Latest news with #Amini
Newsweek
27-06-2025
- Politics
- Newsweek
Did Mahsa Amini Die in Vain?
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Thousands of young women have risked their lives in the streets of Iran for what too many Americans take for granted: freedom. Those streets may once again become the battleground for Iran's future. The United States' breathtaking strike on Iran's nuclear program, in coordination with Israel, may have opened the door to what some hope will become the liberation of the Iranian people. It was a moment that seized the world's attention and reasserted America's role as a global superpower. Mahsa Amini became the symbol of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement when she died in a Tehran hospital in 2022, after being detained by Iran's morality police for allegedly violating the country's hijab laws. Her suspicious death sparked a wave of nationwide protests led by women and girls, igniting a global movement. Whether Amini's tragic death becomes a turning point depends on what comes next. Exiled Crown Prince of Iran Reza Pahlavi called on the broad resistance of women to return to the streets, using the social media platform X to mobilize action. A photo of Mahsa Amini is displayed during a protest against the current leaders of Iran outside of the United Nations on September 24, 2024, in New York City. A photo of Mahsa Amini is displayed during a protest against the current leaders of Iran outside of the United Nations on September 24, 2024, in New York momentum of this moment, years in the making, is fueled in part by Israel's military campaign, which has significantly weakened the Iranian regime's strategic infrastructure. The stated goal is to dismantle Iran's capacity to develop nuclear weapons. Still, the long-awaited opportunity for regime change could backfire. If mishandled, it risks unleashing a wave of mass executions and plunging Iran—and the rest of the world—into even greater danger than before the first bombs fell on what was once the Persian Empire. Supporters argue that Israel's campaign to eliminate Iran's nuclear facilities—including enrichment plants, missile bases, research centers, infrastructure, and oil refineries—is a justified national security measure. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has repeatedly vowed to destroy the state of Israel and bring an end to Western civilization. Israel has called on civilians to evacuate Tehran ahead of further strikes, a step it claims demonstrates its concern for noncombatants. The Israeli army has framed this as a moral act—one few militaries would consider in the midst of war. Yet, as Tehran empties, the voices of women like Mahsa Amini—those who would champion freedom—are also disappearing. The objectives of this war cannot be viewed in isolation. Experts warn that Iran's current regime could be replaced by one even more repressive and hostile to the international order. Regime change must ultimately come from within. Even Pahlavi has emphasized that he does not seek power for himself, but believes the Iranian people must determine their future through elections. "Help us isolate the regime," he told Newsweek. "Help us elevate the cause of freedom." The New Iran, a prominent opposition group, has voiced alarm about the risks of the current moment. Its founder, Iman Foroutan, recently sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning of the dangers of mixed messaging. "We are gravely concerned about a potential resurgence of one of the regime's most brutal tactics: The summary execution of political prisoners," Foroutan wrote. He cited reports from June 16 that at least 15 prisoners may have been executed in Dizelabad Prison in Kermanshah. The following day, he said, inmates at Tehran's notorious Evin Prison were being segregated, raising fears of an impending wave of executions behind closed doors. A nuclear-free Iran does not automatically mean the regime is finished. A decade from now, without political transformation, the world could find itself facing the same crisis again. If Israel truly supports the Iranian people, it must ensure they can participate in demonstrations that could shape the future of their country. The United States should do more to empower Iranians to determine their destiny. Mixed messages from Israel are undermining this cause. The Jewish state must issue clear and consistent guidance that supports the Iranian people's struggle for liberty. The West cannot afford to ignore a potential wave of executions. Iran has a long and bloody record of silencing dissent through mass killings. Iranians today are trapped between a sadistic regime and a war Israel started—with U.S. backing—to secure global security. That war may be necessary, even laudable, but it must not leave the Iranian people behind. They deserve the same freedom and safety that Israelis and Americans are fighting to preserve. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu must remain strategic, unified, and consistent in their message. Only strength—and moral clarity—will drive real change. If this moment is to mean anything, it must be a fight not just for security, but for woman, life, and freedom—to ensure that Mahsa Amini did not die in vain. Felice Friedson is president and CEO of The Media Line, a U.S.-based news agency, and founder of the Press and Policy Student Program, the Mideast Press Club, and the Women's Empowerment Program. She reports from Jerusalem and can be reached at ffriedson@ The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Middle East Eye
23-06-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Iranian women's rights used to justify war again, widely mocked online
A renewed debate around the portrayal of Muslim women, particularly in Iran, has gained traction on social media in recent days, with users critiquing and ridiculing long-standing western narratives that frame women in the region as in need of liberation. Many of the tweets raising the issue of women's rights in Iran build on the widespread protests that took place in Iran in 2022 after the killing of Mahsa Amini. Amini died after being taken into custody for wearing her hijab "inappropriately" in September 2022, sparking off widespread demonstrations across Iran against the country's treatment of women and minorities, as well as against the Islamic Republic as a whole. But the latest debate was ignited after the Israeli military launched an offensive against the Islamic Republic more than a week ago, which initially targeted Iran's nuclear infrastructure and air defence systems, as well as several other targets across the country including housing complexes. The Israeli military said it carried out wide-ranging attacks on "regime targets" in Tehran, including sites tied to Iran's internal security apparatus, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Evin Prison, which holds prominent political dissidents. The conversation about the rights and freedoms of women in Iran follows a series of online posts about women's education, including their level of literacy and legal rights in Iran, which portray Iran's treatment of women as unfair. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Many of these posts draw comparisons between Iran, western countries and Israel, suggesting that women are exceptionally discriminated against in the country. Idiot. One third of the 500+ Iranian civilians murdered by Israel are women — Tameem | تميم (@TameeOliveFern) June 21, 2025 However, many on social media were shocked and outraged by this conversation because the level of female literacy in Iran is extremely high, according to Statista, which suggest that by 2020, the level of literacy among Iranian women was 85.5 percent, higher than that of men, which stood at 80 percent. Many on social media said that the discourse around Iranian women's illiteracy was served to the public over and over again as a way of "weaponising feminism" to justify Israeli and US attacks on Iran. very strange reading americans tweet how iranian women can't go to school and need to be liberated. iran has 98.9% female literacy. 70% of STEM grads are women, highest in the world. oh, and without student debt. classic weaponizing feminism to justify bombs. — maryam (@maryamful) June 22, 2025 Writer and activist Susan Abulhawa made a compilation of these statistics on the social media platform X, where she also shared that Iranian women enjoy free maternity care and subsidised infertility treatments. She also said that many of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) graduates in the country are women, and the level of female homicide is much lower compared to western countries, specifically the United States. This post is for everyone trying to use the mantra of saving Muslim women, the tired bullshit the west has used to actually destroy the lives of Muslim women for decades. Here are some statistics specific to Iran. LITERACY AMONG WOMEN. Prior to the Islamic Revolution in 1979,… — susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى (@susanabulhawa) June 22, 2025 According to a report by Quartz, 70 percent of STEM graduates in Iran are women, a higher percentage than in many other countries, including the US. Human rights groups have in the past substantively critiqued the state of women's rights in Iran, but people on social media have been mocked for using women's rights in Iran as a pretext for justifying Israeli and US attacks on the country. Saying 'Iran murders women' to justify bombing Iranian women — all while supporting Israel as it murdered over 100k women and girls in Gaza in less than two years — is one of the most disgusting stances I've seen, and that takes a lot — Tiberius (@ecomarxi) June 19, 2025 Specifically in response to the questions on social media relating to the treatment of women in the US and Iran, social media was rife with videos from the US, showing police violence against women in the country. Commentators online and on various TV programmes recently claimed that Iranian women are "not allowed to get an education", "can't own property", and even "can't leave their homes", which many social media users found to be a ludicrous assertion. Who is that blonde saying the most stupid shit about how Iranian women aren't allowed to get an education, can't own property, can't leave their homes? Over 60% of college grads in Iran are women. The View's refusal to know *anything* about anything they discuss with such… — Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) June 19, 2025 As of 2020, women made up over 55 percent of university students in Iran, according to research by Brandeis University. In postgraduate and doctoral programmes, female enrollment is consistently between 50-58 percent. Many on social media criticised the discourse of "freeing Iranian women" and compared it to how the west "liberated" Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan and Syrian women which led to innumerable deaths and humanitarian crises in those countries. Since 13 June, Israeli strikes in Iran have killed at least 430 people and wounded 3,500, according to health officials. Independent sources suggest the death toll could be much higher.
Time of India
12-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Nairobi startup's bid to be 'operating system for global South'
Paris: Away from the heady rush to build ultra-capable, sci-fi style artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley, ambitious Nairobi-based startup Amini AI is betting on the technology addressing emerging countries' prosaic problems in the here and now. Chief executive Kate Kallot aims for Amini -- still a relatively small firm with $6 million in funding and 25 employees -- to become "the operating system for the Global South " in the coming years, creating the infrastructure foundation for others to build AI and data processing applications. "There is a huge opportunity for emerging economies to focus on more applied AI innovation rather than fundamental research, which is what a lot of the US and Europe is doing," Kallot told AFP at the Vivatech trade fair in Paris. On its website, the company highlights uses of its platform such as slashing crop insurance costs for farmers across Africa by monitoring conditions, or warning dairy producers in Morocco of water sources at risk from climate change. Such efforts are only a hint of what will become possible as more data is collected, organised and processed from across the emerging world, Kallot believes. "Data in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, a lot of these emerging economies is still analogue and still scattered and still unstructured," she noted. "There is a lot of work that needs to go into building that data infrastructure that can help those countries move from analogue systems to digital and help them be ready to move to AI." Kallot said Amini's small team was helping multiple countries develop such infrastructure, highlighting a recent memorandum of understanding with Ivory Coast and projects in Barbados, India, Nepal and Cambodia. Digital natives short on data Western tech firms have notoriously turned to cheap labour from emerging economies for tasks upstream of AI, such as arduous labelling of vast datasets used to "train" AI models to recognise patterns. But in countries like Kenya or the Philippines, "you have a population that is digitally native, extremely young... a lot of them have studied computer science" and speak English, Kallot said. "The problem they have is that they lack the opportunity to practice their craft, because these regions are still seen as consumers of technology and are still seen as regions where innovation doesn't happen." This is also reflected in how data is stored and processed. A 2024 report from American research firm Xalam Analytics found that just one percent of the world's data centre capacity is located in Africa -- a region with almost 19 percent of the global population. What's more, only two percent of African data gets processed on the continent, Kallot said. "We're still in a very data-scarce environment, and until this is fixed we won't be able to adopt a lot of the very fancy new systems that are being put in place by... the big tech companies," she pointed out. Frugal and local Kallot sees little fallout for now in emerging economies from the US-China confrontation over the advanced chips powering the top-performing AI models. But nations are "becoming some sort of battleground" for infrastructure investment by the superpowers' tech giants like Huawei and Microsoft. One area where Kallot would like to see change is emerging countries coming together to build shared infrastructure like data centres, rather than relying on processing abroad or waiting for foreign firms to build them locally. "Before, building critical infrastructure for your country meant building a road, building a hospital -- today it's actually building the data infrastructure," she said. The choice to leave data to be processed abroad risks "erasing... a lot of your knowledge system and your culture," she warned, as most artificial intelligence training has not included information from much of the emerging world. Looking forward, the limited infrastructure and computing power available outside top economies may actually foster frugal innovations that save energy and resources, Kallot said. Emerging economies boast "brilliant developers that are doing things that are extremely environmentally friendly, that know how to work in a very contained and constrained environment... we just have to surface it and make sure we give them a platform," Kallot said.
The Star
12-06-2025
- Business
- The Star
Nairobi startup's bid to be 'operating system for global South'
PARIS: Away from the heady rush to build ultra-capable, sci-fi style artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley, ambitious Nairobi-based startup Amini AI is betting on the technology addressing emerging countries' prosaic problems in the here and now. Chief executive Kate Kallot aims for Amini – still a relatively small firm with US$6mil (RM 25.34mil) in funding and 25 employees – to become 'the operating system for the Global South' in the coming years, creating the infrastructure foundation for others to build AI and data processing applications. 'There is a huge opportunity for emerging economies to focus on more applied AI innovation rather than fundamental research, which is what a lot of the US and Europe is doing,' Kallot told AFP at the Vivatech trade fair in Paris. On its website, the company highlights uses of its platform such as slashing crop insurance costs for farmers across Africa by monitoring conditions, or warning dairy producers in Morocco of water sources at risk from climate change. Such efforts are only a hint of what will become possible as more data is collected, organised and processed from across the emerging world, Kallot believes. 'Data in Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia, a lot of these emerging economies is still analogue and still scattered and still unstructured,' she noted. 'There is a lot of work that needs to go into building that data infrastructure that can help those countries move from analogue systems to digital and help them be ready to move to AI.' Kallot said Amini's small team was helping multiple countries develop such infrastructure, highlighting a recent memorandum of understanding with Ivory Coast and projects in Barbados, India, Nepal and Cambodia. Digital natives short on data Western tech firms have notoriously turned to cheap labour from emerging economies for tasks upstream of AI, such as arduous labelling of vast datasets used to 'train' AI models to recognise patterns. But in countries like Kenya or the Philippines, 'you have a population that is digitally native, extremely young... a lot of them have studied computer science' and speak English, Kallot said. 'The problem they have is that they lack the opportunity to practice their craft, because these regions are still seen as consumers of technology and are still seen as regions where innovation doesn't happen.' This is also reflected in how data is stored and processed. A 2024 report from American research firm Xalam Analytics found that just one percent of the world's data centre capacity is located in Africa – a region with almost 19% of the global population. What's more, only 2% of African data gets processed on the continent, Kallot said. 'We're still in a very data-scarce environment, and until this is fixed we won't be able to adopt a lot of the very fancy new systems that are being put in place by... the big tech companies,' she pointed out. Frugal and local Kallot sees little fallout for now in emerging economies from the US-China confrontation over the advanced chips powering the top-performing AI models. But nations are 'becoming some sort of battleground' for infrastructure investment by the superpowers' tech giants like Huawei and Microsoft. One area where Kallot would like to see change is emerging countries coming together to build shared infrastructure like data centres, rather than relying on processing abroad or waiting for foreign firms to build them locally. 'Before, building critical infrastructure for your country meant building a road, building a hospital – today it's actually building the data infrastructure,' she said. The choice to leave data to be processed abroad risks 'erasing... a lot of your knowledge system and your culture', she warned, as most artificial intelligence training has not included information from much of the emerging world. Looking forward, the limited infrastructure and computing power available outside top economies may actually foster frugal innovations that save energy and resources, Kallot said. Emerging economies boast 'brilliant developers that are doing things that are extremely environmentally friendly, that know how to work in a very contained and constrained environment... we just have to surface it and make sure we give them a platform', Kallot said. – AFP
France 24
12-06-2025
- Business
- France 24
Nairobi startup's bid to be 'operating system for global South'
Chief executive Kate Kallot aims for Amini -- still a relatively small firm with $6 million in funding and 25 employees -- to become "the operating system for the Global South" in the coming years, creating the infrastructure foundation for others to build AI and data processing applications. "There is a huge opportunity for emerging economies to focus on more applied AI innovation rather than fundamental research, which is what a lot of the US and Europe is doing," Kallot told AFP at the Vivatech trade fair in Paris. On its website, the company highlights uses of its platform such as slashing crop insurance costs for farmers across Africa by monitoring conditions, or warning dairy producers in Morocco of water sources at risk from climate change. Such efforts are only a hint of what will become possible as more data is collected, organised and processed from across the emerging world, Kallot believes. "Data in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, a lot of these emerging economies is still analogue and still scattered and still unstructured," she noted. "There is a lot of work that needs to go into building that data infrastructure that can help those countries move from analogue systems to digital and help them be ready to move to AI." Kallot said Amini's small team was helping multiple countries develop such infrastructure, highlighting a recent memorandum of understanding with Ivory Coast and projects in Barbados, India, Nepal and Cambodia. Digital natives short on data Western tech firms have notoriously turned to cheap labour from emerging economies for tasks upstream of AI, such as arduous labelling of vast datasets used to "train" AI models to recognise patterns. But in countries like Kenya or the Philippines, "you have a population that is digitally native, extremely young... a lot of them have studied computer science" and speak English, Kallot said. "The problem they have is that they lack the opportunity to practice their craft, because these regions are still seen as consumers of technology and are still seen as regions where innovation doesn't happen." This is also reflected in how data is stored and processed. A 2024 report from American research firm Xalam Analytics found that just one percent of the world's data centre capacity is located in Africa -- a region with almost 19 percent of the global population. What's more, only two percent of African data gets processed on the continent, Kallot said. "We're still in a very data-scarce environment, and until this is fixed we won't be able to adopt a lot of the very fancy new systems that are being put in place by... the big tech companies," she pointed out. Frugal and local Kallot sees little fallout for now in emerging economies from the US-China confrontation over the advanced chips powering the top-performing AI models. But nations are "becoming some sort of battleground" for infrastructure investment by the superpowers' tech giants like Huawei and Microsoft. One area where Kallot would like to see change is emerging countries coming together to build shared infrastructure like data centres, rather than relying on processing abroad or waiting for foreign firms to build them locally. "Before, building critical infrastructure for your country meant building a road, building a hospital -- today it's actually building the data infrastructure," she said. The choice to leave data to be processed abroad risks "erasing... a lot of your knowledge system and your culture," she warned, as most artificial intelligence training has not included information from much of the emerging world. Looking forward, the limited infrastructure and computing power available outside top economies may actually foster frugal innovations that save energy and resources, Kallot said. Emerging economies boast "brilliant developers that are doing things that are extremely environmentally friendly, that know how to work in a very contained and constrained environment... we just have to surface it and make sure we give them a platform," Kallot said.
