🚨 Taliban Leaders Are Truly Inhuman. Why?

📌 The international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders, accusing them of crimes against humanity for the persecution of women and girls.

📄 In a statement, the ICC said on Tuesday there were “reasonable grounds to believe” the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and Afghanistan’s chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, had ordered policies that deprived women and girls of:

📚 education
🔒 privacy and family life
🚫 the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion

⚖️ Afghan human rights activists have called for the Taliban’s system of depriving women and girls of rights and freedoms and enforcing segregation to be recognised as gender apartheid.

👩‍🦰 Afghan women who have endured violence and exile for demanding basic rights said the case marked a critical vindication of their struggle.

🗣 Zahra Haqparast was jailed by the Taliban in 2022 for protesting against restrictions on women’s lives, and now lives in exile. She said:

“This is the best news I’ve heard since the Taliban came to power.
I was cooking lunch when I heard the news, and I was so happy that I ran to check immediately if it was true. By the time I got back, an hour had passed and my food was burnt.”

🌍 Despite initial outrage at Taliban restrictions when the group seized power in 2021, Afghan women say an international community that once claimed to be fighting in their name has not done enough to fight back.

🗨 Heather Barr, deputy women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch, said:

“They have felt ignored by the world while the Taliban has systematically stripped their rights away day after day.
This step by the ICC is a good start. Afghan women and girls are owed full justice for the Taliban’s crimes and an end, now, to Taliban abuses.”

🔎 Afghan activists also called on the court to seek justice for other crimes by several perpetrators over more than four decades of war in Afghanistan.

📢 “It is historic but it is insufficient,”

said Shaharzad Akbar, executive director of Rawadari, an Afghan human rights organisation.

“It leaves out many victims of war crimes and other perpetuators.”

#warrant #human #rights #taliban #leaders

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Easy Targets: “Human Safaris” in Sarajevo

An Italian nobleman is one of several people being investigated over the killing of civilians in “human safaris” in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war.

Just as in a Van Damme film Hard Target, the unnamed aristocrat from Milan, who has not been charged with any crimes, is under investigation by prosecutors and is to be questioned. It was alleged he paid to shoot civilians during the conflict 30 years ago.

He is one of at least five Italians under investigation on suspicion of having taken part in what became known as human safaris during the siege of Sarajevo, from 1992 to 1995.

It is alleged that dozens of wealthy foreigners from Europe and Russia paid to be allowed to use sniper rifles to shoot civilians in streets and squares.

On Wednesday, Italian police seized a gun silencer, photographs and documents from the home of another suspect, a 64-year-old Italian man near Alessandria. Experts are analysing the silencer to find out whether it is compatible with weapons used in Bosnia.

The suspect’s ex-wife told prosecutors he used to have nightmares about killing civilians.

She said: “When we lived together, one night after we had watched a war film, he had a nightmare and woke up with a start, accidentally hitting me. He told me he had those nightmares, because in the past he had killed people during the war in Bosnia in the 90s.

He told me he would leave Milan by plane and that with him there were other people who took part in these weekends during the war.

He told me that he had started to take part when the war broke out in Yugoslavia, but then he stopped going on the weekends and spent longer periods there as a sniper, shooting Muslims.”

The woman said her ex-husband had a photograph of himself in military fatigues, which were “not a conventional uniform”. He also had a written pass, inscribed in a foreign language she did not understand, which authorised him to travel through the war zone.

She said: “On the back of this pass, there were markings which corresponded to the people killed during the fighting. There were circles and lines, a sort of tally.”

The man, who hunted animals and worked for Genova city council before retiring, has not been named. He has denied taking part in human safaris, insisting that during the time he spent in Bosnia he was fighting for Serb paramilitaries.

He has said that, as a council worker, he could not have afforded to pay to go on sniper weekends, even if he had wanted to. He told investigators he admired Italy’s Fascist movement, and was fascinated by the country’s paratrooper regiment and its special forces units.

The man is accused, along with three other Italians, of the aggravated murder of men, women and children who he allegedly shot from hill positions overlooking Sarajevo during the city’s siege.

The others are an 80-year-old former lorry driver from Pordenone, a 64-year-old businessman from Brianza and a man from Tuscany. It is alleged that the men, most of whom had far-Right political views, would meet in the northeastern city of Trieste then travel to Sarajevo.

Magistrates in Italy, Belgium and Austria are investigating the human safari allegations. They are due to meet later this month at Eurojust, the EU’s criminal justice cooperation agency in The Hague, to discuss their findings.

Allegations that wealthy foreigners took part in the horrific activity were made in a 2022 documentary, Sarajevo Safari, by Miran Zupanič, a Slovenian director.

Ezio Gavazzeni, an Italian journalist, then started looking into the alleged role of Italians. That led last year to prosecutors in Milan opening an investigation.

About 11,000 civilians were killed by shelling and sniper fire from Bosnian Serb positions on the hills around Sarajevo during the 1992 to 1995 war, which followed Bosnia’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia.

#human #safaris

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New York: Will Human Teachers Be Replaced By Robots?

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The humanoid robot is being introduced as part of a pilot program, along with an AI teaching assistant, at Salamanca high school in Salamanca, New York, located on the Allegany territory of the Seneca nation.

Teachers have criticized the program, deeming it “inappropriate” and claiming it dehumanizes the profession with the introduction of human-like robots. Some local Native American residents have also criticized the pilot program, citing its implementation as “culturally tone deaf”.

The robot, named Sally, was purchased by the Cattaraugus county school district – which includes Salamanca high school – for $57,590.

According to a presentation on the program, Sally will be a closed-loop system, but available virtually to students 24/7 for those with access, and offers personalized learning options.

The district will be the first in the US to deploy a humanoid robot and AI teaching assistant, according to a press release by Realbotix.

“The Salamanca pilot also includes deployment of a Realbotix M-Series humanoid robot, which uses natural conversation, facial expressions and real-time interaction to create engaging, hands-on learning experiences,” the press release states.

Realbotix has denied ties to the sex doll company, and denied any inferences that the dolls – manufactured by Abyss Creations, a subsidiary of Realbotix – are related to the pilot program.

“The Salamanca teachers’ union as a whole is concerned about the background of the company of Realbotix. We’re very concerned about the security of the software that they’re implementing, and whether or not the data will be stored, how it will be gathered, are the recording capabilities,” said Lacey Pihlblad, president of Salamanca Teachers’ Association and a teacher at the high school.

“We would like to see the school district pause implementing the robot, pause implementing the software aspect of this AI technology until we can have more individuals weigh in.”

She said New York state is currently shifting away from too much technology in the classroom.

“There’s a growing consensus that indicates our students should be exposed to less technology. Placing a humanoid robot into the classroom to interact with our children, I believe, is a massive step in the wrong direction, and I believe that the majority of our teachers feel the same,” she added.

“If we’re going to do something of this magnitude, I feel we need to make sure that we do it the correct way, and I’m not sure that that’s currently what’s in place.”

Pihlblad said the union was completing negotiations for a new union contract and intend to include protections around artificial intelligence.

#robots #teachers #school #human #lifeless

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Melinda Person, president of the New York State United Teachers, the parent union of the Salamanca Teachers’ Association, which represents teachers at the high school, told the Guardian that teachers across the state are concerned about the robot program.

“Our members in Salamanca and educators across the state are sounding the alarm that this is really inappropriate,” said Person. “I would say our initial reaction is this is kind of creepy.”

Person said it was “way out of the realm of what we should be doing in our schools”.

“The answer to the challenges in education is not more screens, it’s not more algorithms, not more robots. What we need in our schools right now are more caring adults and more human connection,” she said.

She said teachers were not anti-technology, but rather pro-child, and take positions based on whether something is beneficial for students.

“Putting a lifeless machine in front of students is a bad idea,” she said.

“I would say a machine that the intention of it is to simulate a human relationship with young people who are just learning those skills of how to interact, how to be with their peers, how to solve conflicts, and putting a robot that looks like a human that will lead to the dehumanization of the profession of education, is exactly the wrong thing for us to be doing.”

Alyson Brown, a community health specialist and local resident and Seneca nation member who graduated from Salamanca, said several students have connections to the traumas of Native American boarding schools.

“Many students have connections to relatives who attended the Thomas Indian school located on our Cattaraugus territory. Many native families are viewing this pilot program as history repeating itself,” said Brown.

“I see nothing positive to come from this being introduced in the classroom setting. I worry for the cognitive development of young minds in this exposure.”

A spokesperson for Realbotix did not comment on criticisms from teachers and Native American residents or the call for a pause from the Salamanca Teachers’ Association.

“Realbotix and Salamanca city central school district announced a limited pilot for fall 2026 involving Optio, an AI-powered educational assistant, and one new Realbotix M-Series humanoid unit,” the spokesperson said by email.

“The program is intended to complement, not replace, teachers by giving students supervised access to emerging AI and robotics tools as part of the district’s existing Stem [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] curriculum.

The partnership also gives educators an opportunity to evaluate these technologies in a controlled classroom environment under district oversight.”

The assistant commissioner of public affairs for the New York state department of education, JP O’Hare, said the agency had been in contact with the school district regarding its purchase of a robot “and has raised serious concerns about student privacy, appropriate safeguards, and the risk that the robot could be used to perform functions that should remain the responsibility of trained, qualified professionals.

#robots #teachers #school #human #lifeless

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