A 38-year-old German man was arrested at St Petersburg airport after Russian customs found gummy bear sweets containing cannabis in his luggage.
In an interview last week with US journalist Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed long-standing rumours that the Kremlin was considering a prisoner swap with Vadim Krasikov, who was jailed in Germany after murdering a Chechen dissident in a park in Berlin in 2019.
According to a statement from Russian customs, the man explained he had bought the cannabis gummies in Germany, where they can be used for medical purposes, and uses them on long flights to help him sleep.
She was sentenced to nine years in prison for drug smuggling after a small amount of cannabis oil was found in a vaporiser cartridge in her hand luggage at a Moscow airport.
This is in fact what happened to Brittney Griner, who was released at the end of 2022 in a prisoner swap with the US in return for the controversial Russian arms dealer Victor Bout.
Washington is currently negotiating for the release of two Americans, journalist Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan, who are in Russian jails accused of spying.
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Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France, has been found guilty of illegally funding his 2012 re-election campaign.
He was handed a one-year sentence of which six months were suspended, meaning they might be served by wearing an electronic tag instead of going to jail.
If the sentence is confirmed, he is most likely to be forced to wear an electronic bracelet, carry out community service, or pay a fine.
Several other people implicated in the Bygmalion case, like Sarkozy’s deputy campaign manager Jérôme Lavrilleux, were also handed suspended sentences.
He adopted tough anti-immigration policies and sought to reform France’s economy during a presidency overshadowed by the global financial crisis.
Next year, Sarkozy will be tried over allegations he took illegal funds for his 2007 presidential campaign from the late Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.
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All large news orgs and NGOs need to do the same - federate their server which becomes the source of truth, and then mirror the content over other social media which is not federated. This may or may not include Twitter. I imagine that over time having news and reporting across social media will diminish any advantage Twitter possesses and then news orgs / NGOs might decide if they want their content on a platform like Twitter that cannot be bothered with things like stamping out bots, trolls, inauthentic actors, or supporting a free and fair press.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan says deepfake audio of him supposedly making inflammatory remarks before Armistice Day almost caused “serious disorder”.
The clip used AI - artificial intelligence - to create a replica of Mr Khan’s voice saying words scripted by the faker, disparaging Remembrance weekend with an expletive and calling for pro-Palestinian marches, planned for the same day last November, to take precedence.
The AI fake emerged during an already-tense political row, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the pro-Palestinian marches in a different part of central London were “disrespectful” on Armistice Day.
Through a screengrab, I traced the recording back to TikTok and what appears to be the originator of the clip: an account called HJB News with the ironic tagline “Keeping it real”.
Mr Khan said organisations such as the Electoral Commission, which are responsible for keeping the UK’s elections “free and fair”, also needed more powers to deal with faked information.
TikTok said it had spoken to both the mayor’s office and the Metropolitan Police in November 2023 about the platform’s approach to this content and flagged how similar issues could be raised directly in future.
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For some equivalent posts we’ve seen significantly larger engagement numbers for Mastodon compared to X/Twitter, particularly given the relative sizes of different platforms.
we have had to do very little moderation of replies associated with our content.
So you get significantly larger engagement numbers and spend less time moderating. What’s left to ponder, amigo?
I do fear that as federation grows, then so too will potentially the same threats that happen on centralised social media. The fediverse is going to have a lot of vulnerable servers who won’t moderate or detect trolls & bots and over time the issue could become extremely onerous.
If a server were an obvious conduit for disinfo then other servers could defederate from it. But if it was different accounts on different servers mixed in with authentic users then it’s almost impossible to remove. What tools does mastodon / lemmy even provide to spot inauthentic behaviour? And because we’re talking different servers run in different ways there is no clear picture from above that can be formed in the same way that a centralized social media platform might have - identifying suspicious clusters of nodes or traffic.
As for federation’s future we’ll wait and see. Both bluesky and threads are talking of providing federation protocols - threads using activitypub and bluesky it’s own API. As for Mastodon & Lemmy I see a lot of positive interest in these things. The fact we’re commenting on Lemmy instead of Reddit says a lot.
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