Sudanese paramilitaries have attacked the city of el-Fasher killing at least 38 people, according to local activists, while international rights groups accuse the fighters of widespread sexual violence. The local resistance committee, a volunteer group coordinating aid in el-Fasher, said on Sunday that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) targeted the centre of the capital of North Darfur state "with four high-explosive missiles". The massacre followed an earlier drone attack on the city's Saudi Hospital on Friday, which killed nine people and wounded 20, forcing doctors to halt operations. World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described attacks on healthcare facilities across Sudan as "deplorable" in a post on X on Saturday. The RSF and Sudan's army have been locked in a power struggle since mid-April 2023, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises, with tens of thousands killed and more than 11 million displaced.

International watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Thursday accused the Burkina Faso army of killing at least 60 civilians in drone strikes which the government said targeted armed groups. The deaths occurred in three military drone strikes since August, two at crowded markets and another at a funeral, the rights group said in a new report. Since becoming head of state after a 2022 coup, Captain Ibrahim Traore has focused on a strong security response in reclaiming swathes of territory controlled by armed groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the ISIS (ISIL) group. But those efforts have often been criticised as heavy-handed, with the HRW report being the latest instance of that criticism. HRW said it interviewed dozens of witnesses between September and November 2023 and analysed photographs, videos and satellite images.

A drone attack on an open market south of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, has killed at least 40 people, activists and medical workers said, as the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) battle for control of the country. At least 70 others were injured in the attack in Khartoum's Mayo neighbourhood on Sunday, according to resistance committees and two healthcare workers at the Bashair University Hospital, where the casualties were treated. Many of them will require amputations. The group posted footage on social media showing bodies wrapped in white sheets in an open yard at the hospital. Reporting from Khartoum, Al Jazeera's Hiba Morgan said the drone attack was carried out by the Sudanese army.

Washington, DC – Despite numerous eyewitness testimonies, investigations by media outlets and rights groups, and a Palestinian probe all determining that Israeli forces fatally shot journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the United States has not condemned Israel for the killing. Instead, since the veteran Al Jazeera reporter was killed on May 11 in the occupied West Bank, top US officials have insisted that Israel can and should conduct an investigation. But in this US response, many advocates see a familiar script that President Joe Biden's administration has employed on more than one occasion to address Israeli violations: raise concerns, call for more information, and then move on like they never happened. "It's pretty damn thick file of abuses and murders and violations without any end or acceptable outcome as to the investigation of these crimes," Khalil Jahshan, executive director of the Arab Center Washington DC, a think tank, told Al Jazeera. "So that is continuing unfortunately, and governments on purpose bet on the short attention span of the public."

TBILISI, July 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - (Editor's note: contains offensive language and terms of racial abuse) From scanning residents' faces to let them into their building to spotting police suspects in a crowd, the rise of facial recognition is accompanied by a growing chorus of concern about unethical uses of the technology. A report published on Monday by U.S.-based researchers showing that Russian facial recognition companies have built tools to detect a person's race has raised fears among digital rights groups, who describe the technology as "purpose-made for discrimination." Developer guides and code examples unearthed by video surveillance research firm IPVM show software advertised by four of Russia's biggest facial analytics firms can use artificial intelligence (AI) to classify faces based on their perceived ethnicity or race. There is no indication yet that Russian police have targeted minorities using the software developed by the firms - AxxonSoft, Tevian, VisionLabs and NtechLab - whose products are sold to authorities and businesses in the country and abroad. But Moscow-based AxxonSoft said the Thomson Reuters Foundation's enquiry prompted it to disable its ethnicity analytics feature, saying in an emailed response it was not interested "in promoting any technologies that could be a basis for ethnic segregation".

Beijing – Muslims in China's Xinjiang were "arbitrarily" selected for arrest by a computer program that flagged suspicious behavior, activists said Wednesday, in a report detailing big data's role in repression in the restive region. The U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said leaked police data that listed over 2,000 detainees from Aksu prefecture was further evidence of "how China's brutal repression of Xinjiang's Turkic Muslims is being turbocharged by technology." Beijing has come under intense international criticism over its policies in the resource-rich territory, where rights groups say as many as 1 million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities have been held in internment camps. China defends the camps as vocational training centers aimed at stamping out terrorism and improving employment opportunities. Surveillance spending in Xinjiang has ballooned in recent years, with facial recognition, iris scanners, DNA collection and artificial intelligence deployed across the province in the name of preventing terrorism.

BANGKOK - An order for mobile phone users in Thailand's restive south to submit a photo of themselves for facial recognition purposes is causing uproar from opponents who see it as further curtailing the rights of the Muslim-majority population. But an army spokesman on Wednesday defended the move, saying the facial identification scheme is needed to root out insurgents deploying mobile phone-detonated home-made bombs. Thailand's three southernmost states -- Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat -- have since 2004 been rife with conflict between Malay-Muslim rebels and the Buddhist-majority Thai state, which annexed the region around a century ago. The tit-for-tat violence has claimed around 7,000 lives, mostly civilians of both faiths, and security forces have detained individuals suspected of being separatist rebels without warrants in the past. Now telecoms companies are requiring all users of the region's 1.5 million mobile numbers to submit a photo of themselves for facial recognition purposes following orders from the army -- a move that is drawing anger from rights groups as the deadline to register photos nears.

ATAQ, YEMEN – The United States has waged a drone war in Yemen for 16 years, trying to suppress al-Qaida's branch there. But the campaign has had a hidden cost: civilians cut down by the drones' missiles. There is no comprehensive count of civilian deaths because of the difficulty of confirming identities and allegiances of those killed. But in an examination of drone strikes this year alone, AP found that at least 30 of the dead likely did not belong to al-Qaida. That is around a third of all those killed in drone strikes so far in 2018.

Apple is investigating a factory in southwest China after a labour rights group said the tech giant's supplier forced student workers to work "like robots" to assemble its popular Apple Watch. Many were compelled to work in order to get their vocational degrees and had to do night shifts, according to an investigation by Hong Kong-based NGO Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM). SACOM interviewed 28 students at the plant in Chongqing municipality over the summer, and all of them said they had not voluntarily applied to work there, according to the report published last week. They worked under the guise of "internships", SACOM said, a practice rights groups say is widespread in China as manufacturers pair up with vocational schools to supply workers and fill labour shortages when they ramp up production for new models or the Christmas rush. "Our graduation certificate will be withheld by the school if we refuse to come," said one student majoring in e-commerce, according to SACOM.

Inc. in June pitched its facial recognition technology -- which can identify people from surveillance footage using image databases -- as a tool for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, showing that Amazon continued to push the software to law enforcement agencies as criticism swirled from the company's workforce and civil liberties groups. Employees in the Amazon Web Services cloud-computing unit met with the federal agency in California to present its artificial intelligence tools, according to emails obtained by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. Those tools include Rekognition, which uses artificial intelligence to quickly identify people in photos and videos. The software enables law enforcement to track individuals from cameras in public places. The American Civil Liberties Union in May criticized the use of the technology by police departments in Oregon and Florida, saying it threatened civil rights.