Will AI transform education for the better, or will it come at the cost of human connection and critical thinking?
The rise of Artificial Intelligence has schools racing to respond to tools like ChatGPT. While some fear it may replace teachers and erode human connection, others see it as a chance to transform and improve education.
Presenter: Stefanie Dekker
Australia’s most decorated living war veteran has lost an appeal against a civil court ruling that implicated him in war crimes while serving in Afghanistan.
Australia’s Federal Court dismissed the appeal lodged by Ben Roberts-Smith on Friday, in the latest setback for the 46-year-old’s fight to salvage a reputation tattered by reports that he took part in the murder of four unarmed Afghan prisoners.
Three federal court judges unanimously rejected his appeal of a judge’s ruling in 2023, which said Roberts-Smith was not defamed by newspaper articles published in 2018 that accused him of a range of war crimes.
In the earlier ruling, a judge had found that the accusations were substantially true to a civil standard and Roberts-Smith was responsible for four of the six unlawful deaths of noncombatants he had been accused of.
Delivering the appeal court’s verdict, Justice Nye Perram explained that the reasons for the decision are being withheld due to national security implications that the government must consider.
The marathon 110-day trial is estimated to have cost 25 million Australian dollars ($16m) in legal fees that Roberts-Smith will likely be liable to pay.
He has however said he will fight to clear his name in Australia’s High Court, his last avenue of legal appeal.
“I continue to maintain my innocence and deny these egregious spiteful allegations,” Roberts-Smith said in a statement. “We will immediately seek to challenge this judgement in the High Court of Australia.”
Tory Maguire, an executive of Nine Entertainment that published the articles Roberts-Smith claimed were untrue, welcomed the ruling as an “emphatic win”.
“Today is also a great day for investigative journalism and underscores why it remains highly valued by the Australian people,” Maguire said.
Australia deployed 39,000 troops to Afghanistan over two decades as part of United States and NATO-led operations against the Taliban and other armed groups.
Perth-born Roberts-Smith, a former SAS corporal, had won the Victoria Cross – Australia’s highest military honour – for “conspicuous gallantry” in Afghanistan while on the hunt for a senior Taliban commander.
An Australian military report released in 2020 found evidence that Australian troops unlawfully killed 39 Afghan prisoners and civilians. The report recommended 19 current and former soldiers face criminal investigation.
It’s not clear whether Roberts-Smith was one of them.
Police have been working with the Office of the Special Investigator, an Australian investigation agency established in 2021, to build cases against elite SAS and Commando Regiments troops who served in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.
The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times said in a series of reports in 2018 that Roberts-Smith had kicked an unarmed Afghan civilian off a cliff and ordered subordinates to shoot him.
From multi-billion-dollar deals, defence ties, closer relations and diplomatic agreements, Donald Trump had a lot going on during his visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Al Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara gives his take on Trump’s tour.
A social media post has dragged former FBI director James Comey into a maelstrom of accusations from critics that he called for the assassination of United States President Donald Trump.
Comey, a fierce Trump critic, denied in a statement that the photo he took and shared on Instagram was a call for violence, adding that “I oppose violence of any kind.” He has since taken down the photo in question.
His rebuttal has, however, done little to calm Trump’s supporters, with the country’s Homeland Security Department and the Secret Service announcing on Thursday that they were investigating the incident.
Here’s a breakdown of what happened:
Comey shared an Instagram photo on Thursday showing seashells on a beach arranged in the numbers “86 47”.
“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” his caption read.
Critics were quick to point out that the number “86” refers to old US slang that refers to “getting rid of” something, or “removing something”. The slang was highly in use in restaurants back in the 1930s, and usually signalled to waiters and customers that an item on a menu was sold out and could not be provided.
The “47”, they claim, refers to Trump’s current term in office as the 47th president of the US.
Comey, on the same day, took the photo down. In a separate Instagram post, the former intelligence boss explained that he took the photo while “on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message”.
“I didn’t realise some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down,” he said.
The hashtag #8647 has previously, and as early as March, appeared on social media sites like TikTok among posters criticising Trump and calling for his removal. It has come to represent a silent code for opposing the president.
Trump’s supporters on social media channels have denounced Comey’s post, calling it a call for the president’s “assassination”.
Just James Comey causally calling for my dad to be murdered.
This is who the Dem-Media worships. Demented!!!! pic.twitter.com/4LUK6crHAT
President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr on Thursday said in an X post that Comey had “casually called for my dad to be murdered”, adding that the post was “demented”.
Grok, a conversational AI assistant on the Elon Musk-owned social media site, responding to comments from X users asking for clarification on the meaning of the numbers, said it was “basically a sneaky way of saying “get rid of Trump”. However, the assistant also added that the numbers do not “inherently mean assassinate Trump” but rather they imply “political removal”.
Speaking on Fox News, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard said she did not accept that Comey was unaware of the violent interpretation of “86 47”. Gabbard said Comey “should be held accountable and put behind bars for this”.
Republican Congressman Andy Ogles said he sent a letter to US intelligence agencies calling for an investigation into Comey’s “disturbing” post to see if the former intelligence boss had violated two federal laws – threatening the president and interstate sharing of threatening communication.
Ogles also demanded confirmation on whether Comey still has access to classified material because of his previous role as FBI director.
“If Comey broke the law, he shouldn’t get a pass. He should be in handcuffs,” Ogles wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in an X post said the matter was already being investigated by US intelligence authorities.
“Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey just called for the assassination of @POTUS Trump. DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately,” she posted.
FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed on X that his agency will aid the investigation and “provide all necessary support”.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair said Comey’s post was a call to “terrorists & hostile regimes to kill the President of the United States as he travels in the Middle East”.
“Any Democrat or Media Outlet who fails to condemn this clear Incitement of Violence is complicit and must be described as such.”
Comey was appointed by former President Barack Obama. Before the 2016 election, Comey investigated Hillary Clinton’s use of private email servers during her time as secretary of state. Many Democrats argue that this investigation, on the eve of the vote, cost her the election, in which Clinton was the party’s nominee against Trump.
But Comey also led the FBI’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections, and was fired in 2017 by Trump early in his first term in office.
Comey had testified to Congress that Russia did interfere in the 2016 elections. The administration’s official reason for firing him was that Comey was “ineffective”, referring to dissatisfaction with the Clinton investigation, which eventually ended without the politician being charged.
The major sticking point between Trump and Comey, according to analysts, was Comey’s focus on the Russia issue and his refusal to state in public that Trump and his Trump Organisation were not personally being investigated.
Their situation seemed desperate; their demeanour, portrayed in several videos published by news outlets, was sour.
On a recent weekday in March, men, women, and even children – all with their belongings heaped on their heads or strapped to their bodies – disembarked from the ferry they say they were forcibly hauled onto from the vast northwest African nation of Mauritania to the Senegalese town of Rosso, on the banks of the Senegal River.
Their offence? Being migrants from the region, they told reporters, regardless of whether they had legal residency papers.
“We suffered there,” one woman told France’s TV5 Monde, a baby perched on her hip. “It was really bad.”
The deportees are among hundreds of West Africans who have been rounded up by Mauritanian security forces, detained, and sent over the border to Senegal and Mali in recent months, human rights groups say.
According to one estimate from the Mauritanian Association for Human Rights (AMDH),1,200 people were pushed back in March alone, even though about 700 of them had residence permits.
Those pushed back told reporters about being randomly approached for questioning before being arrested, detained for days in tight prison cells with insufficient food and water, and tortured. Many people remained in prison in Mauritania, they said.
The largely desert country – which has signed expensive deals with the European Union to keep migrants from taking the risky boat journey across the Atlantic Ocean to Western shores – has called the pushbacks necessary to crack down on human smuggling networks.
However, its statements have done little to calm rare anger from its neighbours, Mali and Senegal, whose citizens make up a huge number of those sent back.
Mali’s government, in a statement in March, expressed “indignation” at the treatment of its nationals, adding that “the conditions of arrest are in flagrant violation of human rights and the rights of migrants in particular.”
In Senegal, a member of parliament called the pushbacks “xenophobic” and urged the government to launch an investigation.
“We’ve seen these kinds of pushbacks in the past but it is at an intensity we’ve never seen before in terms of the number of people deported and the violence used,” Hassan Ould Moctar, a migration researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, told Al Jazeera.
The blame, the researcher said, was largely to be put on the EU. On one hand, Mauritania was likely under pressure from Brussels, and on the other hand, it was also likely reacting to controversial rumours that migrants deported from Europe would be resettled in the country despite Nouakchott’s denial of such an agreement.
Mauritania, on the edge of the Atlantic, is one of the closest points from the continent to Spain’s Canary Islands. That makes it a popular departure point for migrants who crowd the coastal capital, Nouakchott, and the commercial northern city of Nouadhibou. Most are trying to reach the Canaries, a Spanish enclave closer to the African continent than to Europe, from where they can seek asylum.
Due to its role as a transit hub, the EU has befriended Nouakchott – as well as the major transit points of Morocco and Senegal – since the 2000s, pumping funds to enable security officials there to prevent irregular migrants from embarking on the crossing.
However, the EU honed in on Mauritania with renewed vigour last year after the number of people travelling from the country shot up to unusual levels, making it the number one departure point.
About 83 percent of the 7,270 people who arrived in the Canaries in January 2024 travelled from Mauritania, migrant advocacy group Caminando Fronteras (CF) noted in a report last year. That number represented a 1,184 percent increase compared with January 2023, when most people were leaving Senegal. Some 3,600 died on the Mauritania-Atlantic route between January and April 2024, CF noted.
Analysts, and the EU, link the surge to upheavals wracking the Sahel, from Mali to Niger, including coups and attacks by several armed groups looking to build caliphates. In Mali, attacks on local communities by armed groups and government forces suspicious of locals have forced hundreds over the border into Mauritania in recent weeks.
Ibrahim Drame of the Senegalese Red Cross in the border town of Rosso told Al Jazeera the migrant raids began in January after a new immigration law went into force, requiring a residence permit for any foreigner living on Mauritanian soil. However, he said most people have not had an opportunity to apply for those permits. Before this, nationals of countries like Senegal and Mali enjoyed free movement under bilateral agreements.
“Raids have been organised day and night, in large markets, around bus stations, and on the main streets,” Drame noted, adding that those affected are receiving dwindling shelter and food support from the Red Cross, and included migrants from Togo, Nigeria, Niger, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana and Benin.
“Hundreds of them were even hunted down in their homes or workplaces, without receiving the slightest explanation … mainly women, children, people with chronic illnesses in a situation of extreme vulnerability and stripped of all their belongings, even their mobile phones,” Drame said.
Last February, European Commission head, Ursula von der Leyen, visited President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani in Nouakchott to sign a 210 million euro ($235m) “migrant partnership agreement”. The EU said the agreement was meant to intensify “border security cooperation” with Frontex, the EU border agency, and dismantle smuggler networks. The bloc has promised an additional 4 million euros ($4.49m) this year to provide food, medical, and psychosocial support to migrants.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was also in Mauritania in August to sign a separate border security agreement.
Black Mauritanians in the country, meanwhile, say the pushback campaign has awakened feelings of exclusion and forced displacement carried by their communities. Some fear the deportations may be directed at them.
Activist Abdoulaye Sow, founder of the US-based Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in the US (MNHRUS), told Al Jazeera that to understand why Black people in the country feel threatened, there’s a need to understand the country’s painful past.
Located at a confluence where the Arab world meets Sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritania has historically been racially segregated, with the Arab-Berber political elite dominating over the Black population, some of whom were previously, or are still, enslaved. It was only in 1981 that Mauritania passed a law abolishing slavery, but the practice still exists, according to rights groups.
Dark-skinned Black Mauritanians are composed of Haratines, an Arabic-speaking group descended from formerly enslaved peoples. There are also non-Arabic speaking groups like the Fulani and Wolof, who are predominantly from the Senegal border area in the country’s south.
Black Mauritanians, Sow said, were once similarly deported en masse in trucks from the country to Senegal. It dates back to April 1989, when simmering tensions between Mauritanian herders and Senegalese farmers in border communities erupted and led to the 1989-1991 Border War between the two countries. Both sides deployed their militaries in heavy gunfire battles. In Senegal, mobs attacked Mauritanian traders, and in Mauritania, security forces cracked down on Senegalese nationals.
Because a Black liberation movement was also growing at the time, and the Mauritanian military government was fearful of a coup, it cracked down on Black Mauritanians, too.
By 1991, there were refugees on either side in the thousands. However, after peace came about, the Mauritanian government expelled thousands of Black Mauritanians under the guise of repatriating Senegalese refugees. Some 60,000 people were forced into Senegal. Many lost important citizenship and property documents in the process.
“I was a victim too,” Sow said. “It wasn’t safe for Blacks who don’t speak Arabic. I witnessed armed people going house to house and asking people if they were Mauritanian, beating them, even killing them.”
Sow said it is why the deportation of sub-Saharan migrants is scaring the community. Although he has written open letters to the government warning of how Black people could be affected, he said there has been no response.
“When they started these recent deportations again, I knew where they were going, and we’ve already heard of a Black Mauritanian deported to Mali. We’ve been sounding the alarm for so long, but the government is not responsive.”
The Mauritanian government directed Al Jazeera to an earlier statement it released regarding the deportations, but did not address allegations of possible forced expulsions of Black Mauritanians.
In the statement, the government said it welcomed legal migrants from neighbouring countries, and that it was targeting irregular migrants and smuggling networks.
“Mauritania has made significant efforts to enable West African nationals to regularise their residence status by obtaining resident cards following simplified procedures,” the statement read.
Although Mauritania eventually agreed to take back its nationals between 2007 and 2012, many Afro-Mauritanians still do not have documents proving their citizenship as successive administrations implement fluctuating documentation and census laws. Tens of thousands are presently stateless, Sow said. At least 16,000 refugees chose to stay back in Senegal to avoid persecution in Mauritania.
Sow said the fear of another forced deportation comes on top of other issues, including national laws that require students in all schools to learn in Arabic, irrespective of their culture. Arabic is Mauritania’s lingua franca, but Afro-Mauritanians who speak languages like Wolof or Pula are against what they call “forced Arabisation”. Sow says it is “cultural genocide”.
Despite new residence permit laws in place, Sow added, migrants, as well as the Black Mauritanian population, should be protected.
Russian attacks have increasingly hit hotels hosting journalists in Ukraine, in what could constitute “war crimes”, according to a new report.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Truth Hounds – a Ukrainian organisation founded to document war crimes – released the report on Friday. It found that Russian attacks on hotels housing journalists moved from being “isolated events” early in the conflict in 2022 to a “sustained threat” by 2025.
At least 31 strikes on 25 hotels being used by journalists have been recorded since Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022, the report states.
“These attacks appear to be part of a broader Russian strategy aimed at intimidating journalists and suppressing independent media coverage of Russia’s actions in Ukraine,” the report said.
The hotels hit are mainly close to the front line. Only one was being used for military purposes at the time of the attack, the NGOs said.
“In total, 25 journalists and media professionals have found themselves under these hotel bombings, and at least seven have been injured,” it stated.
According to the RSF, at least 13 journalists have been killed while covering Russia’s war on Ukraine, with 12 of the deaths on Ukrainian territory.
The report highlighted that the attacks followed a clear pattern, occurring at night, using ballistic missiles launched at civilian hotels that were not “legitimate military targets”.
“Our analysis therefore suggests that these attacks are neither random nor incidental but are instead part of a broader strategy aimed at discouraging independent reporting from the front line,” the authors concluded.
Due to the safety obstacles to reporting from a war zone, 13 percent of respondents to a survey said there had been a “reduction” in assignments to high-risk areas, affecting how the war is covered.