A photographer was found guilty of treason and sentenced to 16 years in prison for allegedly sharing information with an American journalist about underground bunkers from the Soviet era.
Following a closed-door trial, the court in Perm’s western city sentenced Grigory Skvortsov on Thursday without providing further information. Skvortsov, who was detained by Russian authorities in 2023, has denied any wrongdoing.
Skvortsov’s sentence would be served in a maximum-security correctional prison camp, according to the court.
Additionally, it published a photo of him as the verdict was read out in a glass courtroom cage dressed in black.
Skvortsov claimed in an interview with a group of exiled Russian lawyers in December that he had shared information with the Russian author of a book about underground Soviet installations for use in the event of a nuclear war.
In the interview with Pervy Otdel, Skvortsov did not identify the US journalist with whom he was working.
Russia has dramatically expanded its definition of what constitutes state secrets since its invasion of neighboring Ukraine in 2022, and it has imprisoned academicians, scientists, and journalists who it believes have broken the new laws.
Skvortsov, a photographer of architecture, has also spoken out in person against Moscow’s military assault on Ukraine. He alleges that FSB officers tried to press on him to confess treason after he was detained in November of 2023.
Following the verdict, a Skvortsov support group posted a message on Telegram claiming that “a miracle had not occurred” and that the photographer’s only chance of leaving jail was being exchanged as part of a prisoner swap between Russia and the West.
Skvortsov is one of those facing criminal charges that is likely “politically motivated and marked by serious legal violations,” according to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning rights organization Memorial.
New Delhi, India – Paras* and his family were supposed to have the financial difficulties over by enrolling in one of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) schools. Instead, things have only worsened due to the federal government’s long delays in dispensing Paras’s monthly fellowship allowance of 37, 000 rupees ($435).
Paras is a research fellow at the IIT looking for solutions to the world’s growing infectious disease crisis. His fellowship is a result of the Indian Department of Science and Technology (DST) funding program INSPIRE.
But delays in the scheme’s payment have meant that Paras was not able to pay the instalments on the laptop he bought for his research in 2022. His savings plans and credit score fell, too.
In a drought-stricken region of western India, Paras’ parents are farmers, and their income depends on a frequently subpar harvest. So, he has resorted to borrowing money from friends, including as recently as between August and December, he told Al Jazeera.
Paras is not the only one. Nearly a dozen top institutes in India are currently and former researchers, according to the Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE) initiative. The interviewees studied at institutions such as the IIT, a network of engineering and technology schools across the country, and the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, another network.
Without a stipend, all had gone from three to nine months.
According to them, the fellowship’s deterioration and procedural lapses have resulted from these delays in funding and insufficient funding.
Many researchers recently took to social media to complain, tagging Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Minister of Science and Technology Jitendra Singh.
Many of us who are pursuing PhDs under DST-funded fellowships have been receiving their stipends for more than a year, according to Sayali Atkare, an INSPIRE fellow, who posted a LinkedIn post. Many young researchers are now experiencing significant financial and emotional stress as a result.
Last year, India ranked 39th in the Global Innovation Index of 133 countries, up one spot from the year prior. In terms of innovation, it leads lower-middle-income nations like Vietnam and the Philippines. Malaysia and Turkiye are the two countries with the highest incomes, followed by China.
The federal government termed the ranking an “impressive leap” in a news release. According to the statement, India’s “growing innovation potential” has been backed by government initiatives that prioritize technological advancement, business ease, and entrepreneurship.
Modi praised India’s expanding research potential at a federal government conference in April. Under his leadership in the past decade, the government has doubled its gross spending on research and development from 600 billion rupees ($7.05bn) to more than 1, 250 billion rupees ($14.7bn), while the number of patents filed has more than doubled – from 40, 000 to more than 80, 000.
The government has made numerous efforts to ensure “talented individuals face no obstacles to advancing their careers,” Modi said, including double the spending on R&, D (research and development), double the number of patents filed in India, and the creation of state-of-the-art research parks and fellowships and facilities. > ,
However, an analysis of government documents, budgets and interviews with researchers reveals that the government is more focused on commercial research, primarily product development led by start-ups and big corporations. It doesn’t provide much funding for research conducted at the nation’s top universities.
For instance, a program that provides interest-free loans to private companies conducting research in sunrise domains like semiconductors made up of 70 percent of the Science and Technology Department’s annual budget for the current fiscal year.
At the same time, the government has made misleading statements about its investments in the country’s research institutes, including with schemes like the INSPIRE fellowship, where funds have actually been cut instead of being increased as touted by the government.
[Courtesy: Creative Commons] Researchers at some of India’s top universities claim they have struggled for months due to unpaid stipends.
Pay issues, delayed funding, and poor pay
The INSPIRE scheme offers PhD and faculty fellowships to “attract, attach, retain and nourish talented young scientific Human Resource for strengthening the R&, D foundation and base”.
Top-ranking postgraduate students and doctoral researchers are eligible to receive fellowships to conduct research in fields ranging from climate science, biochemistry, neuroscience, cancer biology, biotechnology, and renewable energy.
PhD fellows are eligible for a monthly salary of 37, 000 rupees ($435.14) to 42, 000 rupees ($493.94) for living expenses under the scheme, as well as a salary of 20 000 rupees ($235.21) per year for research-related expenses, such as paying for equipment or traveling to work.
Faculty fellows are offered teaching positions with a monthly salary of 125, 000 rupees ($1, 470) and an annual research grant of 700, 000 rupees ($8, 232).
653 fellows enrolled in the PhD fellowship program between 2024 and 2025, and 85 were in the faculty fellowship program.
A faculty member at an institution in eastern India said, “I was unable to attend an important annual meeting in our field because it required travel.” He has not received his payments since September 2024.
We’ve made endless phone calls and written countless emails, most of which leave the message unanswered or are met with ambiguous responses, according to Atkare, a PhD student who wrote about the government’s failure on LinkedIn. Even some government officials “reply” rudely.
Another INSPIRE PhD fellow told us of a running joke: “If they pick up the phone, you can buy a lottery ticket that day. Your lucky day is today.
Abhay Karandikar, DST Secretary, acknowledged the delays in funding in May and promised to fix them right away.
Karandikar told the Hindu newspaper that he was “aware” of the disbursement crisis but said that from June 2025, all scholars would get their money on time. “Every issue has been resolved,” the statement read. He said, “I don’t anticipate any issues in the future.”
Al Jazeera requested a comment from the science and technology minister, the DST secretary and the head of the department’s wing that implements the INSPIRE scheme, but has not received a response.
Dodgy math
To launch Vigyan Dhara, or “the flow of science,” in January, the federal government folded three R&, D-related initiatives to ensure “efficiency in fund utilisation.” The INSPIRE scheme had been funded under one of those schemes.
But chaos has resulted in chaos instead of efficiency.
DST requested new bank accounts from institutions during Vigyan Dhara, which caused delays in the payment of INSPIRE fellowships.
New Delhi also said that it had “significantly increased” funding for the Vigyan Dhara scheme, from 3.30 billion rupees ($38.39m) in the last financial year to 14.25 billion rupees ($167.58m) in the current financial year.
[Press Information Bureau] The Indian government claimed to have increased scheme funds.
That math, however, was not accurate. The 3.30 billion rupees ($38.39m) is what the government earmarked for the scheme, which was only launched in the last quarter of the fiscal year. The three schemes’ annual budget, which was replaced by Vigyan Dhara, totaled 18.27 billion rupees ($214.93 million). In effect, the allocation to the current budget decreased by 22%, from 18.27 billion to 14.25 billion ($167.58 million).
The allocation to Vigyan Dhara schemes was reduced by 22 percent]Union Budget FY 2025-26]
Overall, the budget for Vigyan Dhara’s constituent schemes decreased by 67.8% from the previous fiscal year, which was the same as the previous fiscal year, which was the same as the budget for the remaining schemes, which was the same as the budget for the remaining ones, which was the same as 167.6 million rupees.
According to Al Jazeera, DST officials did not respond to a request for information on Vigyan Dhara’s budgetary allocations.
Commercialisation of research
The Indian government, on the other hand, allocated 200 billion rupees ($2.35 billion) to the new R&D and innovation (RDI) initiative targeted at the private sector.
This money is a larger 1-trillion-rupee ($11.76bn) corpus that India’s finance minister announced to offer low- or no-interest rates.
These changes in schemes are intended to make India a “product nation”, get more patents filed in India, and curb the brain drain, as Union Minister Aswini Vaishnaw and DST officials explain in different videos.
Screenshot of the post-budget webinar during which DST officials explained the RDI scheme.
However, the researchers’ issues at state-run organizations continue to be unresolved.
“The government throws around big terms, but those toiling in laboratories are suffering”, said Lal Chandra Vishwakarma, president of All-India Research Scholars Association.
“Stipends should be paid in the same way that central government employees are paid. He argued that subscribers should receive their money on a consistent basis each month.
In the current scenario, most fellows Al Jazeera spoke to said that they would prefer a fellowship abroad.
“It’s not just about money; it’s also about the ease of research, which is much better in Europe and [in] the United States.” There is a lot of staff there. In India, you get none of that”, said a professor at an IIT, who supervises an INSPIRE PhD fellow who faced funding issues.
Researchers told us that researchers who are heavily funded in the private sector should downplay their funding costs to increase their chances of getting funded by government research projects.
If we lose the first few years as a result of cost-cutting, we are behind our colleagues abroad, the IIT professor said.
“Once we submit necessary documents, like annual progress reports, DST takes at least three months to release the next instalment. A theoretical mathematician who works on a PhD said, “It’s standard.”
“As of right now, I would advise only people with high-income backgrounds and privileges to work in academia.” Not because that’s how it should be, but because for others, it’s just so hard”, the IIT professor said.
The first instance of the country’s capital punishment in nearly three years has resulted in the execution of a man who was found guilty of killing and dismembering nine people he had spoken to on social media.
Takahiro Shiraishi was hanged on Friday following his death sentence for the 2017 killings of eight women and one man in his Kanagawa apartment.
He was nicknamed the “Twitter killer” because he had spoken to his victims on the now-defunct X-Face social media platform.
Shiraishi confessed to killing the victims after reaching out and offering to assist those who were putting their lives on hold. According to reports from the media, he had concealed fragments of the bodies of his nine victims in coolers around his tiny apartment.
Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki, who authorized Shiraishi’s hanging, said he made the decision after considering the case and taking into account the convict’s “extremely selfish” motivation for crimes that “caused great shock and unrest to society.”
In this photo, Takahiro Shiraishi covers his face inside a Tokyo police car, according to Kyodo, who took it in November 2017.
The man who was given a death sentence for a stabbing rampage in Tokyo’s Akihabara shopping district’s Akihabara shopping district’s 2008 execution on Friday was the first to be executed there since July 2022.
The death penalty was used for the first time since Shigeru Ishiba’s government’s inauguration in October, according to the introduction.
Iwao Hakamada, who had spent the longest time in the world on death row, was cleared by a Japanese court in September. He was found guilty of crimes committed nearly 60 years ago, according to the court.
The guru Shoko Asahara and 12 former members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, who planned the 1995 sarin gas attacks on Tokyo’s subway system, which killed 14 people and injured thousands, were executed in one of the most well-known executions in Japan in 2018.
In Japan, prisoners are executed just hours before the execution, which has long been condemned by human rights organizations because of the strain it places on death-row prisoners, by hanging.
The death penalty is still in place in Japan and the United States, the only industrialized nations in the group of seven.
In their final Group H game, Real Madrid defeated Red Bull Salzburg 3-0 to set up a round-of-16 meeting with Juventus.
The Spanish giants won the match on Thursday in Philadelphia thanks to the contributions of Vinicius Junior and Federico Valverde.
In the 84th minute, Gonzalo Garcia scored the third for Madrid, giving them a second successive multi-goal victory following their tournament opening draw with Al Hilal.
Real’s Austrian rivals were eliminated as a result of Al Hilal’s 2-0 victory over Pachuca from Saudi Arabia.
As Group H champions, Manchester City will now face Al Hilal in the following round after beating Juventus 5-2 earlier in the day.
Vinicius Junior, a Brazilian forward for Real Madrid, scores the team’s first goal [Franck Fife/AFP]
Real Madrid defeated Salzburg for the second time in the 2025 season, following their 5-1 defeat in Spain during the UEFA Champions League.
Madrid, a five-time champion, had better work than dominance. The winners had only one more shot on goal than Salzburg’s three, which was 12 shots apart.
Due to a stomach condition that required him to spend a short while in the hospital, Kylian Mbappe has not yet played in the tournament.
Vinicius Junior made up for the Frenchman’s Thursday absence, though.
After Jude Bellingham had given him a 20th-minute breakaway, Christian Zawieschitzky denied him on the break and he was unable to convert the game’s first shot into the target.
However, two brilliant moments over a five-minute period completely tipped Madrid’s favor.
Gonzalo Garcia scores Real Madrid’s third goal [Susana Vera/Reuters]
The Brazilian weaved left on the dribble to avoid defender Joane Gadou in the 40th minute after catching another fantastic ball from Bellingham. He well out of Zawieschitzky’s reach and into the bottom right corner with his early low finish.
He tapped a wide-open Valverde behind him to make a similarly effective finish past Zawieschitzky in the 45th minute before he reached Arda Guler’s deflected pass on the right side of the box.
In the 66th minute, Bellingham made the next crucial move, preventing Thibaut Courtois’ defeat by Edmund Baidoo’s effort off the line.
On Friday, June 27, 2018, this is how things are going.
Fighting
One person was killed and two others were hurt in Russian airstrikes in Kherson, in the south of Ukraine, according to regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin.
After fierce opposition from Ukrainian forces, Russian troops took control of the village of Shevchenko in the eastern Ukrainian Donetsk region, which is close to a lithium deposit, according to a Russian-backed official in the occupied area.
As Russian forces advance closer to the industrialized Dnipropetrovsk region, Syrskii has also mandated that defensive lines be constructed more quickly in the Sumy region.
Military
According to a South Korean lawmaker, North Korea will send more troops to Russia as soon as July in order to support its conflict with Ukraine, citing information from Seoul’s spy agency.
diplomacy and politics
In the most recent of a series of prisoner swaps agreed at peace talks in Istanbul earlier this month, Ukraine and Russia exchanged a new group of captured soldiers. At least 1, 000 soldiers would be exchanged between them during their direct meeting in Istanbul on June 2, but neither side disclosed how many prisoners would be released.
According to officials, the leaders of the 27 European Union countries have agreed to extend sanctions against Russia for another six months, easing fears that Hungary, a Kremlin-friendly nation, will veto them. The sanctions include the continued freezing of Russian central bank assets, which will be available until at least until 2026.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, has urged Brussels to send “a clear political message” that it supports Kyiv’s efforts to join the EU.
At the EU summit in Brussels, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban earlier claimed a state-organized consultation had given him a “strong mandate” to oppose the EU’s accession of neighboring Ukraine.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an international body that monitors chemical weapons, reported discovering a prohibited tear gas in seven samples of samples from Ukraine, which has accused Russia of using the riot control agent on the front lines. The OPCW has third time confirmed that CS gas is being used in Ukraine’s fighting-torn areas.
Radoslaw Sikorski, the country’s foreign minister, predicted that Vladimir Putin’s “regime” would fall as it did when the Soviet Union was toppled.
Vladimir Herzog, a journalist and dissident who was killed during Brazil’s dictatorship, was the subject of an agreement that the Brazilian government has acknowledged as a responsible party.
Herzog’s family received a statement of liability and a compensation package worth 3 million Brazilian reais, or $544, 800, on Thursday, according to the government.
Herzog’s widow, Clarice Herzog, received retroactive payments of a pension she should have received following her husband’s passing in the amount of about $6, 000 per month, according to the settlement.
Herzog’s son, Ivo Herzog, applauded the government’s choice to accept responsibility in a statement released by The Associated Press news agency.
Ivo remarked that Ivo’s apology is not just symbolic. The state’s “act” makes us think that the current Brazilian state doesn’t think like the state it was then.
He added that the story of his family included those who lost loved ones during the dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, in addition to the hundreds, if not thousands, of others.
He explained that it has taken decades to win the government over its wrongdoing.
Ivo, who currently runs the Vladimir Herzog Institute, a human rights organization named after his father, said, “This has been a struggle not only of the Herzog family, but also of all the families of the murdered and disappeared.”
Vladimir Herzog passed away in 1975, just before the end of the dictatorship. He was 38 years old.
A decade prior, the Brazilian army oversaw the uprising of left-wing President Joao Goulart and established a government known for its human rights violations, including the arbitrary detention and torture of dissidents, students, politicians, indigenous people, and anyone else deemed a threat.
Many of them fled to exile. Some people died or vanished without a trace while others did not. Around 500 people die, according to estimates, though some experts place that figure at 10,000 or higher.
Herzog was a well-known journalist, and he also fled to exile in the United Kingdom at first. However, he returned to Brazil to work for TV Cultura, a public television station, as a news editor. Herzog was summoned by authorities to an army barrack on October 24, 1975, for that role.
Military sources there indicated that he would be asked to provide details about his political connections. Herzog stepped aside to make his statement. But he never came back.
Herzog’s death was later described as a suicide and the military released a staged photo of his body hanging from a rope.
However, a rabbi who later examined Herzog’s body discovered signs of torture. The staged photograph became a representation of the Brazilian dictatorship’s abuses as Herzog’s funeral, which was conducted with full religious rites.
Ivo, his son, was only nine years old at the time. He spoke to Al Jazeera earlier this year about the release of a movie titled I’m Still Here, which highlighted another murder committed by the dictatorship: that of politician Rubens Paiva.
Paiva, like Herzog, voluntarily abstained from service to testify at the request of military officials, never to be seen again. His body was never discovered. Paiva’s family was waiting for a death certificate that acknowledged the military’s contribution to his death, which took decades.
Ivo praised the film I’m Still Here for raising awareness of the injustices of the dictatorship. He added that he hoped the Brazilian government would acknowledge the harm that it had caused to his family and amend the 1979 Amnesty Law, which forbade the prosecution of numerous military officials.
What are they anticipating? For everyone to pass away in the period”? Herzog addressed Eleonore Hughes, a journalist. Brazil’s “political system of forgetfulness” is prevalent, and little of it has changed.
The Herzog family’s agreement was framed as a positive step by Brazil’s federal legal counsellor, Jorge Messias, on Thursday.
He claimed, “We are witnessing something unheard of: The Brazilian state officially honors Vladimir Herzog’s memory.”
He also compared Brazilian politics’ current state to that of the coup d’etat of 1964. After their candidate was defeated in the 2022 election, thousands of far-rightist President Jair Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings in Brazil’s capital on January 8, 2023.
Left-wing leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country’s current president, has compared it to a coup. Bolsonaro testified in court this month about the accusations that he was a part of the election results’ overturning effort.