Turkish security forces "neutralized" eight PKK/YPG terrorists in northern Iraq and northern Syria, Turkey’s National Defense Ministry said on Sunday.

The ministry said on Twitter that three terrorists were neutralized in the Operation Pence-Yildirim zone in northern Iraq with an air operation, plus five others in the Operation Peace Spring area in northern Syria, both of the areas near Turkey’s southern borders.

Turkish authorities often use the word neutralized in statements to imply the terrorists in question surrendered or were killed or captured.

The terrorist PKK often uses bases in northern Iraq, just across Turkey’s southern border, to plot terror attacks in Turkey, and the YPG/PKK has tried to establish a terror corridor in northern Syria, targeting both Turkish soldiers and border areas.

Turkey has carried out a series of offensives since 2019 against terrorist groups in northern Iraq, particularly the PKK. The latest operations are Pence-Simsek and Pence-Yildirim launched this April in the Metina and Avasin-Basyan regions, following up on operations Pence-Kaplan and Pence-Kartal, which began in June 2020.

Also, since 2016 Ankara has launched a trio of successful anti-terror operations across its border in northern Syria to prevent the formation of a terror corridor and enable the peaceful settlement of residents: Euphrates Shield (2016), Olive Branch (2018), and Peace Spring (2019).

In its over 35-year terror campaign against Turkey, the PKK – listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US, and EU – has been responsible for the deaths of at least 40,000 people, including women, children, and infants. The YPG is the PKK's Syrian offshoot./ yenisafak

Palestinian group Hamas said Sunday that it had reached out to the UN as well as officials in Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on securing the release of its members being held in Saudi Arabia.

In a statement, Hamas said its leader Ismail Haniyeh had communicated through friends with the four countries about the issue.

The Palestinian group said Haniyeh provided UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres with a list of Hamas detainees in Saudi Arabia.

According to the statement, Haniyeh received pledges “from these countries to settle the issue” of detainees.

There was no comment from authorities in the four countries or the UN on Hamas’ statement.

In August, a Saudi criminal court sentenced Mohammed Al-Khudari, former Hamas representative in the kingdom, to 15 years in prison on charges of supporting the Palestinian group, in addition to various jail sentences for 69 Palestinian and Jordanian nationals.

Meanwhile, Haniyeh said his group seeks to free its representative Marwan al-Ashqar held in Libya.

On Oct. 21, 2019, al-Ashqar, his son, and two other Palestinians were charged by a Libyan court with forming a secret foreign organization and possession and smuggling of weapons and were sentenced with terms ranging from 17 to 27 years./ yenisafak

Facebook has long been aware of the harms of its applications and services, according to new internal documents sent to multiple news outlets on Friday.

Documents leaked by a whistleblower revealed that the social media giant does not try to prevent or rectify the issues.

One of the documents showed a Facebook researcher created an account for a test user named Carol Smith for an experiment in the summer of 2019.

Just two days after joining the platform, Smith, who was described as a conservative mother from North Carolina, was given recommendations by Facebook to join groups dedicated to QAnon – a conspiracy theory movement.

Although Smith did not follow the QAnon groups, her feed was filled with related groups and pages within a week, which showed that Facebook’s practices violated its own rules against misinformation and hate speech.

After supporters of former US President Donald Trump raided Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, Facebook employees were unprepared to prevent Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement, the documents showed.

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower, first leaked internal documents earlier this month.

She told a Senate committee that choices being made inside Facebook are “disastrous” for children, public safety and privacy, and stressed that “congressional action is needed.”/ yenisafak

Pakistan has accused the US of colluding with its longtime rival India to sabotage the multibillion-dollar China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project.

The rare direct charge came from the head of the local CPEC authority, Khalid Mansoor, who is also a special assistant to Prime Minister Imran Khan, at a seminar organized by the prestigious Institute of Business Administration in the business capital of Karachi, local English-language daily Dawn reported on Sunday.

Washington has long opposed the $64 billion project, calling it a "debt trap" for Pakistan, but this is the first time Islamabad has reacted this bluntly.

New Delhi, an archrival of Beijing and Islamabad, has also opposed the project, which is part of Beijing's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, viewing it as against its strategic interests in the region.

"From the point of view of the emerging geostrategic situation, one thing is clear: the United States supported by India is inimical to CPEC. It will not let it succeed. That’s where we have to take a position,” Mansoor was quoted as saying.

"There’s no way Pakistan will forgo any of its benefits. It has more than once burnt its fingers in (the Western) alliance in the past,” he said, adding that attempts to dilute Beijing's strategic influence in the region will not succeed.

The West, he went on to argue, views CPEC as a symbol of China’s political ambition.

“That’s the reason CPEC is seen suspiciously by both the United States and Europe… They view CPEC more as a move by China to expand its political, strategic, and business influence,” Mansoor added.

Islamabad, he said, has discussed the possibility of Afghanistan's inclusion in the CPEC with the Taliban government, but gave no further details, including Kabul's response.

Signed in 2015, the CPEC aims to connect China's strategically important northwestern Xinjiang province to the port of Gwadar in southern Pakistan, through a network of roads, railways, and pipelines to transport cargo, oil, and gas./ yenisafak

Facebook in India has been selective in curbing hate speech, misinformation and inflammatory posts, particularly anti-Muslim content, according to leaked documents obtained by The Associated Press, even as its own employees cast doubt over the company’s motivations and interests.

From research as recent as March of this year to company memos that date back to 2019, the internal company documents on India highlights Facebook’s constant struggles in quashing abusive content on its platforms in the world’s biggest democracy and the company’s largest growth market. 

Communal and religious tensions in India have a history of boiling over on social media and stoking violence.

The files show that Facebook has been aware of the problems for years, raising questions over whether it has done enough to address these issues. Many critics and digital experts say it has failed to do so, especially in cases where members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or the BJP, are involved.

Across the world, Facebook has become increasingly important in politics, and India is no different.

Modi has been credited for leveraging the platform to his party's advantage during elections, and reporting from The Wall Street Journal last year cast doubt over whether Facebook was selectively enforcing its policies on hate speech to avoid blowback from the BJP. Both Modi and Facebook chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have exuded bonhomie, memorialized by a 2015 image of the two hugging at the Facebook headquarters.

The leaked documents include a trove of internal company reports on hate speech and misinformation in India. In some cases, much of it was intensified by its own “recommended” feature and algorithms. But they also include the company staffers’ concerns over the mishandling of these issues and their discontent expressed about the viral “malcontent” on the platform.

According to the documents, Facebook saw India as of the most “at risk countries” in the world and identified both Hindi and Bengali languages as priorities for “automation on violating hostile speech.” Yet, Facebook didn’t have enough local language moderators or content-flagging in place to stop misinformation that at times led to real-world violence.

In a statement to the AP, Facebook said it has “invested significantly in technology to find hate speech in various languages, including Hindi and Bengali” which has resulted in “reduced the amount of hate speech that people see by half” in 2021.

“Hate speech against marginalized groups, including Muslims, is on the rise globally. So we are improving enforcement and are committed to updating our policies as hate speech evolves online,” a company spokesperson said.

This AP story, along with others being published, is based on disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including the AP.

Back in February 2019 and ahead of a general election when concerns of misinformation were running high, a Facebook employee wanted to understand what a new user in the country saw on their news feed if all they did was follow pages and groups solely recommended by the platform’s itself.

The employee created a test user account and kept it live for three weeks, a period during which an extraordinary event shook India — a militant attack in disputed Kashmir had killed over 40 Indian soldiers, bringing the country to near war with rival Pakistan.

In the note, titled “An Indian Test User’s Descent into a Sea of Polarizing, Nationalistic Messages,” the employee whose name is redacted said they were “shocked” by the content flooding the news feed which “has become a near constant barrage of polarizing nationalist content, misinformation, and violence and gore.”

Seemingly benign and innocuous groups recommended by Facebook quickly morphed into something else altogether, where hate speech, unverified rumors and viral content ran rampant.

The recommended groups were inundated with fake news, anti-Pakistan rhetoric and Islamophobic content. Much of the content was extremely graphic.

One included a man holding the bloodied head of another man covered in a Pakistani flag, with an Indian flag in the place of his head. Its “Popular Across Facebook” feature showed a slew of unverified content related to the retaliatory Indian strikes into Pakistan after the bombings, including an image of a napalm bomb from a video game clip debunked by one of Facebook’s fact-check partners.

“Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the researcher wrote.

It sparked deep concerns over what such divisive content could lead to in the real world, where local news at the time were reporting on Kashmiris being attacked in the fallout.

“Should we as a company have an extra responsibility for preventing integrity harms that result from recommended content?” the researcher asked in their conclusion.

The memo, circulated with other employees, did not answer that question. But it did expose how the platform’s own algorithms or default settings played a part in spurring such malcontent. The employee noted that there were clear “blind spots,” particularly in “local language content.” They said they hoped these findings would start conversations on how to avoid such “integrity harms,” especially for those who “differ significantly” from the typical US user.

Even though the research was conducted during three weeks that weren’t an average representation, they acknowledged that it did show how such “unmoderated” and problematic content “could totally take over” during “a major crisis event.”

The Facebook spokesperson said the test study “inspired deeper, more rigorous analysis” of its recommendation systems and “contributed to product changes to improve them.”

“Separately, our work on curbing hate speech continues and we have further strengthened our hate classifiers, to include four Indian languages,” the spokesperson said./TRT

Hundreds of inmates escaped as gunmen attacked a jail in Nigeria's Oyo State, authorities said on Saturday.

Olanrewaju Anjorin, a spokesman of the Oyo correctional center in Oyo state, said in a statement that 837 prisoners escaped after Friday night's attack on the prison in Abolongo district.

He added that 262 prisoners had since been captured, but 575 prisoners are still missing and efforts are underway to catch them.

The attack is the third this year in the Western African country. On Sept. 13, 240 inmates were freed after gunmen attacked a detention facility in north-central Kogi state, while on April 5 at least 1,800 were freed in the southeast Imo state./aa

A soldier on Saturday attacked Zeinalabidin Hurrem, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander who was recently appointed as the governor of East Azerbaijan province of Iran, during his inauguration.

The person came on stage and slapped Hurrem when he was addressing the ceremony held in Tabriz, the provincial capital.

"The soldier attacked me because his wife was vaccinated by a male health worker," the governor later told state television.

Hurrem said he does not know the soldier, forgave him and will not file a complaint.

Meanwhile, prosecutors in Tabriz launched an investigation against the soldier, who is part of the Revolutionary Guards.

The IRGC in a statement supported Hurrem, saying legal action would be taken against the military officer./aa