The International Criminal Court has halted an investigation into alleged rights abuses carried out by Philippines authorities as part of a harsh crackdown on the drug trade, saying it is reviewing a deferral request from Manila.

The ICC’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan said the probe was suspended after the Philippines government filed a request to defer the case earlier this month, according to court documents cited by Reuters on Friday. 

“The prosecution has temporarily suspended its investigative activities while it assesses the scope and effect of the deferral request,” he wrote, adding that the court is seeking more information from the government in Manila.

Based in The Hague, the ICC allows states to ask for postponements if they conduct their own investigations into the charges in question. President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration filed its deferral request on November 10, while the country’s Justice Ministry announced its own investigation into the alleged abuses late last month.

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The court initially opened the probe in September over allegations that Philippines police had carried out thousands of extrajudicial executions and used other brutal tactics against suspected drug dealers, and that Duterte gave implicit backing to those actions. Activists have accused authorities of killing innocent people, including children, though the police insist they only use violence in self-defense.

While Duterte has declined to cooperate with the ICC probe, saying it has no authority on the island nation, and even pulled the Philippines out of the international body in 2019, the court has jurisdiction to investigate alleged violations committed by the country while it was still a member.

The president’s chief legal counsel, Salvador Panelo, confirmed the deferral request in brief comments to Reuters, saying “There is no inconsistency with the request for suspension of action,” though he did not elaborate.

Since its founding some 20 years ago, the ICC has successfully convicted just five people of war crimes or crimes against humanity – all leaders of armed movements in Africa, including in Mali, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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Russia’s multi-pronged support of Myanmar is a microcosm of its strategy in Southeast Asia.

In the months since Myanmar’s February military coup, Russia and China have been the junta’s most powerful allies, but Russia has exploited regional instability to position itself as a third path between China and the West. While China was closer with the former Myanmar government than the military, it was also concerned about the government’s ties with the West and potential interference in its development efforts, particularly its Belt and Road Initiative. Russia, on the other hand, doesn’t depend on stability in Southeast Asia to the same degree as China and can instead take advantage of warring factions. Last month, on his first trip outside of the immediate region since February, Myanmar’s junta leader Min Aung Hlaing went to Moscow to meet with high-level Russian defense officials instead of heading to Beijing. Hlaing has reportedly visited Russia seven times within the past decade and previously stated that over 6,000 Myanmar officers have studied at Russian military academies. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Russia was responsible for almost 40% of arms sales to Myanmar from 1999-2018, second only to China. SIPRI data further indicates that Russia has been Southeast Asia’s largest arms supplier over the past two decades, counting Vietnam and Laos as top customers. But Russia is offering the region more than arms and has promised Myanmar two million Covid-19 vaccines and assistance in the nation’s own vaccine production efforts. Russia has also been trying to expand free trade agreements between its Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and Southeast Asian countries, most recently getting Indonesia to sign on to the deal. Stepping even further into soft power efforts, last week Russia’s foreign minister met with his Bangladeshi counterpart and agreed to encourage Myanmar to engage in dialogue with Bangladesh on the Rohingya crisis.

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Leftist, former schoolteacher Pedro Castillo is declared President of a divided Peru, projected economic growth could play in his favor. 

Peru, like many of its neighbors, has been battling the triple and interwoven threat of Covid-19, social unrest, and severe economic downturn. But for the past several years Peru has also been challenged by sharp divisions between its executive and legislative powers. Last November, Peru’s unicameral legislature voted to impeach then-President Martín Vizcarra, citing mismanagement of the pandemic and corruption, in a move that outraged thousands. The June presidential elections were likewise fraught. Castillo’s right-wing rival Keiko Fujimori, who is also under investigation for corruption, alleged electoral fraud and the Peruvians initiated a six-week long investigation, eventually finding Castillo the rightful victor. The EU, U.S. and 14 electoral missions deemed the elections legitimate, and the U.S. called the election a “model of democracy” for the region. Castillo, who previously worked as an elementary school teacher and has never held public office, will be greeted by a political establishment that is almost entirely against him. Peruvian citizens are also deeply divided, and many urban elites reportedly moved their money overseas out of fear for Castillo’s economic policies. But Castillo’s Peru Libre party holds fewer than 40 of 130 seats in the legislature and Castillo has already recruited several moderate advisors. Further, he has backed away from talk of nationalizing Peru’s lucrative multinational mining, oil, gas, and hydrocarbon companies, instead pledging to raise taxes on mining firms. Prices of copper and gold, two of Peru’s most critical exports, remain high and Covid-related trade obstacles are expected to ease over the coming months. While it is uncertain how effective Castillo will be, or where he will ultimately fall on his policies, positive projections for Peru’s export-based economy will likely play in his favor.

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Enjin becomes first blockchain platform to gain acceptance into the United Nations Global Compact, signaling widespread range of corporate sustainability efforts.

On Tuesday, Enjin, an innovative blockchain technology company focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), became the first such company to join the United Nations Global Compact. Upon admission, Enjin stated that it hopes to use NFTs to promote sustainability and equality in line with the UN pact that encourages businesses and firms worldwide to adopt more environmentally friendly and socially responsible practices. NFTs have surged in popularity in the past two years, and during the first quarter of 2021 NFT sales reportedly exceeded US $2 billion. In essence, an NFT is a way to prove ownership of a unique virtual item. It’s a unit of data that’s stored on a blockchain, or digital ledger, that certifies exclusive ownership of digital files ranging from photos to sports trading cards. Enjin, which is headquartered in Singapore, has focused its NFT efforts on games and apps and is reportedly able to operate with a lower carbon footprint than Bitcoin due to a slimmed-down verification model that requires less energy. This week, the UN Global Compact not only included Enjin as a member, but gave the company its highest membership rank, sending a signal that it’s interested in promoting such an environmental effort by crypto and blockchain entrepreneurs. For its part, Enjin has stated that it wants to employ the technology in carbon capture companies, fighting climate change in the process. The Head of the UN AI and Robotics Center remarked that during the global struggle to recover from the pandemic we should take advantage of new technologies like AI and blockchain to better equip ourselves for the future.

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Scientists have used artificial intelligence to “predict” formulas for new designer drugs, with the stated goal of helping to improve their regulation. The AI generated formulas for nearly nine million potential new drugs.

Researchers with the University of British Columbia (UBC) used a deep neural net for the job, teaching it to make up chemical structures of potential new drugs. According to their study, released this week, the computer intelligence fared better at the task than the scientists had expected.

The research team used a database of known designer drugs – synthetic psychoactive substances – to train the AI on their structures. The market for designer drugs is ever-changing, since their manufacturers are constantly tweaking their formulas to circumvent restrictions and produce new “legal” substances, while cracking their structure takes months for law enforcement agencies, the researchers said.

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“The vast majority of these designer drugs have never been tested in humans and are completely unregulated. They are a major public-health concern to emergency departments across the world,” one of the researchers, UBC medical student Dr. Michael Skinnider has said.

After its training, the AI was able to generate some 8.9 million potential designer drugs. Afterwards, researchers ran a data sheet of some 196 new drugs, which had emerged in real life after the model was trained, and found that more than 90% of these have been already predicted by the computer.

“The fact that we can predict what designer drugs are likely to emerge on the market before they actually appear is a bit like the 2002 sci-fi movie, Minority Report, where foreknowledge about criminal activities about to take place helped significantly reduce crime in a future world,” senior author Dr. David Wishart, a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta, has said.

Identifying completely unknown substances remains an issue for the AI, the research team has noted, but they hope it might potentially help with that task, since the computer was also able to predict which formulas of designer drugs were more likely to be created and hit the market. The model “ranked the correct chemical structure of an unidentified designer drug among the top 10 candidates 72 percent of the time,” while throwing in spectrometry analysis, which is an easily obtained measurement, bumped the accuracy to some 86%.

“It was shocking to us that the model performed this well, because elucidating entire chemical structures from just an accurate mass measurement is generally thought to be an unsolvable problem,” Skinnider stated.

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Criminals convicted of multiple cases of rape could face chemical castration in Pakistan as the country’s parliament supported new legislation aimed at tackling the rise in sexual offenses there.

The amendments to existing legislation, which allow for speedy conviction and harsher punishments for rapists, have been voted in by the MPs on Wednesday.

They introduce the death penalty or a life sentence for gang rape as well as chemical castration for repeat sex offenders, with the consent of the convict.

Chemical castration was described in the bill as a process through which “a person is rendered incapable of performing sexual intercourse for any period of his life, as may be determined by the court through administration of drugs.”

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It’s planned to establish special courts across the country to make sure that verdicts in sexual assault cases are delivered “expeditiously, preferably within four months.” If chemical castration is assigned as a punishment, it “shall be conducted through a notified medical board,” according to the new legislation.

Mushtaq Ahmed, a senator for the religious Jamaat-i-Islami party, had earlier denounced the bill as un-Islamic. Ahmed argued that there was no mention of chemical castration in Sharia law and that rapists are to be hanged in public.

By resorting to drugs to reduce the libido of repeat sex offenders, Pakistan joins South Korea, Poland, the Czech Republic and some US states, where chemical castration has been introduced.

The measure was put on the table a year ago by Pakistani President Arif Alvi in response to a vast public outcry over a spike across the country in cases of rape involving both women and children.

Back then, Amnesty International decried chemical castration as a “cruel, inhumane” treatment, advising Islamabad to instead focus on reforming its “flawed” justice system and to ensure justice for the victim.

Local NGO War Against Rape told Reuters last year that less than 3% of sexual assault or rape prosecutions in Pakistan result in a conviction.

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Scientists have used an AI tool to identify which animals are most likely to contract and spread mutated versions of Covid-19. The model highlighted both pets and wild animals as likely reservoirs for the virus.

Using information about their habitats and various biological traits, researchers at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York developed the machine learning tool to figure out which animals had the particular ACE2 protein that the coronavirus was most likely to latch onto. 

Out of 5,400 tested, the scientists narrowed it down to 540 mammalian species.

Some of its predictions have been previously documented as transmission risks, for instance, dogs, cats and bats, while farm animals like pigs and exotic zoo animals were surprise additions.

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Other expected additions are minks, Sunda pangolins, and 35 species of bats – which are together ranked among the top 10% of animals most likely to spread the virus, in line with lab results. 

The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society journal, also ranked water buffalo, a number of primates, including gorillas and 76 rodent species as being more susceptible to infection.

The researchers taught the AI to identify patterns between rates of transmission and some 60 ecological and biological traits collected by earlier studies, including the overlap between the animal and human habitats as well as their respective lifespans, diets, and sizes.

Previously, the specific amino acid sequences had only been mapped out in around 300 species, including about 143 mammals — and figuring out which ones are more prone to infection is key to predicting the spread of the virus, researchers said.

Arinjay Banerjee at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada told the New Scientist that the results will help researchers “track viral infections and the possible emergence of animal-adapted coronavirus variants” around the world. Barbara Han, who led the study, said predictions needed to be followed up with systematic surveillance and lab studies.

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