Author: Steven Sahiounie

The Indonesian military’s chief of staff has confirmed that the country’s armed forces will no longer conduct virginity tests on female recruits after criticism that the practice is cruel, degrading and has no scientific validity. “There’s no more of that,” Army Chief of Staff Andika Perkasa declared, discussing the so-called ‘two-finger’ virginity tests which had examined “whether the hymen was ruptured or partially ruptured” before female cadets could be admitted. Addressing concerns raised by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which investigated the process in 2014 and 2015, Perkasa made it clear that the selection process going forward will be equal for male and female…

A Swiss university student has won Twitter’s first bug bounty competition, revealing that the algorithm is flawed and biased toward young, ‘beautiful,’ and light-skinned faces. Bogdan Kulynych, a swiss university student, demonstrated the bias in the Twitter saliency cropping algorithm, which crops images for previews by focusing on the most interesting parts of the image. In 2020, Twitter came under fire for its faulty image cropping algorithm when users discovered that the algorithm was highlighting white faces over black ones when it came to image previews, such as in this tweet: The algorithm even preferred white dogs over black ones,…

NASA has spent nine years and almost $2 billion on its mission to drill and store Martian rock samples. The Perseverance rover robot was ready to make it happen on Friday but came up empty-handed. What happened? The Perseverance rover’s robot appeared to function flawlessly, but when the metal tube which was supposed to hold the sample was inspected, it was discovered to be empty. The rover chose a rock in an old Mars lake bed that may have previously harbored alien life and attempted to drill into it. But then something odd happened: the sample disappeared. The mission team…

RSPCA Australia has condemned a social media video which showed a teenager forcing a quokka to vape from an e-cigarette at Rottnest Island in Western Australia (WA). The recent video showed a teenage girl laughing as she shoved an e-cigarette device down the quokka’s throat. The quokka, which could be seen standing on its back legs, licked at the device which it believed to be food. RSPCA WA executive manager Hannah Dreaver told 9News it was “completely and utterly irresponsible and unacceptable for this poor defenseless, vulnerable animal to be subjected to that kind of cruelty.” “Those animals are really, really vulnerable,” Dreaver warned,…

Journalist Richard Medhurst claims that he initially didn’t recognize Julian Assange, who looked “awful and ill,” as the WikiLeaks founder appeared in London’s High Court while the United States pushes to have him extradited. Medhurst told RT said that he “literally did a double take” upon seeing Assange during the High Court preliminary hearing on Wednesday, which he was connected to remotely. “I couldn’t recognize that it was Assange, he looked extremely old,” Medhurst declared, adding that the WikiLeaks founder looked so “awful and ill” that it took him a “minute” to realize it was Assange as medical witnesses testified that his “health has deteriorated and he’s been…

Indigenous leaders have cautiously welcomed Ottawa’s $320-million funding pledge to support communities looking for unmarked graves at former residential school sites and to help survivors, deeming it a “long overdue step.” The Trudeau administration announced the funding on Tuesday, with indigenous groups currently developing plans to uncover more burial sites. Around Can$83 million (US$66 million) will go towards plans to research and locate sites, memorialize and rebury victims. A National Advisory Committee (NAC) will offer assistance. Other portions of the funding will be used for mental health and community support, and to help “manage” residential school buildings – by either demolishing or remodeling them…

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has demanded Canadian businessman Michael Spavor, arrested in China for alleged spying, be released “immediately and unconditionally” after he was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Wednesday. In a Wednesday statement, Blinken accused China of “arbitrarily” arresting Spavor to “exercise leverage over foreign governments.” “People should never be used as bargaining chips,” the secretary of state said. Spavor was sentenced to 11 years in prison over charges of espionage. In a statement on the ruling, the court said Spavor was “illegally providing state secrets.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau previously condemned the arrest and the trial, which he…

By Pepe Escobar The ever-elusive Afghan “peace” process negotiations re-start this Wednesday in Doha via the extended troika – the US, Russia, China and Pakistan. The contrast with the accumulated facts on the ground could not be starker. In a coordinated blitzkrieg, the Taliban have subdued no less than six Afghan provincial capitals in only four days. The central administration in Kabul will have a hard time defending its stability in Doha. It gets worse. Ominously, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has all but buried the Doha process. He’s already betting on civil war – from the weaponization of civilians in the main…

France’s Ministry of the Interior found that one Covid vaccination or screening center has been vandalized per day on average since mid-July, with around 20 such sites across the country attacked, local media reported on Tuesday. Information gathered from the Ministry of the Interior shows that there have been 20 attacks on vaccination hubs and Covid testing centers nationwide from July 14 to August 9. A vaccination center in Landes, southwestern France was reportedly defaced on July 19, with vandals writing ‘Nazis’ and ‘collaborators’, alongside dozens of swastikas. Meanwhile, the word ‘genocide’ was painted on the floor of another hub…

More than 8,500 people in a town in northern Germany, who thought they were vaccinated, might have been left without protection against Covid-19 as a nurse allegedly injected them with saline instead of a real vaccine. Thousands of people in the small town of Schortens in northern Germany might have to go through the vaccination procedure all over again, just months after they supposedly got immunized against Covid-19, the local authorities have revealed following an investigation in what was deemed a minor cover-up issue but developed into a major vaccination scandal. “A total of 8,557 people might have received no…