“Julian has been indicted for receiving, possessing and communicating information to the public of evidence of war crimes committed by the U.S. government,” his wife, Stella Assange, said. “Reporting a crime is never a crime.”

Khalil, a shy 21-year-old whose name has been changed, was arrested in a pre-dawn raid last October for his allegiance to Hamas. But when Israeli forces smashed through the door of his family home, they didn’t tell him why they were detaining him. He was imprisoned for six months without charge, in conditions he described as “unbelievable”.

“The Israelis are trying to restrain and terrorise us using these methods,” he said. “People are afraid. There is no freedom of speech … I’m scared to travel to any of the cities in the West Bank in case I get detained. Still, it feels like they could raid my house at any minute.”

But as Israeli forces continue to pummel Gaza, claiming to be targeting the remaining Hamas brigades, they have also swept up thousands of Palestinians in raids in the West Bank. The majority, according to the Palestinian prisoners’ commission, are not aligned to Hamas. Even so, the raids and an increasing number of settler attacks have succeeded in creating a climate of fear that is undermining Hamas’s rivals Fatah, who operate the ruling Palestinian Authority, highlighting its inability to protect Palestinians and quietly fuelling Hamas’s popularity.

“These raids are generating distrust towards the Palestinian Authority but also fear of attack by them – they can’t protect us but at the same time they could attack us too,” said Khalil, pointing to the authority’s history of detaining members of Hamas in the West Bank.

Guardrails to prevent artificial intelligence models behind chatbots from issuing illegal, toxic or explicit responses can be bypassed with simple techniques, UK government researchers have found.

The UK’s AI Safety Institute (AISI) said systems it had tested were “highly vulnerable” to jailbreaks, a term for text prompts designed to elicit a response that a model is supposedly trained to avoid issuing.

The AISI said it had tested five unnamed large language models (LLM) – the technology that underpins chatbots – and circumvented their safeguards with relative ease, even without concerted attempts to beat their guardrails.

“All tested LLMs remain highly vulnerable to basic jailbreaks, and some will provide harmful outputs even without dedicated attempts to circumvent their safeguards,” wrote AISI researchers in an update on their testing regime.

Lai Ching-te has been sworn in as Taiwan’s new president, urging China to “cease their political and military intimidation against Taiwan” and to keep the world free from the fear of more war.

Lai was inaugurated on Monday morning at the Japanese-colonial-era presidential office in central Taipei, taking over from Tsai Ing-wen, whose eight years in power saw a sharp deterioration in relations with Beijing.

China claims democratic Taiwan as a province, and has called Lai, 64, a “dangerous separatist” who will bring “war and decline” to the island. The Chinese Communist party has never ruled over Taiwan, but Xi Jinping has declared that what he terms “reunification” is “inevitable”.

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"We can see the wreckage and the situation does not look good," the head of lran's Red Crescent, Pirhossein Kolivand, told state TV.

• Ukrainian drones hit Novorossiysk port, causing a fire and power outages, reports say.
• The attack follows heightened defenses at the port after previous Ukrainian strikes on Crimea.
• Novorossiysk is vital for Russia's oil exports and naval operations in the Black Sea.

The Russian port of Novorossiysk, which has become an important base for the Black Sea Fleet after repeated attacks on its traditional base in Crimea, has been targeted by Ukrainian drones.

This attacks follows previous reports by the UK Ministry of Defence indicating that Russia has been bolstering defenses at the Novorossiysk port to protect its Black Sea Fleet from potential Ukrainian attacks.

DUBAI, May 19 (Reuters) - A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister crashed on Sunday as it was crossing mountain terrain in heavy fog, an Iranian official told Reuters, and rescuers were struggling to reach the site of the incident.

The official said the lives of Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian were "at risk following the helicopter crash", which happened on the way back from a visit to the border with Azerbaijan in Iran's northwest.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi — often seen as a potential successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei— is missing after his helicopter went down in the northwest of the country on Sunday, officials said.

Iran’s Vice President Mohsen Mansouri said contact has been made with one of the helicopter passengers and one of the flight crew, although the connection had frequently been interrupted.

A report by official Iranian news agency IRNA says that it seems the incident was not serious, but does not provide an update on Raisi’s wellbeing or that of any other passengers. Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was also reportedly on board the aircraft.

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Update (NYT):

~~The head of Iran’s Red Crescent Society, Pirhossein Kolivand, told state TV that search and rescue teams have not located the site of the helicopter crash after more than 10 hours of looking, and have made no contact with anyone on board. Any rumors to the contrary were false, he said. Kolivand said rescuers were using their best guesses to set the search area and had no confirmation of the exact location of the missing helicopter.~~

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Update 2 (BBC)

President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and several others are confirmed to have been killed in Sunday's helicopter crash in north-western Iran, state TV says.

Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the Israeli army should create a security zone in southern Lebanon should Hezbollah not heed an Israeli ultimatum to withdraw from the border area. He also called on the security cabinet to order a permanent military presence "in all of the Gaza Strip."

While on a visit to Israel's north, the far-right leader of the Religious Zionism party said that "the war must end with Hezbollah's total military defeat. It must be presented with an ultimatum to stop firing and withdraw its forces… and if [Hezbollah] doesn't fully comply – the Israeli army must launch a defensive attack … deep in Lebanese territory, including a ground incursion and an Israeli military takeover of the southern Lebanon area."

Regarding Gaza, Smotrich said that the IDF must have a permanent military presence in the Strip. Military outposts, he added, should be erected "in the north, center and south of the Gaza Strip, to prevent a situation in which Hamas rebuilds its military infrastructure and [reasserts] civilian control."

Severe flooding caused by heavy rainfall has inundated Voeren and Liège in Belgium, as well as parts of France and Germany.

The municipality of Voeren in Limburg has been severely impacted by heavy rainfall, causing extensive flooding in the area. Streets are submerged, houses inundated, and the local disaster plan has been enacted to manage the emergency. 

"This is worse than in 2021," stated Mayor Joris Gaens, referring to the devastating floods that hit Voeren and the province of Liège three years ago. Emergency shelters have been set up for those affected.

Russian troops attacked a recreation center in a northern suburb of Kharkiv at around 11 a.m. local time, killing six civilians including a pregnant woman and wounding 27, the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor's Office said on May 19.

. . .

“(Russian troops) attacked the area where local residents were resting,” Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleh Syniehubov said in an earlier post on Telegram, condemning the attack. A paramedic was among the wounded, and an ambulance was damaged, he added.

In a later post on Telegram, Syniehubov said Russian forces had fired two Iskander ballistic missiles in a "double-tap" strike – a common Russian tactic in which a target is struck once and then again shortly after, the second strike deliberately targeting rescue workers.

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International far-right leaders, including France’s Marine Le Pen, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Argentina’s Javier Milei, came together in Madrid to rail against socialism and “massive illegal migration” three weeks before hard-right parties are expected to see a surge in support in June’s European elections.

Sunday’s “great patriotic convention”, which was organised by Spain’s far-right Vox party, offered conservatives and far-right populists a chance to congregate and take aim at a variety of familiar targets, from the welfare state to “wokeness” and the agendas of Brussels-based bureaucrats.

The event was also attended by Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, André Ventura, the leader of Portugal’s far-right Chega party, and the Chilean far-right leader José Antonio Kast.

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The United Nations’ humanitarian chief has warned of “apocalyptic” consequences due to aid shortages in Gaza, where Israel’s military offensive in the southern city of Rafah has blocked desperately needed food.

“If fuel runs out, aid doesn’t get to the people where they need it. That famine, which we have talked about for so long, and which is looming, will not be looming any more. It will be present,” the UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, told AFP on the sidelines of meetings with Qatari officials in Doha.

“And I think our worry, as citizens of the international community, is that the consequence is going to be really, really hard. Hard, difficult, and apocalyptic.”

Griffith said 50 trucks of aid a day could reach the hardest-hit people north of Gaza through the reopened Erez crossing on the northern frontier. However, he added, the battles near the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings in Gaza’s south meant the vital routes were effectively blocked.

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Iranian police have arrested more than 260 people, including three European citizens, on suspicion of spreading satanism, the state-run IRNA news agency reported Friday.

The report said the suspects were arrested on Thursday night in Shahryar County, west of the capital of Tehran, for “spreading the culture of satanism and nudity.” It did not elaborate.

It was not clear how such a large number of arrests were made in one night — if the suspects were in one location, at some gathering or party, or not.

Gatherings where unrelated men and women are seen together are illegal in Iran and considered a sin under Islamic law.

In the extensive investigations conducted in the months following the publication of the position paper in November, some testimonies referenced within it have been disputed or deemed unverifiable, and more may face similar scrutiny in the future. We regret their inclusion in the position paper. As mentioned, a substantial portion of the information that is now available was not accessible when the document was originally drafted. The new information that has come to light further reinforces our call for an investigation into the subject. It is crucial to recognize that due to the fragmented nature of traumatic memories, they are often expressed in incomplete, confused, or contradictory ways. Therefore, it is neither accurate nor just for persons lacking the required expertise and tools to assess the credibility of witnesses. Accordingly, moving forward, we will rely on the Patten report and, when available, additional reports and documents produced by competent investigative bodies. We will continue to monitor their findings and reports while drawing necessary professional conclusions.

Since October 7, the Israeli government and other entities have been exploiting reports of sexual violence in a manipulative and cynical manner. These reports have been utilized as part of a campaign to dehumanize Palestinians and as a propaganda tool to justify Israel’s brutal military assault on the Gaza Strip. This assault has resulted, and continues to result, in the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the forced displacement and starvation of most of the Gaza Strip’s population, and extensive destruction of civilian infrastructure, including health facilities. We are appalled by this cynical exploitation of the victims’ suffering, condemn it, and view it as a complete abandonment of any moral integrity.

A volcano on the remote Indonesian island of Halmahera has spectacularly erupted, spewing a grey ash cloud into the sky, and people from seven nearby villages have been evacuated, authorities said on Sunday.

Mt. Ibu erupted on Saturday evening, sending ash 4 km (2.5 miles) high, as streaks of purple lightning flashed around its crater, according to information and images shared by Indonesia's volcanology agency.