Anonymous ID: e964fa Feb. 10, 2025, 5:34 p.m. No.22556719   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6737 >>6866

Norwegian Refugee Council halts aid in over 20 countries after USAID cuts

 

The Norwegian Refugee Council warned that it would have to halt life-saving programs if US government payments are not resumed.

 

The Norwegian Refugee Council announced on Monday that it has suspended emergency aid for hundreds of thousands of people across nearly 20 countries due to the Trump administration’s freeze on USAID funds.

 

One of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations for displaced people, the NRC warned it may be forced to halt life-saving programs unless it receives overdue payments from the US government.

 

“For the first time in our history, we will have to suspend ongoing and urgent humanitarian work for hundreds of thousands of people in nearly 20 countries affected by wars, disasters and displacement,” the organization said in a statement on its website.

 

“We are being forced to lay off aid workers around the world,” it added.

 

While the NRC did not specify all affected countries, it confirmed that Ukraine was among them, where a planned February aid distribution for 57,000 people in frontline communities had to be canceled.

 

The organization welcomed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s waiver for life-saving programs but noted that pending payments had not resumed.

 

“We currently have millions of dollars in outstanding payment requests to the US government,” the NRC said. “Without an immediate solution, we may be forced to shut down US-funded humanitarian programs by the end of February.”

 

Such a suspension would significantly impact vulnerable countries like Burkina Faso and war-torn Sudan, where the NRC provides clean water and other essential aid.

 

USAID is one of the NRC’s largest donors. Last year alone, US-supported programs helped more than 1.5 million people.

 

Since its founding during World War II, the NRC has provided food, water, shelter, education and counseling to displaced communities. It currently operates in 40 countries with around 15,000 staff. In 2022, the organization won the Hilton Humanitarian Prize, one of the most prestigious international awards in the humanitarian aid field.

 

In the Middle East, the NRC has assisted over a million people in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Yemen. It operates in 20 countries in Africa, including Somalia, Mali and Libya.

 

Last month, Rubio issued a waiver allowing life-saving programs to continue after a 90-day freeze on all USAID funding. However, confusion over the waiver’s criteria created uncertainty about which organizations were eligible for continued support, Reuters reported.

 

Responding to criticism about the freeze’s impact, Rubio insisted last week that life-saving programs remained exempt.

 

“I issued a blanket waiver stating that if a program provides food, medicine or urgent aid, it is not included in the freeze,” he said.

 

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2025/02/norwegian-refugee-council-halts-aid-over-20-countries-after-usaid-cuts

Anonymous ID: e964fa Feb. 10, 2025, 5:36 p.m. No.22556741   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6866

Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training: court records reveal copyright violations

 

Facebook parent-company Meta is currently fighting a class action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition, among others, with regards to how it trained LLaMA. According to an X (formerly Twitter) post by vx-underground, court records reveal that the social media company used pirated torrents to download 81.7TB of data from shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen. It then used this information to train its AI models.

 

The evidence, in the form of written communication, shows the researchers’ concerns about Meta’s use of pirated materials. One senior AI researcher said way back in October 2022, “I don’t think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line here.” While another one said, “Using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold,” then they added, “SciHub, ResearchGate, LibGen are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protected by copyright and they’re infringing it.”

 

Then, in January 2023, Mark Zuckerberg himself attended a meeting where he said, “We need to move this stuff forward… we need to find a way to unblock all this.” Some three months later, a Meta employee sent a message to another one saying they were concerned about Meta IP addresses being used “to load through pirate content.” They also added, “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right,” followed by laughing out loud emoji.

 

Aside from those messages, documents also revealed that the company took steps so that its infrastructure wasn’t used in these downloading and seeding operations so that the activity wouldn’t be traced back to Meta. The court documents say that this constitutes evidence of Meta’s unlawful activity, which seems like it’s taking deliberate steps to circumvent copyright laws.

 

However, this isn’t the first time an AI training model has been accused of stealing information off the internet. OpenAI has been sued by novelists as far back as June 2023 for using their books to train its large language models, with The New York Times following suit in December. Nvidia has also been on the receiving end of a lawsuit filed by writers for using 196,640 books to train its NeMo model, which has since been taken down. A former Nvidia employee blew the whistle on the company in August of last year, saying that it scraped more than 426 thousand hours of videos daily for use in AI training. More recently, OpenAI is investigating if DeepSeek illegally obtained data from ChatGPT, which just shows how ironic things can get.

 

The case against Meta is still ongoing, so we will have to wait until the court releases its decision to say if the company committed direct infringement. And even if the writers win this case, Meta, with its huge financial war chest, will likely appeal the decision, meaning we will have to wait for several months, if not years, to see the final court judgment.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-staff-torrented-nearly-82tb-of-pirated-books-for-ai-training-court-records-reveal-copyright-violations

Anonymous ID: e964fa Feb. 10, 2025, 5:40 p.m. No.22556772   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Pakistani immigrant allowed to stay in Britain despite 'preying on barely pubescent girls when his wife wouldn't have sex'

 

A Pakistani immigrant has been allowed to stay in Britain despite preying on “barely pubescent girls” when his wife would not have sex with him.

 

The paedophile, who has been granted anonymity for his own protection, was caught in August 2022 for messaging decoy children he believed were young girls online.

 

He was sentenced to 18 months in prison after admitting three counts of attempting to cause a child under 16 to engage in a sexual act.

 

A Pakistani immigrant has been allowed to stay in Britain despite preying on “barely pubescent girls” when his wife would not have sex with him.

 

The paedophile, who has been granted anonymity for his own protection, was caught in August 2022 for messaging decoy children he believed were young girls online.

 

He was sentenced to 18 months in prison after admitting three counts of attempting to cause a child under 16 to engage in a sexual act.

 

The man, known online as MH, who had arrived in the UK on a spousal visa in 2018, was told he would be deported while in prison in late 2022.

 

He submitted an appeal on human rights grounds, which was rejected in June 2023, one month after his release, however his second appeal was accepted in June 2024.

 

MH told the tribunal hearing that he began grooming the young girls online in March 2021, when his wife was in hospital with Covid.

 

He continued for the next year until digital paedophile hunters caught him and he was arrested.

 

The offender’s wife, who regularly visited him in prison, said she felt “partly responsible” for his crimes because they were not having sex.

 

A Pakistani immigrant has been allowed to stay in Britain despite preying on “barely pubescent girls” when his wife would not have sex with him.

 

The paedophile, who has been granted anonymity for his own protection, was caught in August 2022 for messaging decoy children he believed were young girls online.

 

He was sentenced to 18 months in prison after admitting three counts of attempting to cause a child under 16 to engage in a sexual act.

 

The man, known online as MH, who had arrived in the UK on a spousal visa in 2018, was told he would be deported while in prison in late 2022.

 

Scared girl and man on computer

The pedophile was caught in August 2022 for messaging decoy children he believed were young girls onlineGETTY

He submitted an appeal on human rights grounds, which was rejected in June 2023, one month after his release, however his second appeal was accepted in June 2024.

 

MH told the tribunal hearing that he began grooming the young girls online in March 2021, when his wife was in hospital with Covid.

 

He continued for the next year until digital paedophile hunters caught him and he was arrested.

 

The offender’s wife, who regularly visited him in prison, said she felt “partly responsible” for his crimes because they were not having sex.

 

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The anonymous judge overseeing the hearing said he accepted her “guilt” for failing to provide “intimate relations”, which he felt would "detrimentally impact her ability to care for her children".

 

He also accepted that MH has a “genuine and subsisting relationship” with his two small children, aged three and four, with whom he was allowed up to 12 hours of supervised contact each day.

 

The judge ruled that deporting him from the country would be “unduly harsh”, due to his family taking a “dim view” of his crimes, claiming the criminal would face “significant difficulties” in his home country.

 

MH's appeal was allowed, which means he is legally allowed to stay in the UK despite being on the sex offenders’ register until 2032.

 

A Pakistani immigrant has been allowed to stay in Britain despite preying on “barely pubescent girls” when his wife would not have sex with him.

 

The paedophile, who has been granted anonymity for his own protection, was caught in August 2022 for messaging decoy children he believed were young girls online.

 

He was sentenced to 18 months in prison after admitting three counts of attempting to cause a child under 16 to engage in a sexual act.

 

The man, known online as MH, who had arrived in the UK on a spousal visa in 2018, was told he would be deported while in prison in late 2022.

 

Scared girl and man on computer

The pedophile was caught in August 2022 for messaging decoy children he believed were young girls onlineGETTY

He submitted an appeal on human rights grounds, which was rejected in June 2023, one month after his release, however his second appeal was accepted in June 2024.

 

MH told the tribunal hearing that he began grooming the young girls online in March 2021, when his wife was in hospital with Covid.

 

He continued for the next year until digital paedophile hunters caught him and he was arrested.

 

The offender’s wife, who regularly visited him in prison, said she felt “partly responsible” for his crimes because they were not having sex.

 

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The anonymous judge overseeing the hearing said he accepted her “guilt” for failing to provide “intimate relations”, which he felt would "detrimentally impact her ability to care for her children".

 

He also accepted that MH has a “genuine and subsisting relationship” with his two small children, aged three and four, with whom he was allowed up to 12 hours of supervised contact each day.

 

The judge ruled that deporting him from the country would be “unduly harsh”, due to his family taking a “dim view” of his crimes, claiming the criminal would face “significant difficulties” in his home country.

 

MH's appeal was allowed, which means he is legally allowed to stay in the UK despite being on the sex offenders’ register until 2032.

 

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Appeals Judge Judith Gleeson branded the lower court's decision to let MH stay as "plainly wrong".

 

She said: "The characterisation of the offences as a mere blip in the appellant's life is unsound and inadequately reasoned.

 

"The emphasis on the wife's failure to provide intimate relations to her husband when she was unwell does not explain why the claimant felt the need to engage with barely pubescent girl children online."

 

Speaking to The Sun, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick called this case “disgraceful”.

 

"The public are right to think that our immigration system is rigged in the interests of people who mean us harm, illegal migrants, against the interests of the British public,” he said.

 

"We've got to change our human rights architecture in this country so we can get these people out of the country as quickly as possible.”

 

He added that treaties signed half a century ago should not allow rapists, murderers and paedophiles to stay on the streets and in the country.

 

Reform MP Rupert Lowe weighed in, saying: "My three-step policy solution for dealing with these creatures - deport, deport, deport.”

 

He claimed the UK should stop sending Pakistan foreign aid if they refused to accept deported rapists and criminals.

 

A Home Office spokesman said: “Foreign nationals who commit crime should be in no doubt that we will do everything to make sure they are not free on Britain's streets, including removal from the UK at the earliest possible opportunity.”

 

“We remain resolute in our commitment to ensuring there are no barriers to deport foreign criminals, as it is in the public interest for these people to be removed swiftly.”

 

https://www.gbnews.com/news/migrant-crisis-pakistani-allowed-stay-britain-preying-young-girls-wife