Moussa could almost taste freedom. Ahead, searchlights shimmering in the water: the Italian coastguard which would ferry him to Europe. But behind, closing in quickly, Tunisia’s national maritime guard. Moussa’s dream was soon shattered.

The 28-year-old from Conakry, Guinea, was on board one of four boats intercepted off Sfax during the night of 6 February 2024. The occupants – about 150 men, women and children – were brought ashore to Sfax, handcuffed and herded on to buses.

At about 2am they arrived at a national guard base near the Algerian border. Shortly after, says Moussa, Tunisia’s security forces began methodically raping the women.

“There was a small house outside and every hour or so they’d take two or three women from the base and rape them there. They took a lot of women.

“We could hear them screaming, crying for help. They didn’t care there were 100 witnesses.”

During a meeting in Rome with his rightwing counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, Starmer admired how the pact had prompted a “dramatic” reduction in numbers reaching Italy.

By contrast, the number of refugees and migrants near El Amra continues to grow. One migration observer in Sfax estimates there may be at least 100,000, a number that some feel Tunisia’s increasingly autocratic president, Kais Saied, is deliberately cultivating as a threat to Europe: keep the money coming, or else.

“If Europe stops sending money, he’ll send Europe the migrants. Simple,” says the expert, requesting anonymity.

It is a predicament that provokes questions around Europe’s willingness to ditch commitments to human rights to stymie migration from the global south. And how much abuse of migrants such as Marie is Brussels prepared to overlook before re-examining payments to Saied?

Five contestants competing on a MrBeast-hosted reality competition show have filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against the YouTube star’s production company and Amazon, claiming they were denied pay, forced to participate in unsafe conditions and subjected to a “culture of misogyny and sexism.”

The lawsuit was filed Monday in a Los Angeles court by participants on the Amazon Prime Video show called “Beast Games,” which was announced in March. It features “over 1,000 contestants, $5,000,000 prize, and many other world records,” the creator MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, said at the time.

The 54-page document describes allegations of players being subjected to “unreasonable, unsafe, and unlawful employment conditions” that led to “several” contestants being hospitalized. Plaintiffs said they were fed “sporadically and sparsely” and not given “adequate access to hygienic products or medical care.”

Pezeshkian replaced the ultraconservative Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.

During election campaigning, he had vowed to "fully" oppose police patrols enforcing the mandatory hijab headscarf, as well as easing long-standing internet restrictions.

Relations with the West

At his news conference, Pezeshkian briefly touched on other topics including Iran's fraught relations with the United States and the 2015 nuclear deal.

"We do not want to fight with America if it respects our rights," he said. "It is not us who are hostile (to the Americans). We have not built military bases around their country," Pezeshkian added, referring to U.S. bases in the Gulf and in Iraq.

Iran and the United States have had no diplomatic relations since 1980, the year after the Islamic Revolution that toppled its Western-backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

'Disarm Israel'

He also insisted on Iran's right to maintain its missile program, which has drawn Western criticism, as a deterrent against its arch-foe Israel.

"They (the West) want us not to have missiles, that is fine, but you need to disarm Israel first," he said, adding that otherwise "they can drop bombs on us whenever they want, like in Gaza."

Apple AAPL 1.46%increase; green up pointing triangle and Nvidia NVDA -6.38%decrease; red down pointing triangle are in talks to invest in OpenAI, a move that would strengthen their ties to a partner integral to their efforts in the artificial-intelligence race.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has announced a pause in the movement of its employees in the Gaza Strip “until further notice” after one of its vehicles was hit by gunfire just metres from an Israeli-controlled checkpoint.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric blamed Israel for the attack, telling reporters in New York that the “clearly marked” humanitarian vehicle was “struck 10 times” by Israeli gunfire, including with bullets targeting front windows.

Five of the bullets were on the driver’s side and some on the windscreen.

Dujarric said the convoy’s movements had been coordinated with the Israeli military and it had clearance to approach.

Google is on a determined mission to make Gemini an indispensable part of our daily routines. With deeper integrations into popular apps like Spotify and the Pixel 9 series shipping with Gemini as the default assistant, it’s clear that Google has ambitious plans for its AI model.

The tech giant has been strategically enhancing Gemini’s functionality with new extensions. After adding extensions for Google apps like Keep, Tasks, and Calendar, along with YouTube and YouTube Music, recent findings suggest even more exciting additions are on the horizon.

An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.

In the Google app version 15.34.32.29.arm64 beta, we could enable the toggles for new Gemini extensions for WhatsApp, Google Messages, and Android system notifications. While they aren’t working just yet, their official descriptions provide a glimpse into what they might offer.

The founder and CEO of Rumble — a YouTube alternative billing itself as “immune to cancel culture” — said he has “departed” from Europe after Pavel Durov, the CEO of encrypted messaging app Telegram, was arrested.

“I’ve just safely departed from Europe,” Chris Pavlovski, a Canadian national, posted on X on Sunday, Aug. 25.

He claimed France had “threatened Rumble” and had “crossed a red line” by arresting Telegram’s Durov. In November 2022, Rumble blocked access to French users, claiming the country’s government asked it to remove “certain Russian news sources,” which it said it would legally challenge.

In May, Pavlovski also claimed Russia blocked Rumble because it “refused to comply with their censorship demands.”

Al Jazeera’s Sanad verification agency has probed the details of Israel’s Saturday morning attack on Gaza City’s al-Tabin School, which killed more than 100 people, including women and children.

The investigation determined the attack was “deliberately timed to cause maximum casualties”, with a “large number of displaced people deliberately targeted,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.

Based on the evidence, Sanad said Israel’s military fired the two guided missiles used in the attack to coincide with dawn prayers.

The missiles “penetrated the mosque’s roof, passed through the first floor, where the women’s chapel is located, and exploded on the ground floor, where the men’s chapel is situated”, Sanad said in its report.

Over the years, the case had become bogged down in lengthy pre-trial proceedings. Defence lawyers had argued that the men’s torture in secret CIA prisons had rendered the evidence against them unusable in legal proceedings.

The deal avoids both the prospect of a hugely lengthy and complex trial, or the possibility that confessions seen as crucial to the case would be thrown out. The New York Times reported that news of the deal emerged in a letter from prosecutors to family members of victims of the devastating attacks that killed almost 3,000 people.

Mohammed and Hawsawi were captured together in Pakistan in March 2003. The pair were tortured by their US interrogators, including subjecting Mohammed to a record 183 rounds of waterboarding. - Guardian

CAIRO, July 31 (Reuters) - Qatar's flagship Al Jazeera TV said on Wednesday that its reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Ramy El Rify were killed in an Israeli strike on Gaza City.

Anas Al-Sharif, a colleague of the two dead journalists, told Al-Jazeera that Ghoul and Rifi were on mission to film near the house of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas chief killed in Iran earlier on Wednesday in an attack the movement blamed on Israel.

The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said the new deaths raised to 165 the number of Palestinian journalists who were killed by Israeli fire since Oct 7.

Wind turbines and solar panels have overtaken fossil fuels to generate 30% of the European Union’s electricity in the first half of the year, a report has found.

Power generation from burning coal, oil and gas fell 17% in the first six months of 2024 compared with the same period the year before, according to climate thinktank Ember. It found the continued shift away from polluting fuels has led to a one-third drop in the sector’s emissions since the first half of 2022.

Chris Rosslowe, an analyst at Ember, said the rise of wind and solar was narrowing the role of fossil fuels. “We are witnessing a historic shift in the power sector, and it is happening rapidly.”

The Israeli army is investigating suspicions of a violation of international law by its troops who blew up a main water reservoir serving the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

The reservoir, in Rafah's Tel Sultan neighborhood, was destroyed last week with the approval of the commander of the soldiers, who belong to the 401st Brigade of the Armored Corps, but without the approval of senior officers from the IDF Southern Command.

One soldier posted video footage of the explosion on social media with the caption: "The destruction of Tel Sultan's water reservoir in honor of Shabbat." After an initial probe into the incident, the army will decide whether to refer the case for investigation by the military police.

https://x.com/ytirawi/status/1816965332952555683