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According to Finnish broadcasting company Yle, dozens of North Korean workers appear to be working at a factory near Moscow, packing cat food marketed under the fake-Finnish brand “Elämän Järvi.” The use of North Korean labor abroad violates UN Security Council sanctions https://t.co/JfJf0zfflg #NorthKorea #UNsanctions #catfood #FI #KP #RU

Rabaa: The Hour the World’s Conscience Stood Still On the anniversary of one of the largest single-day killings of protesters in modern history, one question remains unanswered: who will be held accountable? By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands On 14 August, the anniversary returns of a day unlike any other in modern Egyptian history. Not simply because it was the bloodiest Egypt has known wars and massacres before and since ,but because it was the day a state chose to open fire on its own people in broad daylight, in front of the world’s cameras, and then let thirteen years pass without a single officer ever being held accountable. This article will not be a cold recitation of statistics, though the statistics exist, are documented, and are horrifying. It is an attempt to understand something deeper: how a square in the heart of Cairo, filled with tents, children, and worshippers, became the site of the largest mass killing the Arab world has witnessed in the past decade and why the echo of that day still reverberates in every Egyptian prison cell today. I. A Morning That Began Like Any Other For readers unfamiliar with the background: in July 2013, the Egyptian military, led by then-General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, removed Mohamed Morsy Egypt’s first freely elected civilian president, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who had taken office in 2012 following the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak. In response, tens of thousands of Morsy’s supporters staged an open-ended sit-in demanding his reinstatement. By 14 August 2013, more than twenty thousand people had spent weeks camped out at two Cairo squares, Rab’a al-Adawiya and al-Nahda, in a peaceful sit-in. They were not an army, nor a uniform bloc; they were entire families men, women, and children, some affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, many simply ordinary citizens who saw the restoration of elected legitimacy as a cause worth the risk. There were tents for sleeping, communal kitchens feeding the demonstrators, speaking platforms, and a small field clinic that no one imagined would, within hours, become one of the most terrifying places in modern Egyptian history. In the early hours of that morning, Central Security Forces and army units, under the command of then-General Sisi, began what was officially described as a "dispersal" operation targeting both sit-ins simultaneously. It was not a dispersal in any ordinary sense of the word. According to a year-long investigation by Human Rights Watch, it was a pre-planned operation that anticipated, from the outset, thousands of deaths. II. The Numbers the Regime Refuses to Speak The Egyptian government, to this day, cites a death toll of "over 600" for that single day a figure that, even at its official lowest, is horrifying enough to warrant an independent international investigation. But the field investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch, drawing on field hospital records, survivor testimony, and analysis of video footage from dozens of angles, arrived at a far more disturbing figure: at least 817 people killed at Rab’a Square alone, with the true toll likely exceeding 1,000, plus another 87 killed at the nearby al-Nahda Square. When the deaths from the weeks surrounding 14 August are added from the dispersal of the Republican Guard sit-in on 8 July, through the Mansoura Street killings, to the dispersal of an October 6 march the combined total reaches at least 1,150 deaths in just six weeks, according to Human Rights Watch’s meticulous documentation. This figure led the organisation to use a term not deployed lightly in international law: crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch described the Rab’a killings as "one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history." Not in Egyptian history alone in modern history as a whole. What happened at Rab’a is cited in international reporting alongside China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. This is the true scale of what the Egyptian state has spent thirteen years trying to minimise, justify, and reduce to a mere "security incident" in a news bulletin. III. "All According to Plan" When Mass Killing Becomes Administration, Not Chaos The title Human Rights Watch chose for its detailed report on the massacre deserves lingering on: "All According to Plan." This is not an emotive headline; it is a precise legal conclusion built on field evidence. According to the investigation, what happened at Rab’a was not a dispersal operation that spiralled out of control amid chaos or panic, as the regime later tried to portray it. It was a carefully planned operation that assumed, in advance, massive casualties. Then-Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim admitted, in a televised interview broadcast on 31 August 2013 just weeks after the massacre that his ministry had anticipated losses of "10 percent of the people" present at the sit-in, acknowledging that the number of demonstrators exceeded twenty thousand. By simple arithmetic, this is an official admission that the state anticipated, in advance, the deaths of roughly two thousand people and proceeded with the operation regardless. This is the true horror at the heart of the Rab’a story: it was not a security operation that spun out of control, but a conscious administrative decision, made in an air-conditioned room, with advance calculations, by men who knew precisely how many human beings would die under their fire and who proceeded anyway, or perhaps because of it. According to Human Rights Watch’s analysis, the objective was to send an unambiguous message: whoever challenges the new state will pay an irreversible price. IV. Snipers, Women, and Children The Faces the Reports Do Not Tell Behind every number in the Human Rights Watch reports lies a full human story, deliberately omitted from the state’s official narrative. The investigation documented how security forces opened fire from multiple angles, and how snipers positioned themselves atop buildings surrounding the square, targeting according to survivor testimony and analysed video footage any movement in the square, regardless of whether it was an armed combatant or a nurse trying to reach a wounded person. According to documented testimony, entire families had their tents burn over their heads as fire swept through the sit-in. Doctors and paramedics were killed while trying to pull the wounded from the line of fire. Most damningly of all, the documentation shows deliberate targeting of ambulances and field medical points meaning that wounded people who survived the first bullet then faced death by bleeding out, because anyone attempting to save them was themselves a target. This detail the targeting of medics is what elevates the event from "excessive violent repression" to what human rights organisations have described as a systematic crime. When security forces target those trying to save the wounded, they are not merely dispersing a sit-in; they are preventing witnesses from surviving to tell what happened. V. Thirteen Years of Total Impunity The most painful part of the Rab’a story is not only what happened that day, but what has not happened in the years since. From 14 August 2013 to today, not a single officer, of any rank, has been held accountable for the deaths of hundreds, or thousands, of Egyptians. Quite the opposite: the state has moved to entrench impunity through the force of law itself. Egypt issued legislation granting senior military officers immunity from questioning over any violations that may have occurred following Morsy’s removal a law specifically designed to close the door on any future judicial accountability, regardless of how political circumstances might change. Even the fact-finding committee established by then-interim President Adly Mansour to investigate the June and July events concluded, in its report issued more than a year after the events, that the sit-in’s leaders bore responsibility for the deaths, on the grounds that they had allowed weapons into the square even as the same report admitted, in a glaring contradiction, that security forces had failed to target only armed individuals, meaning they had fired indiscriminately on everyone: armed and unarmed, man and woman, adult and child. This is the pattern that has repeated for over a decade: as each anniversary approaches, official statements re-narrate the events and shift blame onto the victims, while the actual perpetrators — those who planned the operation, gave the orders, and pulled the trigger — remain free. Some now occupy the highest offices of the state. VI. Why This Anniversary, Why Now? A reader might ask: why revisit this story after all these years? Has the world not moved on to newer crises? The answer lies in the very nature of impunity. When a state is never held accountable for the largest massacre of protesters in its modern history, it does not simply "forget" the crime it sets a precedent, telling every future ruler and every future security apparatus: mass killing is possible, politically profitable, and free of cost. This poisonous lesson does not remain confined within Egyptian borders; its echo reaches every Arab capital contemplating how to handle its own opposition. More dangerously, this system of impunity did not stop at Rab’a’s edges; it is the foundation on which Egypt’s entire subsequent decade of repression was built: thousands of political prisoners, grossly unfair mass trials that produced death sentences for dozens of defendants in cases linked directly to the Rab’a events themselves, laws criminalising peaceful protest, a muzzled press, and a civil society hollowed of substance. All of it traces back to the morning of 14 August 2013, when the state learned that overwhelming force succeeds, and that the world will condemn for a few days, then move on. VII. Delayed Justice Is Not Forgotten Justice Despite more than a decade of official silence and impunity, the Rab’a case remains alive in international legal memory. Human rights organisations, from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, continue to renew their annual calls for an independent international investigation, grounded in the legal principle that crimes against humanity are not subject to statutes of limitation: delayed justice is not forgotten justice. The victims who fell in that square were not numbers in a statistical report. They were fathers who left behind children too young, that day, to understand why their father would never return. They were mothers who, thirteen years later, are still searching for a clearly marked grave to which they can carry flowers, and young people who had decades of life ahead of them that they never got to live. Their memory does not fade with time; it grows with their children, who carry with them the same question their parents asked before they were killed: when will justice come? Conclusion: What Does This Anniversary Demand of Us? Every year, as the anniversary of 14 August returns, the same question resurfaces one the Egyptian state refuses to answer: who gave the order? Who planned the operation? Who decided that twenty thousand human beings deserved to be shot with live ammunition because they staged a peaceful sit-in? This anniversary is not a call for vengeance, nor an invocation of the past for its own sake. It is a reminder that justice, however delayed, remains a debt still owed. And that every instance of international silence over a massacre of this scale opens the door to the next one, elsewhere, under a different pretext, carrying the same lethal conviction: that the world will condemn for a week, then forget. We will not forget. And we will not stop asking the question that unsettles everyone who took part in that crime, regardless of the office they hold today: where is the accountability? Rab’a is no longer merely the name of a square in Cairo. In the conscience of everyone who believes in justice, it has become a test of the world’s conscience itself a test the world has not yet passed.

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The new guidelines from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) for depicting female athletes during the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham are appreciated by athletes, as they focus on technical skills and the dignity of women, to prevent inappropriate images that convey sexual messages. (translated)

Nieuwe richtlijnen voor het in beeld brengen van vrouwelijke atleten oogsten waardering bij deelnemers

In today’s morning live broadcast on Polish @vottak_tv, I had the honor of discussing Ukraine’s latest territorial gains, the critical lack of air defense, and naval warfare in the Black Sea. The full interview can be watched here from 13:20⤵️ https://t.co/dsDuk6nq4w https://t.co/bjthtBCD0b #Ukraine #BlackSea #AirDefense #PL #UA

UWAGA❗️BORĘDZIE @BorekMati 🗣️ Jesteśmy posiadaczami praw do tego meczu, więc mam taką samą akredytację jak wy. Trzech ochroniarzy mnie i Michała Żewłakowa zaczęło trącać, popychać, krzyczeć, wzywać policję, że niby nie mamy prawa przebywać na murawie na tych akredytacjach. Ja im tłumaczę, że jesteśmy broadcasterem, że byliśmy tutaj przed meczem, że pracujemy przy tej transmisji. Oni zaczęli nas szarpać i wyrzucać z murawy, twierdząc, że musimy mieć czerwone akredytacje. Zrezygnowaliśmy z próby sił widząc siły wroga, że są zdecydowanie liczniejsze, że mieli przewagę liczebną. Oni od razu straszą cię policją... panowie, generalnie to jest niepoważne, bo my płacimy za prawa telewizyjne, prosimy o określone akredytacje, z którymi możemy pracować na stanowisku komentatorskim i murawie. Przez 45 minut drugiej połowy miałem na monitorze obraz opóźniony o trzy sekundy, próbowałem w tej sprawie interweniować, ale tak naprawdę żadnej akcji nie można było skomentować z monitora, bo wszystko było opóźnione i nikt się w tej sprawie nie pojawił. To, jak ci goście się tutaj zachowują... ja nie wiem, czy oni myślą, że to jest jakieś ich królestwo, że oni mogą tutaj ludzi popychać. Pomyliła się im odwaga z odważnikiem i na pewno tak tego nie zostawimy, tylko napiszemy proteścik i będziemy domagać się wyciągnięcia pewnych konsekwencji #sport #mecz #medialne

NRC 1w

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has established new rules for the Eurovision Song Contest, stating that a country currently in an armed conflict or that has undermined the non-political nature of the competition may not host the next event. (translated)

Nieuw Eurovisie-reglement: als een land dat in gewapend conflict zit wint, mag dat land de wedstrijd niet organiseren
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AD 1w

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) will introduce stricter rules for the Eurovision Song Contest starting in 2027, including raising the minimum age for participants to 18 and abolishing the guarantee that the winner can host the festival if safety cannot be ensured in the winning country. (translated)

Strengere regels songfestival: winst geen garantie meer voor organisatie en minimumleeftijd omhoog

"Thousands of innocent Palestinians are being killed, repeatedly displaced, without Hospitals or Schools, and without knowing when their next meal will come" said Israeli Conductor Ilan Volkov at a performance in London - The Zionist supporting @BBC cut the live broadcast... #Palestine #HumanRights #MediaBias #PS #IL #GB

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Wildfires in Friuli Venezia Giulia are spreading and affecting roads and highways, while firefighting helicopters and emergency services from Venice and Trieste are in action, and Italy is warning tourists about the dangers through a cell broadcast system. (translated)

Waldbrände in Friaul eskalieren: Straßen und Autobahn betroffen

A Generation That Forgot the Shape of the Square On memory left to die alone By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands In a house near mine, there is a boy of thirteen. Born in 2013 just a few months younger than the July coup itself, younger than the new republic under whose shadow we now live. I asked him once, with no preamble, no test, out of nothing more than passing curiosity: do you know what January was? He answered simply, without hesitation, without any sense that he was missing something: "An old revolution, against Mubarak, right?" Not entirely wrong. But it is everything he knows. The name Tahrir Square means nothing specific to him. The sound of the crowd chanting has no echo in his mind. He does not know that his own family whom he sees every day saying "thank God for stability," who warn him against "chaos" whenever a political headline crosses the screen once, at a moment two years before he was born, went down into the street, betting their entire lives on the possibility that something might change. This article is not about politics. It is about memory, and about who decides what gets told and what is left to die in silence. I. Who Erases the Picture? The first question that comes to mind is the easiest and most deceptive one: who erases this memory? And where do we begin holding them accountable? But the truth is too complex to reduce to a single actor. No one actually erases memory, in the literal sense of the act. There is no ministry called the "Ministry of Forgetting," no presidential decree ordering January struck from the collective consciousness. What happens is simpler than that, and more dangerous at once: the subject is simply never told. School says nothing. The textbook leaps from one period to another without pausing on January for more than two faded lines, composed with deliberate neutrality, devoid of any detail that might make the event feel alive to its young reader. Television no longer has any reason to return to it; the programmes that once hosted witnesses and activists stopped years ago, replaced by an official discourse that mentions January only in passing, as an unfortunate prelude to the "stability" that supposedly followed. And the home the most dangerous link of all has become afraid of the subject. Speech now carries a price, and many families, whether consciously or by sheer survival instinct, have decided that silence is safer than the story. The father who marched fears passing on to his son a curiosity that might one day lead him into trouble the family cannot afford. The mother who lost a friend in the events prefers not to reopen the wound before a child who does not yet grasp the weight of loss. And so, generation after generation, the circle of those who know shrinks, and the circle of those who do not even ask because they do not know there is anything worth asking widens. No one decided to erase the memory through an explicit decision. The memory was simply left to die alone, with no one tending it. And it is precisely this decentralised absence of responsibility that makes this kind of erasure more dangerous than any direct official ban: there is no single decision to challenge, no single body to hold accountable. Responsibility is distributed across thousands of small decisions made by thousands of individuals, each within their own context, each seeming reasonable when viewed in isolation. II. Why This Is More Dangerous Than Direct Repression An objection might be raised: is direct repression arrest, imprisonment, publishing bans not far more lethal than mere gradual forgetting? The answer is complex, and deserves calm unpacking. Direct repression can be seen. It can be documented, and the victim can know they are a victim, can tell their story, and their pain can become a testimony added to the collective memory, even if it never reaches justice. The political prisoner knows he is a political prisoner. The journalist banned from writing knows he is banned, and can tell the world he is banned. Direct repression, for all its cruelty, leaves a trace that can be followed. But a generation that has forgotten something happened at all does not even have a starting point from which to ask. This thirteen-year-old boy will never ask "why were we repressed?" because he does not know there is anything deserving that question in the first place. He feels no absence, because he does not know there is anything absent. He simply lives in a version of reality stripped of an entire chapter of his country’s history, and never for a moment suspects that this void is a void at all. Here lies the essence of the danger: direct repression creates victims who know they are victims. Erasure of memory, when it succeeds, creates a generation that does not even know it has been deprived of anything. And deprivation that is not felt cannot be resisted, because resistance always begins with an awareness of loss. The regime that came after 2013 does not need to convince the new generation that January was a mistake. That would be an arduous, costly task, requiring sustained propaganda and continuous effort to persuade each individual one by one. It is far easier, and strategically far more efficient, simply to ensure they never know it was anything at all. The void requires no defence; it requires only silence, and silence is free and always available. III. The Four Mechanisms of Erasure Four complementary mechanisms can be identified working together to produce this collective void not as an organised conspiracy, but as a system of incentives that pushes each party, consciously or not, to contribute to the same process. The first mechanism: formal education. The curriculum, as currently designed, treats January as a passing footnote rather than a founding event deserving detail and analysis. The student memorises two dates the start of the revolution and its presumed end without understanding why people took to the streets, what they were demanding, or how they felt in that pivotal moment. The second mechanism: broadcast media. The channels that once hosted live discussions on January, featuring varied perspectives, have gradually disappeared, or transformed their discourse entirely. Today’s televised image either ignores the anniversary altogether, or invokes it only to frame it as a prelude to chaos that must be avoided. The third mechanism: the silence of homes. This is the most dangerous of all, precisely because it is the most human and understandable. Parents who lived through the experience protect it with silence, not out of aversion to the story, but out of fear of its price. This silence, however legitimate its motives, achieves exactly the same effect as official censorship: it blocks the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The fourth mechanism: the absence of alternative spaces. Even those among the new generation who wish to know cannot easily find places to look. Archives are scattered, trustworthy websites are blocked or require effort to reach, and personal testimonies are dispersed across corners of the internet that an ordinary student at an ordinary school will never stumble upon. These four mechanisms require no central coordination to work together. Each naturally serves the others, and all converge on a single result: a growing void in the consciousness of every new generation. IV. Memory as an Act of Resistance If erasure operates without a centre, then resisting it must also be decentralised. No one waits for a government decision to restore January to the curriculum, nor for a television programme to revive the testimonies. Resistance here is necessarily individual, happening in small details, in passing conversations, in the simple decision to tell rather than to stay silent. This is exactly what I try to do, without any claim to heroism, without any grand mission. I try, whenever I can, to tell the thirteen-year-old boy and others like him details that are never written in official reports or in schoolbooks: what the voices in the square sounded like, how someone felt the first time they realised change was possible, what that moment of hope was like before everything changed. The goal is not to bring back the past; the past cannot be brought back. The goal is that this boy, when he grows older and asks again and he will ask, because the questions always return at some point finds someone to tell him the full story, not two faded lines in a schoolbook. That he knows the stability he is told is the fruit of "wisdom" has a prior history, that this history carried other possibilities, and that real people bet their lives on those possibilities. V. Why This Matters Now Talking about the memory of a generation not yet aware might seem an intellectual luxury next to more urgent matters: arrests, a collapsing economy, regional wars. But the truth is that this issue is the foundation on which every other issue is built. A people who do not know they once rose up will not understand why they should ever think of rising again. A generation raised to believe "stability" is the only natural state possible will never ask itself what drove its own parents, shortly before it was born, to risk everything for an alternative that was never guaranteed. Memory is not a luxury; it is the reference point by which every generation measures its present, and through which it determines what is possible and what is not. And whoever understands this understands why erasing memory, not direct repression alone, is among the most important tools of any regime seeking to guarantee its permanence: because a people who have forgotten they were once free will not even know they are missing freedom. Memory, like the word, needs someone to tell it in order to survive. And when the tellers stop, memory does not die suddenly; it withers slowly, generation after generation, until the day comes when a boy asks an innocent question, and finds no one to answer him but two faded lines in a schoolbook.

Iran’s newsrooms, broadcasting studios, publishing houses have suffered serious damage due to US+Israel bombs—Already facing fragile labor protections and restrictions on free speech, journalists are now enduring even worse working conditions By @kziabari https://t.co/1b0Itf1Ixz #Iran #PressFreedom #Journalism #IR #US #IL

Very sad! I always enjoyed his columns! Rod Liddle, journalist and broadcaster, has died aged 66, after a short illness https://t.co/lm7Sb8j1Ub #RodLiddle #journalism #RIP #Therearenospecificcountriesmentionedinthetweet.Therefore #theresultis:

🌍Climate and disaster risks cross borders. So must media preparedness. @UNESCO and @_AfricanUnion Broadcasting are strengthening climate reporting and media's disaster readiness in the Lake Chad Basin. Delighted to join virtually this week's regional workshop in N'Djamena 🇹🇩 https://t.co/gnqz8jIov9 #ClimateAction #MediaPreparedness #DisasterRiskReduction #TD

Broadcast LYKN Channel - update 📍 26 / 07 / 26 LYKN AT MONSTER 2026 #MonsterMusicFestival2026xLYKN ————- #nnutdan #LYKN https://t.co/cfVuK7Nt2n #MusicFestival #LYKN #Monster2026

NRC 4w

Nieuwe richtlijnen van de Europese atletiekbond en de European Broadcasting Union moeten ervoor zorgen dat vrouwelijke atleten tijdens wedstrijden niet langer geseksualiseerd worden, omdat ze historisch vaker beoordeeld zijn op hun uiterlijk dan op hun prestaties, wat schadelijk is voor hun welzijn en carrière. #RespectvolleVerslaggeving #VrouwelijkeAtleten #Seksualisering

Minder borsten, billen en buiken: atletes moeten respectvoller in beeld worden gebracht. ‘We worden nog altijd gezien als lustobject’

How do we help #SIDS prepare for cyclones and floods? By strengthening the media. In 2025, @UNESCO and the African Union of Broadcasting supported climate reporting and disaster preparedness in Cabo Verde, Comoros, Mauritius, and São Tomé & Príncipe. 🎥 https://t.co/vR9NDoLpLZ https://t.co/C9CllCl58S #SIDS #ClimateReporting #DisasterPreparedness #CV #KM #MU #ST

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de Volkskrant Jul 17

De European Broadcasting Union (EBU) heeft nieuwe richtlijnen geïntroduceerd voor cameramensen om vrouwelijke atleten respectvol en minder seksualiserend in beeld te brengen, naar aanleiding van klachten van sporters over de manier waarop ze tijdens tv-uitzendingen worden gefilmd. #Atletiek #Seksualisering #VrouwenSport

Advies om atletes minder seksualiserend in beeld te brengen; tv-registraties al langer reden voor ergernis bij vrouwelijke sporters
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AD Jul 16

Nieuwe richtlijnen van de European Broadcasting Union en European Athletics verbieden sexy camerabeelden van vrouwelijke atleten om de focus te verleggen naar hun sportprestaties in plaats van op hun lichamen. #Vrouwenatletiek #Seksualisering #Sportprestatie

Geen close-ups van billen meer: nieuwe richtlijnen maken korte metten met ‘sexy’ camerabeelden van atletes