KIEV: Ukraine sought to justify faking the death of an anti-Kremlin journalist who appeared alive and well at a press conference in Kiev less than 24 hours after he was “murdered,” citing an alleged Russian plot to kill him.
Onlookers gasped and applauded as Arkady Babchenko re-appeared on Wednesday, introduced by the head of Ukraine’s security service, who said the murder had been staged in order to foil an attempt on his life by Moscow.
Less than 24 hours earlier, Ukraine said the reporter had died from three gunshots to the back in the stairwell of his apartment building in a contract-style killing in a case that provoked an outpouring of grief and a diplomatic spat.
“Thanks to this operation we were able to foil a cynical plot and document how the Russian security service was planning for this crime,” security service head Vasyl Grytsak said at the press conference.
Grytsak announced authorities had arrested the alleged mastermind of the plot, saying a Ukrainian citizen named only by the initial G. had offered to pay a hitman to carry out the killing after being recruited by Russian special forces and paid $40,000.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko later met Babchenko and wrote triumphantly on Facebook that “millions of people are celebrating” the journalist’s new lease of life.
The planned attack was “organized from Russian territory” with the aim of “destabilising the situation in Ukraine” and “killing one whom Russia fears most of all,” he said.
“Thanks to Arkady and the Ukrainian security chiefs, for not allowing this scenario to be carried out in our country.”
Anton Guerachtchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, likened the plot to a story from a crime novel, saying on Facebook that “Sherlock Holmes successfully used the method of staging his own death to efficiently solve complicated crimes.”
But Moscow, later Wednesday, condemned the plot, with the foreign ministry saying “now the true motives are beginning to be revealed for this staging, which is totally obviously yet another anti-Russian provocation.”
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said it was “great news” that Babchenko was alive but on Twitter she slammed the “propagandistic effect” of the set-up.
Grytsak, during his press conference, thanked Babchenko and his family, who he said were in the loop about the secret operation.
The reporter, however, apologized to his wife for putting her through “this hell she had to live through for three days...but there was no other option.”
He later defiantly promised on Twitter to “die at 96 after dancing on Putin’s grave.”
“God, it got so boring being dead,” he wrote. “Good morning.”
News of the “death” of the prominent Russian war correspondent and former soldier set off a series of recriminations between Kiev and Moscow, and pictures and flowers were laid by mourners at the Russian embassy in Kiev.
Ukrainian officials led by Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman accused Russia of being behind the killing of the Kremlin critic, a charge that Moscow batted back.
Reporters Without Borders also condemned the faked death.
“It is pathetic and regrettable that the Ukrainian police have played with the truth, whatever their motive... for the stunt,” Christophe Deloire, the head of the Paris-based media watchdog, told AFP.
And Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, a former colleague of Babchenko, also questioned the value of the operation.
“To me, it’s crossing a line big time. Babchenko is a journalist not a policeman, for Christ sake, and part of our job is trust, whatever Trump & Putin say about fake news,” he wrote on Twitter.
“I’m glad he is alive, but he undermined even further the credibility of journalists and the media,” he added.
A number of Kremlin critics have been killed in Ukraine in recent years, with one gunned down on a Kiev street in broad daylight and another whose car exploded.
Babchenko fought in Russia’s two Chechen campaigns in the 1990s and early 2000s before becoming a war correspondent and author. He repeatedly said he faced death threats.
He has contributed to a number of media outlets including top opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and is an avid blogger, accusing Russian authorities of killing Kremlin critics and unleashing wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere.
He wrote about his experience as a young soldier in the Chechen campaigns in a book published in English under the title “One Soldier’s War.”
Babchenko left Russia in February 2017 after receiving threats, living first in the Czech Republic, then in Israel, before moving to Kiev.
He has hosted a program on the Crimean Tatar TV station ATR for the past year.
Babchenko made a name for himself with his poignant reportages from the frontlines, including the conflict in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 10,000 people.
In recent years his increasingly bombastic posts pushed the boundaries of good taste and some of his colleagues and followers stopped reading him on Facebook.
Anti-Kremlin journalist back from the dead as Ukraine admits set-up
Anti-Kremlin journalist back from the dead as Ukraine admits set-up
- It was initially reported that Arkady Babchenko was killed in Ukraine after leaving Russia
- Reporters Without Borders also condemned the faked death
South Sudan lifts suspension of Facebook and TikTok
- Ban was imposed last week following the circulation of videos depicting the alleged killings of South Sudanese nationals in Sudan
JUBA: South Sudan authorities have lifted the temporary ban on Facebook and TikTok, which was imposed last week following the circulation of videos depicting the alleged killings of South Sudanese nationals in Sudan.
The graphic images, which sparked violent protests and retaliatory killings across the country, have been removed from the social media platforms, the National Communications Authority said in a Jan.27 letter to telecoms and Internet providers
“The rise of violence linked to social media content in South Sudan underscores the need for a balanced approach that addresses the root causes of online incitement while protecting the rights of the population,” Napoleon Adok Gai, the director of the National Communications Authority, said in the letter.
Rights groups blamed the Sudanese army and its allies for ethnically-targeted attacks on civilians in Sudan’s El Gezira state earlier this month, after they captured the state capital Wad Madani from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
The Sudanese army condemned what it called “individual violations,” which were captured on video and shared widely on social media.
Pakistan outlaws disinformation with 3-year jail term
- The law was rushed through the National Assembly with little warning last week
ISLAMBAD: Pakistan criminalized online disinformation on Tuesday, passing legislation that enshrines punishments of up to three years in prison, a decision journalists say is designed to crack down on dissent.
“I have heard more ‘yes’ than ‘no’, so the bill is approved,” Syedaal Khan, deputy chair of Pakistan’s Senate, said amid protest from the opposition and journalists, who walked out of the gallery.
The law targets anyone who “intentionally disseminates” information online that they have “reason to believe to be false or fake and likely to cause or create a sense of fear, panic or disorder or unrest.”
The law was rushed through the National Assembly with little warning last week before being presented to the Senate on Tuesday, and will now pass to the president to be rubber stamped.
Trump says Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok
US President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday that Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok and that he would like to see a bidding war over the app.
Microsoft and TikTok did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for a comment outside regular business hours.
Trump has previously said that he was in discussions with several parties about purchasing TikTok and expects to make a decision on the app’s future within the next 30 days.
The app, which has about 170 million American users, was briefly taken offline just before a law requiring ByteDance to either sell it on national security grounds or face a ban took effect on Jan. 19.
Trump, after taking office on Jan. 20, signed an executive order seeking to delay by 75 days the enforcement of the law that was put in place after US officials warned that there was a risk of Americans’ data being misused under ByteDance.
DeepSeek: Chinese AI firm sending shock waves through US tech
- The program has shaken up the tech industry and hit US titans including Nvidia, the AI chip juggernaut that saw nearly $600 billion of its market value erased, the most ever for one day on Wall Street
BEIJING: Chinese firm DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence chatbot has soared to the top of the Apple Store’s download charts, stunning industry insiders and analysts with its ability to match its US competitors.
The program has shaken up the tech industry and hit US titans including Nvidia, the AI chip juggernaut that saw nearly $600 billion of its market value erased, the most ever for one day on Wall Street.
Here’s what you need to know about DeepSeek:
DeepSeek was developed by a start-up based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, known for its high density of tech firms.
Available as an app or on desktop, DeepSeek can do many of the things that its Western competitors can do — write song lyrics, help work on a personal development plan, or even write a recipe for dinner based on what’s in the fridge.
It can communicate in multiple languages, though it told AFP that it was strongest in English and Chinese.
It is subject to many of the limitations seen in other Chinese-made chatbots like Baidu’s Ernie Bot — asked about leader Xi Jinping or Beijing’s policies in the western region of Xinjiang, it implored AFP to “talk about something else.”
But from writing complex code to solving difficult sums, industry insiders have been astonished by just how well DeepSeek’s abilities match the competition.
“What we’ve found is that DeepSeek... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models,” Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, told CNBC.
That’s all the more surprising given what is known about how it was made.
In a paper detailing its development, the firm said the model was trained using only a fraction of the chips used by its Western competitors.
Analysts had long thought that the United States’ critical advantage over China when it comes to producing high-powered chips — and its ability to prevent the Asian power from accessing the technology — would give it the edge in the AI race.
But DeepSeek researchers said they spent only $5.6 million developing the latest iteration of their model — peanuts when compared with the billions US tech giants have poured into AI.
Shares in major tech firms in the United States and Japan have tumbled as the industry takes stock of the challenge from DeepSeek.
Chip making giant Nvidia — the world’s dominant supplier of AI hardware and software — closed down seventeen percent on Wall Street on Monday.
And Japanese firm SoftBank, a key investor in US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a new $500 billion venture to build infrastructure for artificial intelligence in the United States, lost more than eight percent.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a close adviser to Trump, described it as “AI’s Sputnik moment” — a reference to the Soviet satellite launch that sparked the Cold War space race.
“DeepSeek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” he wrote on X.
Like its Western competitors Chat-GPT, Meta’s Llama and Claude, DeepSeek uses a large-language model — massive quantities of texts to train its everyday language use.
But unlike Silicon Valley rivals, which have developed proprietary LLMs, DeepSeek is open source, meaning anyone can access the app’s code, see how it works and modify it themselves.
“We are living in a timeline where a non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive — truly open, frontier research that empowers all,” Jim Fan, a senior research manager at Nvidia, wrote on X.
DeepSeek said it “tops the leaderboard among open-source models” — and “rivals the most advanced closed-source models globally.”
Scale AI’s Wang wrote on X that “DeepSeek is a wake up call for America.”
Beijing’s leadership has vowed to be the world leader in AI technology by 2030 and is projected to spend tens of billions in support for the industry over the next few years.
And the success of DeepSeek suggests that Chinese firms may have begun leaping the hurdles placed in their way.
Last week DeepSeek’s founder, hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng, sat alongside other entrepreneurs at a symposium with Chinese Premier Li Qiang — highlighting the firm’s rapid rise.
Its viral success also sent it to the top of the trending topics on China’s X-like Weibo website Monday, with related hashtags pulling in tens of millions of views.
“This really is an example of spending a little money to do great things,” one user wrote.
Dubai Lynx expands talent training program Young Lynx Academy to Saudi Arabia
- Winners will be recognized at the Dubai Lynx Awards ceremony on April 9 in Dubai
DUBAI: Dubai Lynx, a prominent creative festival and awards program organized by Cannes Lions, has announced the launch of the Saudi edition of its annual Young Lynx Academy, in partnership with multinational advertising conglomerate Publicis Groupe Middle East.
“Saudi Arabia’s creative industry is at a pivotal moment, driven by ambition and a growing appetite for world-class creative excellence,” Adel Baraja, CEO of Publicis Communications KSA, told Arab News.
He added: “The market is brimming with untapped potential, and we believe initiatives like Young Lynx Academy will play a crucial role in shaping the future of creativity in the Kingdom.”
The Dubai edition will be held on April 7 and 8, and the Saudi edition will take place at Snap Inc.’s Riyadh office from Feb. 18 to 19.
“The Riyadh edition of the Young Lynx Academy, in partnership with Publicis Groupe Middle East, is designed to be an immersive experience that challenges young professionals to think creatively and push their boundaries,” Kamille Marchant, director of Dubai Lynx, told Arab News.
On the first day, participants will meet the mentors who will guide them through the event. The day will also feature keynote speeches from industry experts, networking opportunities, and an introduction to the “centerpiece” of the event, a 24-hour hack challenge, Marchant explained.
On the second day, participants will focus on tackling the brief and present their ideas to a panel of judges. They will be required to work collaboratively on a real-world brief under time constraints, which encourages not just innovative thinking but also teamwork, adaptability, and problem-solving under pressure, she added.
The event will conclude with the announcement of the winning presentation.
Applications are now open, and the winners will be recognized at the Dubai Lynx Awards ceremony on April 9 at the Emirates Golf Club.
