Latest news with #missilestrikes
Al Jazeera
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,233
Here is how things stand on Friday, July 11: Russia's escalation of drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities led to a three-year high in the number of civilians killed or wounded in June, the United Nations said. The UN verified at least 232 people killed and 1,343 wounded during the month – the highest combined toll since April 2022. Russia unleashed heavy air strikes on Ukraine, killing two and wounding 26, before a conference in Rome at which Kyiv won billions of dollars in aid pledges, and US-Russian talks at which Washington voiced frustration with Moscow over the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia's latest assault involved about 400 drones and 18 missiles, primarily targeting the capital. Russia's Ministry of Defence said it had hit 'military-industrial' targets in Kyiv as well as military airfields. It denied targeting civilians, although towns and cities have been hit regularly in the war, and thousands have been killed. Moscow's Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Russian air defences had brought down four Ukrainian drones bound for the Russian capital. Three airports in the Moscow area – Domodedovo, Vnukovo and Zhukovsky – suspended operations temporarily but later resumed, Russia's aviation authority said. In the Kursk region in western Russia, Acting Governor Alexander Khinstein said a Ukrainian drone had killed a man in his own home, two days after four people died in a drone attack on the city's beach. Russia's Defence Ministry said 14 drones were shot down over the Bryansk region and another eight over the Belgorod region, which border Ukraine. A later ministry bulletin said 26 Ukrainian drones were destroyed over the Kursk and Bryansk regions. The Vatican's embassy in Kyiv was slightly damaged during Russian attacks on the Ukrainian capital on Thursday, the embassy said in a statement. Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas, the Vatican's envoy to Ukraine, told Vatican News he had witnessed drones circling the embassy grounds and heard several explosions. United States President Donald Trump, for the first time since returning to office, will send weapons to Kyiv under a presidential power frequently used by his predecessor, two sources familiar with the decision told Reuters. The package could include defensive Patriot missiles and offensive medium-range rockets, the sources said. Britain's Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has signed a previously announced deal to supply Ukraine with more than 5,000 air defence missiles from Thales. The deal was first announced by Prime Minister Keir Starmer on March 2. Participants in a Rome conference on the economic recovery of Ukraine have pledged more than 10 billion euros ($11.7bn) to help the war-torn country, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced. Meloni said Russia should face tougher sanctions to increase pressure on it to halt the war in Ukraine. She also said that firms that have helped Russia fund its war on Ukraine by doing business with the country should be excluded from profiting from Ukraine's reconstruction. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had reinforced the message that Moscow should show more flexibility in dealing with Kyiv during his 50-minute talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the ASEAN foreign ministers' summit in Malaysia. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged President Trump to 'stay with us' in backing Ukraine and Europe. Speaking in Rome, where a Ukraine summit was being held, Merz said Germany was prepared to buy Patriot air defence systems from the US and provide them to Kyiv. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has complained that the Trump administration's contradictory actions and words made it difficult to work with, though Moscow was dedicated to working on improving ties with Washington. However, he denied that there was a slowdown in efforts to normalise US ties. France and the United Kingdom agreed to reinforce cooperation over their respective nuclear arsenals, as the two European countries seek to respond to growing threats to the continent and uncertainty over their US ally. The deal was reached after French President Emmanuel Macron concluded a three-day visit to the UK. The UK has announced that Paris would be the new headquarters for the so-called 'coalition of the willing' to support Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire, with plans under way for a future coordination cell in Kyiv. Zelenskyy said he would replace Ukraine's ambassador to the US and was considering his defence minister, Rustem Umerov, for the post. He said the main task would be to strengthen Ukraine in its defence efforts in the war against Russia, and Umerov was a key figure in doing that. Hungary has summoned the Ukrainian ambassador after a report that a Hungarian-Ukrainian dual citizen was beaten to death during forced mobilisation, an allegation Ukraine's army rejected, saying he died of a pulmonary embolism. Beijing said it was still 'verifying' the case of a Chinese father and son detained by Ukraine for allegedly trying to smuggle navy missile technology out of the war-torn country. Relations between Kyiv and Beijing, a key Russian ally, are strained, with Ukraine accusing China of enabling Russia's invasion through trade and of supplying technology, including for deadly drone attacks. A senior Ukrainian spy officer has been shot in a residential car park in Kyiv before his assailant fled on foot in broad daylight, according to authorities and video footage verified by Reuters. Kyiv's police force said it was working to identify the gunman and that 'measures are being taken to detain him'.
Associated Press
27-06-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
An AP photographer captures the moment a Russian drone dives into a residential district in Kyiv
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Efrem Lukatsky has worked for The Associated Press, based in Kyiv, for more than 30 years. He covered the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and wars in Transnistria, Chechnya, Georgia, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gaza Strip. From Ukraine, he covered the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, the Russia-Ukraine war of 2014 and Russia's full-scale invasion since 2022. Here's what he had to say about this extraordinary this photo? Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities have become more concentrated and systematic, and even Kyiv, the capital and one of the most protected cities in Ukraine, cannot fully handle the volume of simultaneous attacks. In addition to drone barrages that can involve 500 or more Iranian-designed Shahed drones, raids are often accompanied by heavy missile strikes. Many of these drones and missiles simply crash into residential buildings. That's what happened on Tuesday, June 17, when a ballistic missile made a direct hit with an apartment building in the city's Solomianskyi district, punching through every floor from the ninth down to the basement. While I was photographing the damage, another drone barrage hit the area, and I was able to get this I made this photo At 2:30 a.m., my house started shaking from explosions across the city. I rushed out to find a good vantage point to see the smoke rising when I heard about the rocket strike on the apartment building. I went there immediately. Rescue workers were putting out fires and digging through the rubble of the collapsed building to find the injured, but the rescuers ran from the site when the new round of drones hit. You couldn't see them, but you could hear the piercing whine as they accelerated just before impact. I ran toward a blast down the street when suddenly I heard the sound of another incoming drone. I looked up and clearly saw its flight path. I should've taken cover, but the street was wide and empty — no shelter, only the pavement. I needed two seconds to get a sharp this photo works We later learned that 23 people were killed in that building while they slept in their beds. For me, it's vital to find the words and make the photographs that might bring this madness closer to its end, and this photo of a deadly drone careening into a residential area expresses the terror Ukrainian civilians face every day of this war. For more extraordinary AP photography, click here.
Al Jazeera
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Google's AI video tool amplifies fears of an increase in misinformation
In both Tehran and Tel Aviv, residents have faced heightened anxiety in recent days as the threat of missile strikes looms over their communities. Alongside the very real concerns for physical safety, there is growing alarm over the role of misinformation, particularly content generated by artificial intelligence, in shaping public perception. GeoConfirmed, an online verification platform, has reported an increase in AI-generated misinformation, including fabricated videos of air strikes that never occurred, both in Iran and Israel. This follows a similar wave of manipulated footage that circulated during recent protests in Los Angeles, which were sparked by a rise in immigration raids in the second-most populous city in the United States. The developments are part of a broader trend of politically charged events being exploited to spread false or misleading narratives. The launch of a new AI product by one of the largest tech companies in the world has added to those concerns of detecting fact from fiction. Late last month, Google's AI research division, DeepMind, released Veo 3, a tool capable of generating eight-second videos from text prompts. The system, one of the most comprehensive ones currently available for free, produces highly realistic visuals and sound that can be difficult for the average viewer to distinguish from real footage. To see exactly what it can do, Al Jazeera created a fake video in minutes using a prompt depicting a protester in New York claiming to be paid to attend, a common talking point Republicans historically have used to delegitimise protests, accompanied by footage that appeared to show violent unrest. The final product was nearly indistinguishable from authentic footage. Al Jazeera also created videos showing fake missile strikes in both Tehran and Tel Aviv using the prompts 'show me a bombing in Tel Aviv' and then a similar prompt for Tehran. Veo 3 says on its website that it blocks 'harmful requests and results', but Al Jazeera had no problems making these fake videos. 'I recently created a completely synthetic video of myself speaking at Web Summit using nothing but a single photograph and a few dollars. It fooled my own team, trusted colleagues, and security experts,' said Ben Colman, CEO of deepfake detection firm Reality Defender, in an interview with Al Jazeera. 'If I can do this in minutes, imagine what motivated bad actors are already doing with unlimited time and resources.' He added, 'We're not preparing for a future threat. We're already behind in a race that started the moment Veo 3 launched. Robust solutions do exist and work — just not the ones the model makers are offering as the be-all, end-all.' Google says it is taking the issue seriously. 'We're committed to developing AI responsibly, and we have clear policies to protect users from harm and govern the use of our AI tools. Any content generated with Google AI includes a SynthID watermark, and we add a visible watermark to Veo videos as well,' a company spokesperson told Al Jazeera. 'They don't care about customers' However, experts say the tool was released before those features were fully implemented, a move some believe was reckless. Joshua McKenty, CEO of deepfake detection company Polyguard, said that Google rushed the product to market because it had been lagging behind competitors like OpenAI and Microsoft, which have released more user-friendly and publicised tools. Google did not respond to these claims. 'Google's trying to win an argument that their AI matters when they've been losing dramatically,' McKenty said. 'They're like the third horse in a two-horse race. They don't care about customers. They care about their own shiny tech.' That sentiment was echoed by Sukrit Venkatagiri, an assistant professor of computer science at Swarthmore College. 'Companies are in a weird bind. If you don't develop generative AI, you're seen as falling behind and your stock takes a hit,' he said. 'But they also have a responsibility to make these products safe when deployed in the real world. I don't think anyone cares about that right now. All of these companies are putting profit — or the promise of profit — over safety.' Google's own research, published last year, acknowledged the threat generative AI poses. 'The explosion of generative AI-based methods has inflamed these concerns [about misinformation], as they can synthesise highly realistic audio and visual content as well as natural, fluent text at a scale previously impossible without an enormous amount of manual labour,' the study read. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, has long warned his colleagues in the AI industry against prioritising speed over safety. 'I would advocate not moving fast and breaking things,' he told Time in 2023. He declined Al Jazeera's request for an interview. Yet despite such warnings, Google released Veo 3 before fully implementing safeguards, leading to incidents like the one the National Guard had to debunk in Los Angeles after a TikTok account made a fake 'day in the life' video of a soldier that said he was preparing for 'today's gassing' — referring to releasing tear gas on protesters. Mimicking real events The implications of Veo 3 extend far beyond protest footage. In the days following its release, several fabricated videos mimicking real news broadcasts circulated on social media, including one of a false report about a home break-in that included CNN graphics. Another clip falsely claimed that JK Rowling's yacht sank off the coast of Turkiye after an orca attack, attributing the report to Alejandra Caraballo of Harvard Law's Cyberlaw Clinic, who built the video to test out the tool. In a post, Caraballo warned that such tech could mislead older news consumers in particular. 'What's worrying is how easy it is to repeat. Within ten minutes, I had multiple versions. This makes it harder to detect and easier to spread,' she wrote. 'The lack of a chyron [banner on a news broadcast] makes it trivial to add one after the fact to make it look like any particular news channel.' In our own experiment, we used a prompt to create fake news videos bearing the logos of ABC and NBC, with voices mimicking those of CNN anchors Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett, John Berman, and Anderson Cooper. 'Now, it's just getting harder and harder to tell fact from fiction,' Caraballo told Al Jazeera. 'As someone who's been researching AI systems for years, even I'm starting to struggle.' This challenge extends to the public, as well. A study by Penn State University found that 48 percent of consumers were fooled by fake videos circulated via messaging apps or social media. Contrary to popular belief, younger adults are more susceptible to misinformation than older adults, largely because younger generations rely on social media for news, which lacks the editorial standards and legal oversight of traditional news organisations. A UNESCO survey from December showed that 62 percent of news influencers do not fact-check information before sharing it. Google is not alone in developing tools that facilitate the spread of synthetic media. Companies like Deepbrain offer users the ability to create AI-generated avatar videos, though with limitations, as it cannot produce full-scene renders like Veo 3. Deepbrain did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment. Other tools like Synthesia and Dubverse allow video dubbing, primarily for translation. This growing toolkit offers more opportunities for malicious actors. A recent incident involved a fabricated news segment in which a CBS reporter in Dallas was made to appear to say racist remarks. The software used remains unidentified. CBS News Texas did not respond to a request for comment. As synthetic media becomes more prevalent, it poses unique risks that will allow bad actors to push manipulated content that spreads faster than it can be corrected, according to Colman. 'By the time fake content spreads across platforms that don't check these markers [which is most of them], through channels that strip them out, or via bad actors who've learned to falsify them, the damage is done,' Colman said.
ABC News
24-06-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Confusion over Israel-Iran ceasefire
Claims by the US President Donald Trump of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Iran have been rejected by Iranian foreign minister says there will not be an agreement until Israel stops its attacks. It comes just hours after Iran launched a series of missile strikes at US bases in Qatar, causing flights to be turned back, diverted and delayed across the Middle East and around the world.
CNN
22-06-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Iranians demonstrate against US strikes
Crowds of Iranians gathered in public on Sunday to express anger about the US's missile strikes on nuclear sites in Iran and amplify their leaders' promise of retaliation. CNN's Fred Pleitgen reports from protests on the streets of Tehran.
