Late one night in April 2020, towards the start of the Covid lockdowns, Shanley Clémot McLaren was scrolling on her phone when she noticed a Snapchat post by her 16-year-old sister. “She’s basically filming herself from her bed, and she’s like: ‘Guys you shouldn’t be doing this. These fisha accounts are really not OK. Girls, please protect yourselves.’ And I’m like: ‘What is fisha?’ I was 21, but I felt old,” she says.

She went into her sister’s bedroom, where her sibling showed her a Snapchat account named “fisha” plus the code of their Paris suburb. Fisha is French slang for publicly shaming someone – from the verb “afficher”, meaning to display or make public. The account contained intimate images of girls from her sister’s school and dozens of others, “along with the personal data of the victims – their names, phone numbers, addresses, everything to find them, everything to put them in danger”.

McLaren, her sister and their friends reported the account to Snapchat dozens of times, but received no response. Then they discovered there were fisha accounts for different suburbs, towns and cities across France and beyond. Faced with the impunity of the social media platforms, and their lack of moderation, they launched the hashtag #StopFisha.

It went viral, online and in the media. #StopFisha became a rallying cry, a safe space to share information and advice, a protest movement. Now it was the social media companies being shamed. “The wave became a counter-wave,” says McLaren, who is now 26. The French government got involved, and launched an online campaign on the dangers and legal consequences of fisha accounts. The social media companies began to moderate at last, and #StopFisha is now a “trusted flagger” with Snapchat and TikTok, so when they report fisha content, it is taken down within hours. “I realised that if you want change in your societies, if you come with your idea alone, it won’t work. You need support behind you.”

A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.

The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012.

“This is absolutely the wrong place to be digging for gold,” says Amanda Hurowitz, who coordinates the forest commodities team at Mighty Earth, a conservation nonprofit monitoring developments at the open-pit mine. “And for what? So mountains of gold bullion bars can sit in the vaults of the world’s richest countries.”

The unsustainable production of food and fossil fuels causes $5bn (£3.8bn) of environmental damage per hour, according to a major UN report.

Ending this harm was a key part of the global transformation of governance, economics and finance required “before collapse becomes inevitable”, the experts said.

The Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report, which is produced by 200 researchers for the UN Environment Programme, said the climate crisis, destruction of nature and pollution could no longer be seen as simply environmental crises.

“They are all undermining our economy, food security, water security, human health and they are also [national] security issues, leading to conflict in many parts of the world,” said Prof Robert Watson, the co-chair of the assessment.

The federal government says it is keeping a close eye on lethal strikes by American forces on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, while continuing with operations in the region.

Canada has conducted Operation Caribbe — an anti-drug trafficking mission in partnership with the United States Coast Guard — since 2006.

The Department of National Defence says that mission has nothing to do with the deadly strikes conducted by the U.S. Air Force.

This shift has left Canada and other allies in an impossible position, according to Rob Huebert, director of the Centre For Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

"I think the Canadian government is quite rightly being very cautious on its activities to ensure Canadians are not caught up in any kind of illegal activities, but at the same token trying to maintain this working relationship we have," Huebert told CBC News.

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A few hundred people gathered in central Madrid, with thousands more rallying in nearly 80 cities across the globe. On Saturday, December 6, the Venezuelan diaspora responded to a call from Maria Corina Machado, the leading figure of the opposition to Nicolás Maduro's regime, ahead of the ceremony where she is set to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10 in Oslo.

On Plaza España, Venezuelan flags mixed with placards condemning the government in Caracas. For a long time, the opposition wanted to show a united front as Washington increased pressure on Venezuela. "The Nobel is a huge step forward for us. It means there is no longer any disagreement about the criminal nature of Maduro's regime," said José Antonio Vega, Spain coordinator for Vente Venezuela, the party founded by Machado in 2012.

The opposition leader, forced to go underground in Venezuela, confirmed that she would travel to Norway in person to receive her award, despite the risk of being declared a fugitive by authorities. The Nobel Committee awarded her the distinction on October 10 "for her tireless work in support of the democratic rights of the Venezuelan people, and for her fight for a fair and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy."

cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/46973777

Archived

Chinese government circulated sexually explicit deepfakes of dissident Yao Zhang.

Yao Zhang says she doesn’t have any friends, yet every week, thousands of her 175,000 YouTube subscribers tune in to her channel to listen to her live takes on Chinese current affairs.

“China isn’t a democratic country. Everyone suffers in that regime,” Zhang told Radio-Canada during an interview held somewhere between Montreal and Quebec City.

Concerned for her safety, the 39-year-old guards any information that could give away her location.

And for good reason: the Quebec YouTuber, who refuses to be silenced, has been the target of an intimidation campaign by the Chinese government for over a year.

“I have to be very, very careful,” she said. “I stopped all communications with the Chinese community because I don’t know who I can trust.”

[...]

Trained in accounting at McGill University, Zhang did a 180 during the pandemic and began offering news commentary on YouTube, which she continues to do today. The Communist Party of China and president Xi Jinping are often the subjects of her criticisms.

“I’m with Taiwan, I’m with the Uyghurs, I’m with Hong Kong. I’m against the Chinese government,” said the pro-democracy activist.

It was in September 2024 that Zhang first noticed sexually explicit AI-generated images of herself circulating online.

“It wasn’t just one photo. There were many, many of them,” she remembered with disgust.

Shared by anonymous accounts, the images were published on social media under posts of official accounts belonging to the Canadian government and then prime minister Justin Trudeau.

[...]

For the YouTuber, there was no doubt the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was behind what she was seeing. And she was right.

In March, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) released a statement blaming the PRC for a new "spamouflage" campaign using sexually explicit AI-generated images to target individuals in Canada. Zhang says the government told her she is the first documented case of the campaign.

“This new campaign employs various tactics to intimidate, belittle and harass individuals based in Canada who are critical of the PRC,” reads the statement.

Notably, Zhang and members of her family have been doxed. Her date of birth, phone and passport numbers all appear on a doxing website that labels her as a “traitor.” The site, which is still accessible to this day, also uses degrading language to spread defamatory sexually explicit statements about her.

[...]

Though the YouTuber benefits from a certain degree of protection in Canada, she can’t say the same for her family in China.

In 2024, after a trip to Taiwan to support the island’s independence, Zhang said China's national police put pressure on her aunt and grandmother living there in an attempt to silence her.

The strategy is a well known one, detailed in a report published earlier this year by the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions.

“[The PRC] employs a wide range of tradecraft to carry out its activities, one of which is to use a person’s family and friends living in the PRC as leverage against them,” it reads.

[...]

Zhang says she’s received death threats against her and her family and is worried about retribution if she were to ever return to China.

“I’ll go to prison,” she said. “I’ll be like all those who have wanted to change China.”

[...]

Transnational repression is a “genuine scourge” in the country, concluded Marie-Josée Hogue, who presided over the public inquiry into foreign interference. The threat it poses “is real and growing,” adds the report.

The former Canadian ambassador to China, Guy Saint-Jacques, who occupied the function from 2012 to 2016, says budgets allocated to cracking down on dissent “increased substantially” after Xi came to power in 2012.

[...]

Notably, an Enquête investigation revealed that a Chinese dissident found dead in British Columbia in 2022, Hua Yong, was the target of an espionnage operation led by the Chinese secret police.

[...]

Zhang says she is at peace and hopes that more Chinese people in Canada and elsewhere in the world will speak out.

“I am using my life for something very important,” she says.

[...]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/world/americas/honduras-hernandez-arrest-warrant.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7U8.L0RY.F0ifVYijh7gF