As ICE increases its raids on immigrant communities, footage of the arrest of one man, Narciso Barranco, shows seven federal agents — all masked — pinning the 48-year old gardener to the ground and repeatedly punching him in the head before pushing him into an unmarked vehicle. His son, Marine veteran Alejandro Barranco, recently visited him in an ICE detention center. “He looked beat up, he looked rough, he looked defeated. He was sad. It’s just not right,” he says.
Barranco, whose three children have all served in the U.S. military, was arrested while working as a landscaper at an IHOP restaurant in Santa Ana. “We are seeing an extreme abuse of power on the screens of our phones,” says Santa Ana councilmember John Hernandez, who adds that Barranco is a “hardworking Santa Ana resident of over three decades, who has raised three children who have all decided to sacrifice their freedom for this country that we love.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
In Gaza, at least 41 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since midnight, including more Palestinians targeted by Israeli forces while seeking food and humanitarian aid. This comes as UNICEF is warning Gaza is facing what amounts to a “man-made drought” with children at risk of dying from thirst due to Israel’s blockade. We go to Dr. Mark Brauner, an emergency medicine physician who is currently volunteering at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza. He describes “execution-style” killings of Palestinians at food distribution sites and the desperate lack of baby formula leading to the deaths of children suffering from malnutrition and starvation.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
After Bakri Eid was celebrated in India on Saturday, June 7, a video went viral on Facebook claiming to show a blood-filled road in Kolkata following the Qurbani (sacrificial) ritual.
Several users shared visuals of a blood-filled road and remarked sarcastically, “This isn’t Bangladesh or Pakistan…” Some stated that parts of Kolkata resembled “scenes from Bangladesh”. The posts also claimed that the visuals were from Ward 44 in Kolkata. (Examples: 1,2, 3, 4)
BJP leader Sajal Ghosh who represents Ward No. 50 in the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), also shared the video on Facebook and claimed that it was from the Bhawani Dutta Lane and Neel Madhab Sen Lane areas of Bowbazar. In the post, He also urged ‘urban, smart, ultramodern seculars’ to wake up unless they wanted the same picture to emerge from their localities within four-five years.
খুশির ঈদে খুশির বন্যা l
না এটা বাংলাদেশ না পাকিস্তান, এ আমার সাধের মধ্য কলকাতার বউবাজার অঞ্চলের ভবানী দত্ত লেন ও নীল মধব সেন লেন অঞ্চলের ছবি l
ঈদ কুরবানী একটি সম্প্রদায়ের নিজস্ব বিষয়, সে নিয়ে আমি কিছু বলবো না, কিন্তু যে প্রাণীকে আমরা পূজা করি, তার এই পরিণতি আমাদের ভাবাবেগকেও আঘাত দেয় l
অদ্ভুতভাবে প্রশাসন এবং পুরসভা চোখে ঠুলি পড়ে আছেন l
তাই সমস্ত শহুরে স্মার্ট অত্যাধুনিক সেকুলার মানুষজনকে আমার অনুরোধ নিজে জাগুন অন্যকেও জাগান l
নয়তো আর ৪-৫ বছর বাদেই ঈদের দিনের এটাই আপনার পাড়ার ছবি হবে।
Sajal Ghosh BJP West Bengal Kolkata Municipal Corporation
On the same day, the X handle of the West Bengal Police Cyber Crime Wing shared a related fact check. It picked up a Facebook post from a user named Nepal Saha, which contained six photos of purported Eid celebrations in Kolkata, and labelled them as fake. One of these photos is a screenshot from the viral video. The fact check claimed that the photos originated in Bangladesh, with a 2016 post from Dhaka cited as the source. However, the viral video screengrab is not part of the 2016 post, and only two of the five others flagged as fake can actually be traced back to it. (Archive)
We found a website (https://factcheck.wb.gov.in/) bearing the same logo which published the same fact check. The website describes itself as “the Fact Check Portal of the West Bengal Cyber Crime Wing (which) is ready to tackle the menace by presenting verified, accurate, reliable information…”. Note that it uses a gov.in domain.
We tried reaching out to the cyber cell of Bengal Police. When we called on their number, they asked us to speak to the social media cell. The officer who spoke to us from the social media cell confirmed that the fact check had indeed been done by West Bengal Police’s cyber cell. However, he said the concerned person was on leave and only he could enlighten us about it. When we called up again the next day, we were met with the same response — that the person in the know of things was not available.
Alt News Visited the Spot
Taking a cue from Sajal Ghosh’s Facebook post, Alt News was able to precisely identify the spot featured in the viral clip. Bhawani Dutta Lane and Neel Madhab Sen Lane are two narrow streets near the College Street — Mahatma Gandhi Road crossing, stones throw from the Presidency University. We visited the site and shot a video that shows the same area that is seen in the viral clip.
The business establishments visible toward the end of the footage all carry Kolkata addresses. (Outlined in red in the screengrabs below)
Key landmarks visible in the viral video — including a distinct red-coloured house, a grey coloured building with light blue stripes, and a black car — can be seen in the Alt News video as well. The grey building houses the historical and current sections of the West Bengal state archives and bears the address: 6, Bhawani Dutta Lane.
Have Never Seen Streets Turn Red Like this Before: Locals
To understand what transpired, we spoke to several locals. They recounted that on the intervening night of June 6 and June 7, the area experienced heavy rainfall resulting in severe waterlogging. On Saturday, June 7, morning, the ritual of qurbani (animal sacrifice) was carried out in keeping with religious tradition, local residents observed.
With the lanes being already waterlogged from the overnight rain, blood from the animal sacrifices mixed with the stagnant rainwater. Locals themselves came forward to manually clear the drains before the intervention of the civic body.
Alt News spoke to a local shop owner, Rajesh, who said he had lived and worked in the neighbourhood for over four decades. He told us that he had never witnessed anything like this before.
“I’ve been living and working in this neighbourhood for over 40 years, and I’ve never witnessed anything like this. The area indeed gets waterlogged whenever it rains, and the ritual of qurbani is performed here every year. But this is the first time I’ve seen such a scene — it was truly unprecedented.” Rajesh also confirmed that the video shows his locality and is from last Saturday.
The same information was corroborated by another shop owner from the area who told us that he had been in business there for around five to seven years and “had never seen anything like it.” “The water was red and there was a pungent smell”, he told us.
To further corroborate the events, we spoke to another family that had been residing there for over 60 years. They told us that in all their time living there, they had never witnessed such a disturbing sight. According to them, waterlogging is a recurring issue whenever it rains — and Friday was no exception. That evening, the area experienced heavy rainfall, which led to water accumulation due to clogged drains. “I was born and brought up here. In my lifetime, this was the first time I had witnessed something like this. Yes, the streets get waterlogged after a heavy shower. And on Friday, we experienced a heavy rainfall, which led to the accumulation of water.”
“Even at around 7 am, the water was clear, and likely after an hour, it turned red. Yes, it was accompanied by foul odour,” members of the household told Alt News. they did not want to be named. The time of the water turning red was corroborated by two other witnesses.
When asked whether the ritual of qurbani is practised every year on Eid al-adah, the family said, “Yes, but it has never affected the neighbours in any manner.” They also observed that a few local residents took the initiative to clear the clogged drains using sticks in an attempt to improve the situation. Shortly after these efforts, municipal workers arrived, cleaned the affected area, and restored normalcy. “We saw a few locals trying to unclog the drains with sticks. And later the municipality intervened and cleared it up.”
Kamal Pandit, a priest at a nearby temple, repeated the same point — that this was unprecedented. “I have been working here for the past six years. In this span, I have never seen a filthy sight like this. Whenever it rains, the area gets waterlogged, but I have never seen it turn red. It was cleared up in the afternoon.”
To sum up, Alt News’ on-ground investigation confirmed that the viral video was indeed authentic and were filmed in Kolkata. On the night of June 6 (Friday), the city witnessed heavy rain in certain areas, including Bhawani Dutta Lane in central Kolkata. As a result, following the Qurbani (sacrificial) ritual on Bakri Eid the next day, the already waterlogged lanes turned red, possibly due to contamination with animal blood. However, the X handle of Bengal police’s cyber crime wing issued an inaccurate fact-check of a Facebook post carrying a screenshot from the same video, incorrectly claiming that it was from Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2016.
This story will be updated if we receive a response from the cyber cell of police.
Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil reunited with his wife and met his newborn son after being released from over 100 days in ICE detention. After flying from Louisiana to New Jersey, Khalil told reporters, “If they threaten me with detention, even if they would kill me, I would still speak up for Palestine.” Khalil was the first arrested, on March 8. He is a legal permanent resident of the United States, with a green card (now revoked). His wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, a U.S. citizen, was eight months pregnant at the time. Mahmoud played a prominent role in the Palestine solidarity protests at Columbia University last spring. Watch a special report from Democracy Now! from the Newark airport.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
French police have arrested four suspects in connection with a knife attack on exiled Lao democracy activist Joseph Akaravong, including the man who stabbed and seriously wounded the activist before fleeing the scene, local media reported Wednesday.
The main suspect – a man in his 30s who stabbed Akaravong three times in the throat and torso on Saturday – was arrested on Tuesday in Nîmes, about 300 miles (480 kilometers) from the city of Pau, Pau public prosecutor Rodolphe Jarry said in a statement on Wednesday. The suspects were not named.
Akaravong was rushed to a hospital in Pau in critical condition after the attack. His condition has since stabilized, Jarry told French media.
The public prosecutor’s office in Pau has launched an investigation into what they are referring to as an “attempted assassination.” Authorities did not confirm if the attack was politically motivated at this time, reported France’s Le Monde.
Human rights advocates say the attack fits a broader pattern of targeting activists abroad. Rights group Manushya Foundation described the attack as an example of “transnational repression.”
“The attack on Joseph is part of a dangerous and escalating pattern, in which authoritarian regimes continue to monitor, pressure, and even harm activists across borders,” the foundation said in a statement.
Akaravong, one of the most prominent critics of the communist government in Laos, fled the Southeast Asian nation in 2018 after criticizing the collapse of a saddle dam at the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydropower project in Attapeu province that killed dozens of villagers. He was granted political asylum in France in March 2022, the foundation said.
According to the Manushya Foundation, Akaravong was attacked while he was meeting with another Lao woman activist who had recently traveled to France after completing a five-year prison sentence in Laos last September for her criticism of the government on Facebook.
The foundation did not name the woman activist, but last September, Houayheuang Xayabouly was freed from prison in southern Laos. She was arrested in September 2019 after she criticized the government on Facebook for delaying a flood rescue effort.
In recent years, other Lao activists have gone missing or faced violence both inside Laos and outside the country, typically in neighboring Thailand.
The Pau public prosecutor’s office did not immediately respond to RFA’s request for comments.
Written by Tenzin Pema. Edited by Mat Pennington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.
Days after the public fallout between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump over the latter’s Big Beautiful Bill, a video of Trump announcing a ban on the production of Tesla in the United States has gone viral.
In the video, added below, he says: “Today, I am here to announce that I will be banning the production of all Teslas in the United States of America, effective immediately. As everyone knows, Elon stabbed me in the back a few days ago, and lied about my involvement in the Epstein files, so I can’t have that snake Elon making money in the country while I’m president. No one likes Tesla anyway unless you’re a nerd. They catch fire and break down easily, so it’s definitely not the best electric car out there.” He also adds that he bought a Tesla to get Elon Musk’s support for the election, but he now plans to sell for $69, because that’s what it’s worth.
The dramatic feud between Musk and Trump had led to a full-blown war of words on social media in the first week of June. A few days after his exit from the White House on May 28, Musk called the bill a ‘disgusting abomination’ and claimed it would significantly add to the country’s debt. He even called for the President’s impeachment and linked him to the disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on X, which he later deleted. Meanwhile, Trump maintains that Musk’s opposition is primarily owing to the proposed elimination of tax credits for electric vehicles in the bill, which would impact Tesla’s business.
Alt News found no credible news reports on any such announcement by Trump, which raised doubts regarding the authenticity of the video.
A closer look at the viral video also revealed discrepancies between the audio and Trump’s lip movements. Besides that, we also noticed the American national flag pin on Trump’s suit was inverted and a watermark of “@DANGEROUSAIRETURNS” on the right.
A quick search for @DANGEROUSAIRETURNS led us to an Instagram account with the same username.We found the viral video uploaded by this account on June 8, 2025. A closer look at content uploaded by this account indicates that it often shares AI-generated parody content.
We also found a YouTube channel by the same username. The channel’s description clearly says it creates parody content using AI voice-overs.
We also ran the video through HIVE’s AI detection tool. According to this, there is a 99.8% likelihood that the audio in the viral video was AI-generated.
To sum up, an AI-generated video of Donald Trump, in which he sounds a ban on the production of Tesla cars, is being shared as an actual announcement by the US President. At the time of writing this, no such ban has been announced.
Washington, D.C., May 29, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Egyptian authorities to end the prosecution of journalist Rasha Qandeel, who was summoned May 25, interrogated, and charged with “spreading and broadcasting false news inside and outside the country” after her reports on Egypt’s social, political and economic developments for the independent media platform Sotour.
The Supreme State Security Prosecution released Qandeel the same day on bail of 50,000 Egyptian pounds (about US$1,004).
“Accusing Qandeel after questioning her journalistic integrity is another example of Egypt’s legal harassment and use of vague charges to silence independent voices,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “We urge Egyptian authorities to drop all charges against her and stop targeting independent journalism.”
Qandeel, a well-known former BBC Arabic presenter, said she has faced increased verbal attacks from pro-regime Egyptian media presenters after publishing articles last month criticizing the Egyptian army’s arms purchases amid the country’s economic hardships.
If convicted, Qandeel could face up to five years in prison, a fine up to half a million Egyptian pounds, or both, under Article 80(d) of the Penal Code—a provision that raises penalties for spreading “false news” abroad.
Qandeel told Cairo-based news outlet Al-Manassa that the charges followed 31 citizen complaints filed over two weeks in May—all related to investigative reports she published last year.
Egypt ranked as the sixth-worst country globally for press freedom last year, with 17 journalists behind bars.
CPJ’s request for comment from the Egyptian Public Prosecutor’s Office regarding Qandeel’s case did not receive an immediate response.
Rohingya rights groups on Thursday decried “regional inaction and global neglect” over the plight of the Muslim minority from Myanmar after more than 400 refugees were feared drowned when two boats sank this month after setting sail from Bangladesh.
Last week, the U.N. refugee agency said that while details remained unclear, it had collected reports from family members and others about two separate boat tragedies on May 9 and May 10 in which 427 people may have died. It said both boats left from Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where about 1 million Rohingya shelter in camps.
Twenty-six Rohingya diaspora groups, including the U.K.-based Burmese Rohingya Organization, co-signed Thursday’s statement that said just 87 people had survived the two incidents. It added authorities had intercepted a third vessel with 188 people aboard as it attempted to leave Myanmar on May 18.
“These back-to-back disasters are the worst loss of Rohingya lives at sea this year, and they expose the deadly consequences of regional inaction and global neglect,” the statement said, adding that most of those on board were Rohingya who had already been displaced from their homes in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State.
“They were fleeing a growing campaign of widespread violence by the Arakan Army, amounting to a continuation of the ethnic cleansing first started by the Burmese military,” the statement said, referring to a rebel group that has seized control of most of Rakhine state from the Myanmar military.
“Those confined to displacement camps in Burmese military-controlled zones are starving, children are suffering from acute malnutrition, and many families are completely without food,” the statement said.
Most Rohingya are from Rakhine state and most are stateless, regarded as migrants from South Asia and not one of the ethnic groups classified as indigenous in Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s constitution.
In this March 21, 2024, photo Rohingya refugees wait to be rescued from their capsized boat off west Aceh.(Zahlul Akbar/AFP)
About 750,000 Rohingya fled a violent Myanmar military clearance campaign in Rakhine in 2017 and crossed into Bangladesh. The U.S. government determined the killings and rapes by the military amounted to genocide.
Now each year, thousands of Rohingya attempt to leave Bangladesh and Myanmar aboard rickety vessels for other destinations in Southeast Asia. Reports of boats sinking and mass fatalities are common.
The Arakan Army, consisting Buddhist ethnic Rakhine people, has also been implicated in serious rights abuses against Rohingya, human rights groups say, although the AA denies it.
In recent years, the AA’s position on the persecuted Muslim minority has vacillated. After the 2021 coup in Myanmar when the military seized power from a civilian government, the AA evinced a moderate and inclusive position on the Rohingya. But it has since been accused of mass killings after a campaign by the Myanmar junta to recruit Rohingya men, sometimes forcibly, into militias to fight the AA.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.
SEOUL – The mood in the North Korean port city where a warship launch went badly wrong last week is grim, local residents say, as authorities make arrests and officials scramble to find ways to salvage the 5,000-ton vessel.
North Korean state media has reported that several senior officials have been detained, including Hong Kil Ho, the manager of the Chongjin Shipyard, and Ri Hyong Son, a senior military industry official in the ruling Workers’ Party.
The May 21 launch was meant to be a signature event for supreme leader Kim Jong Un, signaling North Korea progress toward building a blue water navy.
He was presiding over the launch when the ship tipped sideways after an attempted “side launch” from the dock side that left one side of the hull submerged. Just a day later, state media reported his angry reaction: calling it a “grave and unacceptable accident” and a “serious criminal act.”
“People are stunned that the government acknowledged the failure so openly,” a resident of North Hamgyong province, where Chongjin is located, told RFA. Like all the sources in this story, the resident spoke on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.
A source from Chongjin said: “The whole city feels like it’s in mourning.”
This photo released by the North Korean government shows leader Kim Jong Un on April 25, 2025, attending a ceremony for the launch of a “new multipurpose destroyer” in Nampo, North Korea.(KCNA via Reuters)
North Korea’s opaque and often brutal political system only adds to the tension. Residents now fear that those involved—engineers, managers, and possibly even their families—may face severe punishment.
“People worry that this will lead to a purge,” a second source from North Hamgyong province said. “Kim takes failure personally, especially when it undermines his image.”
Reasons for failure
The shipyard was once known for building ships like the 9,500-ton Mangyongbong-92, a cargo and passenger ferrywhich launched in 1971. Butit has not launched large-scale vessels like that in decades, according to local sources. During Kim Jong Un’s rule, the yard had pivoted toward production of military assets like submarines and torpedo craft.
“The shipyard used to be capable of building cargo ships before economic collapse in 1990s,” the Chongjin resident said. “But after the economic collapse, they haven’t built larger ships. With the retirement of older engineers, additionally the new generation lacks the experience for this kind of operation.”
This picture taken on April 25, 2025, and released by the North Korean government shows leader Kim Jong Un and daughter Ju Ae attending the launch ceremony of a newly-built destroyer in Nampo, North Korea.(KCNA via AFP)
Following the accident, the damaged warship was covered with blue tarpaulin, visible in satellite images. The residents say attempts to recover the vessel have been slow, hindered by poor infrastructure and a lack of proper equipment.
“There are no large cranes at the shipyard that can lift a vessel of this size,” the first source from North Hamgyong said. “They might use sea cranes, but the approach route through sea to the dock is too narrow and shallow for those to operate easily.”
“It is possible to use crane ships (floating cranes), but the shipyard dock where the vessel has capsized is too narrow, making it extremely difficult to deploy multiple crane ships,” the source added. “Another problem is that the dock is not directly connected to open waters — it lies deep inland and can only be accessed through a narrow channel, which makes it challenging to bring in large crane ships to the site.”
Using balloons?
Satellite imagery appears to show that North Korea is attempting to raise the destroyer into an upright position by attaching numerous balloons to it, according to a U.S. expert.
Decker Eveleth, an imagery analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., likened it to a scene from a popular animated movie.
“North Korea appears to be attempting to lift up their destroyer with methods inspired by Pixar’s hit 2009 film Up. Note the numerous balloons in the air above the destroyer,” he wrote in a post on X featuring a May 25 satellite image from Maxar.
In “Up,” an elderly man ties vast numbers of balloons to his house to fly it to a South American wilderness.
Translated and additional reporting by Jaewoo Park. Edited by Sungwon Yang and Mat Pennington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Chang Kyu Ahn and Ji Eun Kim for RFA Korean.
On May 23, two days after security forces killed several Maoists in Chhattisgarh, the X handle of BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) posted an animated image of Union home minister Amit Shah with a cauliflower in his hand, resting his arm on a tombstone that said, “Naxalism Rest in Peace”. (Archive)
The image was captioned, “Lol” Salam, Comrade,” a pun on communists’ usage of the greeting “Lal Salam” or red salute.
On May 21, 2025, the District Reserve Guard unit of the Chhattisgarh police, a special force created to combat insurgency in Chhattisgarh, carried out an anti-Naxal operation in the state’s Narayanpur district. 27 Maoists, including the general secretary of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), Nambala Keshav Rao, alias Basavaraju, were neutralised in this. Named Kagar, this operation sought to neutralise Maoist presence in the Karreguttallu hill range along the Telengana-Chhattisgarh border region.
The May 23 post by the BJP handle was in response to a statement by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation (@cpimlliberation) condemning “the cold-blooded extra-judicial killing of the General Secretary of CPI(Maoist) Comrade Keshav Rao and other Maoist activists and Adivasis in Narayanpur-Bijapur.” Calling it a massacre, the communist party said, that “celebratory” posts by Indian leaders made it clear that the state was carrying out “an extra-judicial extermination campaign and taking credit for killing citizens and suppressing Adivasi protests against corporate plunder and militarisation in the name of combating Maoism.” The party was likely referring to X posts by Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who hailed the Maoists’ deaths as a “landmark achievement in the battle to eliminate Naxalism”.
In the past 16 months, under the BJP’s governance, more than 400 alleged Maoist insurgents have been killed in Chhattisgarh, a state with a significant Adivasi population.
While the two parties and their ideologues are on two opposing ends on how they view the Naxal movement, the troubling part is that BJP Karnataka’s X post used a trope—the cauliflower—that is a horrifying reminder of a genocide.
Rooted in Bloodshed
To an unsuspecting viewer, Shah holding a cauliflower on the tombstone of the Naxal movement might strike as odd, but harmless. However, the cauliflower here is a deep-rooted symbol of bloodshed. It is a reference to the 1989 Bhagalpur riots in which over a 100 Muslims were killed.
Over 35 years ago, a series of brutal riots broke out in the city of Bhagalpur, Bihar. In October, 1989, rumours of Hindu students being murdered by Muslim mobs amid the cultural furore of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement began spreading. This gave way to a protracted period of organised communal violence, lasting around two whole months. The Bhagalpur riots, as they are called, saw more than 250 villages razed to the ground, leaving well over a thousand people dead, majority of them Muslims.
But something far more sinister took place in Bhagalpur’s Logain village. On October 27, 1989, a mob, allegedly led by police officer Ramchander Singh, killed 116 Muslims. Their bodies were buried, and cauliflower saplings were sown on their mass graves to cover up the killings.
Nearly 25 days later, on November 21, the then-Additional District Manager of Bhagalpur, AK Singh, on a relief mission to a nearby village, overheard conversations between villagers about cauliflower plants sprouting over buried dead bodies and unearthed the massacre. Another account suggests that Singh found out that bodies may be buried under the ground because he saw vultures hovering above the cauliflower plantations.
For more details on the happenings in 1989 and what triggered the clashes, read our earlier report here. You can also read the Bhagalpur Riot Inquiry Commission Report here.
The Cauliflower Imagery
While the Bhagalpur riots took place over three decades ago, in the past few years, the cauliflower symbolism has found its way through graphical representations, imagery and memes. Each time, a minority or non-Right group is targeted, supporters who identify with Hindutva groups or the Right-wing ideology have openly made references to the cauliflower as a ‘solution’.
Not only does such symbolism trivialize the horrors of what unfolded in Bhagalpur but glorifies the action as an acceptable ‘solution’. It’s hard to determine which is more troubling, that the state wing of a party that governs the nation shared this or that “eliminating Naxalism” is being equated to a genocide. As of May 24, despite several social media users pointing out the gory undercurrents to the image, BJP Karnataka’s X handle has not taken the post down.
In a press briefing on May 11, 2025, chiefs of the Indian army, air force and navy shared details on Operation Sindoor. During the briefing, Air Marshal AK Bharti said India destroyed airbases and radar centres in Sukkur, Rafiqui, Rahim Yar Khan, Chaklala (Noor Khan), Bholari, Sargodha and Jacobabad in response to Pakistani attacks.
Soon after this, a video began circulating on social media with claims that these showed the destruction at the Noor Khan (Chaklala) airbase. The airbase is located in the Rawalpindi area, around 10 kilometres from Islamabad.
X user Karma Yogi (@karma2moksha) shared the video and wrote, “Pakistan’s Noor Khan Airbase. As per the shared video, the damage is huge.” (Archive)
On looking at the viral video closely, Alt News noticed that there were only passenger planes and nothing resembling a fighter jet on the tarmac. At the 00:52-minute mark in the video, the word ‘Sudan’ can be seen on the tail of one of the planes.
We performed a reverse image search using a few frames of the viral clip and found the same video uploaded on Instagram by a user named ‘@africanaviators_official’ on March 31, 2025. The caption of the post said these were tragic scenes from Khartoum International Airport in Sudan that show a large number of aircraft being destroyed during clashes between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in May 2023. It also says that the Sudanese army took back control of the Khartoum International Airport from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
A longer version of this video was shared by X handle @smutoro on March 31. The post said that the Khartoum Airport was destroyed by RSF fighters. At the 04:31-minute mark in the video, the words ‘Blue Bird Aviation Company Limited’ can be seen on the damaged plane as well as on the signboard of an aircraft workshop. Blue Bird Aviation is a private airline company from Sudan established in 1989. Thus there is ample evidence that the video is from Sudan and not Pakistan.
According to a report published by Al Jazeera on March 26, the Sudanese army recaptured Khartoum International Airport from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in March 2025, two years after the war.
To sum up, this viral video shows an airport destroyed in a clash during the civil uprising in Sudan, not Pakistan. Social media users wrongly shared it as scenes from Pakistan’s Noor Khan airbase after it was destroyed by the Indian armed forces.
Istanbul, May 19, 2025—Turkish authorities should do everything in their power to protect BirGün reporter İsmail Arı and his family after they received death threats in connection with the journalist’s May 13 report in the leftist daily on court bribery allegations, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.
“Turkish authorities in Ankara must take the threats made against journalist İsmail Arı and his relatives seriously and take decisive steps to better ensure their safety,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “The authorities should swiftly and comprehensively investigate the threats and hold those responsible to account, so all journalists in Turkey can safely do their jobs.”
Arı, based in the capital Ankara, said in a post on X that he filed a criminal complaint on May 16 notifying authorities that he was insulted, threatened and sent a list of his relatives via messaging app by an unknown foreign number earlier in the day, and at least one of his relatives was threatened in a phone call, according to the complaint reviewed CPJ.
Arı told CPJ via messaging app on Monday that the police provided a “caution protection” number for him to call and report incidents for 90 days. The journalist also contacted the Interior Ministry about the matter but did not receive a reply as of Monday evening.
Arı was previously targeted with death threats in late 2023 in connection with his reporting on an Islamist group in southern Turkey.
CPJ’s emailed request for comment to Turkey’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, did not receive a reply.
Many weeks after they were rescued from scam centers inside Myanmar, more than 200 Vietnamese workers are still stranded in a squalid camp near the Thai border because they can’t afford their passage home, two of the workers told Radio Free Asia.
“Life here is very hard. The accommodation is like a chicken coop. You have to sleep on the floor on mats,” said a 31-year-old woman from the northern Vietnamese province of Son La, adding that conditions were “miserable” and infections spread among people there.
Hundreds of Vietnamese were among the more than 8,000 people of various nationalities who were freed in February by a pro-junta Myanmar militia that hosted extensive online fraud operations in its territory on the Thai-Myanmar border.
The Karen National Army, or KNA, let them go after unprecedented pressure from governments, including China, over criminal activity in the militia’s area including forced labor and torture of workers, and fraud against the targets of cyber scams.
Freed workers were taken to a makeshift camp near Myawaddy, the main international border crossing point to Thailand, to await repatriation. While the majority of those freed were Chinese, the Karen force said they included 685 Vietnamese.
Unsanitary conditions at a Myanmar refugee camp where hundreds of Vietnamese are still taking refuge.(Citizen photo)
On May 15, Vietnam confirmed that it had repatriated a total of 450 citizens from Myanmar, and about 200 were still waiting to return. Stranded workers told RFA there were 215 Vietnamese left, and the KNA said 214.
Those still left behind are increasingly sore about it.
“I am very disappointed,” the Son La woman said. “Even Ethiopians, the poorest people here, were allowed to return home, leaving only over 200 Vietnamese people still here.”
People have to pay
RFA spoke directly to two of the Vietnamese workers. Others were within earshot of the call at the camp. They all said that they have to pay money to their embassy to be repatriated – money they don’t have. All requested anonymity for safety reasons.
“At first, you only had to pay 10 million (dong) ($385), but the longer you stay, the higher it gets. Now it’s 12 million ($470), and some people have to pay 13 million $500),” a Vietnamese man in the camp told RFA.
He said he was instructed by a representative of the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok on how to pay to be on the repatriation list.
He showed RFA the contents of a text message exchange with that official via the messaging app Zalo. In it, the official explained that the amount of “more than 12 million (dong)” was to buy a plane ticket, and if there was money left over it would be returned to the family.
“To be honest, I can’t afford to pay because my family is very poor. My family also asked me why I have to pay for the rescue?” the man told RFA.
The woman told RFA that she was also asked to pay money if she wanted to return home. “People from the Vietnamese Embassy in Thailand said it would cost money, and if you don’t pay, you won’t be able to return,” she said.
RFA contacted the Vietnamese embassies in Myanmar and Thailand to verify the above information but received no response.
Victims of scam centers who were tricked or trafficked into working in Myanmar, during a clearing operation at a compound on the Thailand-Myanmar border in Myawaddy, Myanmar, Feb. 26, 2025.(Reuters)
The revelation that the Vietnamese scam center workers have to pay for their passage home may raise awkward questions about the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ handling of the situation.
Past problems with repatriations
The ministry and other Vietnamese government agencies have courted controversy in the past over officials skimming repatriation funds. In 2023, a Hanoi court convicted 54 defendants, including senior diplomats, for collecting over $7.4 billion in bribes to arrange government flights home for Vietnamese citizens stranded overseas during COVID pandemic lockdowns during 2020 and 2021.
While this repatriation operation is far smaller in scale, the scam centers have been headline news, shining a spotlight on the plight of those caught up in huge fraud operations in lawless regions of Southeast Asia. These centers are often staffed by people lured by false job advertisements and forced to work, sometimes under threat of violence, rescued workers and rights groups say.
The scamming, known as “pig butchering” in China, involves making contact with unsuspecting people online, building a relationship with them and then defrauding them. Researchers say billions of dollars have been stolen this way from victims around the world.
The Vietnamese man said he had arrived in Thailand in 2023 to take up another job but was forced to cross the border into Myanmar to work in a Chinese scam center to target Vietnamese people. He said if he did not achieve monthly targets, he would be tortured.
The woman from Son La told a similar story. She got a job as a translator in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand in September 2024 but was then forced at gunpoint by her employers to cross the border into Myanmar to work in a scam center.
She said that after that she had tried to contact the Vietnamese Embassy in Myanmar for help but received no response, and started to plan an escape with other women from India and Indonesia. Their plan was exposed, and she was then locked in a separate room by her Chinese employers for two months as punishment. In April 2025, she was taken to the border camp by the Karen militia.
US sanctions
Despite the KNA’s apparent efforts to show it is untangling itself from the scam industry, on May 5, the U.S. Treasury Department blacklisted the ethnic army, its leader Saw Chit Thu and his two sons for facilitating cyber scams from territory they control on the Thai-Myanmar border. The KNA was designated as a “significant transnational criminal organization” that is barred from holding property in the United States and conducting transactions with U.S. persons.
On May 6, Lt. Col. Naing Maung Zaw, a spokesperson for the KNA, told The Associated Press 7,454 of 8,575 foreign scam workers have so far been repatriated through Thailand. He said more than 10,000 people remained to be identified in the KNA-controlled areas, and the group would continue to work toward the elimination of scam activities.
Speaking to RFA last week, Naing Maung Zaw said they do not have a direct communication channel with the Vietnamese government and have noticed that recently Vietnam has reduced the repatriation of its citizens. He said he wasn’t aware those stuck at the camp have to pay money to the Vietnamese government to be repatriated.
“Now that RFA has mentioned it, I will pay attention to this issue. I will meet the Vietnamese people tomorrow and ask them directly if this is true. If it is true, we will report it to our superiors and do something,” he said.
Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Pham Thu Hang told reporters in Hanoi on May 15 that the ministry will direct Vietnamese representative agencies in Myanmar and Thailand to bring the remaining Vietnamese citizens home as soon as possible.
Edited by Mat Pennington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Truong Son for RFA Vietnamese.
Myanmar’s ousted civilian government called for international intervention, accusing the military regime of committing “war crimes” by killing nearly 400 people within a month, despite the junta’s declaration of a ceasefire on April 2.
From April 3 to May 13, junta airstrikes across 11 of Myanmar’s 14 territories have killed a total of 182 people and injured 298, said the National League for Democracy, or NLD, the party that won a landslide in the 2020 election but was ousted in a coup the following year.
The majority of attacks have targeted those affected by the earthquake-affected areas of Sagaing and Mandalay region, it added.
“We’re sending this appeal directly to the United Nations and to ASEAN,” said a member of the NLD central work committee Kyaw Htwe. “We have confirmed this information with media outlets, party members and the public on the ground.”
On March 28, 2025, Myanmar experienced a devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake centered near Mandalay, resulting in over 5,400 deaths, more than 11,000 injuries, and widespread destruction across six regions, including the capital Naypyidaw.
In response to the disaster, Myanmar’s military junta and various rebel groups declared temporary ceasefires in early April to facilitate humanitarian aid and recovery efforts. The junta extended its ceasefire until May 31. However, despite these declarations, hostilities have continued, with reports indicating that the military has persisted with airstrikes and artillery attacks.
On Monday, an airstrike on a school in rebel militia-controlled Tabayin township in Sagaing region killed 22 students and two teachers. On the same day, junta soldiers raiding Lel Ma village in Magway region’s Gangaw township shot 11 people and arrested eight others.
An attack on Arakan Army-controlled Rathedaung township in Rakhine the following day killed 13 civilians, including children and their parents.
Similarly, attacks with heavy artillery between April 3 and May 13 across five territories killed 14 people and injured 43. Another 166, including infants, were killed by junta raids on villages, when soldiers set fire to civilian homes.
Junta spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun has not responded to Radio Free Asia’s inquiries.
Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.
