Top European rights court says Russia broke international law in Ukraine

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The highest human rights court in Europe has determined that Russia violated Ukrainian law for the first time since the full-scale invasion of 2022.

The European Court of Human Rights’ (ECHR) judges also ruled on Wednesday that Russia was responsible for Malaysia Airlines Flight 17’s fatal accident, marking the first time an international court had formally identified Moscow as the perpetrator of the tragedy that killed 298 people.

The Strasbourg court has heard four cases brought by Ukraine and the Netherlands against Russia that cover a wide range of alleged human rights violations since the start of the conflict, including the MH17-bombing and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.

Any choice will largely be symbolic. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the court’s governing body expelled it in 2022. The complaint was brought before the court.

The MH17 disaster’s victims’ families regard this decision as a significant step in their 11-year legal battle.

A Russian-made Buk missile fired from an area of separatist rebel-controlled eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, shot down the Boeing 777 as it was taking off from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. 196 Dutch nationals were among the 298 passengers and crew who died.

Russia was found to be responsible for the disaster by the UN’s aviation agency in May.

Russia used a record number of drones to attack Ukraine overnight, prompting the court’s decision, which comes shortly after Donald Trump pledged to send more defensive weapons to Kyiv and said he was thinking about imposing severe sanctions on Moscow.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated on Wednesday that Kyiv’s fight against Russian aggression has come to an end.

Why the future of AI may be open (and Chinese)

The global tech sector has been shocked by the release of DeepSeek’s R1, China’s potent new open-source AI model. It was offered for free and without any royalty fees, disrupting financial markets, and reversing Silicon Valley’s tightly regulated business model, which has long been criticized for its dominance of artificial intelligence.

DeepSeek’s open-source release is widely regarded as a key factor in the US’s trillion-dollar tech sell-off, which raises significant investor concern about China’s expanding competitiveness and the commodification of AI. R1 has irked investors and altered global AI geopolitics, earning itself the title “China’s answer” to OpenAI’s GPT4.

Reports show that using Nvidia’s H800 chips, R1’s compute costs were less than $6 million. This indicates a significantly more cost-effective model than proprietary counterparts, even though full development costs are still unnamed. It suggests that R1 might have been constructed for as little as OpenAI’s GPT4 costs, which are rumored to have been in the hundreds of millions. Due to its cost effectiveness and open access, DeepSeek’s business model is distinctly disruptive.

Chinese companies like Alibaba are releasing the Qwen3 Embedding series freely, and Mistral AI from France (with LLM as the first reason) is a step up. If the US doesn’t adopt open-source strategies, it could lose ground. After all, the early internet giants, like Google and Facebook, used free, user-centric services (like Gmail and Maps) to promote adoption before making money.

Giving away time-saving tools seems counterintuitive in a field where secrecy is common and models frequently locked up tightly. Even so, OpenAI, who was a pioneer with GPT4, now appears cautious. The $500 billion Stargate Project, which was established to avert AI leadership, has received strong support from CEO Sam Altman. With the launch of a new shopping feature, the practical expansion beyond ChatGPT has been slow. Innovation has not yet been pushed by US rivals (Google Gemini, Meta Llama, and Anthropic Claude).

Initial US dominance was fueled by incremental gains, which were aided by export restrictions on Nvidia chips and other technology that slowed China’s advance. Jensen Huang of Nvidia warned that these restrictions might have a negative impact, causing China’s chip industry to be slammed and ultimately weakened US control.

China’s strategic workaround is legal, scalable, and collaborative across all at once. It resembles how external developers create Android’s success. Similar to the Google Play model, Chinese companies now use open-source ecosystems to refine and scale models without having to pay any upfront costs.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s lead AI scientist, described DeepSeek’s rise as an open-source triumph, not just China’s ascendancy over the US. The geopolitical stakes are still present: Free access undermines the monetisation of proprietary models. Commercial models lose market share if open-source achieves parity.

Both speed and scale are China’s industrial strengths. By saturated the market with affordable, capable models, it exerts pressure on rivals until only the most popular, widely used model remains valuable, which is then monetized via data, advertising, or premium add-ons, a strategy well-tested by Google and Facebook.

US investors are aware of this for a reason. Systemic concern is at play in the reported $1 trillion decline following DeepSeek’s release. Open-sourcing is another component of a national industrial strategy for China: it uses “AI for good” to subvert, dominate, and claim benevolent intent.

If US technology is freely available, global rivals, including Chinese companies, can repurpose and surpass it. It might also be the opposite.

China also has its limitations. How open-source models trained in that environment can adapt to the demands of global content posed by its stringent internet censorship regime? RedNote (Xiaohongshu), a Chinese social media app that recently attracted a lot of Americans fleeing a potential TikTok ban, has already seen this. Although the cross-cultural exchange has been largely positive, tensions have grown, particularly in Taiwan and Xinjiang, where content is being moderated and censored for sensitive topics.

Chinese AI models may suffer from these limitations as they attempt to win over foreign customers for legitimacy and credibility.

China can compete in open-source AI without having access to cutting-edge US chips, changing the way the world uses AI. Leaders in the US have begun to acknowledge that long-term AI dominance depends not just on proprietary control but also on adoption, accessibility, and innovation at scale, from Elon Musk’s Grok-1 to OpenAI’s evolving stance.

In the end, China’s strategy of reshaping the global playing field requires using the principles of openness and decentralization to reshape the landscape. This may not be the case with guarding models behind closed doors.

The greatest irony is that China’s so-called “socialist AI” strategy may lead to the next era of US tech dominance.

Who better than Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has nominated Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize in the most recent installment of the “can’t-make-this-sh*t-up” contest in international politics and diplomacy.

In other words, the person who is currently in charge of the Gaza Strip’s genocide has proposed that the world’s highest peacemaking prize be given to the primary promoter of that genocide, the man who, in March, declared he was “sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job” in Gaza. That “everything” has resulted in billions of dollars in financial aid and lethal weapons.

Nearly 60, 000 Palestinians have been officially killed in the diminutive territory between October 2023 and the present, despite the exasperation of bodies under the pervasive rubble. In recent weeks, more than 700 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to get food at aid distribution centers supported by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group supported by both the US and Israel.

Trump has also engaged in a lot of do-it-yourself activities, including illegally attacking Iran and bombing civilians in Yemen, since taking office in January.

Indeed, it is amazing that mainstream media outlets have been able to accurately report on Trump’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. For instance, CNN points out that “Trump’s obsession has turned into his most cherished fixation,” which he claims is merited for his efforts to end conflicts all over the world. Netanyahu made his announcement on Monday when he made his third appearance to Washington this year for dinner at the White House.

Trump remarked, “Wow… Coming from you, in particular, this is very meaningful,” while thanking Netanyahu for the honor.

Although “meaningful” is undoubtedly one way to put it, the term fails to fully convey the complete absurdity of the whole arrangement.

However, it’s not like the Nobel Peace Prize has a very strong track record when it comes to upholding the stipulation that it be awarded to the person who “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the organization and promotion of peace conferences.”

Barack Obama, the newly elected US president, received the prestigious award in 2009 after bombing Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria, thereby fostering the international “fraternity.”

Obama also ran covert “kill lists,” allowing military assassinations abroad to be carried out according to his own preferences.

Colombia’s right-wing former president Juan Manuel Santos, who was “proud” of having his nation called “the Israel of Latin America,” was one of the other honoreed Nobel Peace Prize recipients. Santos was a defense minister during Alvaro Uribe’s bloody government’s previous administration’s “false positives” scandal, which saw Colombian soldiers murder an estimated ten thousand civilians and pass the bodies off as “terrorists”

The country comparison was particularly appropriate because Israel has a knack for massacring people in the name of “terrorism.” Shimon Peres, a late Israeli politician, was also named to the list of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in 1994, two years before he led the slaughter of 106 refugees who were sheltered at a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon.

Former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who has spent much of his legal career defending Israel’s killing of Arab civilians, submitted a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for Jared Kushner’s son-in-law. Kushner’s nomination in this case was based on his leading role in the Abraham Accords, which established a framework for peace between Israel and various Arab nations.

Trump has suggested that the US annex the Gaza Strip, forcefully expel the native Palestinian population, and create a brand-new “Riviera of the Middle East” in response to the fact that genocide has also been effectively normalized. For a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, it’s all in a day’s work.

The Times of Israel notes that “Netanyahu claimed the US and Israeli strikes against Iran had “changed the face of the Middle East” and had opened the door for the Abraham Accords to expand.” After all, nothing says “fraternity between nations” like removing Palestine altogether.

Trump favorably contrasted his overzealous attack on Iran with US President Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II when he was considering his decision.

Naturally, it goes without saying that anyone who positively cites the massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians will be categorically disqualified for any kind of significant peace prize. Trump’s nomination may very well have a significant impact in a world where the ostensible goal of peace is frequently used as an excuse for more war.

Bridge collapse in India’s Gujarat state kills at least nine

According to authorities in Gujarat, India’s western state, a bridge collapse over a river resulted in at least nine fatalities.

When a portion of the Gambhira Bridge collapsed on Wednesday morning, Gujarat’s health minister Rushikesh Patel reported that several vehicles slammed into the Mahisagar River.

Patel continued, adding that the state’s Vadodara district had built the bridge in 1985.

At least nine bodies have been recovered, according to senior civil servant Anil Dhameliya, five of whom were seriously hurt in the incident. He claimed that rescue operations were taking place.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed condolences to the victims’ families and said the accident was “deeply saddening.”

Safety concerns have long plagued India’s infrastructure, sometimes causing major accidents on highways and bridges.

Red Bull sack team principal Horner

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After 20 years as the team’s principal, Christian Horner was fired by Red Bull.

The Formula 1 team has won eight drivers’ championships and six constructors’ championships under the leadership of the 51-year-old since its inception in 2005.

The team’s performance has been declining for months, and there have been internal disagreements at the highest level. Additionally, Horner was charged with sexual harassment and coercive, controlling behavior by a female employee 17 months prior.

Horner’s allegations were seconded cleared by an independent lawyer after an internal investigation and a second independent lawyer, who dismissed the complainant’s appeal.

Christian Horner’s operational duties have been removed from effect from today, according to a statement from Red Bull GmBH, the team’s parent company.

Laurent Mekies, who has been promoted from the second team Racing Bulls, will take over as the Englishman’s team principal and chief executive of Red Bull Racing.

The 48-year-old Frenchman, who was previously the race director for Ferrari, had been in the position since the start of the 2024 season.

Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen both won the drivers’ championship under the direction of Horner from 2010 to 2013.

Oliver Mintzlaff, Red Bull’s corporate projects and investments chief executive, thanked Christian Horner for his outstanding work over the past 20 years.

He has contributed significantly to Red Bull Racing becoming one of the most popular and attractive Formula 1 teams thanks to his unwavering commitment, experience, expertise, and thought-provoking thinking.

Christian, I appreciate everything you have done for our team, and you will always be a significant part of it forever.

The 27-year-old star driver Verstappen’s future is uncertain with Horner’s dismissal.

The four-time world champion is contracted to Red Bull until 2028, but Mercedes may want to work with them until the following year.

McLaren has taken over as the team’s leader after winning only two races this year, leaving Red Bull with just two.

Verstappen and Red Bull’s next move?

Verstappen enjoys working in harmony and quiet despite the internal conflict at Red Bull.

Additionally, Horner’s father Jos has a tense relationship with him. He warned that if Horner remained in his position, the team would disintegrate in the wake of the allegations of sexual harassment.

In the last 15 months, Red Bull have also lost two key senior executives.

Adrian Newey, regarded as the best designer in Formula One history, left last year.

He saw his dissatisfaction with the team as other staff members trying to take credit for what were his innovations, and the accusations against him were a significant part of why he left.

In an effort to keep the internal politics at bay, Horner actively reduced Newey’s involvement in press briefings.

At the end of last year, Red Bull’s long-standing sporting director, Jonathan Wheatley, left the team and is now Sauber’s team principal.

Verstappen now “must make the right choice.”

BBC F1 reporter Jennie Gow:

Max Verstappen chose to stay at Red Bull over Christian Horner and his lack of experience, according to the discussion in the paddock, which was certainly present last weekend.

“My phone has been ejected, and friends and paddock residents have been saying the same thing, “Do you mean to protect Max from leaving Red Bull, or is this because he’s already done that, and this is the result of that?”” they asked.

“I don’t know,” I ask. At Silverstone over the weekend, I attempted to ask Max. He would not deny that he was looking around, even though he had none of it. He wouldn’t claim to be completely committed to Red Bull.

What does he do next? He wants to win another championship despite only having won twice this year. He must choose the best path to the right car.

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Gregg Wallace was ‘rushed to hospital over suspected heart attack’ days before axe

Former MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace was reportedly treated for a suspected heart attack days before he was axed

Gregg Wallace was ‘rushed to hospital over suspected heart attack’ days before axe(Image: BBC /Shine TV)

Gregg Wallace, who warned the BBC he “will not go quietly” after their decision to terminate their connection, was recently sacked from MasterChef over misconduct claims. It was announced on Tuesday that the 60-year-old presenter will no longer appear on the channel after his sacking.

The TV star had been accused of making inappropriate sexual comments and jokes over a 13-year period. Fifty people made fresh misconduct claims against the TV presenter, according to BBC News, but he continues to deny all allegations. And now, it has been reported that Gregg was rushed to the hospital and treated for a suspected heart attack days before he was axed.

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Gregg Wallace
Gregg was axed from MasterChef(Image: Dave Benett/Getty Images)

Gregg reportedly told a friend he was taken to the hospital in Ashford with a suspected heart attack after two days of chest pains. According to The Sun, he told his friend: “‘The stress of this betrayal brought on my suspected heart attack. It’s been hell.”

The Mirror have reached out to Gregg’s reps for comment.

Meanwhile, the former greengrocer slammed the BBC, saying he has been exonerated of the most serious allegations levelled against him.

In an Instagram statement on Tuesday, he explained: “I have taken the decision to speak out ahead of the publication of the Silkins report – a decision I do not take lightly.

Gregg Wallace
The star said he ‘wouldn’t go quietly’(Image: BBC)

“But after 21 years of loyal service to the BBC, I cannot sit in silence while my reputation is further damaged to protect others. I have now been cleared by the Silkins report of the most serious and sensational accusations made against me.

“The most damaging claims (including allegations from public figures, which have not been upheld) were found to be baseless after a full and forensic six-month investigation.”

In his statement, he accused the organisation of “peddling sensationalised gossip masquerading as properly corroborated stories.” He said: “To be clear, the Silkin’s Report exonerates me of all the serious allegations which made headlines last year and finds me primarily guilty of inappropriate language between 2005 and 2018.

“I recognise that some of my humour and language, at times, was inappropriate. For that, I apologise without reservation. But I was never the caricature now being sold for clicks.”

He said his personality is what sold him to the BBC in the first place, adding that the “authenticity was part of the brand”. He added: “Now, in a sanitised world, that same personality is seen as a problem.”

Gregg claimed his autism diagnosis wasn’t cared for properly, insisting ‘nothing was done to investigate his disability of protect him from a dangerous environment’.

He signed off by telling the BBC he “will no go quietly”, explaining: “I will not be cancelled for convenience…The full story of this incredible injustice must be told and it is very much a matter of public interest.”

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