US-led coalition reaffirms commitment to protect Kurdish region in Syria

2024-12-20 05:09
Shafaq News/ 

The US-led coalition remains committed to protecting northeastern Syria's Kurdish region from military escalation, a senior official from the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) said on Friday.

In a statement to Shafaq News, the AANES official, Jamill Rahmano, painted a picture of Syria as “uncertain and evolving,” where the future remains clouded by ongoing negotiations among international and regional powers.

Highlighting the coalition’s pivotal role in averting military escalations, he pointed to a recent meeting in Raqqa that brought together the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and local leaders. During the talks, the coalition reiterated its stance, northeastern Syria is governed by international agreements that make military incursions unlikely.

Rahmano also voiced concerns over continued Turkish military activity in Kurdish areas, underscoring the importance of coalition efforts in maintaining regional stability. Regarding de-escalation proposals, he confirmed, “Discussions are underway to designate Kobani as a demilitarized zone to prevent ongoing Turkish bombardment.”

Service conditions in the region remain dire with electricity supplied for only four hours daily, although water access is stable, Rahmano noted.

The conflict between Turkiye and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeastern Syria continues to escalate. Turkiye regards the SDF, particularly its primary faction, the People's Protection Units (YPG), as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which it designates as a terrorist organization.

Turkiye's staunch opposition to any form of autonomous Kurdish governance in the region has fueled repeated military campaigns, often carried out alongside its ally, the Syrian National Army (SNA). Despite multiple US-brokered ceasefire efforts, the situation remains volatile, with tensions showing no signs of abating

Opinion

Rebuilding Syria requires much more than bricks and mortar

The very social fabric that holds Syrian people together needs to be repaired, and this work requires significant investment from all stakeholders.

Tamer Qarmout
Associate Professor in Public Policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
Published On 22 Dec 2024

A Syrian boy rides his bicycle past destroyed buildings in the city of Harasta in Eastern Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus on December 14, 2024 [Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP]

Rebuilding Syria after more than a decade of devastating conflict is no simple task. The country’s destruction spans physical infrastructure, governance systems, and the very social fabric that once held its people together. While the dream of a prosperous, strong and unified new Syria is certainly achievable after the fall of the al-Assad regime, certain conditions must be met before the country can rise from its ashes.

First, a transitional government whose authority is accepted by all stakeholders must be formed to ensure a smooth transfer to democracy. Any attempt to rebuild can only achieve success if it is guided by an inclusive and stable government that has international recognition and the trust of the Syrian people. A new Syria cannot be built without a new social contract that champions human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Crafting this contract will demand the collective wisdom of Syria’s brightest minds and intellectual leaders, as well as the genuine support of the global community. Only a transition steered by Syrians themselves, but fully supported by international institutions through the sharing of expertise and provision of technical support, can ensure successful reconstruction.

This endeavour will be challenging, and the path to realising it will likely be fraught with obstacles as the current political landscape remains fragmented, with no clear path to a stable and fully representative government. Without this, however, reconstruction efforts risk becoming another tool for deepening divisions rather than healing them.

Second, the stability of the Syrian state and security of its people must be guaranteed. A country under attack and fraught with conflict cannot be effectively rebuilt. Israel’s air attacks on Syrian territory and annexation of more land since the fall of the al-Assad regime have exacerbated instability. Such actions not only devastate infrastructure but also demoralise communities and jeopardise hopes for swift reconstruction and recovery.

As the global community keeps a close eye on Syria’s new leadership to ensure a smooth transition, it must also send a clear and forceful message to Israel. This message should strongly condemn Israel’s actions and demand their immediate cessation. The international community needs to make it clear that such behaviour is unacceptable and must stop right away. Stability isn’t just about the absence of war; it’s about creating an environment where people feel safe to rebuild their lives and invest in their future, The last thing Syrians need at this critical stage is a new war front with all the uncertainties and instabilities it will create for the new transitional government.

Third, international sanctions must be lifted to allow the country to get back on its feet. The Caesar Act, especially, which has crippled Syria’s economy and made it nearly impossible to bring in foreign investment, must be repealed. These sanctions, which were aimed at pressuring the previous regime to enact human rights reforms and ease repression, have also had a significant effect on the lives of everyday Syrians, deepening their suffering and despair.

The global community may hesitate to fully lift sanctions due to uncertainty about Syria’s new leadership. Nevertheless, a more nuanced approach could be adopted. Instead of blanket sanctions, a targeted strategy that involves easing restrictions on Syria’s dynamic business community and private sector could be implemented. This would contribute to Syria’s long-term stability and speed up reconstruction. Meanwhile, targeted sanctions against specific government officials can be used as a tool to encourage a positive transition, if necessary. This approach balances the need for caution with the imperative of economic revival and reconstruction.

Fourth, civil society must be empowered to play an active role in the reconstruction process. Independent local organisations must be closely involved in all reconstruction efforts, ensuring transparency and accountability. Under the rule of the al-Assad family, Syria has never had an independent civil society. Years of iron-fisted control have snuffed out community-led initiatives, leaving a society ill-equipped for meaningful public participation. However, during a period of transition and wide-reaching reconstruction, grassroots organisations that advocate for fairness and ensure aid reaches those in need have a crucial role to play. Without them, the rebuilding process risks being tainted by corruption and favouritism. Syria’s new rulers must prioritise supporting and strengthening Syrian civil society to ensure a healthy and successful reconstruction.

Rebuilding Syria isn’t just about politics – it’s a complex technical puzzle, too. The country desperately needs people with technical knowledge and experience to be able to make a long-term plan for reconstruction, budget effectively and tackle obstacles that will inevitably emerge in various complex rebuilding projects. But here’s the tricky part: Should Syria’s new leaders tap into the know-how of officials from the old regime? These officials and civil servants have valuable insider knowledge, but their ties to a government accused of terrible acts could make large segments of the population lose faith in the whole process. Finding the right balance is crucial. The rebuilding effort must be inclusive of all Syrians, and especially those hit hardest by the war – women, children, and minority groups. Alienating any group by giving too much power to people with close ties to the old regime would not just be wrong, but a surefire way to reignite tensions and sabotage any reconstruction effort before it truly begins.

Syria’s reconstruction will also be expensive. Who’s going to pay for all this? Syria’s new leadership cannot do this alone using only what is left in the state’s coffers. A coalition of international donors, including UN organisations, would need to provide the country with extensive funds. But they’ll open their wallets only if there’s a government that people trust. Donors need to know their money won’t be wasted or stolen. It’s also important to ensure the aid coming into Syria is not scattered or politically motivated. Donors tying aid to their own political demands and priorities would lead only to wasted efforts, gaps in help and more distrust. What’s needed is a united approach that would prioritise the real needs of the Syrian people and not allow aid efforts to be shaped by political games. Syria could benefit from hosting a comprehensive reconstruction conference, bringing together international donors and the new Syrian government to align reconstruction priorities, ensure transparent collaboration, and begin rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and social fabric.

Last but not least, education will be crucial in rebuilding Syria into a vibrant, inclusive, prosperous country. A strong education system fosters a society that values human rights, community involvement, and fairness. Only by investing in education and community engagement can Syria heal its social fabric and nurture a generation that chooses dialogue and collaboration over conflict.

The most important aspect of rebuilding Syria will be rebuilding Syrian society. After all, behind all the technical stuff are real people – families who have lost loved ones in arbitrary detention, children who were left without an education, entire communities suffering from trauma. Rebuilding isn’t just about fixing roads, houses, schools, and hospitals; it’s about giving people back their dignity and hope. Syrians need to feel their suffering wasn’t for nothing, that they have a say in the future of their country, and that the days ahead hold more than loss and conflict.

Rebuilding Syria will take time and require dedication from all stakeholders. It’s not just about construction – it’s about rebuilding trust, including everyone in the process, and making sure people are held accountable. The journey ahead is long, but with the right groundwork, there’s hope that Syria can once again become a thriving, resilient country. This is a challenge that matters for Syrians and all of us.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Tamer Qarmout
Associate Professor in Public Policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
Dr Tamer Qarmout is an Associate Professor in Public Policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Prior to joining academia, Dr Qarmout worked for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in several management positions. His research focuses on public policy analysis, good governance, public administration reform, foreign aid, and conflict resolution. He also has expertise in the areas of policy development, strategic planning, management, institutional reform, and public sector capacity development. He has significant program management experience dealing with stakeholders in planning and implementing large programs aimed at building institutional and governance capacities of public and nonprofit organizations, and post conflict early recovery and reconstruction schemes. 

Prior to joining the Doha Institute, he worked as a lecturer and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Fertility Rates Falling across the World But Not in Post-Soviet Central Asia

Russians Today Associate Stalin with Victory and Order and See Him as Model Russian Ruler, ‘Svobodnaya Pressa’ Informal Survey Finds

Paul Goble

Sunday, December 22, 2024

    Staunton, Dec. 20 – On the 145th anniversary of the birth of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Svobodnaya Pressa journalists conducted an informal survey of Russians on the streets of Moscow. They found that Russians today feel that Stalin is the embodiment of victory and order and thus is the model Russian ruler.  
    Although the survey was not conducted among anything resembling a representative sample and although those sharing their views may not have wanted to say anything to someone they did not know that might put them at odds with the Kremlin, the answers they did give suggest how successful Putin has been in getting Russians to look past Stalin’s crimes.
    (For the poll, see svpressa.ru/reports/sptv/442873/ and the attached video recording of Russians’ answers.)

Sunday, December 22, 2024

Fertility Rates Falling across the World But Not in Post-Soviet Central Asia

Paul Goble

Sunday, December 22, 2024

    Staunton, Dec. 20 – Over the last three years, fertility rates – the number of children per woman per lifetime – have fallen across the world from 2.23 in 2022 to 2.19 in 2024 and are now below replacement levels almost everywhere including in Russia. But there is one region that is an exception: the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia.
    There, according to Moscow observer Konstantin Dvinsky, statistics show they have risen in four of the give countries over the last 20 years and so the population there will continue to rise and at least for some time be a source of migrant labors for other countries, such as Russia (iarex.ru/articles/143234.html).
    Between 2003 and 2023, fertility rates rose from 2.07 to 3.01 in Kazakhstan, from 2.5 to 3.5 in Uzbekistan, from 3.42 o 3.5 in Tajikistan and from 2.59 to 3.5 in Kyrgyzstan, reversing earlier declines and making Central Asia an outlier as far as demographic behavior of the world’s regions is concerned.
    According to Dvinsky, this is good news for Russia because it means that the Russian Federation will be able to count on Central Asia as a source of immigrant labor well into the future.  

India child marriage crackdown reaches nearly 5,000 arrests


Photo used for illustrative purpose.

A crackdown on illegal child marriages in India's northeast has resulted in nearly 5,000 arrests, after 416 people were detained in the latest police sweep, a minister said on Sunday.

"We will continue to take bold steps to end this social evil," Himanta Biswa Sarma, Chief Minister of Assam state, said in a statement.

"Assam continues its fight against child marriage," he added, saying raids have been carried out overnight and that those arrested would be produced in court on Sunday.

India is home to more than 220 million child brides, according to the United Nations, but the number of child weddings has fallen dramatically this century.

Assam state had already arrested thousands in earlier abolition drives that began in February 2023, including parents of married couples and registrars who signed off on underage betrothals. It takes the total now arrested to more than 4,800 people.

Sarma has campaigned on a platform of stamping out child marriages completely in his state by 2026.

The legal marriage age in India is 18 but millions of children are forced to tie the knot when they are younger, particularly in poorer rural areas.
Many parents marry off their children in the hope of improving their financial security.

The results can be devastating, with girls dropping out of school to cook and clean for their husbands, and suffering health problems from giving birth at a young age.

In a landmark 2017 judgement, India's top court said that sex with an underage wife constituted rape, a ruling cheered by activists.

Agence France-Presse

60,000 more Rohingya flee Bangladesh amid escalating conflict in Myanmar

Arakan Army claims to control border of Rakhine state along Bangladesh border as junta army defeated in more areas

SM Najmus Sakib |22.12.2024 -  TRT/AA

DHAKA, Bangladesh

Amid escalating conflict between the junta government and rebel Arakan Army in Myanmar, a fresh 60,000 Rohingya entered Bangladesh in the last two months, a Bangladeshi official said on Sunday.

Bangladesh is hosting over 1.2 million Rohingya in its southeastern Cox’s Bazar district. Most of the Rohingya Muslims fled from Myanmar in August 2017 in a military crackdown.

The Rohingya infiltration has also been facilitated by corruption on the Bangladesh-Myanmar border as some people help the Rohingya cross border in exchange for money.

Md. Touhid Hossain, foreign affairs adviser, told reporters about his visit to Bangkok, where an informal consultation meeting was held on Thursday among six countries, including Laos, Thailand, India, China, Myanmar, and Bangladesh.

“Our position in principle is not to allow any more Rohingya to enter. However, sometimes the situation becomes such that we have nothing more to do. In such a situation, we allowed 60,000 Rohingya to enter. It's not that we officially let them in, they entered through different routes,” Hossain explained in Dhaka.

However, he said he believed that there would not be another wave of influx of Rohingya. “But we have to make arrangements to stop that wave, along with the international community,” he added.

The meeting was held last Thursday under the chairmanship of Thai Foreign Minister Maris Sangiampongsa. Myanmar's Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister U Than Swe was also present at the meeting.

Neighboring countries do not see any possibility of Myanmar returning to its previous state, Hossain added, noting that all the countries in the meeting asked Myanmar to resolve its internal problems through talks with all parties.

The Arakan Army takes control of more areas in Rakhine state along the Bangladesh border. However, Hossain said it is not possible to hold formal talks with those who now control more areas in Myanmar along the Bangladesh border.

Citing the meeting with Swe, Hossain said: “I told him (Than Swe) that the Myanmar border is not under your control. The border has come under the control of non-state actors. As a state, we cannot get involved with non-state actors. So, they (Myanmar government) have to see in what way to solve the border and Rohingya problems.”

Anadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. 

How WhatsApp became the world’s ‘everything app’

From its private messaging focus, WhatsApp’s acquisition by Meta has seen it expand into a business platform, e-commerce and more.

Issie Lapowsky, Rest of World

WhatsApp @WhatsApp/X and Canva.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

Shivika Sabharwal’s nerves kicked in the second she spotted the size of the crowd. It was mid-September, and Sabharwal was standing center stage inside a massive event space at Mumbai’s extravagant Jio World Convention Centre. The space, which had recently hosted the star-studded wedding between billionaire heirs Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant, had been transformed into a sea of green – green spotlights, green archways, a neon-green light display — in honor of WhatsApp’s first business summit in India.

Around 1,000 lanyard-wearing executives had shown up for the event, and all eyes were trained on Sabharwal.

The relatively introverted 32-year-old is a professional ceramist and not a tech expert. But she was the perfect messenger for the story that WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, has been increasingly eager to tell: how businesses of all sizes are using its messaging app to grow.

Standing on stage alongside her father and business partner, Sabharwal explained how she started her company, Shivika Pottery Gallery, out of her home on the outskirts of Delhi. In the early days, she advertised her creations to her personal network from her own WhatsApp account. But as her business expanded, she needed a dedicated way to manage messages and reach new potential customers. Her father, who’d spent some of his career working in tech, suggested she try the WhatsApp Business app, a free product that allows small businesses to set up digital storefronts.

Sabharwal used the app to run ads on Instagram and Facebook that allowed users to begin chatting with her on WhatsApp. It increased her reach – so much so that she expanded into teaching pottery, sometimes hosting as many as 30 classes in a single month. When WhatsApp started seeking out volunteers to test its new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot for businesses, Sabharwal and her father signed up – she was eager for new tools to manage her inbox. “This lets me remain focused on what I love,” Sabharwal told the crowd at the Mumbai summit, “which is creating pottery and teaching students.”
ADVERTISEMENT


WhatsApp may have transformed Sabharwal’s business. But Meta’s goal isn’t to sell pottery. Rather, Shivika Pottery Gallery is a tiny element in the larger solar system of services, features, and connections that make up WhatsApp. Summit attendees also learned about the Bengaluru transit system, which now lets people buy train tickets on WhatsApp, and about Max Life, a major Indian insurance company that uses WhatsApp to translate its services into seven regional languages. They heard from the co-founder of Delhi-based children’s food brand, Slurrp Farm, which now makes a quarter of its direct sales on WhatsApp, and from an executive at HDFC Bank, the 10th largest bank in the world, about how customers are now banking on the platform. “Our banking experience has to work for everyone, and this is where we find WhatsApp interesting,” Anjani Rathor, HDFC’s chief digital officer, told the crowd.

WhatsApp is the world’s most widely used messaging app; the company says it has 2 billion daily users. These users send more than 100 billion messages every day in 60 languages across 180 countries. Some 400 million of those users are in India, WhatsApp’s biggest market, followed by another 120 million in Brazil.

WhatsApp initially achieved that global dominance in large part by doing just one thing very well: enabling cheap, private, and reliable messaging on almost any phone, almost anywhere in the world. But in the decade since Meta acquired WhatsApp for an eye-watering $22 billion in 2014, the app has been transformed from a narrowly focused utilitarian tool into a sort of “everything app.” In countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia, WhatsApp is now also a place for scheduling doctor’s appointments and conducting real estate deals – and buying Sabharwal’s ceramic ducks. In Brazil, the beauty juggernaut L’Oréal now makes an average of 25% of its online direct-to-consumer sales on WhatsApp.

The shift has been driven, of course, by money. WhatsApp has never been much of a moneymaker. While Meta makes billions off mining people’s personal data to sell more ads, WhatsApp is an encrypted app, whose founders once very publicly swore off advertising altogether.

Lately, however, WhatsApp has been aggressively luring big businesses to its suite of paid messaging products for businesses, and openly flirting with the possibility of introducing ads in the not-too-distant future.

True to Meta’s appetite for voracious expansion, WhatsApp’s goal is nothing short of getting “every business in the world on the platform,” Nikila Srinivasan, Meta’s head of product for business messaging, told Rest of World. During the event in Mumbai, the company announced it would soon begin physically touring smaller cities throughout India to onboard local businesses to the app.

Nikila Srinivasan, head of product for business messaging, at Meta’s office in New York. 

George Etheredge for Rest of World.

It’s still early days, but WhatsApp’s efforts to generate revenue this way are beginning to pay off. Meta now makes billions of dollars from the “click-to-message” ads that businesses purchase. Meta also charges tens of thousands of large enterprises, from Air France to Volvo, to send messages through its premium API, which includes a full suite of marketing, payment, and other features. While Meta’s paid messaging tools brought in about $1 billion last year – peanuts compared to the whopping $132 billion the company earned from ads – paid messaging revenue is growing far faster than ad revenue and has more than doubled since early 2023.

For Meta, which has squeezed every cent out of Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp represents a potentially vast and largely untapped opportunity. It’s little wonder that Mark Zuckerberg has begun referring to WhatsApp as “the next major pillar” of his company.

And yet, for that to be true, Meta will need to pull off a delicate balancing act. To get its money’s worth out of WhatsApp, it will need to transform it into a place where the world’s businesses want to spend their money, without sacrificing the privacy and simplicity that made the world flock to the app in the first place.

Inside the MPK21 building at Meta’s vast Menlo Park headquarters. Marissa Leshnov for Rest of World

Before Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, it was something like the anti-Facebook. Where Facebook had become a place for publicly posting photos and messages for all your friends to see, WhatsApp was all about one-on-one and small group messages. Where Facebook was loaded with ads, apps, and games, WhatsApp’s founders – former Yahoo engineers Jan Koum and Brian Acton – eschewed unessential features and publicly swore off ads. The company had spent no money on marketing and had just 32 engineers at the time it was acquired. (Rest of World attempted to reach Koum and Acton, but received no replies).

But perhaps most significantly, where Facebook struggled to adapt to the mobile era, WhatsApp, which launched in 2009, was a mobile-first product that had amassed roughly half a billion users in just five years – many of them in countries where several people’s first experience of the internet took place on a cellphone. It did so by offering those users a cheap workaround to the sky-high SMS prices that some telecom monopolies charged. Rather than getting hit with a bill for every message they sent, WhatsApp users spent just $1 a year for unlimited messages. That and a $250,000 seed investment were enough to keep WhatsApp financially afloat until it raised $60 million from Sequoia Capital in two separate rounds.

But WhatsApp wasn’t just cheap. Working out of an unmarked, converted garage in Mountain View, California, the engineering team was laser-focused on ensuring speed and reliability – whether a user was messaging from the latest iPhone in a major American city, or BlackBerrys and Nokia feature phones operating in the most remote places. “We were trying to hit every user, everywhere, on every platform,” Chris Peiffer, one of WhatsApp’s first hires and who worked at Stanford University with Koum, told Rest of World. He recalled hiking to a cellular dead zone in the hills near Mountain View with a Nokia C3 to test WhatsApp’s durability with limited bandwidth.

Reliable messaging for everyone, everywhere, wasn’t just altruism – it was a business strategy. WhatsApp’s most likely users weren’t in Silicon Valley, where unlimited texting plans were already widespread, Peiffer said. Instead, the greatest opportunity was in countries like India, where the cost of SMS was out of reach for huge segments of the population, or in tiny European countries like the Netherlands, where cross-border communication was far more common, and therefore, more costly.

Making the app work in all of those places meant building a lightweight product, which wouldn’t drain users’ data, by gathering tons of information about them. “The overall mantra from Jan was: This is the user’s data. They paid for it. We should not be using it wastefully,” Michael Donohue, WhatsApp’s former engineering director, told Rest of World. The founders’ commitment to knowing virtually nothing about its users was such that, in 2013, WhatsApp began plans to bring end-to-end encryption to users’ chats.

This trifecta of cost, reliability, and privacy quickly made WhatsApp a global phenomenon, with users exchanging 10 billion messages a day around the world by 2012. None of this escaped Zuckerberg, who was rushing to ensure the mobile revolution didn’t pass Facebook by. “WhatsApp is already ahead of us in messaging in the same way Instagram was ‘ahead’ of us in photos,” Zuckerberg wrote in April 2012, according to internal documents revealed as part of a federal lawsuit in the US. It was around the same time that Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, and Zuckerberg wrote that he’d gladly shell out another billion for WhatsApp “if we could get them”.

When Facebook did finally acquire WhatsApp – two years later and for a whole lot more money than $1 billion – investors naturally wondered how the social networking giant planned to make a return on this huge investment. Zuckerberg vowed that WhatsApp would “continue to operate independently”, and that its product roadmap would “remain unchanged.” Koum, meanwhile, assured users that the acquisition wouldn’t betray WhatsApp’s ethos. “There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision, and our product,” he said at the time.

As Acton would later tell Forbes, Zuckerberg was supportive of the company’s plans to encrypt the app. Koum and Acton also slipped what was effectively a no-advertising clause into the deal terms, stipulating that they could cash out their remaining shares if Facebook ever tried to make money on WhatsApp without their consent.

But before long, former employees say, culture clashes began between the Facebook and WhatsApp teams.

“WhatsApp was just like: We are focused on doing this communication thing, and that’s all we’re going to do. We’re not going to think about six different things we could build at the same time,” said Donohue, the former engineering director. “I think that was one of the differences.”

Brian Acton and Jan Koum at a conference in Laguna Beach, California, in October 2016. Credit: Reuters.

The clearest physical metaphor for the way that the Meta machine has subsumed WhatsApp is located right inside the company’s vast Menlo Park headquarters.

MPK21, as the building is known, is a nearly 49,000-square-meter behemoth that boasts its own redwood forest. Reaching WhatsApp’s section of the building involves a labyrinthine journey – past the twee reading nooks marking Instagram territory, the conference rooms with nerdcore names like Lorem Ipsum, the spotless mini-kitchens stocked with prebiotic soda, and the motivational posters bearing mottos like “Begin Anywhere”. After a five-minute trek, a bright green wall with the WhatsApp logo appears in the distance, with its own inspirational poster to match: “Move Fast, Stay Simple”.

On a Wednesday in September, the space was nearly empty, save for WhatsApp’s vice president of product, Alice Newton-Rex, who sat in a sunlit conference room dressed in a brand-appropriate green blazer. Newton-Rex joined the company in 2019, when Facebook itself was in the midst of a radical rethink of its role in the world. That year, Zuckerberg announced plans for a new “privacy-focused vision for social networking.” While the Facebook of old had been akin to a digital town square, Zuckerberg argued, “people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room”.

This shift, which became derisively known as Facebook’s “pivot to privacy”, meant overhauling the way its news feed functioned. But it also meant that WhatsApp, the most private of all of Facebook’s apps, would take a more prominent role within the company’s orbit. “We began to expand our vision for the product,” Newton-Rex told Rest of World.

A big part of that vision involved seizing on what Meta believes is a fertile opportunity in business messaging. While mobile adoption and social media use have exploded around the world, e-commerce still lags in many top mobile markets. Only about a third of social media users in India shop online, according to a recent Bain & Company study conducted in partnership with Meta.

And yet, other studies Meta has commissioned have found that 90% of Indian consumers now message with a business at least once a week, and 66% report being frustrated with businesses that don’t offer messaging. The company has found similar results in studies of WhatsApp’s other top markets, including Indonesia and Brazil. For Meta, these two trends combined created an opening to incorporate more transactions into messaging itself.

Alice Newton-Rex, vice president of product at WhatsApp. 

Marissa Leshnov for Rest of World

“What we realised is, as people were using WhatsApp to talk with friends and family, they were slowly also using it to talk to the local community around them, which meant local businesses,” Srinivasan, Meta’s head of product for business messaging, told Rest of World. She noted that her own mother in Chennai, India, has used WhatsApp for years to schedule deliveries of fresh milk. Similar to messaging, the business use cases for WhatsApp were growing fastest in international markets.

WhatsApp’s first business tool – the free WhatsApp Business app that allows companies to advertise and message users – launched in early 2018, and has since grown to 200 million users around the world. Later that year, the company came out with an API that, for the first time, charged companies to send larger volumes of messages over longer periods of time. The product has since expanded to include features that enable appointment booking, subscription sign-ups, loan approvals, personalized promotions, and more within a WhatsApp chat.

Though it’s available to businesses of all sizes, it was designed to serve companies that need more tools than the free app has to offer.

That includes multinational giants like L’Oréal. According to Guilherme Eler, the company’s social commerce director for Latin America, Brazil was always behind other mature markets in terms of e-commerce sales for beauty products. Door-to-door sales, meanwhile, are common. “When it comes to beauty, people used to buy through conversations,” Eler said.

When Covid-19 hit, consumers had little choice but to begin buying products online, and according to Eler, many turned to WhatsApp – a platform used by 90% of Brazilians. “We realised this was a singular opportunity to emulate the door-to-door experience,” he said.

L'Oréal began relying on WhatsApp as a tool for offering beauty tips and promoting products to users based on their individual skincare needs. The company soon found that open rates for messages on WhatsApp could be six times higher than on email. Customers also spent more and made more frequent purchases when they shopped via WhatsApp. “We didn't choose WhatsApp. The Latin American population chose WhatsApp,” Eler said. “We chose to be where the consumers were.”

For Shauravi Malik, co-founder of Slurrp Farm, the path to marketing and selling on WhatsApp began even earlier. Nearly six years ago, at one of her investors’ suggestions, the self-proclaimed WhatsApp super-user began adding a WhatsApp number to the packaging of her company’s snacks and cereals. It was early days for WhatsApp’s business products, and companies still needed separate phones for each dedicated WhatsApp account. But the platform was an essential way to reach mothers, who are Slurrp Farm’s primary customers, Malik told Rest of World. “We are in the core business of changing behavior about how we eat,” she said. “It’s so important to do this at the level of each individual parent.”

Slurrp Farm’s operations on WhatsApp have since grown more sophisticated. As Malik told the crowd at the summit in Mumbai, the company now segments its audience by their city or the age of their child, in order to send more personalised promotions via WhatsApp. Slurrp Farm has also used WhatsApp’s checkout features to allow people to shop directly on the platform. According to Malik, about 25% of direct-to-consumer sales now take place on WhatsApp. There are likely even more shoppers who buy their products elsewhere after having chatted with Slurrp Farm’s customer service team, which Malik said is increasingly becoming more like a sales team. “They are the closest touch point to the consumer, and suited to it,” she said.

And yet, for all of the success that brands have had on WhatsApp, Eler from L'Oréal believes the platform still has a long way to go in terms of the breadth of the e-commerce tools it offers. He’s still waiting for WhatsApp to introduce customer reviews and other more sophisticated e-commerce tools to its product catalogs. “I’m not fully happy,” Eler said. But, if anything, that should be encouraging news for WhatsApp, he said, because it shows “it can get way bigger”.

WhatsApp’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. 

Marissa Leshnov for Rest of World.

One innovation that Meta hopes will boost WhatsApp’s value with businesses is generative AI. WhatsApp executives argue it will multiply what companies get done on the platform. Part of the reason WhatsApp has taken off as a customer service and sales channel in countries like India and Brazil, Srinivasan said, is because the price of labour there is low enough that businesses can afford to have call centers full of workers responding to WhatsApp chats. But AI, she argued, could make that possible for just about any company, anywhere. “We’re really, really bullish about the power of AI,” she told Rest of World. “A few years from now, I can see a world where every small business has an AI agent that’s representing them.”

The list of AI features now packed into WhatsApp seems to grow by the month: Meta AI is now baked into the WhatsApp search bar, allowing users to start a conversation with a Meta chatbot. Businesses, meanwhile, are beginning to use a customer service version of the chatbot that can automatically generate responses to inquiries, as well as tools that help them craft AI-generated ad campaigns for Facebook and Instagram.

Meta has also built a new AI marketing tool for its ad portal. That feature allows any business to upload a list of phone numbers for customers who have opted in to receive messages. The tool then matches that list against numbers that have been shared on Facebook and Instagram, and uses AI to determine which subset of customers would be the best fit for a given message. “This means that businesses are going to see better ROI [return on investment] and people will see more relevant messages,” Zuckerberg told an audience in São Paulo this summer when he introduced the tool.

And yet, with each new revenue-boosting feature, WhatsApp has added a little asterisk to its core privacy promises, according to Nathalie Maréchal, co-director of the privacy and data program at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C. “It’s not necessarily that those asterisks are illegitimate. It’s that they’re complicated,” she told Rest of World, “and many users are either not going to take the time, or aren’t going to prioritize, fully understanding it”.

Meta has stood by its commitment to end-to-end encryption – so much so that it’s threatened to pull the app from India if the government forces the company to break encryption, as it’s currently trying to do. Meta has also expanded privacy tools for users, including enabling disappearing messages, encrypting backups, and protecting people’s IP addresses in calls. But while its dedication to encryption isn’t in doubt, Maréchal said, the new features Meta has introduced for businesses are a “departure from the original expectations that were set by WhatsApp’s founders”.

When businesses upload lists of their customers’ numbers to the AI marketing tool, for example, Meta can use data from people’s Facebook and Instagram activities to select which customers to target, a Meta spokesperson told Rest of World. And, since chats with Meta AI are, by definition, chats with Meta, they are not encrypted, the spokesperson said. WhatsApp discloses this in the app, but it still means that the things people say and search there can be used to train Meta’s AI models. Meta declined to comment on whether these unencrypted chats with Meta AI could also be subject to government requests for data. That would be relevant context for users, particularly in a country like India, where government data requests are on the rise and where Meta has said its AI chatbot is especially popular on WhatsApp.

Namrata Maheshwari, the India-based encryption policy lead for digital rights group Access Now, told Rest of World that while WhatsApp’s pushback against encryption-threatening laws “is a good sign for users”, there “continue to be concerns” due to Meta’s privacy policy, user data sharing, and transparency reporting.

“Establishing and maintaining a separation from other Meta apps like Facebook and Instagram will be the difference between the privacy that WhatsApp offers, and the gold standard for private messaging,” Maheshwari said.

Newton-Rex said privacy is “in the DNA” of WhatsApp and that the company is trying to clearly communicate with users about what privacy protections WhatsApp offers and where. That includes AI products. “The cornerstone of this is transparency. We’re not relying on the expectation that people have,” she told Rest of World. “We’re investing in user education.” Newton-Rex also said that while Meta is considering allowing ads on WhatsApp, those ads will never appear in users’ main inboxes. Instead, she said, the company is assessing incorporating ads into WhatsApp’s Channels feature, which allows users to publicly broadcast messages to lists of followers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, WhatsApp’s gradual Meta-morphosis over the last few years has drawn sharp criticism from the app’s original team. “It’s a shadow of the product we poured our hearts into, and wanted to build for the world,” Neeraj Arora, a former WhatsApp executive who orchestrated the Facebook deal, wrote in a lengthy LinkedIn post in 2022. At the time, Arora was running his own social media app along with Donohue. He did not respond to Rest of World’s requests for comment.

Peiffer, meanwhile, said he understands why the product has had to change. “It’s very hard to keep a software product at the forefront of consumer attention for 15 years,” he said. “That is an extraordinary balancing act.” While Peiffer left WhatsApp prior to the Facebook acquisition, he later returned to the company to help build the business messaging products.

As WhatsApp evolves, the company’s executives are keenly aware of the risk of turning the app into the junk drawer of the mobile era, overloaded with too many features and AI chatbots hawking products and driving away users. “That is actually the central tension,” Newton-Rex said. “How do we keep it simple? How do we make sure we’re designing for everyone, even as we add new things?”

That tension is top of mind for WhatsApp’s business customers, too. “We need to be really cautious about not replicating what email became,” said Eler from L'Oréal. Right now, WhatsApp is working, he said. “I don’t want to spoil it.”

The big question, of course, is whether WhatsApp’s billions of users want it to change. So far at least, the data suggests they haven’t been turned off. According to Meta, 1 billion users now message with a business each week across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. WhatsApp is even growing aggressively in one particular market that has always eluded it: the United States, where the app surpassed 100 million monthly active users in July.

For Meta, that’s a major breakthrough in its ambitions to turn WhatsApp into a cash cow. As Zuckerberg told investors in July, “All of the work that we’re doing to grow the business opportunity there over time is just going to have a big tailwind if the US ends up being a big market.”

Of course, that future is a long way off. While Meta doesn’t disclose how much revenue WhatsApp brings in, it’s safe to say that, even after all this investment, it still accounts for a tiny slice of Meta’s revenue. But to the company’s leadership, that may be more of a feature than a bug, because it means it still has ample opportunity to grow. As Srinivasan put it, albeit perhaps optimistically, “The only way for this to go is up.”

Issie Lapowsky is a tech journalist based in Philadelphia.

This is the first of a three-part series.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

US warplane shot down by "friendly fire" over Red Sea

Xinhua
2024-12-22

Two US Navy pilots ejected safely after their fighter jet was shot down Sunday over the Red Sea in an apparent "friendly fire" incident, said the US military.

"The guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg, which is part of the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, mistakenly fired on and hit the F/A-18," US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement.

Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their stricken aircraft, with one suffering minor injuries, according to the statement.

The apparent friendly fire incident came the same day US forces conducted airstrikes on a missile storage facility and a command-and-control facility reportedly operated by the Houthis group within Sanaa, Yemen.

"CENTCOM forces conducted the deliberate strikes to disrupt and degrade Houthi operations, such as attacks against US Navy warships and merchant vessels in the Southern Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb, and Gulf of Aden," CENTCOM said in a separate statement.

US forces also shot down multiple Houthi one-way attack drones and an anti-ship cruise missile over the Red Sea, it said.

The US military operations came hours after the Houthis claimed responsibility for a ballistic missile attack on central Israel, which injured at least 20 Israelis in Tel Aviv.

Since November 2023, the Houthis have been carrying out rocket and drone attacks on Israeli cities and disrupting "Israeli-linked" shipping in the Red Sea.

In response, the US-led navy coalition stationed in the area has been conducting regular air raids on Houthi targets since January in a bid to deter the armed group.

Source: Xinhua Editor: Zhang Long

Two US Navy pilots shot down over Red Sea in 'friendly fire' incident

Two US Navy pilots were recovered alive after their aircraft was shot down over the Red Sea early on Sunday in what the US military described as "an apparent case of friendly fire". The military earlier said it struck Houthi targets in Yemen, hours after the Iran-backed militia fired a missile at Israel's commercial hub Tel Aviv.


Issued on: 22/12/2024 - 

FRANCE24
By: NEWS WIRES

A fighter jet lands on aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Red Sea in June 2024. © Bernat Armangue, AP file photo


Two US Navy pilots were shot down Sunday over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the US military said, marking the most serious incident to threaten troops in over a year of America targeting Yemen's Houthi rebels.

Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their stricken aircraft, with one suffering minor injuries. But the shootdown underlines just how dangerous the Red Sea corridor has become over the ongoing attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthis despite US and European military coalitions patrolling the area.

The US military had conducted airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels at the time, though the US military’s Central Command did not elaborate on what their mission was and did not immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press.

The F/A-18 shot down had just flown off the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, Central Command said. On Dec. 15, Central Command acknowledged the Truman had entered the Mideast, but hadn't specified that the carrier and its battle group was in the Red Sea.

“The guided missile cruiser USS Gettysburg, which is part of the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, mistakenly fired on and hit the F/A-18,” Central Command said in a statement.

From the military's description, the aircraft shot down was a two-seat F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet assigned to the “Red Rippers” of Strike Fighter Squadron 11 out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia.

It wasn't immediately clear how the Gettysburg could mistake an F/A-18 for an enemy aircraft or missile, particularly as ships in a battle group remain linked by both radar and radio communication.

However, Central Command said that warships and aircraft earlier shot down multiple Houthi drones and an anti-ship cruise missile launched by the rebels. Incoming hostile fire from the Houthis has given sailors just seconds to make decisions in the past.

01:58

US strikes Houthi targets in Yemen © France 24

Since the Truman's arrival, the US has stepped up its airstrikes targeting the Houthis and their missile fire into the Red Sea and the surrounding area. However, the presence of an American warship group may spark renewed attacks from the rebels, like what the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower saw earlier this year. That deployment marked what the Navy described as its most intense combat since World War II.

On Saturday night and early Sunday, US warplanes conducted airstrikes that shook Sanaa, the capital of Yemen that the Houthis have held since 2014. Central Command described the strikes as targeting a “missile storage facility” and a “command-and-control facility,” without elaborating.

Houthi-controlled media reported strikes in both Sanaa and around the port city of Hodeida, without offering any casualty or damage information. In Sanaa, strikes appeared particularly targeted at a mountainside known to be home to military installations. The Houthis later acknowledged the aircraft being shot down in the Red Sea.

The Houthis have targeted about 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones since the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip started in October 2023 after Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw 250 others taken hostage.

Israel’s grinding offensive in Gaza has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, local health officials say. The tally doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

The Houthis have seized one vessel and sunk two in a campaign that has also killed four sailors. Other missiles and drones have either been

Two US Navy pilots shot down over Red Sea in apparent 'friendly fire' incident, US military says

Both pilots were recovered alive, with one suffering minor injuries


Photo by: Bernat Armangue/AP
A fighter jet maneuvers on the deck of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Red Sea.

By: AP via Scripps News

Two U.S. Navy pilots were shot down Sunday over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the U.S military said, marking the most serious incident to threaten troops in over a year of America targeting Yemen's Houthi rebels.

Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their stricken aircraft, with one suffering minor injuries. But the shootdown underlines just how dangerous the Red Sea corridor has become over the ongoing attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthis despite U.S. and European military coalitions patrolling the area.

AP This is a locator map for Yemen with its capitol


The U.S. military had conducted airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels at the time, though the U.S. military’s Central Command did not elaborate on what their mission was and did not immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press.

The F/A-18 shot down had just flown off the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, Central Command said. On Dec. 15, Central Command acknowledged the Truman had entered the Mideast, but hadn't specified that the carrier and its battle group was in the Red Sea.


“The guided missile cruiser USS Gettysburg, which is part of the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, mistakenly fired on and hit the F/A-18,” Central Command said in a statement.

RELATED STORY | Sailor dies after being 'lost overboard' in the Red Sea, US Navy says

From the military's description, the aircraft shot down was a two-seat F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet assigned to the “Red Rippers” of Strike Fighter Squadron 11 out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia.

It wasn't immediately clear how the Gettysburg could mistake an F/A-18 for an enemy aircraft or missile, particularly as ships in a battle group remain linked by both radar and radio communication.

However, Central Command said that warships and aircraft earlier shot down multiple Houthi drones and an anti-ship cruise missile launched by the rebels. Incoming hostile fire from the Houthis has given sailors just seconds to make decisions in the past.


Since the Truman's arrival, the U.S. has stepped up its airstrikes targeting the Houthis and their missile fire into the Red Sea and the surrounding area. However, the presence of an American warship group may spark renewed attacks from the rebels, like what the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower saw earlier this year. That deployment marked what the Navy described as its most intense combat since World War II.

On Saturday night and early Sunday, U.S. warplanes conducted airstrikes that shook Sanaa, the capital of Yemen that the Houthis have held since 2014. Central Command described the strikes as targeting a “missile storage facility” and a “command-and-control facility,” without elaborating.

Houthi-controlled media reported strikes in both Sanaa and around the port city of Hodeida, without offering any casualty or damage information. In Sanaa, strikes appeared particularly targeted at a mountainside known to be home to military installations. The Houthis later acknowledged the aircraft being shot down in the Red Sea.

The Houthis have targeted about 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones since the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip started in October 2023 after Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw 250 others taken hostage.

RELATED STORY | Yemen Houthi rebels fire missile at US warship in Red Sea

Israel’s grinding offensive in Gaza has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, local health officials say. The tally doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

The Houthis have seized one vessel and sunk two in a campaign that has also killed four sailors. Other missiles and drones have either been intercepted by separate U.S.- and European-led coalitions in the Red Sea or failed to reach their targets, which have also included Western military vessels.

The rebels maintain that they target ships linked to Israel, the U.S. or the United Kingdom to force an end to Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza. However, many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the conflict, including some bound for Iran.

The Houthis also have increasingly targeted Israel itself with drones and missiles, resulting in retaliatory Israeli airstrikes.

Haiti's budding musicians hold concert amid ongoing gang violence


Copyright © africanews

Odelyn Joseph/Copyright2024

 The AP. All rights reserved
By Rédaction Africanews

Haiti

Around the world, it’s time for year-end school concerts and Haiti is no exception, despite the gang violence which is ravaging the country.

Children at the only music school in the capital Port-au-Prince, demonstrate bravery and devotion to their art, aspiring to futures as musicians and singers.

While hundreds of schools across the country were forced to close because of the fighting and lack of funds, the music school continued to attract students.


Funded by an NGO, it began teaching children at internally displaced shelters.

Yvenson Jeantille, who dreams of being a professional musician, makes the long walk from home to the school at least twice a week.

“The situation of the country as it reaches me, it has an impact, but I don’t let it interfere in my future,” he said.

Gangs are believed to control some 85 per cent of the capital. Thousands have died this year and rapes and kidnappings have spiked.

Families are reluctant to send their children to school, let alone allow them to play outdoors.

Teacher Kevin Marc Duverseau says music is important for the children as it helps them cope with the situation in the country.

“Music, in general, helps alleviate frustrations that we know many of us in our country are feeling,” he said.

“It also helps translate the feelings we all have, which can be both negative and positive, but even negative feelings can give rise to beautiful music."

As the fighting rages on, the Ecole Soleil d’Espoir (School of Hope and Sunshine) offers children the opportunity to dream of a brighter future.

 

Thousands celebrate the shortest day of the year

• 
  

Revellers celebrate Winter Solstice at Stonehenge in southern England on Dec. 22, 2023. File/AFP

Thousands of tourists, pagans, druids and people simply yearning for the promise of spring marked the dawn of the shortest day of the year on Saturday at the ancient Stonehenge monument.

Revelers cheered and beat drums as the sun rose at 8:09 a.m. (0809 GMT) over the giant standing stones on the winter solstice - the shortest day and the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere.

No one could see the sun through the low winter cloud, but that did not deter a flurry of drumming, chanting and singing as dawn broke.

There will be less than eight hours of daylight in England on Saturday - but after that, the days get longer until the summer solstice in June.

The solstices are the only occasions when visitors can go right up to the stones at Stonehenge, and thousands are willing to rise before dawn to soak up the atmosphere.

“This is all about renewal, rebirth, we’re entering into the new year, and it’s also a good time to acknowledge what’s taking place in the year that’s been,” said civil servant Chris Smith, 31. “There’s such a vibe. I mean, if you look around, you’ve got everybody here, there’s such an energy in the space.”

The stone circle, whose giant pillars each took 1,000 people to move, was erected starting about 5,000 years ago by a sun-worshiping Neolithic culture.

Its full purpose is still debated: Was it a temple, a solar calculator, a cemetery, or some combination of all three?

In a paper published in the journal Archaeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University said the site on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometres southwest of London, may have had political as well as spiritual significance.

That follows from the recent discovery that one of Stonehenge’s stones - the unique stone lying flat at the center of the monument, dubbed the “altar stone” - originated in Scotland, hundreds of miles north of the site.

Some of the other stones were brought from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, nearly 240 kilometres to the west,

Lead author Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology said the geographical diversity suggests Stonehenge may have served as a “monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos.”

Associated Press

Father Christmas delivers gifts to Brazilian Amazon communities


Copyright © africanews

Edmar Barros/Copyright 2024

 The AP. All rights reserved
By Rédaction Africanews

Brazil


It might not be quite the 25th of December yet, but Father Christmas was very busy on Saturday visiting children in communities in the Brazilian Amazon.

Or at least his stand-in was.

In an initiative run by the Santa Claus Friends group, he could be seen travelling along the Negro River to distribute presents to children in rural and riverside communities.


"Every child in any community always smiles back. Wherever we go, it's a smile, it's a great joy," said Father Christmas impersonator, Jorge Alberto Moreira Barrozo.

With water levels low because of the ongoing drought, the group only travelled from the Amazon gateway city of Manaus to nearby Catalão, instead of the usual multiple locations.

But families from nearby communities were invited to come collect their gifts from Santa on smaller boats.

Community leader, Raimunda Ferreira, said it was a huge event for local communities.

"For riverside children, the people of the countryside, there’s not a lot of new things happening,” she said.

“This for us was like a gift from God. Children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, everyone was happy with the presence of Papa Noel and his friends."

And a fun day was had by all as Father Christmas played football and ran races with the children .