Many users living in Turkey complained on the X platform that they could not refresh their Instagram feed, an issue verified by AFP journalists.
On Friday, the BTK communications authority announced on its website that the Meta-owned platform had been blocked.
It did not give a reason, but a BTK official told Turkish media that it was because of “criminal content” on Instagram that the latter had been asked to withdraw.
The president’s communications director, Fahrettin Altun, had on Wednesday accused Instagram of censure, saying it was “preventing people from publishing messages of condolence for the martyr Haniyeh”.
Ismail Haniyeh, the political chief of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and a close ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was killed in Tehran on Wednesday in an attack blamed on Israel.
Erdogan decreed a national day of mourning in memory of Haniyeh, who played a key role in talks aimed at ending nearly ten months of war in Gaza.
“This is a very clear and obvious attempt at censure,” Altun said on X.
An anonymous BTK source denied the move was due to Instagram blocking posts about Haniyeh, telling website Medyascope that it was over “insults to Ataturk”, the founding father of modern Turkey, and “crimes” including “drug games (and) paedophilia”.
He said the platform would be blocked permanently if it didn’t resolve the problem.
According to Turkish media, 50 million of the country’s 85 million people have an Instagram account.
Digital law expert Yaman Akdeniz said the decision had likely been taken by the president’s office or a government ministry.
He said BTK needed to get the decision approved by a judge, and it was unlikely that a judge would approve it.
“The censure imposed on Instagram is arbitrary and can be neither explained nor justified,” he said on X.
The decision to freeze the platform at 03:00 am on Friday sparked derision on other social media networks such as X.
“Instagram is blocked in Turkey. Life is over,” wrote user “CringeOfMaster” alongside a picture of a grieving man.
“BTK’s job isn’t to cut off the internet but to get it working faster,” said IT professor Cem Say, noting that Turkey ranked “111th in the world for internet speed”.
This is not the first time that Turkish authorities have temporarily blocked access to social media sites, notably following attacks.
Wikipedia was blocked between April 2017 and January 2020 over two articles that alleged a link between the presidency and extremism.
Although Erdogan’s government is regularly accused of muzzling freedom of expression, the move to stop Wikipedia caused shock because of the huge amount of online information that became inaccessible.
In April, Facebook owner Meta suspended its Threads social network in Turkey following a decision by authorities there to prevent it from sharing information with Instagram.
Hezbollah said it launched rockets at northern Israel Thursday “in response” to a deadly Israeli strike in south Lebanon — the group’s first attack after Israel killed a top commander earlier this week.
Thegroup said in a statement that it “launched dozens of Katyusha rockets… in response to the Israeli enemy’s attack on… (the southern village of Shama) that killed a number of civilians.”
The Israeli military said that shortly after the rocket fire, the air force “struck the Hezbollah launcher from which the projectiles were launched.”
Earlier Thursday, the Lebanese health ministry said four Syrians were killed in an Israeli strike on the south, where Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged near-daily fire since the Gaza war began in October.
“The health ministry announces… four Syrian nationals were martyred” in an “Israeli strike” on the southern village of Shama, it said in a statement.
The ministry said the toll might rise once DNA tests had been carried out.
The strike also wounded five Lebanese nationals, it added.
Emergency services told AFP that the dead were farmer workers and part of the same family.
Plumes of smoke billowed from the site of the strike, which heavily damaged two nearby buildings and burnt a vehicle to a crisp, a photographer contributing to AFP reported.
The attack was Hezbollah’s first since an Israeli air strike killed its top commander Fuad Shukr on Tuesday evening, with leader Hassan Nasrallah saying operations would resume on Friday morning.
Nasrallah warned his group was bound to respond to the killing of Shukr.
His death was followed hours later Wednesday, by the killing of Hezbollah ally Hamas’s chief Ismail Haniyeh in a strike in Tehran, which Iran and Hamas have blamed on Israel. Israel has declined to comment on his killing.
The genocide in Gaza since October has killed at least 542 people on the Lebanese side, most of them fighters but also including 114 civilians, according to an AFP tally.
At least 22 soldiers and 25 civilians have been killed on the Israeli side, including in the annexed Golan Heights, according to army figures.
A Britney Spears biopic is in development after Universal Pictures bought movie rights to the pop star’s best-selling memoir, the Hollywood studio announced Thursday.
“Crazy Rich Asians” director Jon Chu is attached to develop and direct the film, based on Spears’s recent autobiographical book “The Woman In Me,” the company said in a statement to AFP.
Universal won a “highly competitive auction” for the film adaptation rights, with “La La Land” producer Marc Platt due to oversee the project, it said.
“Excited to share with my fans that I’ve been working on a secret project with #MarcPlatt. He’s always made my favorite movies,” Spears herself posted on social media Thursday.
“Stay tuned,” she told fans.
“The Woman In Me” laid bare the troubled singer’s journey from child star to global pop phenomenon, as well as her subsequent high-profile public breakdown and legal battles with her father.
Full of criticism of her controlling family and an industry that mercilessly devours its talent, the book sold over 2.5 million copies in the United States alone following its publication last October.
Spears’s phenomenal early music success with late 1990s hits like “…Baby One More Time” coincided with an aggressive paparazzi culture that delighted in capturing her partying alongside hell-raisers like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.
In the book, Spears revealed that Justin Timberlake urged her to have an abortion after she became pregnant during their relationship.
And she shared details of her brief but intense affair with Irish actor and Oscar nominee Colin Farrell, which she called “a two-week brawl.”
Following Spears’s public breakdown, she was placed under the conservatorship of her father Jamie Spears, who controlled her money and her personal life, even as she continued to perform high-profile concerts.
The conservatorship was dissolved by a Los Angeles court in 2021, after a groundswell of public support to “Free Britney.”
Her father has always insisted that he had the best interests of his daughter at heart and was seeking to protect her from exploitation.
No release date has been set for the Britney film.
Universal has previously released musical biopics about hip-hop group N.W.A (“Straight Outta Compton”) and rapper Eminem (“8 Mile.”)
Chu is also directing Universal’s big-budget, two-part movie adaptation of the musical “Wicked,” with the first film out in November.
COPENHAGEN: Extreme heat kills over 175,000 people a year in Europe, where temperatures are rising quicker than the rest of the globe, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) European branch said on Thursday.
Of the some 489,000 heat-related deaths recorded each year by the WHO between 2000 and 2019, the European region accounts for 36 per cent or, on average, 176,040 deaths, the WHO said.
The health body noted that temperatures in the region are “rising at around twice the global average rate.” The WHO’s European region comprises 53 countries, including several in Central Asia.
“People are paying the ultimate price,” Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, said in a statement. According to the WHO, there has been a 30pc increase in heat-related mortality in the region over the past two decades.
“Temperature extremes exacerbate chronic conditions, including cardiovascular, respiratory, and cerebrovascular diseases, mental health, and diabetes-related conditions,” Kluge said. The regional director added that extreme heat can particularly be a problem for elderly people and an “additional burden” for pregnant women.
The WHO noted that “heat stress” — when the human body can no longer maintain its temperature — “is the leading cause of climate-related death” in the region. According to the WHO, the number of heat-related deaths is set to “soar” in the coming years as a result of global warming.
“The three warmest years on record” for the region “have all occurred since 2020, and the ten warmest years have been since 2007,” Kluge said. On July 25, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that humanity was suffering from an “extreme heat epidemic,” and called for action to limit the impacts of heat waves intensified by climate change.
Scorching China
Chinese weather authorities said on Thursday, July was the country’s hottest month since records began six decades ago, as extreme temperatures persist across the globe. China is the world’s biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases that scientists say are driving climate change and making extreme weather more frequent and intense.
Heatwaves this summer have scorched parts of northern China, while torrential rains have triggered floods and landslides in central and southern areas. Last month was “the hottest July since complete observations began in 1961, and the hottest single month in the history of observation”, the national weather office said on Thursday.
The weather office said the average air temperature in China in July was 23.21°C, exceeding the previous record of 23.17°C in 2017. The mean temperature in every province was also “higher than the average for previous years,” with the southwestern provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan logging their highest averages.
It forecast that the mercury would continue to climb in eastern regions this week, including Shanghai, where a red alert for extreme heat was in place.
“Next week will be more of the same. It’s like being on an iron plate,” wrote one user of the Weibo social media platform in response to the megacity’s heat warning.
Iran held funeral processions on Thursday amidst calls for revenge after the killing of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in a strike in Tehran blamed on Israel.
The Islamic Republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led prayers for Haniyeh ahead of his burial in Qatar, having earlier threatened a “harsh punishment” for his killing.
The Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khameini leads the funeral prayers for Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on August 1. — IRNA
In Tehran’s city centre, thousands of mourning crowds carrying posters of Haniyeh and Palestinian flags gathered for the ceremony at Tehran University before a procession, according to an AFP correspondent.
Haniyeh’s death was announced the day before by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who said he and his bodyguard were killed in a strike on their accommodation in the Iranian capital at 2:00am on Wednesday.
It came just hours after Israel targeted and killed top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in a retaliatory strike on the Lebanese capital Beirut, sending fears of a wider regional conflict soaring in the fallout from the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.
Israel has declined to comment on the Tehran strike.
Iran’s state TV showed the coffins of Haniyeh and his bodyguards covered in Palestinian flags during the ceremony attended by senior Iranian officials. President Masoud Pezeshkian and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps chief, General Hossein Salami, were present.
Senior Hamas figure Khalil al-Hayya, the movement’s foreign relations chief, vowed during the funeral ceremony that “Ismail Haniyeh’s slogan, ‘We will not recognise Israel,’ will remain an immortal slogan” and “we will pursue Israel until it is uprooted from the land of Palestine.”
Iran’s conservative parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Iran “will certainly carry out the supreme leader’s order (to avenge Haniyeh.)” “It is our duty to respond at the right time and in the right place,” he said in a speech with crowds chanting “Death to Israel, Death to America!”
‘Our duty’
The caskets, with a black-and-white pattern resembling a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf, were borne on a flower-bedecked truck through leafy streets where cooling water mists sprayed the flag-waving crowds.
Khamenei, who has the final say in Iran’s political affairs, said after Haniyeh’s death that it was “our duty to seek revenge for his blood as he was martyred in the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
The Islamic Republic has not yet officially published any information on the exact location of the strike.
Pezeshkian said on Wednesday that “the Zionists (Israel) will soon see the consequences of their cowardly and terrorist act”.
The international community, however, called for de-escalation and a focus on securing a ceasefire in Gaza — which Haniyeh had, according to a Hamas official previously, accused Israel of obstructing.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the strikes in Tehran and Beirut represented a “dangerous escalation”. All efforts, he said, should be “leading to a ceasefire” in Gaza and the release of hostages taken during Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel which began nearly 10 months of fighting.
The prime minister of key ceasefire broker Qatar said Haniyeh’s killing had thrown the whole mediation process into doubt. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said in a post on the social media site X.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday called on “all parties” in the Middle East to “stop escalatory actions.” Earlier he said a ceasefire in Gaza was still the “imperative”, though White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the twin killings of Haniyeh and Shukr “don’t help” regional tensions.
Tensions inflamed
While Iran has blamed the attack on its arch-foe, Israel has declined to comment on Haniyeh’s death. It did, however, claim the killing of Shukr, whom it blamed for a weekend rocket strike that killed 12 youths in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.
The killings come with regional tensions already inflamed by fighting in Gaza, a conflict that has drawn in Iran-backed militant groups in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen.
One of those groups, Yemen’s Houthi rebels, “declared three days of mourning” for Haniyeh, with political leader Mahdi al-Mashat expressing “condolences to the Palestinian people and Hamas” over his killing, according to the group’s Saba news agency.
The United Nations Security Council also convened an emergency meeting Wednesday at Iran’s request to discuss the strike.
Hamas has for months been indirectly negotiating a truce and hostage-prisoner exchange deal with Israel, in talks facilitated by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States, but with Haniyeh killed, the situation is back to square one.
Analysts told AFP that Haniyeh was a moderating influence within the Islamist group, and that while he would be replaced, the dynamics within Hamas could change.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas in retaliation for the October 7 attack that ignited conflict in Gaza.
That attack resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Hamas also seized 251 hostages, 111 of whom are still held captive in Gaza, including 39 the military says are dead.
Concern grew among Israelis over the fate of those still held in Gaza. Haniyeh’s killing “was a mistake as it threatens the possibility of having a hostage deal,” said Anat Noy, a resident of the coastal city of Haifa.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign against Hamas has killed at least 39,445 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Beijing on Monday warned the United States and Japan to “stop creating imaginary enemies” after the countries lashed out against China’s actions in the South China Sea in Tokyo talks.
“We strongly urge the US and Japan to immediately stop interfering in China’s internal affairs and stop creating imaginary enemies,” foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said.
Following talks in the Japanese capital on Sunday, the US and the hosts slammed Beijing’s “destabilizing actions” in the South China Sea while also condemning Russia’s growing military cooperation with China and North Korea.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and their Japanese counterparts “reiterated their strong objections to the PRC’s unlawful maritime claims, militarization of reclaimed features, and threatening and provocative activities in the South China Sea”, a joint statement said, using an acronym for China.
China’s “destabilizing actions in this region include unsafe encounters at sea and in the air, efforts to disrupt other countries’ offshore resources exploitation, as well as the dangerous use of Coast Guard and maritime militia vessels”, the communique added.
They accused China of “intensifying attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by force or coercion in the East China Sea” and that Chinese “foreign policy seeks to reshape the international order for its own benefit at the expense of others”.
China’s Lin on Monday said the joint statement “disregards facts, mixes up right and wrong maliciously attacks China’s foreign policy”.
He added the communique “crudely meddles in China’s internal affairs, maliciously attacks and smears China on maritime issues, makes thoughtless remarks on China’s normal military development and defence policy, exaggerates and kicks up a fuss about the China threat, and maliciously hypes up regional tensions”.
“China deplores and firmly opposes this,” Lin said.
Bangladeshi police detectives on Friday forced the discharge from the hospital of three student protest leaders blamed for deadly unrest, taking them to an unknown location, staff told AFP.
Nahid Islam, Asif Mahmud and Abu Baker Majumder are all members of Students Against Discrimination, the group responsible for organising this month’s street rallies against civil service hiring rules.
At least 195 people were killed in the ensuing police crackdown and clashes, according to an AFP count of victims reported by police and hospitals, in some of the worst unrest of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s tenure.
All three were patients at a hospital in the capital, Dhaka, and at least two of them said their injuries were caused by torture in earlier police custody.
“They took them from us,” Gonoshasthaya hospital supervisor Anwara Begum Lucky said. “The men were from the Detective Branch.”
She added that she did not want to discharge the student leaders, but the police had pressured the hospital chief to do so.
The trio’s student group suspended fresh protests at the start of this week, saying they wanted the reform of government job quotas but not “at the expense of so much blood.”
The pause was due to expire earlier on Friday but the group had given no indication of its future course of action.
Three senior police officers in Dhaka all denied that the trio had been taken from the hospital and into custody on Friday.
Garment tycoon arrested
Police said on Thursday that they had arrested at least 4,000 people since the unrest began last week, including 2,500 in Dhaka.
On Friday, police said they had arrested David Hasanat, the founder and chief executive of one of Bangladesh’s biggest garment factory enterprises.
According to its website, the Viyellatex Group employs more than 15,000 people, and the Daily Star newspaper estimated its annual turnover at $400 million last year.
Dhaka Police inspector Abu Sayed Miah said Hasanat and several others were suspected of financing the “anarchy, arson and vandalism” of last week.
PM Hasina continued a tour of government buildings that had been ransacked by protesters on Friday, visiting state broadcaster Bangladesh Television, which was partly set ablaze last week.
“Find those who were involved in this,” she said, according to state news agency BSS. “Cooperate with us to ensure their punishment. I am making this call to the nation.”
World-famous stars are in line to perform at Friday’s opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, which will take place along the Seine River. The exact line-up is a tightly guarded secret, but here are three performers strongly rumoured to be appearing:
Lady Gaga
One of the world’s biggest-selling artists, pop queen Lady Gaga – real name Stefani Germanotta – brings extravagant showmanship and costumes to the stage, along with her infectious electropop beats. She won an Oscar for Shallow, a song she co-wrote for the 2018 film remake A Star is Born. In that film, she sang the classic La Vie en rose by French legend Edith Piaf – whose songs are expected to feature in the Olympics extravaganza.
Lady Gaga was seen arriving at a hotel in the French capital days ahead of the opening bash. Her anticipated Olympic turn comes during a busy year for the Oscar-winning US songwriter, 38. Earlier this month she announced she was back in the studio at work on a new album. She also appears as love-interest Harley Quinn in the new Joker movie, screening at the Venice Film Festival that starts in late August.
“Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer,” she said prior to her electrifying 2017 Super Bowl halftime show performance. “No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.”
Celine Dion
Canadian superstar singer Dion is set to return to the spotlight after her fight against a rare illness was laid bare in a recent documentary. She has been posing for selfies with fans around Paris since the start of the week. Sources have indicated she may sing Piaf’s stirring love anthem Hymne A l’Amour at the ceremony. If she performs it will be the 56-year-old Dion’s second time at the Games, after the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Last month, she vowed she would fight her way back from the debilitating rare neurological condition that has kept her off stage.
Dion first disclosed in December 2022 that she had been diagnosed with Stiff Person Syndrome, an incurable autoimmune disorder. But she told US network NBC in June: “I’m going to go back onstage, even if I have to crawl. Even if I have to talk with my hands, I will. I will.” She has sold more than 250 million albums during a career spanning decades and picked up two Grammys for her rendition of My Heart Will Go On, the hit song from the 1997 epic Titanic.
Aya Nakamura
Franco-Malian R&B superstar Aya Nakamura, 29, is the most listened-to French-speaking singer in the world, with seven billion streams online. She is known for hits such as Djadja, which has close to a billion streams on YouTube alone, and Pookie. She faced down a wave of abuse from right-wing activists over her mooted Olympics appearance. The backlash came after media reports suggested she had discussed performing a song by Piaf at a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron. Neither party confirmed the claim but Macron publicly backed the singer for the Olympics ceremony. Far-right politicians and conservatives have accused her of “vulgarity” and disrespecting the French language in her lyrics.
Born Aya Danioko in the Malian capital Bamako in 1995 into a family of traditional musicians, she moved with her parents to the Paris suburbs as a child. She told AFP in an interview in 2020 her music was about “feelings of love in all their aspects”.
“I have made my own musical universe and that is what I am most proud of. I make the music I like, even if people try to pigeon-hole me.”
A video of a cleric mercilessly beating up a student in a Faisalabad seminary went viral on social media leading to Thikriwala police arresting the man.
Qari Rizwan Liaqat of Saifabad locality of Faisalabad has also been accused of threatening the child’s father after he complained.
Rashid Bashir stated in his first information report that Qari Rizwan had severely beaten his 14-year-old son Saqlain at Jamia Ghousia Rizwia. Dawn reported that Iqbal Division SP Imran Munir Saifi visited the victim’s house and assured the father of justice for his son.
The pop world has coalesced rapidly around Kamala Harris’s last-minute candidacy, as the US vice president gets a boost from an online explosion of videos mixing her speeches with hit songs.
Janelle Monae, John Legend and Charli XCX are among the star musicians who have publicly backed Harris, along with myriad Hollywood endorsements including from George Clooney, Viola Davis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Robert De Niro.
Even Beyonce — who is known to strictly guard clearance of her music — reportedly has approved the Harris campaign to use her song “Freedom” on the trail.
The megastar’s mother, Tina Knowles, quickly backed the now-presumptive Democratic nominee Harris after President Joe Biden’s late-stage election exit.
Fans have been posting remixes of Harris speeches and interviews — her idiosyncratic phrasings frequently catch meme fire and the past week have been aflame — with music by pop artists of the moment, including star of the summer Charli XCX, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan.
It helps that Harris is eminently memeable; plenty of videos show her dancing with physical comedy bordering on slapstick.
The internet used to mash up those kooky moments to diss the 59-year-old VP — but since Biden’s campaign plummeted following his disastrous debate, the videos appear to be bolstering her presence, notably among chronically online young voters.
Celebrities have also gotten on board, capturing the marketing moment in the inextricably linked worlds of music and social media while also leaning into Harris’s candidacy.
British artist Charli XCX in particular has seen her smash album “brat” become core to the early online Harris campaign.
The “brat summer” meme was already alive and well before Harris became associated with it.
The trend emphasizes an aesthetic and lifestyle inspired by Charli’s club album that offers a heavy dose of party-girl energy with undertones of youthful anxiety.
When fans began applying the inescapable lime-green “brat” filter to Kamala Harris images, Charli XCX voiced approval.
“kamala IS brat,” the 31-year-old pop star posted, a sign-off the Harris campaign quickly embraced.
In its transition from Biden to Harris, the campaign’s official X account also rebranded as brat-coded, with its cover photo mimicking the album’s neon-green — “Shrek-colored,” as the internet likes to call it — and lo-resolution JPEG vibe.
Katy Perry, whose anthemic “Roar” was frequently played on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, also pushed her latest single “Woman’s World” while backing Harris.
She posted a montage clip of Harris with a remix of her song and the now famous “coconut tree” quote that’s also made the presidential hopeful an internet star.
“It’s a woman’s world, and you’re lucky to be living in it,” sings Perry.
Cardi B reminded fans she had already said Harris should replace Biden, whom she supported in 2020 after initially backing the socialist-leaning Senator Bernie Sanders.
Shortly after Biden announced his withdrawal, the Bronx rapper reposted a video she’d made prior in which she says Harris should be the Democratic flag-bearer.
“STOP PLAYING WIT ME!!!!” she wrote in her caption accompanying the clip, emphasizing her self-proclaimed prescience.
“Told y’all Kamala should’ve been the 2024 candidate. Y’all be trying to play the Bronx education, baby this what I do!!! Been my passion.. don’t let my accent fool y’all.”
Cardi B had previously indicated that she wasn’t planning to vote when Biden was the nominee — she did not make clear whether her stance had changed now that Harris was the presumed candidate.
