World

WASHINGTON — A majority of justices on the US Supreme Court appeared sceptical on Monday of efforts to impose restrictions on federal government efforts to curb misinformation online.

Both conservative and liberal justices on the nine-member court appeared reluctant to endorse a lower court’s ruling that would severely limit government interactions with social media companies.

The case stems from a lawsuit brought by the Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, who allege that government officials went too far in their bid to get platforms to combat vaccine and election misinformation, violating the First Amendment free speech rights of users.

The lower court restricted top officials and agencies of Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration from meeting and communicating with social media companies to moderate their content.

The ruling, which the Supreme Court put on hold until it heard the case, was a win for conservative advocates who allege that the government pressured or colluded with platforms such as Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, to censor right-leaning content under the guise of fighting misinformation.

Representing the Justice Department in the Supreme Court on Monday, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher said there is a “fundamental distinction between persuasion and coercion”.

“The government may not use coercive threats to suppress speech, but it is entitled to speak for itself by informing, persuading or criticising private speakers,” he said.

The lower court, Fletcher said, “mistook persuasion for coercion”.

Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, said the record showed that government officials had engaged in “constant pestering of Facebook and some of the other platforms” treating them “like their subordinates”.

“I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media,” Alito said.

But Chief Justice John Roberts, also a conservative, said the federal government does not speak with one voice.

“The government is not monolithic,” Roberts said. “That has to dilute the concept of coercion significantly, doesn’t it?”

Fletcher said interactions between health officials and social media platforms at the heart of the case needed to be viewed in light of “an effort to get Americans vaccinated during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic”.

“There was a concern that Americans were getting their news about the vaccine from these platforms and the platforms were promoting bad information,” Fletcher said, adding that “the platforms were moderating content long before the government was talking to them”.

‘No place in our democracy’

J. Benjamin Aguinaga, the solicitor general of Louisiana, denounced what he called “government censorship,” saying it has “no place in our democracy”.

“The government has no right to persuade platforms to violate Americans’ constitutional rights, and pressuring platforms in backrooms shielded from public view is not using the bully pulpit at all,” Aguinaga said. “That’s just being a bully.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal, pushed back, saying “my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways”.

“Some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country.” she said.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative, asked whether it would be coercion if someone in government calls up a social media company to point out something that is “factually erroneous information”.

The lower court order applied to the White House and a slew of agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, the Justice Department as well as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The decision restricted agencies and officials from meeting with social media companies or flagging posts.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry hailed the “historic injunction” at the time, saying it would prevent the Biden administration from “censoring the core political speech of ordinary Americans” on social media.

He accused federal officials of seeking to “dictate what Americans can and cannot say on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms about COVID-19, elections, criticism of the government, and more”.

Some experts in misinformation and First Amendment law criticised the lower court ruling, saying the authorities needed to strike a balance between calling out falsehoods and veering towards censorship or curbing free speech.

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin said Russia would not be "intimidated" as he hailed an election victory that paves the way for Putin to become the longest-serving Russian leader in more than 200 years.

"I want to thank all of you and all citizens of the country for your support and this trust," Putin said early Monday morning in a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Moscow hours after polls closed.

"No matter who or how much they want to intimidate us, no matter who or how much they want to suppress us, our will, our consciousness — no one has ever succeeded in anything like this in history. It has not worked now and will not work in the future. Never," he added.

With more than 80 per cent of voting stations having submitted results, Putin had secured 87.2 per cent of all votes cast, official election data showed — a record victory in a presidential election where he faced no genuine competition.

The three-day election was marked by a surge in deadly Ukrainian bombardments, incursions into Russian territory by pro-Kyiv sabotage groups and vandalism at polling stations.

The Kremlin had cast the election as a moment for Russians to throw their weight behind the full-scale military operation in Ukraine, where voting is also being organised in Russian-controlled territories.

Putin singled out Russian troops fighting in Ukraine for special thanks in his post-election speech in Moscow.

And he was unrelenting in claiming his forces had a major advantage on the battlefield, even after a week which saw Ukraine mount some of its most significant aerial attacks on Russia and in which pro-Ukrainian militias barraged Russian border villages with armed raids.

“The initiative belongs entirely to the Russian armed forces. In some areas, our guys are just mowing them — the enemy — down,” he said.

If he completes another full Kremlin term, Putin will have stayed in power longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 18th century.

Former Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev, meanwhile, congratulated Putin on his “splendid victory” long before the final results were due to be announced.

And state-run television praised how Russians and rallied with “colossal support for the president” as well as the “unbelievable consolidation” of the country behind its leader

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump said Sunday he favours a national abortion ban after a certain number of weeks, with exceptions — but did not confirm how many weeks, leaving his stance on a top US election issue murky.

The former president said that he would “soon” issue a proposal on the number of weeks at which a ban should be implemented, as he spoke to “Fox News Sunday” days after becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for November’s White House race.

Trump was asked about a New York Times article from February that said he had told advisers he liked the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban — with exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s health — but was hesitant to address it publicly lest he alienate socially conservative supporters.He did not specify to Fox at what point in a pregnancy he believed abortions should be banned, saying that “in a number of weeks I’ll be coming out with a recommendation”.

“I think the recommendation will be accepted,” Trump said, adding he was proud that his three Supreme Court nominations had shifted the court’s balance rightward, allowing it in 2022 to end federally guaranteed abortion rights.

The Supreme Court’s shock ruling left it to states to establish their own abortion laws. Some have enacted near-total bans; others, like Maryland, passed laws to enshrine abortion rights. Many conservatives hope a national ban could override laws like Maryland’s.

Biden and Democrats have been leaning strongly into the issue — regularly pointing out that polls show most Americans oppose a federal ban — and Trump indicated Sunday that he was aware of the political risks involved.

“I think you have to have the three exceptions,” he said.

“You have to go with your heart. But beyond that, you also have to get elected, okay. And if you don’t have the three exceptions, I think it’s very, very hard to get elected.”

He noted that in the 2022 midterm elections in the state of Pennsylvania, where exit polls showed abortion to be the leading issue, a Republican candidate for governor who strongly opposed abortion rights was defeated.

Republican losses in other off-year elections, even in normally conservative states like Kansas, have been linked to the abortion issue.

Trump noted bans on abortion after a certain number of weeks do exist elsewhere, notably in France and other European countries.

His former vice president Mike Pence said on Sunday that he thought Trump had erred in not taking a firmer anti-abortion position during the 2020 presidential campaign.

Pence, an evangelical Christian who said on Friday that he will not endorse his ex-boss, told CBS that he would like to see the Republican candidate support a ban from at least 15 weeks.

MOSCOW — Russians voted on Sunday on the final day of an election to extend Vladimir Putin’s rule to three decades, as Ukraine launched fatal attacks on the border and some voters crowded outside polling stations in protest.

Polls closed in Moscow at 17:00 GMT after the three-day vote marked by a surge in fatal Ukrainian bombardments, incursions into Russian territory by pro-Kyiv sabotage groups and vandalism at polling stations.

The Kremlin cast the election as an opportunity for Russians to throw their weight behind the full-scale military operation in Ukraine, where voting is also being staged in Russian-controlled territories.

Kyiv slammed the ballot as illegitimate and urged the international community to reject Putin’s inevitable new six-year mandate.

Allies of the late Alexei Navalny — Putin’s most prominent rival, who died in an Arctic prison last month — urged voters to flood polling stations at noon and spoil their ballots for a “Midday Against Putin” protest.

His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, was greeted by supporters with flowers and applause when she joined a long queue of voters at the Russian embassy in Berlin.

Some voters in Moscow appeared to heed Navalny’s call, telling AFP they had come to honour his memory and show their opposition in the only legal way possible.

‘Russia is not Putin’ 

“I came to show that there are many of us, that we exist, that we are not some insignificant minority,” said 19-year-old student Artem Minasyan at a polling station in central Moscow.

Leonid Volkov, a senior aide to the late opposition leader who was recently attacked in Lithuania where he fled political persecution in Russia, thanked Russians for joining the protest.

“You saw each other. The whole world saw you. Russia is not Putin. Russia is you,” he wrote on social media.

But Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, spun the long lines outside embassies abroad as evidence of support for the Kremlin.

“If the people queuing abroad to vote in the Russian presidential election had taken part in the ‘noon’ action, they would have all dispersed after noon. But no,” she wrote on social media.

Some voters in Moscow expressed their support for Putin, saying that casting their ballots for him was the only way to guarantee peace.

“What we want today, first of all, is peace,” said 70-year-old pensioner Lyubov Pyankova, at a polling station in Putin’s native city of Saint Petersburg decorated with the ‘V’ symbol associated with the military that Moscow has also used to promote the vote.

Russia simply wanted “not to be disturbed, not to be told what to do,” she added.

Meanwhile, a surge in Ukrainian strikes on Russia continued unabated with the Russian defence ministry reporting at least eight regions attacked overnight and on Sunday morning.

Fatal border attacks 

Three airports serving the capital briefly suspended operations following the barrage, while a drone attack in the south sparked a fire at an oil refinery.

In Russia’s border city of Belgorod, multiple rounds of shelling killed two — a man and a 16-year-old girl — and injured 12 more, the region’s governor said on Sunday.

The governor has ordered the closure of shopping centres and schools in Belgorod and the surrounding area for two days because of the strikes.

In the Russian-controlled territory of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, where voting is also taking place, “kamikaze drones” set a polling station ablaze, according to Moscow-installed authorities.

‘Difficult period’ 

The 71-year-old Putin, a former KGB agent, has been in power since the last day of 1999 and is set to extend his grip over the country until at least 2030.

If he completes another Kremlin term, he will have stayed in power longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 18th century.

He is running without any real opponents, having barred two candidates who opposed the conflict in Ukraine.

In a pre-election address Putin said Russia was going through a “difficult period” and called on the country to be “united and self-confident”.

Voting will wrap up in Kaliningrad, Russia’s westernmost time zone, at 18:00 GMT and an exit poll is expected to be announced shortly afterwards.

A concert on Red Square is being staged on Monday to mark 10 years since Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula — an event that is also expected to serve as a victory celebration for Putin.

CARACAS — Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro said on Saturday he will seek a third term in July 28 elections, from which the state apparatus has excluded his main rival — the favorite in opinion polls.

“We’ll go to a new victory,” the 61-year-old said as he accepted his ruling PSUV party’s official nomination to be its candidate, after 11 years in office marked by sanctions, economic collapse and accusations of widespread repression.

There was no challenger from within the “Chavista” movement, in power for 25 years and named for Maduro’s popular predecessor Hugo Chavez.

“I am here for the people, that is why today, March 16 of this year, 2024, I accept the presidential candidacy for the elections of July 28,” the incumbent said.

Maduro will have served 18 years as president of the once-prosperous South American country at the end of a third, successive term.

Since 2013, he has presided over a severe economic crisis, worsened by US sanctions, that has seen seven million people flee the country as GDP plummeted by 80 per cent in a decade.

With backing from a system of political patronage, the military — as well as Cuba, Russia and China — he has consolidated power over parliament, the judiciary and other state institutions, and jailed and neutralised critics and challengers.

Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who polls show would beat the incumbent in a fair race, has been disqualified by Maduro-aligned courts on charges of corruption widely dismissed as spurious, and for supporting Western sanctions against the regime.

SEOUL — North Korean state media on Saturday referred to leader Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter as a “great person of guidance”, employing a term usually reserved for senior leaders and hinting at her status as a potential successor, analysts said.

Both the English- and Korean-language versions of an official Korean Central News Agency report on Kim and his daughter’s visit to a greenhouse farm used the plural form of the honorific, suggesting it applied to both of them.

“The great persons of guidance, together with cadres of the party, the government and the military, went round the farm,” read the English-language report, which ran with images of the pair.

Analysts said it was the first time Kim’s daughter — never named by Pyongyang’s state media, but identified as Ju Ae by South Korean intelligence — had been described as such by the North.

“This is the first expression of elevating Kim Ju-ae to the ranks of” a leader, Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, told AFP.

The North Korean term “hyangdo” — meaning guidance — is typically only reserved for “top leaders or successors” of the isolated regime, said Cheong Seong-chang, director of Centre for Korean Peninsula Strategy at the Sejong Institute.

“This level of personal worship for Kim Ju-ae strongly suggests that she will succeed Kim Jong-un as the next leader of North Korea,” Cheong added.

At Kim’s side

Kim Jong-un — the grandson of North Korea’s founding leader Kim Il-sung and the third generation of the Kim family to lead the country — married his wife Ri Sol-ju in 2009, according to Seoul’s spy agency.

Ju Ae was first introduced to the world by Pyongyang’s state media in 2022, when she accompanied her father to the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

She has since been seen at many of her father’s official engagements, including military drills, a visit to a weapons factory, a stop at a new chicken farm and a military parade.

In an image released by Pyongyang on Saturday, Ju-ae was seen using binoculars to observe recent paratroop drills, standing beside her father and senior military officials.

Prior to 2022, the only confirmation of her existence had come from former NBA star Dennis Rodman, who made a visit to the North in 2013 and claimed he’d met a baby daughter of Kim’s called Ju-ae.

Seoul had initially indicated that Kim and his wife Ri had their first child, a boy, in 2010, and that Ju Ae was their second child.

But last year, Seoul’s unification minister said that the government was “unable to confirm for sure” the existence of Kim’s son.

WASHINGTON — The leader of the US Senate called on Thursday for Israel to hold new elections in the most strident criticism yet by a senior American official of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza.

The remarks from Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking elected Jewish American in history, came amid increased pressure from President Joe Biden over the mounting death toll in the conflict, sparked by the October 7 sudden attacks by Hamas fighters.

“As a democracy, Israel has the right to choose its own leaders, and we should let the chips fall where they may. But the important thing is that Israelis are given a choice,” said Schumer, the head of the chamber’s Democratic majority, without suggesting a timeline for a vote.

“There needs to be a fresh debate about the future of Israel after October 7.”

Schumer said Netanyahu was one of four “major obstacles” to a two-state solution and peace, alongside Hamas and its Palestinian supporters, radical right-wing Israelis and the Palestinian Authority’s leader Mahmoud Abbas.

He accused the Israeli leader of surrounding himself with right-wing extremists and being “too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows”.

“Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah,” Schumer, an outspoken ally of the Israeli government who visited the country just days after the attacks, told colleagues on the Senate floor.

He warned that if Netanyahu’s coalition continued to pursue “dangerous and inflammatory” policies after the war, the United States would look at playing “a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course”.

Vowing to destroy Hamas after the October 7 sudden attack, Israel has carried out a relentless campaign of bombardment and ground operations in Gaza, killing at least 31,341 people, most of them civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Famine 

The United Nations is warning of famine amid hampered efforts to get more aid into the war-devastated Gaza Strip and desperate residents have stormed relief shipments.

Mediators failed to reach a truce between Israel and Hamas fighters for the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, which started on Monday, and Hamas authorities have since reported more than 40 air strikes across Gaza.

Daily aid airdrops by multiple nations have been taking place but the air and sea missions are not seen as adequate, and the UN has reported difficulty in accessing Gaza’s north with aid.

“The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed radically since then and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past,” Schumer said.

“Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel’s credibility on the world stage, and work towards a two-state solution.”

The United States also sanctioned three Israeli settlers and two farming outposts on Thursday, accusing them of being involved in “undermining stability in the West Bank”.

The move marks the second time this year that Washington has sanctioned Israeli settlers, as it looks to respond to the rise in West Bank settler violence since Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7.

“Today, we are taking further action to promote accountability for those perpetuating violence and causing turmoil in the West Bank,” US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.

The US Treasury Department website showed that the three sanctioned individuals, Zvi Bar Yosef, Neriya Ben Pazi and Moshe Sharvit were Israeli citizens in their late 20s and early 30s, who were living in the West Bank.

The Treasury Department also unveiled sanctions against two mixed farming communities, “Moshes Farm” — also known as “Tirza Valley Farm Outpost” — and “Zvis Farm”, which is situated near the existing settlement of Halamish.

The move freezes any assets associated with the sanctioned individuals and entities, and generally prohibits Americans from dealing with them.

The Palestinian Authority says at least 430 people have been killed at the hands of Israeli forces or settlers since October 7.

“There is no justification for extremist violence against civilians or forcing families from their homes, whatever their national origin, ethnicity, race, or religion,” Miller said.