Faint cracks emerge in the facade of Putin’s rule, one year after Ukraine invasion
Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny is fond of a phrase, “the wonderful Russia of the future,” his shorthand for a country without President Vladimir Putin.
But in the year that has passed since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has gone back to a dark, repressive past.
Over the last 12 months, Putin’s government has crushed the remnants of Russia’s civil society and presided over his country’s first military mobilization since World War II. Political opponents such as Navalny are in prison or out of the country. And Putin has made it clear that he seeks to reassert Russia as an empire in which Ukraine has no place as an independent state.
Cattle, not coca, drive deforestation of the Amazon in Colombia – report
Authorities have blamed the growing of coca – the base ingredient of cocaine – for clearcutting, but a recent study shows otherwise
Luke Taylor in Bogotá
Cattle-ranching, not cocaine, has driven the destruction of the Colombian Amazon over the last four decades, a new study has found.
Successive recent governments have used environmental concerns to justify ramping up their war on the green shrub, but the research shows that in 2018 the amount of forest cleared to cultivate coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, was only 1/60th of that used for cattle.
The study’s findings vindicate conservation experts who have long argued that Colombia’s strategy to conserve the Amazon – often centered on combating coca production – has been misplaced.
Harassment of Women Journalists"We're Going to Stab You and Bury You"
Women journalists around the world are insulted, threatened and flooded with hate. The international reporting project Story Killers shines a light on the systematic harassment women reporters face on the internet. We spoke with some of those who have been affected.
By Nicola Abé, Maria Christoph, Christina Hebel, Laura Höflinger, Dialika Neufeld und Antje Windmann
"We’ll find you and we’ll kill you." Nastia Zhvik found this sentence on the Russian social network VKontakte. Another user wrote: "We’re going to stab you and bury you." The posts were meant for her. As a warning.
Zhvik, 26, is a journalist, a young woman with a calm voice. She's from Sevastopol, a port city on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. Shortly before she was threatened, police had searched the two-room apartment that she shares with her parents, confiscating her laptop and her smartphone. Zhvik says the officers threatened her with criminal proceedings for extremism, for which she could face several years in prison if convicted. She stands accused of having shared an English-language post on Instagram following the explosion on the Crimean Bridge, a post that supported the attack and alleged that the bridge, Putin’s prestige project, was illegal.
Turkey winds down quake rescue as Blinken pledges fresh US aid
Turkey on Sunday said rescue efforts following last week's devastating earthquake had ended in all but two provinces as visiting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced $100 million in fresh humanitarian aid.
The 7.8-magnitude tremor that struck southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6 has killed more than 44,000 people, with the likelihood of finding survivors two weeks on extremely remote.
No survivors have been found in at least 24 hours.
The head of Turkey's disaster agency Yunus Sezer on Sunday said search and rescue efforts had been completed in all provinces apart from Hatay and Kahramanmaras, the earthquake's epicentre.
Israeli diplomat removed from African Union summit
A bloc official says the envoy was removed because she was not duly accredited to attend the event in Ethiopia.
A senior Israeli diplomat has been removed from the African Union’s annual summit in Ethiopia as a dispute over Israel’s accreditation to the bloc escalated.
A video posted on social media showed security personnel walking Ambassador Sharon Bar-Li out of the auditorium during the opening ceremony of the summit in Addis Ababa on Saturday.
Ebba Kalondo, the spokesperson for the African Union’s chairman, said the diplomat was removed because she was not the duly accredited Israeli ambassador to Ethiopia – the official who was expected.
Meta to introduce paid-for verification for Instagram
Some Instagram users will now be able to pay for a blue tick verification, its parent company Meta has announced.
'Meta Verified' will cost $11.99 (£9.96) a month on web, or $14.99 for iPhone users and will be available in Australia and New Zealand this week.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, said the move will improve security and authenticity on the social media app.
The move comes after Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, implemented a paid-for verification system in November 2022.
Instagram's paid subscription service is not yet available for businesses, but any individual can pay for verification.
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