Facebook and Instagram get rid of fact checkers
Meta is abandoning the use of independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with X-style "community notes" where commenting on the accuracy of posts is left to users.
In a video posted alongside a blog post by the company on Tuesday, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said third-party moderators were "too politically biased" and it was "time to get back to our roots around free expression".
Joel Kaplan, who is replacing Sir Nick Clegg as Meta's head of global affairs, wrote that the company's reliance on independent moderators was "well-intentioned" but had too often resulted in the censoring of users.
However, campaigners against hate speech online have reacted with dismay - and suggested the change is really motivated by getting on the right side of Donald Trump.
Death toll of Haiti gang violence rose to 5,600 in 2024, UN says
UN Human Rights Office adds that 2,200 were injured and nearly 1,500 kidnapped as international mission struggles
Tue 7 Jan 2025 16.17 GMT
Death toll of Haiti gang violence rose to 5,600 in 2024, UN says
UN Human Rights Office adds that 2,200 were injured and nearly 1,500 kidnapped as international mission struggles
More than 5,600 people were reported killed in Haiti last year, the UN has said, as an international mission led by Kenya struggles to contain rampant gang violence.
The number of killings increased by more than 20% compared with 2023, according to the UN Human Rights Office. More than 2,200 people were reported injured and nearly 1,500 kidnapped, it said.
“These figures alone cannot capture the absolute horrors being perpetrated in Haiti, but they show the unremitting violence to which people are being subjected,” Volker Türk, UN high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former paratrooper and rabble-rousing politician who co-founded France’s National Front and pushed the far right into the limelight, died on Tuesday aged 96.
US says Sudan's RSF rebels committing 'genocide'
US Secretary of State Blinken announced sanctions on the leaders of the rebel group. The RSF has been at war with Sudan's military since April 2023, in a conflict that has further devastated the African country.
The outgoing administration of US President Joe Biden has imposed sanctions on the leaders of Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday that RSF members and allied militias "have committed genocide" in Sudan. The paramilitary group has been locked in a brutal war with the Sudanese military, once its ally, since April 2023.
Powerful earthquake kills at least 53 in Tibet, rattles Nepal
REUTERS
January 7, 2025 at 16:55 JST
A magnitude 6.8 earthquake rocked the northern foothills of the Himalayas near one of Tibet’s holiest cities on Tuesday, Chinese authorities said, killing at least 53 people and shaking buildings in neighboring Nepal, Bhutan and India.
The quake hit at 9:05 a.m. (0105 GMT), with its epicenter located in Tingri, a rural Chinese county known as the northern gateway to the Everest region, at a depth of 10 km (6.2 miles), according to the China Earthquake Networks Centre. The U.S. Geological Service put the quake’s magnitude at 7.1.
At least 53 people had been killed and 62 injured on the Tibetan side, China’s state-run news agency Xinhua reported.
More funerals in Gaza as incessant Israel bombing continues
- Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza continues with at least 31 Palestinians killed and 57 injured over the past 24 hours, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.
- Tom Fletcher, the UN’s relief chief, says efforts to save the lives of survivors in Gaza is “at breaking point” because of continued Israeli attacks on aid workers, including an assault on a World Food Programme convoy and the collapse of law and order in the war-torn enclave.
- Israel’s military has launched a manhunt in the occupied West Bank after gunmen killed three Israelis near an illegal settlement in the Qalqilya governorate.
- US envoy Amos Hochstein says the Israeli military will withdraw completely from south Lebanon after it withdrew from another of the nearly 60 border villages its troops are currently operating in. But Hochstein does not confirm if the Israeli pullout will be completed within the 60-day deadline of the ceasefire deal with Hezbollah.
- Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed at least 45,885 Palestinians and wounded 109,196 since October 7, 2023. At least 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks that day and more than 200 taken captive.
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