By the same logic, Paris could detain the CEOs of Renault or Citroën because terrorists have used their cars… Jailing Durov is like incarcerating the Post Office for «illegal» statements written in private letters….
The French authorities have charged the tech mogul with multiple offenses related to crimes committed via his platform
Telegram founder Pavel Durov has pledged to strengthen moderation efforts on his social media platform, speaking before a French court on Friday, according to Franceinfo.
The Russian tech mogul, who also holds citizenship in France, the UAE, and St. Kitts and Nevis, was arrested in Paris in August 2024.
The French authorities charged him with over a dozen offenses related to illegal content on Telegram, including complicity in the distribution of child pornography and enabling drug trafficking, among other allegations.
Durov was eventually released on bail of €5 million ($5.15 million), but was prohibited from leaving France and required to report to local police twice a week.
Children play with fireworks on the rubble of destroyed buildings in Bureij – but Israel resumes bombing after ceasefire hour..[Eyad Baba/AFP
The way Hamas and its elements on the ground communicate is not conventional. It’s not anyone picking up the phone and deciding where to go or where to find someone. It’s much more complex and with drones deployed in the skies of the Gaza Strip and with fighter jets, movements become very, very hindered and very restricted..
This could be the technical reasons Hamas is referring to, that it’s not moving freely and it will take time to get the list because as of now, nobody knows where the hostages or the captives are at, and it will take time.
And the past three days have been quite intense in terms of bombardment in terms of the drones deployed in skies..
Now imagine a mechanism that involves going on the ground, particularly if you are on a list, if you are wanted, if you are a member of the fighting groups and you are moving based on instructions, a chain of messengers moving messages and communicating on the ground. It takes a long time.
It takes also a great deal of caution as well as of diligence to avoid being harmed.
We have captives everywhere and it doesn’t surprise me if there are some of them are in northern Gaza or Gaza City or central area or the Rafah city. Nobody knows the exact location.
And the 15 months of devastation and the ongoing attacks technically prevented anyone from the top of the pyramid in the leadership to the grassroots the ground from communicating properly and locating exactly each one of these captives about their whereabouts, about their safety.
15m ago
(06:25 GMT)
The moment the Israel-Hamas truce was to take effect
It is now 8:30am local time (06:30GMT) in Israel and Palestine.
This is the moment that the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was supposed to take effect in Gaza.
But as we’ve been reporting, the Israeli prime minister has said the truce will not happen unless Hamas hands over the names of the captives it will be releasing later today.
Hamas has blamed technical reasons for the delay, but said it remains committed to the terms of the truce.
Images of Israeli captives, who were kidnapped during the deadly October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, hang from a tree at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, Israel, January 17, 2025 [Amir Cohen/Reuters]
The Israeli prime minister had already alluded to this last night.
Under the agreement, Hamas needs to give the names of the captives it will release today. It should have done that 24 hours before the captives were to be released. So, essentially yesterday.
And that hasn’t happened.
So, now we have confirmation from the Israeli PM’s office, basically telling the army that the ceasefire will not go ahead – and that is due to start in the coming minutes – unless they get the names from Hamas.
The Palestinian group has also issued a statement saying this is due to technical reasons.
What does that mean? Well, Hamas doesn’t communicate with a phone call, obviously. They use messengers. And they are very much aware of surveillance, even though under this agreement, Israel should stop surveillance for 12 hours so that Hamas can move the captives inside Gaza to the border and hand them over.
So, putting this into context, there’s so much international pressure on both sides that it is very difficult to see how this ceasefire would not go ahead.
Will there be delays? Potentially at this point in time.
I’m pretty sure that Qatar will be putting incredible pressure on Hamas if indeed these names have not been handed over to do so. We’ll have to wait to see what happens next.
25m ago
(06:15 GMT)
Israeli military restricts movements in Gaza
The military has issued a statement, renewing its warnings to Gaza residents, warning them not to approach its forces until further notice.
Here’s what the statement says:
We warn residents against approaching the Netzarim axis in light of the forces’ current operations.
You must not approach the area of the Rafah crossing, the Philadelphi Corridor, and all areas where the army is deployed.
Fishing or swimming is prohibited along the coast of the Gaza Strip, and you must not enter the sea in the coming days.
It is forbidden to approach Israeli territory and the buffer zone or move from the south to the north through the Gaza valley to avoid exposing yourself to danger.
40m ago
(06:00 GMT)
Mixed feelings in Gaza as ceasefire set to take effect
It’s the first time in 15 months that the skies above me right here in the central area and across the Gaza Strip are relatively quiet, but we know the scars of the war are still fresh, and the challenges to recovery are quite immense.
The feelings here are quite mixed. People are showing a sense of excitement and happiness.
We are minutes away from the ceasefire taking effect. However, we know people will not be able to go back to their homes until seven days from the time it takes effect, meaning they will have to stay where they are.
Movement is quite restricted and limited as per the instructions the Israeli military put out, along with a map that has been circulating for the past 24 hours, warning people not to get close to where soldiers are deployed, including the Netzarim junction and the Philadelphi Corridor.
People are looking forward to returning to their homes in the northern part of Gaza City. They are also looking forward to mourning their loved ones properly, especially those who were killed and whom they were unable to reach in the past few months.
There is agony as well, as many sole survivors don’t have any of their family members left to celebrate with them at this particular moment.
Throughout the night, the Israeli drones kept buzzing, causing psychological trauma and disconnecting them from the feeling that there is a ceasefire that is going to happen.
The Israeli military also carried out strikes in Khan Younis, targeting many areas as well as in the north.
42m ago
(05:58 GMT)
Hamas cites technical reasons for delay in naming captives
The Palestinian group has issued a statement on Telegram, reaffirming its commitment to the terms of the ceasefire agreement.
It said the delay in handing over the names of the captives to be released in the first phase is due to “technical and field reasons” on the ground.
We’ll bring you more on this as soon as we have it.
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53m ago
(05:46 GMT)
Netanyahu says ceasefire won’t begin until Hamas names captives to be freed: Report
Israel’s Ynet News is reporting that the prime minister has told the Israeli military that the ceasefire, which is to begin at 8:30am local time, will “not begin until Israel has the list of released hostages, which Hamas has pledged to provide”.
The outlet did not provide additional details.
The report comes after Israeli media said Hamas is yet to provide the names of the three female captives it is supposed to release today.
Earlier, Ynet News, citing an unnamed Hamas source, said the Palestinian group is blaming the delay on technical reasons.
The source told Ynet that Hamas members communicate “physically via emissaries and it takes time to agree on the names and the location of the hostages when [Israeli military] planes are still above them”.
Now if you were to ask an old-fashioned housewife, to prepare a complicated dinner with strong-smelling crayfish, seafoods and vegetables, , she would probably first make sure that there was a suitable garbage bin at hand. But that’s not the way that the magnificent men in their nuclear machines thought, about the garbage from their […]
The United States Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld a federal law banning TikTok if its Chinese parent company does not sell the popular social media app by Sunday.
‘Stealing sovereign reserves by the West in response to political disputes, as in Russia, Libya, Venezuela.. is eroding faith in US dollar hegemony and US ability to indulge in infinite borrowing‘.
EU mulls mobilizing Belgian king’s 81 year old Decree to continue thousands more illegal anti Russia sanctions – FT
The renewal of the restrictions, set to expire at the end of January, has been in limbo due to Hungary’s veto threats
Queen Mathilde d’Udekem d’Acoz ), and King Philippe of Belgium by the President of the EU , Ursula von der Leyen
EU officials are desperately developing backup plans to secure sanctions against Russia, including potentially invoking an 81-year-old law that involves the Belgian king, after Hungary threatened to veto their renewal, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
The bloc is seeking to hold on to the $213,000,000,000 of Russia’s frozen foreign assets seized in the Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear and continue diverting billions in interest payments to the Ukraine regime
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban warned the EU in December that his government could veto the sanctions, which require unanimous approval to be extended.
Catfish taste with their whole bodies – and that’s just one way animals sense the world totally differently than us..- An intro into the vast and magical animal worlds we can imagine but never live.
ED YONG: Every animal has its own sensory world, its own thin slice of the fullness of reality that it can detect. Evolution has shaped the senses of animals according to their needs, but no animal can sense everything.
No animal is perfect at everything. There is so much information out there that to be able to detect it all would be an overwhelming experience and also unnecessary. There’s also a cost to the senses. Senses don’t come for free..
To build a sense organ and to maintain all the neurons that feed into that sense organ takes up a lot of energy, which is why their senses are so refined and so constrained by their evolutionary needs.
So the word umwelt was popularized and defined by a German zoologist named Jakob von Uexküll in the early 20th century.
It comes from the German word for environment, but he meant the animals’ sensory environment. And that’s the specific set of sights, smells, textures, and sounds that that animal has access to and that another animal might not.
When you really think about the senses, you do start to understand the very different kinds of information that those senses offer their owners.
So we obviously taste with our tongues, but a catfish is essentially a swimming tongue. It has taste buds all over its skin. If you put little pieces of food near the flank of a catfish, it will be able to taste it and turn around and snap it up. For most animals, taste is about food. It’s about trying to work out whether something is worth eating or not.
And for humans, food is something that we put in our mouths. But if you are a very small animal, food can be something you land on.
And which is why for many insects taste buds are some things that are found in their feet as well as in their mouths. A fly landing on the apple that you are trying to eat can taste it just by walking on it before you put it in your mouth.
I, like most of you, have two eyes. They sit in the front of my face and they point forwards, which means that my visual world is always in front of me and I walk into it.
But most birds have eyes on the sides of their heads, which means their visual world is around them. They often have close to wraparound vision, seeing to the sides and also a little bit to the back. And that kind of wraparound vision is really hard to wrap your head around.
And then of course there are changes that can occur over an animal’s lifetime. So the umwelts of an adult might be different to the umwelts of a juvenile.
Jumping spiders are very driven by vision. They have excellent eyes. But those eyes also become more sensitive as they get older, more sensitive to light, which means that I think the world of a jumping spider will get brighter as it ages. One scientist describe this to me as a jumping spider watching the sun rise as it gets older.
So a sea otter has very sensitive paws. They don’t look very sensitive. They look like these weird sort of cauliflowery mittens. They have a sensitive touch that is equal to our exquisitely sensitive fingertips.
One of the key differences is that they are also extremely skilled at using that sense of touch. They’re very fast about making touch-based decisions.
A sea otter will dive down into the ocean and very quickly root around with its paws. It will grab that sea urchin, yank that clam, and then rise to the surface before eating its food.
A sea otter doesn’t have the benefit of blubber that a whale or a walrus might have. It has very thick fur, but it can find enough food to eat because it has not only very sensitive hands, but very fast hands too.
Even in a completely dark room where the very large eyes of an owl might not be of much use, they can still hear and they hear really well. The dish of feathers around an owl’s face that gives it that distinctive owl-y look acts as a radar dish funneling sound towards its ears.
Those ears are incredibly sensitive, but they also have a unique trick that allows the owl to work out exactly where sound is coming from. Based on when sound arrives in my ears, where those first arrives at the left or the right, I can tell where a sound is coming from in the horizontal plane.
I can’t do that trick in the vertical very well because my ears are level with each other so sound arrives at both of them from above or below at the same time. An owl solves this problem because its ears are offset.
So they’re asymmetrical. So one ear is slightly higher than the other. And when sound arrives at that ear first, the owl knows where in the vertical plane it’s target is.
And that’s why an owl in the dark can land exactly on a mouse. It’s why owls in the wild can bust through snow to pick up scurrying rodents that they couldn’t even see.
One of the primary uses of scent in the animal kingdom is for navigation, for finding your way around a landscape.
You know, my dog, Typo, absolutely can do this. He knows where we are by cross-referencing his memories of the smells of the neighborhood against what he’s smelling at any given moment.
But there are other animals that use scent for navigation in even more extraordinary ways. A lot of sea birds, the group known as tubenoses, use the odorscapes of the ocean to find food.
The ocean looks featureless to us, right? We can glide over it and just see this endless expanse of uniform blue, but it’s not featureless to an albatross.
Underwater features like mountains and valleys leads to concentrations of nutrients, which then concentrate food, plankton, and then krill, the kinds of things that a seabird might eat.
And so the ocean has this undulating odorscape: odors that reveal the concentration of possible food and then areas of no scent that reveal scarcity in the deep.
Elephants can do this too. Elephants can navigate over long distances. Obviously, they have that trunk. They have constantly scanning about with this extremely elongated nose. You know, they’ll react to the imminent arrival of rain.
People have suggested that they can find buried sources of water by smelling it. It’s quite difficult to understand exactly how elephants smell because they are large, intelligent animals that are difficult to work with.
Part of this relies on us using our imaginations like watching their incredible behavior, looking at their trunk, and trying to just make educated guesses about what their olfactory world might be like.
There’s a wonderful quote by Marcel Proust that I think captures what’s magical about the umwelt concept. He said that the only true voyage would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes to see the hundreds of universes that each of them sees.
That’s how I think about the sensory worlds of other animals. I think that when I get to empathize with the smell world of a dog or the touch world of a sea otter, I feel like I’m traveling, like I’m leaving the confines of my own body and my own lived experience and going on this fantastical voyage into the world of another creature.
The Free 