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Iran’s internet shutdown is strikingly sophisticated and may last some time

Iran’s internet shutdown, now in place for 36 hours as the authorities seek to quell escalating anti-government protests, represents a “new high-water mark” in terms of its sophistication and severity, say experts – and could last a long time. As the blackout kicked in, 90% of internet traffic to Iran evaporated. International calls to the country appeared blocked and domestic mobile phones had no service, said Amir Rashidi, an Iranian digital rights expert. This is far from the first time a country has blocked the internet for political reasons. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak blocked the internet for six days during the 2011 Tahrir protests, and the Taliban shut down Afghanistan’s for 48 hours in September, ostensibly to curb “immorality.” But the level of shutdown in Iran is unprecedented and in some ways far harsher than its 2019 digital blackout, which internet observers described at the time as the most “severe disconnection” they had seen anywhere. “There is no reception on the phones. There is no antenna. It’s like you are living in the middle of nowhere, with no BTS towers,” said Rashidi. Even Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system, which was a lifeline for Iranians during the 2022 protests over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody, was being jammed, Rashidi said, although the extent varied from one neighbourhood to another. While Iranians across the country were suddenly cut off from the internet, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, continued to post on X. He did so at least 12 times on Friday, inveighing against Donald Trump and US action in Venezuela. This is what makes this blackout different from previous internet blockages in Iran, said Doug Madory, an expert in internet infrastructure who studies such disruptions. It is more sweeping, but also appears to be more fine-tuned, which potentially means Tehran will be able to sustain it for longer. Rashidi said: “There are things that are important for the government to do. If they want to put out their propaganda they need to have access to Telegram, they need to have access to Twitter, they need to access Instagram.” Alluding to Mubarak’s 2011 shutdown, Madory said there were “big costs to taking everything down”. “If you look at what happened in Egypt … the government couldn’t operate,” he said. “People really use the internet for a lot of things, and when they take it all down, nothing works.” Based on external evidence, Madory and Rashidi believe the Iranian government has whitelisted some sites, allowing some officials and institutions to continue to access the internet. Some of its Telegram channels appeared to be working, Rashidi said, indicating that its administrators must have internet service. The government appeared to soften the blackout briefly for university websites on Friday, then shut service down again. All of this suggests Iran has developed more precise tools for censoring the internet. “If they end up implementing a whitelist, and it works as planned it may enable them to operate in some kind of degraded state for an extended period of time,” said Madory. “What they’re doing is trying to set this up so that they don’t have to turn everything back on. They want just the bare necessities to be able to communicate and then shut everything else off.” Iran has been working to upgrade its ability to censor the internet for some years, said Rashidi and Madory, trying to build a internal service similar to China’s that connects domestic users while cutting them off from the outside world. It is not alone in such efforts. India is building a government-managed messaging app to rival WhatsApp, and Russia is pushing a state-backed “super app” similar to China’s WeChat. Iran’s national model may not yet be working, however, because sites linked to it are currently inaccessible, said Rashidi. National internet or no, however, Madory suspects the blackout may last some time. “This might be for the long haul,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for a while and I think it’s going to be a big one.”

Indonesia blocks Musk’s Grok chatbot due to risk of pornographic content

Indonesia temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot on Saturday due to the risk of AI-generated pornographic content, becoming the first country to deny access to the AI tool. The move comes after governments, researchers and regulators from Europe to Asia have condemned and some have opened inquiries into sexualised content on the app. xAI, the startup behind Grok, said on Thursday it was restricting image generation and editing to paying subscribers as it tried to fix safeguard lapses that had allowed sexualised outputs, including depictions of scantily clad children. “The government views the practice of non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of human rights, dignity, and the security of citizens in the digital space,” communications and digital minister Meutya Hafid said in a statement. The ministry has also summoned X officials to discuss the matter. Musk said on X that anyone using Grok to make illegal content would suffer the same consequences as if they had uploaded illegal content. xAI replied to Reuters’ email seeking comment with what seemed to be an automated response: “Legacy Media Lies”. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Indonesia, with the world’s biggest Muslim population, has strict rules that ban the sharing online of content deemed obscene. Indonesia’s block follows Grok switching off its image creation function on Friday for the vast majority of users after the widespread outcry about its use to create sexually explicit and violent imagery. Musk has also been threatened with fines, regulatory action and reports of a possible ban on X in the UK. The tool has also been used to manipulate images of women to remove their clothes and put them in sexualised positions. The function to do so has been switched off except for paying subscribers. Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese has also expressed concern over the use of artificial intelligence on the Grok chatbot to enable exploitative sexual content. The prime minister on Saturday joined a growing list of international leaders including British counterpart Keir Starmer in criticising the social media platform. “The use of generative AI to exploit or sexualise people without their consent is abhorrent,” he told reporters in Canberra. “The fact that this tool was used so that people were using its image creation function through Grok is, I think, just completely abhorrent. “It, once again, is an example of social media not showing social responsibility and Australians and indeed, global citizens deserve better.” While the number of reports received by Australia’s eSafety Office remains small, it says there has been a recent increase relating to the use of Grok to create sexualised or exploitative imagery. The watchdog warned on Friday it would use its powers including removal notices where such material meets the thresholds defined in the Online Safety Act. “X, Grok and a wide range of other services are also subject to systemic safety obligations to detect and remove child sexual exploitation material and other unlawful material as part of Australia’s world-leading industry codes and standards,” it said. With Reuters and AAP

Ukraine war briefing: UK earmarks £200m to prepare for possible Ukraine troop deployment

Britain said it was allocating £200m (US$270m) to fund preparations for the possible deployment of troops to Ukraine, after pledging its soldiers this week to a multinational force for the country in the event of a ceasefire. Visiting the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Friday, British defence minister John Healey said the money would be spent on upgrading vehicles and communication systems and counter-drone protection, as well as ensuring troops are ready to deploy. The announcement follows Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday agreeing to a declaration of intent at a summit of the “coalition of the willing” of Ukraine’s allies, outlining a potential future deployment. Healey said the funding announcement showed the government was “surging investment” into preparations for Ukraine. Russia bombarded Ukraine with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles in a large-scale overnight attack, officials said Friday. For only the second time in the nearly 4-year-old war, it used a new hypersonic missile that struck western Ukraine in a clear warning to Kyiv’s Nato allies. The intense barrage and the launch of the nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile came days after Ukraine and its allies reported major progress toward agreeing on how to defend the country from further Moscow aggression if a US-led peace deal is struck. Russia fired a total of 242 drones and 36 missiles, including the Oreshnik, to hit infrastructure in the western Lviv region and in and around Kyiv, Ukraine said. Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said Ukraine would be initiating international action in response to the use of the missile, including an urgent meeting of the UN security council and a meeting of the Ukraine-Nato Council. “Such a strike close to EU and Nato border is a grave threat to the security on the European continent and a test for the transatlantic community. We demand strong responses to Russia’s reckless actions,” he said in a post on X. Zelenskyy said the strike was “demonstrably” close to EU states and warned Ukraine’s neighbours to take note of the dangers: “From the standpoint of the use of medium-range ballistics, this is the same challenge for Warsaw, Bucharest, Budapest, and many other capitals,” he said in his nightly video address. “Everyone should understand it in the same way, and take it equally seriously.” The UN security council will meet on Monday to discuss Ukraine, after Russia launched strikes on capital Kyiv causing heating outages in the middle of winter, according to the body’s revised scheduled published Friday night. “The Russian Federation has reached an appalling new level of war crimes and crimes against humanity by its terror against civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine,” Ukrainian ambassador Andriy Melnyk said in a letter to the security council seen by AFP. The leaders of Britain, France and Germany said they spoke about the attack and deemed it “escalatory and unacceptable,” according to a readout of their call released by Keir Starmer’s office on Friday. EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said the Oreshnik launch was “meant as a warning to Europe and to the US”. “Putin doesn’t want peace, Russia’s reply to diplomacy is more missiles and destruction,” Kallas wrote on social media. German chancellor Friedrich Merz, who spoke to the leaders of France and Britain, said: “Threatening gestures are intended to instil fear, but they will not work. We stand with Ukraine.” UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres “strongly condemns” Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure, his spokesperson said Friday. Ukrainian officials said four people were killed and at least 25 wounded in Kyiv as apartment buildings were struck in the attack. Those killed included an emergency medical aid worker, according to Kyiv city military administration head Tymur Tkachenko. Four doctors and one police officer were injured while responding to the attacks, authorities said. Zelenskyy said 20 residential buildings in Kyiv had also been damaged, including the Qatari embassy, in one of the largest attacks on the capital for months. Qatar expressed “deep regret” over the embassy hit and said that none of its staff there had been harmed. Russia denied targeting the area around the mission and claimed it was hit by a Ukrainian air defence missile. Mass heating outages caused by Russian strikes on Kyiv are set to last into the weekend, as the capital’s mayor called on residents to temporarily leave the city with sub-zero temperatures expected to fall even lower. About half of snowy Kyiv’s apartment buildings – nearly 6,000 – were left without heat amid daytime temperatures of about minus 8 degrees Celsius (17.6 fahrenheit), mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Water supplies also were disrupted. Ukraine said Friday that Russia had hit two cargo ships off its south coast in the Black Sea, killing a Syrian crew member on board one of the vessels. One of the ships was en route to load grain at the southern port of Chornomorsk, while the other was hit near the port of Odesa while transporting soya beans, restoration minister Oleksiy Kuleba said on Telegram.

Trump claims he has cancelled second wave of attacks on Venezuela

Donald Trump has claimed that he cancelled a second wave of attacks on Venezuela because it was cooperating with the US on oil infrastructure and had released political prisoners. The US president said he had cancelled planned military action in recognition that the authorities in Caracas had released “large numbers” of prisoners and were “seeking peace”. “This is a very important and smart gesture,” Trump posted on social media. “The USA and Venezuela are working well together, especially as it pertains to rebuilding, in a much bigger, better, and more modern form, their oil and gas infrastructure. Because of this cooperation, I have cancelled the previously expected second Wave of Attacks, which looks like it will not be needed.” Trump did not elaborate on the alleged plan for fresh strikes but said the US navy armada in the Caribbean would remain, leaving Washington with the ability to attack Venezuela at short notice. “All ships will stay in place for safety and security purposes.” On Friday morning, US marines and navy sailors seized a fifth oil tanker, the Olina, which was falsely flying the flag of the small south-east Asian country of Timor-Leste, in the Caribbean near Trinidad. The assault was launched from the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford, which remains positioned off Venezuela’s coast. In a post on Truth Social later on Friday, Trump said the Olina was “on its way back to Venezuela”. At a meeting with American oil industry figures at the White House, Trump said the US would sell up to 50m barrels of Venezuelan oil and pick which firms could invest in the country. “One of the reasons you couldn’t go in [was] you had no guarantees, you had no security, but now you have total security,” Trump told the executives. “You’re dealing with us directly. You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all. We don’t want you to deal with Venezuela.” The Venezuelan government earlier said it had received a “delegation of diplomatic officials from the US Department of State who will carry out technical and logistical assessments inherent to the diplomatic function”, with a view to the “restoration of diplomatic missions in both countries”. The expectation is that the assessment will lead to the gradual reopening of the US embassy, which has had no diplomats since 2019, when the US and other countries declared Nicolás Maduro’s government illegitimate and recognised Juan Guaidó as interim president. “Likewise, a delegation of Venezuelan diplomats will be sent to the US to carry out the corresponding duties,” the regime added, while insisting on framing the move as part of its efforts to “address the consequences arising from the aggression and the kidnapping of the president of the republic and the first lady, as well as to pursue a working agenda of mutual interest”. On Thursday, Venezuela announced the release of an “important number” of detainees. About 24 hours later, however, human rights organisations were able to confirm only about a dozen releases and are pressing the regime to free all political prisoners, who they estimate number between 800 and 1,000. The Committee for the Freedom of Political Prisoners posted that it was stationed outside various prisons, where “institutional indifference persists”. “In many cases, officials claim to be unaware of release orders; in others, even while acknowledging the official announcements, they point to the alleged absence of release warrants,” the NGO said in a statement. The former opposition candidate Enrique Márquez was among those released from prison, according to an opposition statement. “It’s all over now,” Márquez said in a video taken by a local journalist who accompanied him and his wife, as well as another freed opposition member, Biagio Pilieri. Spain’s foreign ministry confirmed the release of five Spanish nationals, one of them a citizen with dual nationality, who it said were “preparing to travel to Spain with assistance from our embassy in Caracas”. On Thursday, Trump said he planned soon to meet the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. Since the US operation to capture Maduro on 3 January the future governance of the South American country has remained an open question, with Trump over the weekend dismissing the idea of working with Machado, saying “she doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country”. But in a Fox News interview on Thursday, the US president said Machado was “coming in next week sometime”, adding: “I look forward to saying hello to her.” Asked whether he would accept Machado’s Nobel peace prize if she gave it to him, Trump said: “I’ve heard that she wants to do that. That’d be a great honour.” This will be Trump’s first meeting with Machado, who said this week that she had not spoken to the US president since she won the prize in October. Trump has not publicly made the same offer to Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, although in an interview with the New York Times on Thursday Trump said the US was “getting along very well” with Rodríguez’s government and that they were “giving us everything that we feel is necessary”. On Friday, the retired diplomat Edmundo González, who was chosen by Machado to run for president in 2024 – and who, the opposition has shown by obtaining copies of the tally sheets, did in fact win the vote – said he had spoken by phone with Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and told him that “democratic reconstruction in Venezuela depends on the explicit recognition of the electoral result of 28 July 2024”. González has been living in exile in Spain since September. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, said in an interview published on Friday by El País that during a one-hour phone call with the US president this week, “Trump told me he was thinking about doing bad things in Colombia. The message was that they were already preparing something, planning it – a military operation.” Asked whether he feared suffering the same fate as Maduro, Petro said: “Undoubtedly. Nicolás Maduro, or any president in the world, can be removed if they do not align with certain interests.” Strikes on Colombian insurgent groups in Venezuela are apparently not off the table, however. On Thursday, Colombia’s interior minister said that during a call between Trump and Petro, the Colombian leader asked for US cooperation in combating fighters of the National Liberation Army (ELN), whose troops straddle the border. Petro asked if the US could help “hit the ELN hard on the border because when we attack they always end up in Venezuela and there have been times when Venezuela helped and other times it hasn’t”, he told local radio station Blu Radio. “They agreed to conduct joint operations against the ELN.” In recent days, Colombia’s defence minister, Pedro Sánchez, has taken to calling the 6,000-strong ELN a “cartel”. While the group was born as a leftist Cuba-inspired guerrilla force in the 1960s, it has since become deeply involved in Colombia’s drug trade. Trump told Fox News that it would take time for Venezuela to get to a place where it can hold elections. US strikes on alleged drug boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea have killed more than 100 people since they began in September. They formed part of a concerted pressure campaign on Maduro that culminated in his dramatic abduction by US forces. As part of that campaign, the US was understood to have conducted a strike on a docking area inside Venezuela, but land strikes would mark a significant escalation, with suggestions they could target cartels in Mexico. “We are going to start now hitting land with regard to the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico,” Trump told the broadcaster Sean Hannity on Fox News. Sibylla Brodzinsky, Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Growing protests in Iran do not necessarily herald a return to monarchy

Supporters of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s deposed shah, were claiming the crowds out in the streets of Iran were a direct response to his call to action. They described it as a referendum on his leadership and that the response showed he had won. Yet the issue of an alternative leadership for Iran remains unresolved. Many Iranians, eager to end the 47-year-long rule of the clerics, still view a return to monarchical rule with suspicion. On the international stage, Donald Trump has yet to endorse Pahlavi. Pahlavi’s supporters, including on the foreign satellite channels, highlight the many calls for the return of the shah being heard in the crowds. However, just as Trump did not rush to back the candidacy of the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, the US president is being equally cautious about Pahlavi, apparently fearing the US may end up entangled in a civil war. The lack of a clear alternative leadership or even a single set of political demands by the protesters, apart from ending corruption, repression and inflation, has been a boon to Pahlavi since he at least has name recognition and has nurtured support for the monarchy for decades. Others inside Iran capable of leading the country to a secular future, such as Narges Mohammadi and Mostafa Tajzadeh, have been locked in jail sporadically for years. One Iranian described Iran as living in an era of no manifesto politics. Pahlavi, calling on his supporters to take to the streets again on Friday, is due at an event in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on Tuesday, but his team stressed he had not yet been granted a meeting with Trump, and the event, a Jerusalem prayer breakfast, was unconnected with the US president’s team. In a sign of Trump’s caution, the president has also avoided acting on his unspecific pledge to come to the aid of the Iranians if they were being attacked. Trump’s caution has led to reports the president may be exploring a deal with a breakaway group inside the government. Officials from Oman, traditional mediators between the US and Iran, are due in Tehran this weekend. Although desperation is setting in, there is no sign the panic that has swept parts of the government is forcing the supreme leader to rethink his determination to retain Iran’s uranium stockpile or aspirations to enrich uranium inside the country. For him it is a symbol of national sovereignty. But Trump may also be wary of a full embrace of Pahlavi since it is possible to misinterpret the calls for his return. In an internal analysis given to the Guardian, one Iranian said: “What is heard in the slogans today is not a call [to] return to the crown; it is an escape from a dead end. A society that has no way out retreats – not out of interest, but out of compulsion. This retreat is not a choice; it is the nervous reaction of a tired political body that no longer responds to prescriptions. “For decades, society was told to ‘wait’. It waited. It was told ‘it will be fixed’. It wasn’t fixed. It was told ‘it can’t get worse, it’s enough’. It got worse. Then they said ‘we have no alternative’. And this was precisely the moment when the street created its own alternative; not with classical rationality, but with the instinct for survival. “The monarchist slogan is not a declaration of love for Pahlavi: it is a declaration of disgust for the Islamic Republic. It is a cry of ‘no’ when no ’yes’ is available … Everyone is stuck in the past or in empty promises. When the horizon is empty, society looks back because it sees nothing ahead.” The Iranian Writers’ Association also called for caution about “externally imposed solutions”. “Freedom certainly will not fall from the sky with bombs and missiles from predatory powers. Those who have risen up against the status quo while maintaining their independence from domestic and foreign exploiters,” the group said. “Neither wait for repetition of an imaginary past and its heralds, nor wait for fake reformers.” Pahlavi has long been disliked by the left in Iran. The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company, one of the most prominent independent unions, said on Wednesday it opposed “the reproduction of old and authoritarian forms of power”. “The path to liberation of workers does not lie through the path of a leader carved above the people nor by relying on foreign powers,” it added. Either way, the current reformist Iranian leadership, struggling to understand the evaporation of the nationalism created by the 12-day war in June, has few solutions left. It can rally the people against what it claims are foreign malice and rioters. It can hope somehow the technocrats in the economics ministry and Central Bank have gathered the resources to stabilise the currency. Ahmad Naghibzadeh, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Tehran, warned the solutions may no longer be technocratic, but historic. He told Euronews: “In the end, there will be no choice but to repeat in Iran what happened in Europe, that is, they decided the dispute between religion and state in favour of the state.”

EU states back controversial Mercosur deal with Latin American countries

European Union member states have backed the biggest ever free trade agreement with a group of Latin American countries, ending 25 years of negotiations but stoking further tensions with farmers and environmentalists around the bloc. The contentious Mercosur deal with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay prompted immediate protests in Poland, France, Greece and Belgium, with farmers blocking key roads in Paris, Brussels and Warsaw. Opposition parties in France from the far left and the far right also seized on the deal, agreed in principle on Friday, to try to topple Emmanuel Macron’s government with a motion tabled for a vote of no confidence. The member state approvals end months of wrangling in Brussels and a last-minute hitch before Christmas when Italy’s opposition threatened to collapse the deal. France, Poland, Austria, Ireland and Hungary voted against while Belgium abstained. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, long seen as a key vote, backed it, allowing the landmark deal to be adopted under qualified majority voting rules. The European parliament must approve the deal to bring it into force, but as trade falls within the exclusive competence of the European Commission, its head, Ursula von der Leyen, is expected to travel to Paraguay on Monday to formally sign the agreement. Von der Leyen said the EU had listened to farmers, describing the deal as a “win-win agreement” yielding a €50bn opportunity to EU exporters by 2040 and €9bn growth to Mercosur countries. She also vowed to step up import controls to ensure EU standards on meat and other farm produce imports were upheld. Supporters of the deal say it will help deepen the EU’s economic cooperation with the global south, where China is already seeking alliances in the wake of the disruption Donald Trump has caused to the international trade order. It will also help the EU wean itself off China for critical minerals and rare earths vital for the auto and tech sectors as these elements are abundant in the Mercosur countries. Brazil accounts for about 20% of the world’s reserves of graphite, nickel, manganese and rare earths. But it also holds 94% of global reserves of niobium, a metal used in the aerospace industry, while Argentina is the third largest producer of lithium, a material used in batteries in electric vehicles. “The deal is not only about economics. Latin America is a region of intense competition for influence between western countries and China. Failing to sign the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement risked pushing Latin American economies closer to Beijing’s orbit. “The conclusion of the deal also signals that Europeans are serious about diversifying their export markets away from the US,” said Agathe Demarais, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a leading thinktank. Farmers in beef, poultry and grain sectors claim they are collateral damage. “This will kill our agriculture in Poland,” Janusz Sampolski, a Polish farmer, told Agence France-Presse. “We will be dependent on supply chains from other countries,” he said, adding that it could threaten Poland’s food security “in the event of the threat of war”. The Climate Action Network said the deal was not only about tariffs and quotas but would “drive deforestation” and “worsen human rights conditions in some of the world’s most sensitive ecosystems” with incentives to farm more beef and soy and timber for paper in deforestation-prone areas.