on what happened and why, and will take further steps to increase our resilience in energy security,” Borrell said in a statement. “Any deliberate disruption of European energy infrastructure is utterly unacceptable and will be met with a robust and united response.”
The U.S. State Department said late Tuesday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed the situation with Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod and that the United States “remains united with our allies and partners in our commitment to promoting European energy security.”
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan tweeted that the U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate the apparent sabotage.
Denmark’s defense minister Morten Bodskov is due to discuss the matter with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels on Wednesday.
“I’m not going to speculate on the cause” of the leaks, replied White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to questions about the incident Tuesday, adding that she had nothing to report on whether the United States had been requested by European officials to help determine the cause of the ruptures.
The 1,222-kilometer-long Nord Stream 1 pipeline has been, until recently, a major source of gas for Germany. Nord Stream 2, which is 1,234 kilometers in length, has yet to go into commercial operation.
“We have established a report and the crime classification is gross sabotage,” the Swedish national police said Tuesday, announcing a preliminary investigation into possible sabotage of Nord Stream 1.
“There are three leaks, and therefore it is difficult to imagine that it could be accidental,” said Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen Tuesday.
“We see clearly that this is an act of sabotage — an act which likely means a further step of escalation of the situation in Ukraine,” concurred Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
Frederkisen and Morawiecki spoke in Gloeniow in Poland at the opening ceremony for Baltic Pipe, part of a Polish plan to reduce its energy dependence on Russia. The line will connect Poland to Norwegian gas fields through Denmark.
“No option can be ruled out right now,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, regarding the possibility of sabotage, adding that the leaks are a cause for concern.
Russia closed Nord Stream 1 earlier this month, ostensibly for maintenance work.
The majority owner of the network’s operator, Nord Stream AG, is Gazprom, a Russian state-owned energy company.
“The destruction that occurred on the same day simultaneously on three strings of the offshore gas pipelines of the Nord Stream system is unprecedented,” said NordStream AG in a statement. “It is not yet possible to estimate the timing of the restoration of the gas transport infrastructure.”
“The biggest leak is spreading bubbles a good kilometer in diameter. The smallest is creating a circle about 200 meters” in diameter, according to a statement from the Danish armed services, which included photographs of the leaks off the island of Bornholm.
Scientists in Europe say seismographs on Monday recorded powerful blasts in the Baltic Sea, the same day the two gas pipelines dropped pressure.
“There was a spike and then regular noise,” said Josef Zens, a spokesman for the German geological research center GFZ. “We cannot say if that could be gas streaming out.”
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action,” wrote Bloomberg Opinion columnist Javier Blas, quoting the late British author Ian Fleming.
“The leaks are more likely a message: Russia is opening a new front on its energy war against Europe. First, it weaponized gas supply, halting shipments, including via the Nord Stream pipeline. Now, it may be attacking the energy infrastructure it once used to ship its energy,” said Blas, author of The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources.
Amid much speculation on social media about who might have sabotaged Nord Stream there is no credible evidence of a likely culprit or motive. Analysts and amateurs on Twitter contend the Russians may have deployed divers or unmanned submersible vehicles to poke holes in the pipelines.
The leaks are a result of a “terrorist attack” and “an act of aggression” against the European Union, declared Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to the Ukrainian presidential office.
Some anonymous accounts on Twitter, parroting Russian state media, sought to blame Washington and Kyiv. On social media on Tuesday, a video clip from early February recirculated of Joe Biden vowing to “bring an end” to the Nord Stream 2 project if Russia invaded Ukraine.
The Kremlin has stated that if Western Europe wants Russian gas, it should end sanctions against Moscow imposed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seven months ago.
“My understanding is the leaks will not have a significant impact on Europe’s energy resilience,” Secretary Blinken said in Washington.
“This just drives home the importance of our efforts to work together to get alternative gas supplies to Europe and to support efforts to reduce gas consumption and accelerate true energy independence by moving to a clean energy economy,” a White House National Security Council spokesperson told VOA.
While the impact to Europe ahead of the winter as a result of the loss of the pipelines remains to be seen, the trio of leaks poses an immediate hazard to wildlife and maritime navigation.
The gas could suffocate animals and is an explosion threat to passing ships, according to environmental groups.
Contributors include Patsy Widakuswara at the White House; Nike Ching at the State Department, and Chris Hannas in Washington. Some information in this report came from Reuters.
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За словами Жозепа Борреля, уся наявна інформація свідчить про те, що витоки є результатом навмисних дій
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За амністією на свободу вийдуть 829 громадян країни та четверо іноземців
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Влада заявила, що провела понад 1200 арештів по всій країні, у тому числі активістів, адвокатів і журналістів
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