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Italy concerned over adult actor detained in Egypt

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Officials in Italy, where sentiments are still high over the unresolved murder of student Giulio Regeni, who was detained and died in Egypt eight years ago, are becoming concerned over the arrest of an Italian-Egyptian pornographic performer in Cairo.

According to reports in Italian publications, Elanain Sherif, 44, also known by his stage name Sheri Taliani, was snatched up at Cairo airport on Nov. 9 and brought to prison without providing an official reason, his attorney said on Friday.

Although he had not been notified by Egyptian officials, Sherif’s attorney, Alessandro Russo, told Reuters that the detention could have been due to the country’s ban on the online publication of pornography.

A request for comment was not immediately answered by the Egyptian foreign ministry.

Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani stated that the situation was being monitored “with the utmost attention” by the government and the Italian embassy in Cairo.

The lawyer added that Sherif has not been heard from since he was moved from a jail in Cairo to another prison in Alexandria a few days after his detention. His mother was the last person known to see him the day after he was taken into custody.

Although Sherif was born in Egypt, he currently resides in Italy and is dual-national.

According to Russo, he was attempting to get in touch with an Egyptian attorney that Sherif’s mother had assigned to represent him in Egypt.

“From Italy, we can only try to verify that Elanain Sherif is being treated well, the Egyptian lawyer will take care of the case over there,” he said.

“It’s clear that we are thinking with concern about the cases of Giulio Regeni and Patrick Zaki.”

Four Egyptian security guards have been accused by Italy with the 2016 abduction and murder of Regeni, a postgraduate student at Cambridge University in Britain.

Italian prosecutors claim that Egyptian authorities imprisoned him because they believed he was a British spy, while Egypt originally claimed he had died in a sex attack or a car accident before blaming the murder on a band of criminals

In 2020, upon returning home to Egypt, Zaki, an Egyptian scholar who had been studying in Italy, was detained. He received a pardon from the Egyptian president last year, only one day after being sentenced to three years in prison for disseminating false information.

Musings From Abroad

French army begins Chad pullout

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Just two weeks after local authorities said they were terminating their defence collaboration, the French army announced that jets deployed in the capital N’Djamena had returned home on Tuesday, marking the beginning of France’s military departure from Chad.

The government of Chad, a crucial Western partner in the war against Islamic jihadists in the area, unexpectedly terminated its defence cooperation treaty with France on November 28, a decision that caught French authorities off guard.

It is still unclear how the evacuation will be executed and if any French forces will remain in the central African country at all, even after the first Mirage aircraft returned to their base in eastern France on Tuesday.

“It marks the beginning of the return of French equipment stationed in N’Djamena,” Army spokesperson Colonel Guillaume Vernet said.

Due to anti-French sentiment and military takeovers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, France has already withdrawn its troops from those West African nations.

Decades of French military participation in the Sahel area came to an end with the departure from Chad, and more recently, French military operations against Islamist extremists in the region were discontinued.

There are still around 1,000 French soldiers in Chad. Vernet stated that it would still take several weeks for the two nations to establish a schedule for reducing its activities.

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Musings From Abroad

Court documents show Meta contractor overlooked Ethiopia rebel threats to moderators

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New evidence cited by Reuters suggests that a contractor employed by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, overlooked threats against content moderators by Ethiopian rebels during a case contesting the removal of dozens of moderators in Kenya.

Last year, 185 content moderators sued Meta and two contractors for losing their positions with Sama, a Kenyan business that moderated Facebook material, for seeking to form a union.

After Facebook switched contractors, they were barred from applying for the same jobs at Majorel.

Foxglove, a British non-profit helping Ethiopian moderators, submitted court filings on Dec. 4 alleging that Sama ignored their accusations that OLA rebels had targeted them for deleting their videos.

In the petition obtained by Reuters, the moderators said Sama accused them “of creating a false account and manufacturing” the threatening messages before agreeing to a probe and transferring one of the rebels’ officially named moderators to a safe house.

In his statement, Moderator Abdikadir Alio Guyo said that OLA had threatened “content moderators who were constantly pulling down their graphic Facebook Posts.”

“They told us to stop removing their content from Facebook or else we would face dire consequences,” he said, adding that his supervisor dismissed his concerns.
In his declaration, another moderator, Hamza Diba Tubi, stated that OLA sent him a message with the names and addresses of both himself and his coworkers.

“Since I received that threatening message, I have lived in so much fear of even visiting my family members in Ethiopia,” he said.

After peace negotiations in Tanzania in 2023 failed to end a decades-old conflict, the government of Oromiya, Ethiopia’s biggest province, accused OLA rebels of killing “many civilians” in assaults.

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