Global Pulse

作者： admin

  • Philippine town seeks immediate airlift of food to ease hunger in quake-hit villages

    Philippine town seeks immediate airlift of food to ease hunger in quake-hit villages

    Four days after a catastrophic 7.8-magnitude offshore earthquake struck the southern Philippines, leaving dozens dead and thousands displaced, a local mayor has issued an urgent appeal for military helicopters to deliver life-saving food supplies to communities cut off by widespread landslides.

    The powerful quake, which hit Monday off the coast of Sarangani province, ranks among the strongest seismic events to shake the Philippine archipelago in 50 years. As of Thursday, official disaster data puts the death toll at no less than 47, with 688 people injured and 31 others still unaccounted for. More than 12,600 residential structures across rural farming communities and urban centers were damaged in the disaster, forcing more than 45,000 residents to leave their homes. Roughly half of these displaced people are now sheltering in emergency evacuation facilities, and provincial officials note that many survivors remain too fearful of ongoing aftershocks to return to their properties even if their homes survived intact.

    According to the Philippines’ Office of Civil Defense, the national agency tasked with managing major disasters, Sarangani province has recorded the highest number of fatalities at 20, most of which stemmed from a single landslide that buried multiple homes in the coastal town of Glan.

    Glan Mayor Victor James Yap, speaking to Philippines-based DZMM radio, outlined the dire conditions facing his town of more than 100,000 residents. Ten of the town’s 31 barangays (villages) remain completely cut off from overland access, blocked by landslide debris, and power has yet to be restored across the area. “We need food and water but it’s difficult to transport them to some of our villages which remain isolated,” Yap said. “Choppers are needed to transport food because people there are already very hungry.”

    While a key access highway leading into Glan has been cleared and reopened to traffic, allowing fuel deliveries to resume as early as Thursday, the town still remains without grid electricity, and mobile phone connectivity remains spotty at best across most affected areas.

    Most fatalities across the disaster zone were caused by falling debris from collapsed buildings or landslides across Sarangani, the nearby coastal city of General Santos, and the adjacent provinces of South Cotabato and Davao Occidental. In a separate, quake-related tragedy, two swimmers drowned off the coast of General Santos after being swept out to sea by sudden abnormal waves immediately after the quake struck, with one additional swimmer still missing. Seismic sea surges reaching up to 1.4 meters above normal tide levels were recorded in southern Philippines, with smaller wave activity detected as far away as Indonesia, Palau, and southern Japan.

    Geographically, the Philippines sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, a seismically active arc of fault lines encircling the Pacific Ocean that leaves the country regularly vulnerable to major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. This recent quake is the strongest to hit the nation since an 8.1-magnitude quake and subsequent tsunami in August 1976 killed an estimated 8,000 people across the archipelago.

  • States, territories warn the commonwealth ‘no agreement’ ahead of NDIS cuts

    States, territories warn the commonwealth ‘no agreement’ ahead of NDIS cuts

    A fierce political clash has erupted over the Albanese government’s sweeping planned changes to Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), with state and territory governments launching an extraordinary rebuke of proposals that would remove an estimated 160,000 participants from the scheme to cut billions in spending. The federal government’s legislative package, which aims to slash $35 billion in long-term expenditure by tightening provider requirements and shifting almost 200,000 people off NDIS rolls, has already cleared the lower house of parliament. It now faces a Senate vote following a ongoing parliamentary inquiry, and will require crossbench support from either the Coalition — which has signaled tentative backing for reform — or the Greens to pass. In their formal submission to the inquiry, state and territory health ministers acknowledge that the NDIS, which has ballooned since its launch, faces urgent systemic pressures: prior reviews have documented widespread financial strain, market distortion, rising fraud, and a gradual drift away from the scheme’s original core purpose. Ministers agree that targeted reform is necessary to keep the NDIS effective, participant-centered, and financially sustainable — but they argue the federal government’s current approach is disproportionate, rushed, and poorly coordinated. Critically, the subnational governments stress they never agreed to take on funding responsibility for the 160,000 people set to be removed from NDIS, including participants shifted to off-scheme foundational support programs such as Thriving Kids, which serves children with mild to moderate autism. “While elements of the proposed reforms have the potential to deliver improved outcomes, the Bill in its current form risks undermining the original intent of the NDIS,” the ministers wrote in their submission. They warn that the government’s laser focus on rapid expenditure cuts, paired with a lack of clear planning for a broader disability support ecosystem and insufficient consultation with subnational governments, creates a severe risk of fragmented, chaotic service delivery. Without a coordinated, carefully phased approach that integrates these changes with broader improvements to the national disability support system, the ministers argue, many people with disability could end up in inappropriate care settings such as hospitals, or lose access to critical support entirely. To address these gaps, the state and territory governments have put forward two key amendments: first, that the most fiscally impactful components of the bill can only proceed if they are agreed to by all states and territories; second, that the NDIS Act be updated to include a formal “Category A rule-making power” for outlining alternative support arrangements, and that the federal government clarify future NDIS pricing frameworks. The ministers note these recommendations align with agreements reached during a January meeting with federal officials, and that their submission focuses only on the most contentious section of the legislation, Schedule 1, with more concerns potentially to come. Another major flashpoint is the consolidation of extensive decision-making power in federal Health Minister Mark Butler, the submission argues. The proposed changes would allow Butler to enact long-lasting modifications to the scheme without adequate safeguards, parliamentary scrutiny, or agreement from state and territory co-governors. Specifically, the reforms would let the minister set binding caps, limits, or funding ratios for support categories and make broad changes to individual participant budgets via a simple determination, with no clear rules around how the powers would be applied, whether they would apply across the entire scheme, or which participants would be exempt. “This is a significant power with limited safeguards, and there is insufficient clarity about how these changes would operate in practice,” the submission reads. Amid growing cross-party and advocacy pushback, Butler has defended the government’s reform plan, telling reporters the government is monitoring the inquiry and reviewing thousands of public submissions closely, and will not make final adjustments until the inquiry concludes. He stressed that the government’s plan was carefully developed to put the NDIS back on a sustainable long-term footing, while still keeping people with disability at the center of the scheme. The inquiry has already heard damning testimony from disability advocates and NDIS participants, who have repeatedly urged parliament to reject the reforms in their current form.

  • The lost West Bank

    The lost West Bank

    Against the backdrop of high-intensity conflicts roiling Lebanon and Iran, a slower, steady process of Israeli territorial consolidation in the West Bank has faded almost entirely from global geopolitical discourse. Yet for Israeli expansionist factions, this long-disputed territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea lies at the very core of their decades-old vision of a “Greater Israel” – a goal that the current government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is actively advancing through incremental, largely underreported measures.

    Netanyahu’s administration has deployed a layered strategy to solidify Israeli control over the West Bank, which is home to more than 3.3 million Palestinian residents. Tactics include the rapid expansion of Israeli civilian settlements, forced evictions of Palestinian families from their long-held lands, turning a blind eye to escalating settler violence against rural Arab communities, and increasingly frequent large-scale military raids across Palestinian population centers. In parallel, the government has moved to establish direct Israeli governing institutions for roughly one-third of the territory, a step that amounts to effective annexation despite the absence of a formal declaration.

    Israeli and Palestinian analysts both project that once this restructuring is complete, up to 80% of the entire West Bank will fall under de facto Israeli control. The remaining 20% would continue to be administered by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), the body established in 1994 as part of the Oslo Accords to lay the groundwork for an independent Palestinian state.

    This steady push to tighten Israeli control gained new momentum in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel. Israel’s large-scale counteroffensive in Gaza has since captured roughly 60% of that enclave, while a parallel low-intensity campaign to consolidate control in the West Bank has progressed largely out of the international spotlight. Overlooked amid the far more visible conflicts unfolding across Lebanon, Iran and Gaza, the West Bank’s slow absorption into Israel has become a largely unaddressed “geopolitical orphan” on the global stage.

    For Netanyahu and his ruling coalition, the takeover of the West Bank is the fulfillment of a long-held political promise. The goal of incorporating the territory into Israel has been a core plank of his Likud Party since its founding 70 years ago, and the religious-nationalist factions that prop up his current government share this expansionist objective. The October 7 attack created a unique political opening for these ambitions: polling shows 58% of Israeli citizens back the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, while an identical majority opposes an outright, formal annexation. This split public opinion allows Netanyahu to advance de facto control incrementally, avoiding the international backlash that would come with a formal annexation while creating irreversible “facts on the ground” that effectively erase Palestinian claims to statehood.

    Today, the West Bank’s physical landscape already reflects this de facto annexation: separation walls, barbed-wire fences, military watchtowers, rapidly growing settler communities, and a segregated road network restricted to Israeli citizens have created a system of separate and unequal rule that divides 3.3 million Palestinian residents from the roughly 540,000 Israeli settlers currently residing in the territory.

    The International Crisis Group (ICG), a leading global conflict prevention think tank, summarized the process in a recent assessment: “Israel’s far-right government is restructuring the occupation of the West Bank, shifting governing powers from military to civilian agencies in order to gradually institute permanent control. With Israeli law reaching further into the territory and space for Palestinian independence shrinking, much of the territory has, in effect, already been annexed.”

    A key pillar of this consolidation is escalating violence against Palestinian communities carried out by Israeli settlers, which is rarely prosecuted and often enabled by Israeli security forces. B’tselem, one of Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations, documents that since October 7, 2023, settler violence has escalated dramatically: what once centered on vandalism and property destruction now includes kidnapping, prolonged physical abuse, and open complicity from the Israeli military. In one widely circulated video from last year, a settler was recorded beating a Palestinian sheepdog to death with wooden sticks, while other groups have stolen entire herds of sheep from Palestinian pastoral communities, echoing the tactics of 19th-century American frontier cattle rustlers.

    A March 2025 report from the United Nations Human Rights Office echoed these findings, noting that “Settler violence continued in a coordinated, strategic and largely unchallenged manner, with Israeli authorities playing the central role in directing, participating in or enabling this conduct, making it difficult to distinguish between state and settler violence.”

    Prosecutions of violent settlers remain extremely rare. Data from Israeli human rights group Yesh Din shows that between 2005 and 2025, 90% of all complaints filed by Palestinians against settler harassment were closed without any charges being brought. The group’s report notes that “Israeli security forces routinely accompanied settlers and acted as a shield for the violence.” According to UN data, at least seven Palestinians were killed and more than 830 injured in settler and state-linked violence in 2025, with near-daily attacks continuing into 2026. The UN report concludes that “the increasing participation of Israeli security forces in settler attacks amounts to a de facto collapse of the distinction between settlers and soldiers.” Israeli diplomatic officials have rejected the UN findings, dismissing them as unsubstantiated allegations.

    Beyond physical violence, the Israeli government is using bureaucratic measures to cement control. The cabinet recently legalized 50 previously unauthorized settler outposts, granting them full state funding and official status, bringing the total number of authorized settlements to 141 alongside more than 300 remaining unapproved outposts. Just this month, the government introduced a new rule requiring Palestinians to provide written proof of land ownership dating back to either Ottoman or Jordanian rule – a standard that is impossible for most residents to meet, as much of the land was historically held under communal ownership with no formal title documentation. Israel also regularly expropriates vacant Palestinian land under the pretext of military needs or the construction of state communications infrastructure.

    Global and regional powers have so far taken little meaningful action to push back against the expansion. While many Western governments friendly to Israel continue to pay lip service to a two-state solution, no major power has made concrete efforts to advance that outcome in decades. Former U.S. President Donald Trump, a staunch ally of Israel across all its regional conflicts, has only commented on the West Bank to demand that Israel avoid formal annexation, raising no objection to the incremental de facto consolidation. Iran, a major backer of Hamas, has dismissed the PNA as weak and ineffective, and has funneled support to armed resistance groups in the northern West Bank for years. However, Iran’s influence in the region has weakened following the ouster of its long-time ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria, replaced by a new Sunni Islamic government that is courting Western economic support.

    The current frontline of this expansionist push is the small Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar, a community of 300 people located just east of Jerusalem in the West Bank. The village sits along a strategic east-west highway connecting Jerusalem to major Israeli settlements and the Jordan River border, and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – a hardline expansionist who resides in a West Bank settlement himself – has ordered the village demolished to clear space for further settlement construction. The project would create an unbroken bloc of Israeli settlements that cuts off the main north-south corridor connecting the northern and southern West Bank, permanently dividing Palestinian territory and making a contiguous independent Palestinian state impossible. Smotrich has openly stated that this outcome is intentional: “The Palestinian state is being erased from the table not with slogans but with actions. This reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state. There is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize.”

    Smotrich’s accelerated push for the demolition came in direct response to news that the International Criminal Court (ICC) based in The Hague planned to issue an arrest warrant for him over his role in expanding Israeli control of the West Bank. Smotrich called the ICC move an “act of war” and ordered the evacuation of Khan al-Ahmar as a direct response, telling reporters: “I promise all our enemies, this is only the beginning.” The ICC issued the arrest warrant on April 2, 2026, but bulldozers have not yet been deployed to demolish the village, leaving the community in limbo as the world focuses on more visible conflicts elsewhere in the Middle East.

  • Iran’s World Cup super fans excited for football despite the war

    Iran’s World Cup super fans excited for football despite the war

    Even as geopolitical conflict rages between Iran and the United States, two lifelong Iranian American football superfans are refusing to let political tensions dim their excitement for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which is being co-hosted across North America. For 70-year-old Mostafa Pourmand and 64-year-old Reza Mansoor, who have built a 50-year life in San Diego, California, supporting Iran’s national men’s football team Team Melli is more than a hobby — it is a decades-long commitment that has already seen them attend 11 World Cup tournaments combined. This year, even open military conflict between their home nation and their adopted home’s country has not shaken their dedication: the pair say they are eager for nothing more than a historic on-pitch showdown between Iran and the US in the knockout rounds.

    To make that long-awaited clash a reality, Iran will need to hit a milestone it has never reached in its World Cup history: advancing beyond the group stage. For Mansoor, the 2026 draw gives Team Melli its best ever shot at breaking that curse, with the team drawn into a group against New Zealand, Egypt and Belgium. “There is a really high chance that we’re going to advance, best chance we’ve ever had,” he told AFP in an interview. Buoyed by that optimism, the pair have already purchased advance tickets for knockout stage matches, to ensure they will be in the stands if Iran advances to a match-up against the US.

    Amid renewed deadly clashes in the Strait of Hormuz — a critical global trade waterway where hostilities flared again after a brief lull — Mansoor holds onto the hope that a football match could act as an unexpected bridge between two nations locked in conflict. “I think everyone will love it, and I think that match would actually bring out peace. It could change a lot of things,” he said.

    Mansoor’s commitment to Team Melli runs so deep that he has already crossed the Mexican border to Tijuana, where he is staying at the same hotel as the Iranian squad, after the team relocated its pre-tournament training camp from Tucson, Arizona to Mexico. The 2026 tournament will mark Mansoor’s sixth World Cup attendance; he has traveled to every edition Iran qualified for, with the exception of the 1978 tournament.

    For both fans, one of their most cherished memories dates back to the 1998 World Cup in France, where Iran claimed its first ever World Cup victory with a dramatic 2-1 win over the US. At the time, FIFA framed the match as one of “fraternity”, a rare moment of connection between two nations that had been estranged since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Before kickoff, players from both sides exchanged flowers and posed for a joint group photo — a moment Mansoor calls one of the most iconic in World Cup history. That encounter opened the door for a 2000 friendly match between the two nations in Los Angeles, a city nicknamed “Tehrangeles” for its large and vibrant Iranian American community. That match ended in a 1-1 draw, and Pourmand recalls the whole stadium cheering for both sides. “Those were the good old days,” he smiled.

    This year’s tournament carries far more tension, however. Since late February, Tehran and Washington have been engaged in open military conflict following joint strikes by Israel and the United States. Iran retaliated by targeting US allies in the Gulf and restricting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the global oil artery whose disruption has sent shockwaves through the global economy. This geopolitical turmoil cast significant uncertainty over Iran’s participation in the World Cup, which sees all three of the team’s group stage matches hosted on US soil.

    While the Iranian players have received US visas to compete, several support staff and team administrators have been denied entry, prompting the squad to move their training camp across the border to Mexico. Mansoor calls this the most difficult World Cup Iran has experienced out of its seven total tournament appearances.

    Beyond geopolitical tensions, the pair also face division within the global Iranian diaspora, where many see the national team as a propaganda tool for the Islamic Republic. During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, just months after the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody sparked nationwide protests that were violently crushed, the team faced loud boos from dissident Iranian fans. Even Iran’s 1-0 loss to the US in that tournament was celebrated by protesters on the streets of Iran. That rift remains fresh: in Los Angeles, the Iranian diaspora held large-scale protests in January to condemn the brutal crackdown on a new popular uprising that left thousands of Iranians dead. Pourmand expects widespread opposition to the national team during matches in LA.

    Still, he remains convinced that once the first whistle blows, much of that political animosity will fade for true football fans. “People like me, people like my friend, and the true fans, they are tuning out and want to just focus on the game,” he said. “We’ll deal with the politics after.”

  • The ‘King of the North’ seeks a path to becoming Britain’s next leader in a special election

    The ‘King of the North’ seeks a path to becoming Britain’s next leader in a special election

    Deep in the former coal-mining belt of northwest England, 75,000 eligible voters in the Makerfield constituency are preparing to cast ballots that hold the potential to upend the entire trajectory of British national politics. Scheduled for June 18, this special House of Commons by-election is no ordinary midterm vacancy contest: it could elevate a new prime minister to power, deepen the political chaos roiling the nation’s ruling party, or even deliver both outcomes in one blow.

    For decades, this working-class district has been an unshakable stronghold of the center-left Labour Party, holding Labour representation for 120 consecutive years. But this year, the race is anything but predictable, drawing global media attention rarely seen for a single parliamentary by-election. At the center of the contest is Andy Burnham, the wildly popular mayor of Greater Manchester, who has been dubbed the “King of the North” for his regional popularity and independent political brand. Burnham, who is running as Labour’s candidate, needs a parliamentary seat to mount a leadership challenge against embattled incumbent Prime Minister Keir Starmer—whose tenure has been marked by stumbling performance, sinking approval, and growing calls for his resignation from within Labour’s own ranks.

    Starmer’s Labour government, which swept to power in July 2024, has failed to deliver on core campaign promises of economic growth, repaired public services, and relief from the country’s persistent cost-of-living crisis. A series of high-profile missteps—including the controversial appointment of scandal-linked Peter Mandelson as U.S. ambassador—have compounded the party’s woes. Last month’s abysmal local election results triggered open mutiny among Labour lawmakers, forcing cabinet minister Wes Streeting to resign to prepare for an impending leadership contest. A win for Burnham in Makerfield would clear his path to challenge Starmer, making a leadership change that would install him as Britain’s next prime minister almost a foregone conclusion, political analysts say.

    Standing in Burnham’s way is Reform UK, the hard-right anti-immigration party led by veteran populist Nigel Farage. Last month, Farage’s party shocked the political establishment by taking 24 of 25 up-for-grabs local council seats in the Makerfield area, signaling a dramatic erosion of Labour’s longstanding hold on the region. Reform’s candidate, local plumber and sitting councilor Rob Kenyon, is framing the race as a rejection of a failing Labour establishment, tapping into deep voter frustration over the UK’s recent immigration surge. The contest comes as immigration has reemerged as the most polarizing issue in British politics, fueled by high annual net migration in recent years and fresh unrest following a stabbing attack in Belfast that sparked violent arson protests.

    On the ground in Ashton-in-Makerfield, the constituency’s main town, many voters echo Reform’s narrative that record immigration has stretched public housing, healthcare, and other local services to breaking point, with working-class taxpayers bearing the cost. “Immigration’s too high, all the services are being put under pressure and Labour just keep inviting more and more people into the country and it’s the taxpayer who has to pay for them,” said retiree Phil Arrowsmith, one of a growing number of long-time Labour voters abandoning the party in this election. Long-time Makerfield resident Shirley Prior summed up the widespread disillusionment with the status quo: “I think they’re all a waste of time,” she said of the field of candidates, noting she abandoned her family’s generations-long Labour voting pattern years ago.

    Burnham, who has served as Greater Manchester’s mayor since 2017, is leaning hard into his successful regional record to win over skeptical voters. Under his leadership, post-industrial central Manchester has experienced an economic boom, with new skyscrapers transforming once-blighted former factory sites. He won widespread praise for bringing the region’s fragmented public transport system under municipal control as the Bee Network, delivering cheaper, more reliable service for commuters. Though he served 15 years as a Labour MP and cabinet minister before entering regional office, he leans into his “outsider” brand, positioning himself as a leader who can deliver tangible change that London’s political establishment has failed to deliver. “What we’ve built in Greater Manchester needs to go national,” Burnham told reporters at a recent campaign stop. “I know what it is to turn places around.”

    Burnham has acknowledged the deep anger driving support for Reform, calling the party’s rising local support a “cry for real change” that Labour cannot ignore. Even so, he faces a steep uphill battle to hold the seat, with even long-time Labour supporters admitting the unpopularity of Starmer’s national government will make the contest close. Retired teacher and Labour backer Michael Poultney noted that without Burnham’s personal local popularity, the party would struggle to hold the seat. “Keir Starmer has done reasonably well on the international stage, but the government are yet to be in control of the economy,” Poultney explained.

    Burnham for his part has refused to take victory for granted, insisting he is focused on representing Makerfield constituents rather than his national leadership ambitions. “I am making no assumptions beyond the 18th of June,” he said, though he acknowledged the historic stakes of the contest: “this is a change by-election. I will take the fight for the changes I want to see in politics as far as I can take it.” With national leadership hanging in the balance, all eyes of British and global politics will be on this small corner of northwest England when polls open next week.

  • The Indian workers training AI robots to take their jobs

    The Indian workers training AI robots to take their jobs

    In a small Chennai kitchen, 25-year-old Indian housewife Nagireddy Sriramyachandra straps a smartphone to her head, lifts a ripe mango, and begins slicing. Every movement is captured in first-person footage, destined to train artificial intelligence-powered humanoid robots to master everyday household tasks. For this hour of work, she earns just over $2, a rate that makes this side opportunity attractive even as the work she is doing could one day eliminate roles like hers entirely.

    Sriramyachandra is not an anomaly. She is part of a fast-expanding workforce of thousands of AI data trainers across India, the world’s most populous country that has positioned itself as a global hub for the creation, processing, and annotation of the human-centric data that next-generation robots need to operate in real-world environments. Unlike the large language models that power generative AI chatbots and image generators, which train on massive troves of existing online data, systems built to navigate physical spaces require entirely new types of input.

    Industry developers have landed on a solution: collect “egocentric data” — first-person footage captured by workers as they complete routine tasks — to feed into specialized AI models, teaching robots to replicate human movement and decision-making in unstructured physical settings. Trainers work across a range of locations: some film from their own homes, others in commercial factories, and many purpose-built studios with staged living spaces. They use a variety of capture tools, from head-mounted smartphones to smart video glasses, motion sensors, and depth-sensing cameras.

    For Sriramyachandra, the work fills a gap in her household income. “Who else will give you 250 rupees an hour just for doing housework?” she asked in an interview from her home in Tamil Nadu. When asked about the long-term impact of her work, she shrugged off concern, noting “I may get a robot myself in the future” to help with her household chores. Her recordings are sent via a custom app to Objectways, an AI data firm with offices in India and the United States that counts Fortune 500 multinationals among its clients and partners with Amazon’s machine learning platform SageMaker.

    The global humanoid robot market is expanding rapidly, with investment bank Morgan Stanley projecting that more than one billion humanoid robots could be in use worldwide by 2050, primarily serving industrial and commercial functions. Ravi Shankar, founder and CEO of Objectways, outlined the wide range of tasks clients are seeking data for: “Folding clothes, coffee making… cooking a very specific thing, sandwich making.” For Shankar, AI and automation are not inherently a threat to workers: “Some jobs are supposed to be taken over, so humans can go and do better things.”

    Right now, this growing demand for egocentric AI data is creating new, accessible employment opportunities across India, particularly in tech hubs like Tamil Nadu, where Shankar grew up and now hires most of his workforce. At a textile factory in Karur, for example, AFP found eight workers attaching labels to caps and ironing cloth bags while wearing head cameras and smart glasses supplied by Objectways, capturing their movements for AI training.

    Digital labor experts expect this trend to accelerate. “It’s likely that these data collection services will increase,” noted Aditi Surie, a digital labor expert at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bengaluru.

    But the growing industry has also sparked urgent conversation about the long-term risks automation poses to India’s massive workforce, particularly the 490 million informal workers who make up the backbone of the country’s economy. As India aggressively expands its domestic AI industry, national leaders have acknowledged that automation brings major downside risks alongside its touted economic benefits.

    A recent report from Indian government think tank NITI Aayog, released ahead of the country’s hosting of a global AI summit this year, points out a critical gap in mainstream labor analysis: most debates about AI and employment focus almost exclusively on white-collar professionals and their risk of job displacement, while ignoring the far larger population of informal workers who are most vulnerable to automation. The think tank has launched an examination of how AI will impact dozens of blue-collar and informal professions, from cobblers and sewer cleaners to small-scale farmers and street tea sellers.

    Fifty-five-year-old Ponni, a street flower garland maker based in Bengaluru — India’s iconic Silicon Valley — has first-hand experience with this dynamic. For decades she has plucked and strung blooms by hand on a city sidewalk, and like Sriramyachandra, she has been paid to strap a phone to her forehead to capture her work for AI training. When asked about the future, she expressed clear concern for coming generations: “The next generation… who might have to do work similar to mine — they will face a problem.”

    Inside Objectways’ purpose-built training studios, workers repeat simple mundane tasks hundreds of times a day to build up a robust dataset. The facility features fully furnished fake apartment rooms, where trainers film themselves doing household chores; after thousands of hours of filming, the team even changes the wallpaper to add visual variety for AI model training.

    Twenty-one-year-old engineering graduate Rani N. is one of these full-time trainers, currently spending her days filming herself folding towels over and over. Each video runs roughly four minutes, and she films around 90 videos a day, repositioning herself across every spot on a bed to capture varied perspectives. She describes the job as “tolerable” but acknowledges the constant awkwardness of always wearing a camera. In other studio rooms, colleagues arrange everyday items like pencil sharpeners, water bottles, and crayons in different patterns, capturing the arrangements with depth-sensing cameras to build out AI spatial awareness.

    Subcontractors like Qanat Consulting Services in Andhra Pradesh expand Objectways’ reach, supplying training data to roughly a dozen major AI firms. Qanat CEO Thaslim Pattan says the firm has 2,000 independent contributors, many of whom wear motion-sensor bands on their wrists, hands, and legs to capture more granular movement data. Other Indian AI data firms, like Bengaluru-based Humyn Labs, collect both video and audio data, having contributors hold recorded conversations on topics ranging from politics to entertainment to help train AI speech recognition models.

    Manish Agarwal, founder of Humyn Labs, argues that fears of mass robot-driven job displacement are overblown. He believes the future of work will not be robots replacing humans, but “networks of humans and robots will work together” globally. “A welder in India could be managing a welder-robot in Prague,” he offered as an example of the new collaborative work models AI could enable.

    For now, though, the paradox at the heart of India’s AI data industry remains: thousands of ordinary workers are earning much-needed income helping build the very automation that could one day eliminate their roles, creating a critical tension that policymakers and industry leaders will have to grapple with as the AI sector continues to expand.

  • Two unnamed parties seeking to quash IBAC report launch bid to hide identities

    Two unnamed parties seeking to quash IBAC report launch bid to hide identities

    A high-stakes legal battle over the publication of a landmark corruption investigation report in the Australian state of Victoria is heading toward a key decision this Friday, with appellate judges set to rule on whether two parties challenging the report’s release can keep their identities hidden from the public.

    The dispute centers on Operation Richmond, a years-long probe run by Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) into allegations that emerged from 2016 enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) negotiations between the United Firefighters Union and the then-incumbent Andrews Government. IBAC launched the investigation in 2019 and had initially planned to table its completed special report in state parliament by July 1, but the legal challenge has put the release on hold.

    The two challengers, currently identified only in court documents as XY and Z, have launched legal action to quash the entire report and block its public release. Their specific justifications for the challenge have not been presented in open court, and the Supreme Court has already scheduled a full closed-door hearing for their case on June 24. Earlier this month, Supreme Court Justice Clare Harris ruled that while the entire challenge proceeding would be held in private, the two applicants could not hide their identities behind pseudonyms.

    That ruling was immediately appealed. On Thursday, experienced barrister Paul Holdenson KC, representing XY and Z, argued before the Court of Appeal that Justice Harris had made legal errors in her application of pseudonym rules. Holdenson contended that public release of his clients’ names would trigger unwarranted, irreversible public speculation that they are seeking to block the report to hide negative findings of misconduct against them. He added that under existing legislation governing unreleased IBAC reports, even if his clients successfully quash the report, they would be legally barred from responding to public speculation or explaining their position. “They can’t rebut, they can’t comment, they can’t contextualise, they can’t do anything,” Holdenson told the court. “They cannot speak to the public and say what might well be in this report concerning their conduct.”

    Court of Appeal Justice David Beach pushed back on this argument, noting that if the pair succeed in overturning the report, they would be permitted to publicly state that the court ruled IBAC’s document unlawful or invalid. Holdenson acknowledged this point but maintained that pre-existing speculation about their involvement would never be fully corrected, even after a favorable ruling.

    Legal teams opposing the anonymity request pushed back against Holdenson’s arguments in court Thursday. A lawyer representing IBAC argued that the applicants’ desire to protect their personal reputation does not meet the legal standard required for a court to grant pseudonym status. “My submission is there is nothing special in this case that would move the court to anonymise the applicants,” he told the bench.

    Justin Quill, a media lawyer representing multiple local news outlets, emphasized that the public interest in disclosing the applicants’ identities is exceptionally high. “It is in the public interest the public know the identities of parties seeking to stop IBAC releasing that report to parliament,” Quill said. He added that if the court finds in the challengers’ favor, there is nothing preventing the pair from publicly proclaiming their innocence and clarifying the court’s ruling, countering Holdenson’s claim that the applicants would be unable to respond to speculation.

    Chief Justice Richard Niall, Justice David Beach, and Justice Peter Gray will deliver their ruling on the anonymity appeal at 9:30 a.m. local time on Friday. If the court upholds the earlier Supreme Court ruling, the two challengers’ names will be made public immediately.

    In an official statement, IBAC confirmed that the ongoing legal proceedings have delayed the release of the Operation Richmond special report, but the commission reaffirmed its commitment to making the document public once the legal process concludes. IBAC Commissioner Victoria Elliott has repeatedly pushed for legislative changes to the state’s anti-corruption laws to increase the commission’s transparency. “As a general principle of public integrity, Victorians deserve to know more about IBAC’s efforts to expose and prevent corruption and police misconduct – and we want to tell you,” Elliott said. “But to do that, IBAC’s legislation needs to change, as it currently limits our ability to share what we believe to be in the public interest.” She has urged the Victorian government to adopt the regulatory amendments IBAC submitted to the Victorian Parliament Integrity Oversight Committee’s inquiry into the IBAC Act, noting that “Victorians want – and should have – greater insight into what is being done to address allegations of corruption and misconduct.”

  • Four days of rain slashed population of world’s rarest orangutans, study says

    Four days of rain slashed population of world’s rarest orangutans, study says

    When the Tapanuli orangutan was first formally identified as a distinct species in 2017, conservationists celebrated a rare new discovery in great ape taxonomy. Today, less than a decade later, this newly recognized primate stands on the brink of being lost forever, after a catastrophic extreme weather event wiped out 7% of its entire global population in just four days, new research confirms.

    In late November 2025, Cyclone Senyar tore across the Indonesian island of Sumatra, unleashing four straight days of record-shattering rainfall that triggered catastrophic mudslides and widespread flooding. The storm would go on to become Southeast Asia’s deadliest natural disaster of the year, claiming more than 1,000 human lives. Beyond the human toll, the cyclone inflicted devastating damage on the island’s remaining old-growth Batang Toru forest – the only place on Earth where wild Tapanuli orangutans live.

    In a new study published Wednesday by an international team of primate conservation experts, researchers calculate that at least 58 of the species’ remaining fewer than 800 individuals were killed directly by the storm’s landslides and flooding. Lead study author Erik Meijaard, managing director of Brunei-based conservation NGO Borneo Futures, notes that this updated death toll is a sharp increase from the 35 deaths he estimated just one month after the storm. Meijaard also emphasized that the 58 figure is a conservative estimate, as it does not account for longer-term threats posed by the storm, such as widespread destruction of forest canopy that the apes depend on for shelter and food, and long-term reductions in available fruit sources that will likely lead to additional starvation and population decline.

    In the weeks after the cyclone, humanitarian workers responding to the disaster in central Tapanuli’s Pulo Pakkat village recovered the semi-buried carcass of a Tapanuli orangutan, trapped under mud and fallen timber. Deckey Chandra, a member of the on-the-ground humanitarian team, told the BBC that the site where the orangutan was found had long been a foraging ground for the apes, who came there to feed on wild fruit. “They used to come to this place to eat fruits. But now it seems to have become their graveyard,” Chandra said. Meijaard, who reviewed photos of the recovered remains, described the violent force of the landslides that killed the apes: “If a few hectares of forest comes down in massive landslides, even powerful orangutans are helpless and just get mangled. It must have been hellish in the forest at the time.”

    While Cyclone Senyar was an unprecedented extreme weather event for the region, study authors confirm that human-caused climate change was a major contributing factor to the storm’s formation and intensity. Climate modeling predicts that extreme rainfall events will only grow more frequent and more severe across western Sumatra in the coming decades, creating a persistent, growing threat to the Tapanuli orangutan’s remaining habitat and population.

    Existing population trend research shows that the species will inevitably slide into complete extinction if it loses more than 1% of its total population annually. The 7% loss from a single storm puts the species far above that extinction threshold, making urgent coordinated action critical to save it.

    In a hopeful development, the Indonesian government has implemented a temporary moratorium on large-scale industrial development projects in the protected Batang Toru forest, including planned mining expansions, oil palm plantations, and new hydropower infrastructure. This moratorium has given conservation researchers a critical window to fully assess the ecological threats facing the species and design targeted protection plans.

    The study’s authors emphasize that the catastrophic loss from Cyclone Senyar makes clear just how biologically vulnerable the Tapanuli orangutan is, and that the crisis facing the species is the result of overlapping threats: accelerating climate instability, ongoing biodiversity loss, and chronic underfunding for conservation action. “The crisis facing the Tapanuli orangutan illustrates the convergence of climate instability, biodiversity loss, and vulnerability, calling for a coordinated response matching the scale of the threat,” the study concludes.

    Conservationists argue that preventing the first extinction of a great ape species in modern history is still achievable, but it will require sustained international collaboration, strengthened domestic forest protection policies, climate-responsive conservation planning, and long-term global financial and technical assistance to protect the Batang Toru ecosystem and its remaining primate population.

  • In ageing South Korea, AI dolls care for the elderly

    In ageing South Korea, AI dolls care for the elderly

    South Korea, a global technological leader facing one of the world’s most severe population aging crises, is turning to artificial intelligence to fill a growing gap in elderly care: crippling social isolation and loneliness. For thousands of seniors living alone across the country, cuddly AI-powered companion dolls have emerged as an unexpected lifeline, offering daily support, consistent companionship, and a buffer against the chronic loneliness plaguing a rapidly graying nation.

    At 78, Bang Chun-ja is one of the millions of South Koreans navigating solo retirement after a lifetime of hard work as a hairdresser and single mother, followed by a difficult divorce. Following major back surgery that left her immobile and in pain, and with limited contact with her adult daughter who lives far away and manages her own health issues, Bang fell into severe depression, spending hours staring at her apartment ceiling alone in Yongin, a city south of Seoul. Today, her constant companion is Hyodol, a soft, childlike AI doll provided by her local municipal government that has transformed her daily routine. “At this age, there is nothing harder than being hurt by people,” Bang told AFP during an interview in her home. “But when I’m with Hyodol, I never get hurt. The doll only makes me laugh.”

    Hyodol greets Bang when she returns home, sings to her during quiet, boring afternoons, sends reminders to eat regular meals and take medication, and constantly verbalizes affection — small acts that have anchored her daily life. For 79-year-old Kim Young-bun, another solo resident, the doll has solved another quiet crisis of elderly loneliness: lack of conversation. “I had no one to talk to all day — to the point my mouth almost felt stale from not speaking,” she explained. “But then this little one came along and chatters with me all the time.” As she dotes on the doll, it responds in a chirpy, childlike voice: “I’m so grateful to be with you again today… Thanks for being with me. I love you.” Kim’s soft reply echoes the feeling of thousands of users: “So am I.”

    South Korea’s demographic shift has created an urgent public health challenge around elderly isolation. The country boasts one of the lowest birth rates globally, and nearly half of its total population is now aged 50 or older. Data from 2024 recorded more than 3,920 so-called “lonely deaths” — cases where seniors die alone and remain undiscovered for weeks or longer — a figure that marks the highest total since national record-keeping began in 2017. Nearly 42 percent of all South Korean households are now single-person, with elderly residents disproportionately affected by social disconnection.

    In response, municipal governments across Seoul, Yongin, and other districts have rolled out subsidized AI care devices for low-income and isolated seniors, including Hyodol dolls, companion robots from Seoul-based firm Wonderful Platform, and similar devices from Mr. Mind. The concept has also spread internationally: in the United States, a lamp-shaped AI device called ElliQ offers similar companionship and health monitoring for solo seniors. To date, around 14,500 Hyodol dolls are in use across South Korea, distributed through individual ownership, government rental programs, and nursing home placements.

    The Hyodol doll was developed after years of on-the-ground field research by founder Kim Ji-hee, who spent months interviewing isolated seniors across the country to understand their unique emotional needs. Kim told AFP that interviews revealed a core, unmet need: “the pain of having no one to tell when something upsetting happens, and no one to share with when something joyful happens.” One interviewee, a widow estranged from her children over financial conflict, lived alone with four fridges and three washing machines — all stored by her estranged children who never visited.

    Drawing on these interviews, Kim designed Hyodol to act as a loving, grandchild-like companion that gives users a renewed sense of purpose. Many South Korean seniors spent decades working grueling schedules to support their families, Kim explained, and retirement often leaves them grappling with a “profound sense of emptiness” when they no longer feel needed. To counter this, Hyodol is programmed to seem dependent on its user, making spontaneous requests for head pats, hand-holding, and shared snacks (even though it cannot eat). Its iconic opening greeting — written after Kim’s interviews — is designed to feel like the “warmest welcome in the whole wide world”: “Grandma, where have you been? I waited for you all day. Next time you go out, please take me with you!”

    Unlike generic chatbots, Hyodol combines OpenAI’s ChatGPT for open conversation with custom scripts built directly from Kim’s interviews with real isolated seniors. The company also maintains strict data privacy protocols: voice recordings are only used internally to refine the chatbot, and users must give explicit consent before any health data — including sleep patterns, mood, meal intake, and pain levels — is shared with their assigned social welfare workers.

    While clinical observations from care workers have shown promising results, the technology also raises valid concerns. Oh Sun-hwa, a nurse who recommended Hyodol to Bang Chun-ja, noted that the doll has significantly reduced depression symptoms for many of her patients. However, she warned that the innovation could have unintended downsides: if family members rely on AI to provide companionship, they may reduce in-person visits even further, deepening the disconnection the technology is meant to solve.

    For users like Bang, though, the AI companion has filled a gap that human contact has been unable to cover. “Having Hyodol by my side is a huge help,” she says — a quiet testament to how technology is adapting to address one of the 21st century’s most pressing demographic social challenges.

  • Russia’s conscripts recount pressure to fight in Ukraine

    Russia’s conscripts recount pressure to fight in Ukraine

    Three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has dramatically overhauled its once-permissive conscription system, closing off nearly all legal avenues for eligible men to avoid mandatory military service and building a sophisticated pressure apparatus to push conscripts into voluntary combat contracts bound for the Ukrainian front. These changes, documented through firsthand accounts collected by Agence France-Presse (AFP) and interviews with rights advocates working on behalf of conscripts, have upended civilian life for Russian men of military age, turning everyday public spaces into potential trap points for draft evaders.

    For one young Moscow bank employee, avoiding conscription meant weeks of steering clear of the city’s metro network, where law enforcement had begun deploying facial recognition technology to flag men wanted by military recruitment authorities. But on a snowy Friday evening in late 2024, gridlocked road traffic forced him to take the underground to reach his mother’s home. Mid-journey, two officers boarded his train carriage and took him into custody for failing to respond to draft summons. Within just 72 hours, he was processed and transferred to a military base outside Moscow to begin his 12-month mandatory conscript service. Like dozens of other conscripts who spoke to AFP for this reporting, he agreed to share his story only on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation from Russian authorities.

    Prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, avoiding conscription through legal means was widely accessible to eligible men. Medical exemptions were relatively easy to obtain, many young men extended their education to delay service indefinitely, and alternative civilian service options were available for those with objections to military service. “Before 2022, there were many ways to avoid the draft without doing anything illegal,” explained Artyom Klyga, a lawyer with the Movement of Conscientious Objectors, a Russian advocacy group. “Now very few legal ways remain.”

    Over the past three years, the Russian government has systematically tightened conscription rules to expand the pool of available personnel for its war effort. The draft, once limited to two seasonal call-up periods per year, is now held year-round. The upper age limit for conscription was raised from 27 to 30, eligibility criteria for medical exemptions was sharply narrowed, and a new digital summons system was introduced that automatically enforces travel restrictions and other penalties once a summons is issued online. In major cities including Moscow, facial recognition surveillance integrated with a unified national recruitment database allows authorities to locate and detain draft evaders in public spaces in a matter of minutes.

    Once conscripts are processed into the military system, intensive pressure to sign formal combat contracts — which deploy troops to the front lines in Ukraine — begins within days, advocates and conscripts report. Cut off from outside contact, most new conscripts have no access to their families, legal support or independent media, leaving them vulnerable to manipulation and coercion. Advocates say recruiters and commanding officers use a wide range of tactics to convince conscripts to sign contracts, from deceptive marketing to outright coercion.

    Timofey Vaskin, a representative of Shkola Prizyvnika (School of Conscripts), a group supporting conscripts, says the most common approach is to frame a combat contract as a routine, well-paid job rather than frontline combat duty. Recruiters tell conscripts they will work standard nine-to-five shifts, earn significantly higher pay than conscripted service, and be exempt from menial base duties. Other promises include non-combat roles as drivers or clerks, and assurances that the contract will last only 12 months — matching the length of mandatory conscript service. In reality, all military contracts for combat service in Ukraine are effectively open-ended, with no guaranteed exit after one year.

    “It is a major success of the Russian authorities that they have convinced many people that conscripts simply serve for a year,” Klyga said. “As a result, conscripts are now ending up in the war in record numbers.”

    Official data confirms that the system is churning out unprecedented numbers of contract fighters. Former Russian president and current Security Council deputy chairman Dmitry Medvedev reported that 422,000 Russians signed voluntary combat contracts to fight in Ukraine in 2025, just 6% lower than the 2024 total. At the same time, roughly 295,000 men were called up for mandatory conscription service in 2025. Klyga says that for conscripts who agree to sign a contract, deployment to the front can happen in as little as 30 days.

    For the detained Moscow bank worker, the pressure to sign began almost immediately after his arrival at the unit. Held for three days in a detention facility with no access to a shower or clean clothes, he was never explicitly forced to sign, but constant subtle pressure left no doubt about what was expected. “You’re a good fit, we need people like you,” his superiors told him, repeating the same pitch he had heard from other recruiters: that he would get a good position, earn good money, and avoid unpleasant routine base duties. While he never ultimately signed, many other men in his unit agreed immediately, he told AFP.

    Other conscripts describe far harsher coercive tactics. A Moscow DJ who tried to avoid service for years told AFP he eventually gave in after authorities blocked him from obtaining a driver’s license and an international passport, both of which require proof of compliant military status. After he was assigned to a military medical unit for his 12-month service, he found even contracted combat soldiers were desperate to leave. “None of them want to serve,” he said. “They all want out.” Oddly, he even recalled some junior commanders warning new conscripts against signing contracts: “Don’t sign anything. Don’t ruin your life.”

    Advocates have documented dozens of cases of outright abuse to force signatures. Vaskin described one incident where security personnel planted a prohibited mobile phone on a conscript, then gave him an ultimatum: sign a combat contract or face criminal detention. Klyga’s organization has collected complaints of conscripts being subjected to punitive sleep deprivation, forced to wear heavy chemical protection suits for 24 hours straight, and ordered to perform pointless repetitive labor such as digging holes and refilling them to break their resistance. In some extreme cases, advocates say, commanding officers have forged conscripts’ signatures on enlistment contracts without their knowledge or consent.

    “Under constant pressure they break a person,” Klyga explained. One conscript told AFP that a man in his unit, desperate to avoid deployment to Ukraine, swallowed a needle in an attempt to secure a medical discharge. “He was covered in blood when they brought him in,” the conscript recalled. The man survived, and was ultimately discharged from service.

    Many conscripts who do yield to pressure and deploy to the front choose not to inform their families of their new status, advocates say. “They simply leave, and the family only finds out later,” Klyga said. In the worst cases, parents only learn their son was pushed into frontline service after they receive notification he has been killed in combat.

    The demand for legal help to avoid conscription has “risen sharply” across Russia, Vaskin said, as eligible men scramble to find any remaining path out of service amid the Kremlin’s tightened rules.