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The former first family’s production firm, Higher Ground, is in talks with several potential partners, including Amazon.

Barack and Michelle Obama’s time with Spotify Technology SA is coming to an end.

The former first family’s production company, Higher Ground, won’t be signing a new deal with the audio platform, according to people familiar with the negotiations. The company is instead talking to other distributors about a deal worth tens of millions of dollars, among the most-lucrative in the podcasting business.

Higher Ground is in the middle of negotiations with several potential partners, including Amazon.com Inc.’s Audible and iHeartMedia Inc., said the people, who asked not to be identified because the conversations are private. The company wants to pick a new home within the next few weeks. It has talked with multiple big networks, including Spotify, but the Swedish streaming giant declined to make an offer, according to three sources familiar with the discussions.

Spotify shares were little changed at 9:50 am in New York trading. Amazon stock rose 1.1%, while iHeartMedia climbed 2.5%.

Higher Ground is seeking a deal that will allow it to produce several shows and release them on multiple platforms at the same time. This could explain iHeart’s interest given that it hasn’t historically relied on an exclusive strategy for its podcasts. This is one reason why some potential bidders, like Spotify, have bowed out — a widely released show will end up on their service anyway. Companies like Spotify and Amazon have pursued exclusive rights to promote their own services.

The Obamas are each willing to appear in an eight-episode program, which for some isn’t enough of a commitment to justify a deal to those for shows like “SmartLess,” “Call Her Daddy” and “My Favorite Murder. ” Those shows appear weekly, or with a frequency to close to that, while Higher Ground’s programs featuring the Obamas have been limited series.

Higher Ground signed a deal with the music streaming giant in 2019 as the Obamas planned their post-presidency media business. The company has produced a few podcasts since then, starting with “The Michelle Obama Podcast,” which features the former first lady chatting with friends and family on the subject of relationships. Spotify said that show was one of its five most popular podcasts in 2020.

Higher Ground and Spotify were partners on the shows under the current deal, meaning the future agreement would be for new programming.

Higher Ground and Spotify have clashed during the course of their partnership. Both “The Michelle Obama Podcast,” and “Renegades: Born in the USA,” a show featuring conversations between Barack Obama and musician Bruce Springsteen, debuted exclusively on the platform. They only went live on other services months later. That exclusivity is why Spotify paid Higher Ground, but the production company found that being tied to one service limited the audience for its shows.

The two parties also disagreed about how much of the company’s output would include the former president and first lady. Spotify wanted more shows featuring two of the most famous people in the world, while Higher Ground hoped to use their deal to provide a platform for a range of voices. Higher Ground has pitched Spotify dozens of shows, but produced five. The company released “The Big Hit Show,” one of its only programs that didn’t feature an Obama, in January. Sources familiar with their current deal said more Spotify programming will be released through the fall.

Spotify has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to work exclusively with some of the most popular podcasters, including Joe Rogan, Bill Simmons and Alex Cooper of “Call Her Daddy.” The company did so hoping to capitalize on their star power to build its app’s reach, while recuping the costs through ad sales. It has had less success doing deals with mainstream celebrities and Oscar-nominated filmmakers that had no experience making podcasts.

Spotify’s investments encourage Amazon and SiriusXM to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on their own deals, and the Obamas are hoping to capitalize on what has been a frothy market. With Spotify out of the bidding, however, the list of potential homes for the Obamas has shrunk by at least one.

(Adds share trading in a fourth paragraph. An earlier version of this story corrected the terms of Spotify’s deal with the Obamas.)

CAIRO (AP) — An Egyptian court Thursday a former member of parliament and others to ten years in prison for smuggling antiquities out of the country, as part of a campaign to stop the trade.

Egypt’s state news agency said that former member of Alaa Hassanein and 4 others would serve 10 years. Hassan Rateb, a prominent businessmen, and 17 others will face five years in prison. All were fined 1 million Egyptian pounds, or $54,000 roughly.

Egypt has drastically stepped up efforts in recent years to stop the trafficking of its antiquities, which flourished in the turmoil following a 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocratic leader Hosni Mubarak. Often the suspects have been high-profile figures. In 2020, an actor and brother of the country’s former minister of finance Raouf Boutros-Ghali was going to 30 years for smuggling antiques.

The state news report did not specify what kind of antiquities were being smuggled — but it said that in some cases the convicted had organized and funded secret excavations. Egypt is still rich in undiscovered ancient sites dating back to the time of the Pharoahs, and its Greek and Roman era.

The country has in recent years Warning foreign museums that it will not help them mount exhibits on ancient Egyptian antiquities unless they return smuggled artifacts. The Antiquities Ministry said it has retrieved more than 1,000 artifacts and around 22,000 ancient coins since 2016.

In 2019, the ministry displayed a gilded ancient coffin from the 1st Century BC, which New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art returned after US judges determined it to be a looted antiquity.

The story behind the US law that sanctions anyone, anywhere if they are determined to be a ‘human rights offender’.

American-born British businessman Bill Browder did not set out to expose Russian money laundering operations and link President Vladimir Putin to those schemes. But after Browder’s Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested and found dead in his jail cell, the gloves were off.

Browder lobbied Congress for years until the Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing the United States to sanction individuals suspected of human rights abuses, including Russian judges, Saudis involved in the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and Chinese officials linked to the abuse of Uighurs .

In this episode, host Steve Clemons speaks to Browder about his latest book, Freezing Order.

For the first time since Russia launched its all-out war against Ukraine on Feb. 24, Vladimir Putin on Thursday publicly flaunted his role as commander-in-chief, ordering his defense minister to halt plans to storm the last bastion of Ukrainian military resistance in Mariupol.

“I consider the proposed storming of the industrial zone unnecessary. I order you to cancel it,” he told Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in a televised meeting, referring to Russian troops’ bid to storm the Azovstal plant where the last remaining Ukrainian troops in the city have been fending off a full Russian invasion for weeks. Ukraine has warned that many civilians remain trapped inside the plant as well.

In remarks bound to raise eyebrows after Moscow has spent nearly two months trying to cover up its own devastating losses in Ukraine—during which time they lost some 20,000 troops, according to Ukrainian estimates—Putin went on to claim his decision stemmed from a desire to protect human lives.

“This is an instance when we must think… I mean we must always think, but in the given situation even more so… about the preservation of the lives and health of our soldiers and officers,” he said.

“There’s no need to climb into these catacombs and crawl underground through these industrial facilities,” he said. “Block off this industrial area so that not even a fly can get through.”

His remarks come after a Ukrainian commander holed up in the plant issued a desperate appeal to the international community earlier this week, warning that “hundreds of civilians” were trapped there and there were “only a few days, or even hours” left for them amid heavy bombardment by Russian troops. On the eve of Putin’s announcement, the Ukrainian presidential administration had also called for negotiations in the city “without any conditions” to “save” Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.

Bizarrely, Putin went on to congratulate Shoigu on what he described as the successful “liberation” of Mariupol, despite the fact that the city has essentially been wiped off the face of the earth after nearly two months of Russian attacks. (A 91-year-old Jewish survivor of the Nazi occupation of Mariupol in 1941 was among those killed during Russia’s siege, making Putin’s claims of the Kremlin acting to “de-Nazify” Ukraine all the more laughable.)

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For many Russia observers, the unexpected announcement was seen as a veiled admission that the Kremlin is aware of its need to save face in light of mounting reports of disillusionment among Russian troops, major losses, and perhaps even the sinking of the country’s most powerful battleship, the Moskva, which sparked outrage even among some of Putin’s most loyal propaganda figures. (Moscow’s repeated claim that all of the 500 or so sailors on board were rescued, and that the ship was not downed by Ukrainian missiles, has been torn to shreds by family members of those on board who disputed those claims in interviews with independent media outlets .)

And even as Putin lauded what he described as a successful operation to take control of Mariupol on Thursday, the city’s mayor said there was new evidence of Russian troops going to great lengths to mask civilian deaths and possibly their own military losses.

“The locals have told us that near Manhush [outside Mariupol] They have dug a 30-meter mass grave and are transporting bodies there in trucks that they are trying to hide,” Vadym Boychenko said in televised comments.

Ukrainian authorities have said up to 22,000 civilians were killed in the city since Russia’s takeover on March 1.

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Colombo, Sri Lanka – Agnes Felician wears a sombre black dress, a simple silver cross her only adornment, as she joins the tail end of a group of Catholic protesters at Colombo’s iconic seafront protest venue, now dubbed “Gota Go Gama” (Gota Go Home Village).

Felician, 41, is among thousands of Sri Lankan protesters who have congregated daily since April 9 to demand President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation, holding him responsible for the worst economic crisis the island nation is facing since its independence from Britain in 1948.

But on this day, April 17, Felician and her fellow protesters are also seeking justice for the victims of the devastating simultaneous bombings on Easter Sunday 2019, which ripped through three churches and as many hotels, killing nearly 270 people, including 45 foreign nationals from 14 countries – the worst such attack in Sri Lanka’s history.

“A curse has befallen this government. After the Easter Sunday bombings, nothing has worked for this country and the opposition leaders are cursed. They have blood on their hands for their failure to deliver justice,” an emotional Felician, a school teacher, told Al Jazeera as she stood in front of the colonial-era presidential secretariat building.

Hundreds of churchgoers across Sri Lanka marked the third anniversary of the coordinated 2019 bombings that have been blamed on local armed groups allegedly affiliated with ISIL (ISIS) as family members of the victims joined the clergy in calling for justice and closure.

A trial of 25 men accused of plotting the bombings began in November last year but was adjourned in January to allow time for the indictments to be translated into the Tamil language, which the majority of the suspects speak.

Rajapaksa, who swept to power in the aftermath of the Easter bombings, pledged to cleanse the country of “all elements of terror” and promised an expedited probe into the incident.

But critics have faulted his administration for not pressing charges against the former President Maithripala Sirisena, who was accused of not acting on an Indian intelligence report warning of the Easter Sunday bombings 17 days before they took place. Sirisena was also criticized for only ordering a probe into the bombings five months later.

Anger among the protesters over the acquittal of former police chief Pujith Jayasudara and former defense secretary Hemasiri Fernando, who were charged with crimes against humanity in failing to prevent the bombings despite warnings, is also mounting.

In recent months, however, the Sri Lankan Roman Catholic Church has criticized the government, questioning the investigation into the bombings.

Last month, while addressing the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the head of Sri Lanka’s Catholic Church, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, called for a UN-led mechanism to probe the 2019 attacks, which he said earlier appeared to be purely the work of ” Muslim extremists” but now suggested it was a “grand political plot”.

For the Sri Lankan government, already reeling under a crippling external debt burden and the current holding bailout talks with the International Monetary Fund, the protests over the Easter bombings have added to the pressure as they could cast Sri Lanka in a negative light on the international stage .

Sri Lanka’s economy hit rock bottom late last year. Last week, Colombo announced “soft defaulting” by suspending external debt payments in order to divert funds for essential purchases.

As the administration grapples with the financial and political crisis, dozens of angry protests are breaking out daily across the nation, away from the main protest venue in Colombo, demanding fuel, gas, food and medicine supplies.

The islandwide protests, now in their second week, have grabbed international attention, with Sri Lankans overseas convening similar protests in their adopted homes, demanding the president’s resignation and an audit of the assets of the powerful Rajapaksa family.

‘Our pain is enormous’

Meanwhile, at the protest camp in Colombo, Catholic protesters dressed as corps – complete with dramatic makeup – symbolizing the fate that befell worshipers three years ago.

“Do you know why we dressed up this way? We feel like death. Our pain is enormous, our families inconsolable,” Tanya Fernando, 39, who lost her sister-in-law to the bombing of the Katuwapitiya church in Negombo, told Al Jazeera.

“We lost our family members, friends and neighbors but we don’t know the truth about the bombings. There isn’t a day that passes by without mourning their loss. We are completely shattered by the lack of a genuine probe.”

Fernando said the protesters demanding Gotabaya’s resignation is “divine retribution”.

The Easter Sunday bombings proved a watershed moment in Sri Lanka’s chequered social relations, driving a deep wedge between the Catholic and the Muslim minorities, who comprise nearly 7 and 10 percent of the country’s 22 million population respectively.

Buddhists of the ethnic Sinhala majority constitute more than 70 percent.

There was intense anger directed towards the Muslim community after the 2019 attacks, leading them to fear both reprisals and social ostracisation.

Sugunan Anthony, a 37-year-old churchgoer from Negombo who joined the protest, said the government tried to create divisions between the island’s Christians and Muslims.

“Think of the divisions they created using these incidents? Now we know why. The bombings were convenient to divide people and garner votes,” he told Al Jazeera.

After the attacks, Anthony said, Muslims were portrayed as the “enemies of our faith”. He said many Christians supported this administration in the belief that it would deliver justice and ensure the security of every citizen.

“The actual masterminds of the serial bombings are unknown and we suspect other sinister hands in addition to those who mounted the attacks,” he said.

“Justice for the murdered now appears elusive. We want the government to reveal the identities of the real masterminds and punish the top public officials who failed to ensure public safety.”

The bombings also rekindled memories of the island’s decades-long civil war with Tamil separatists that ended in 2009.

‘Extremists in every community’

Since the 2019 attacks that shattered the country’s already fragile social fabric, the Christian community’s focus has shifted towards the government.

“There are extremists in every community. We gather … to demand a new political path for the country. All of us are victims of this country’s divisive politics,” Dilshad Careem, a 22-year-old Muslim student from Kandy, told Al Jazeera.

“We believe majority Buddhists also want a peaceful existence. I support the Catholic protesters who want justice for Easter Sunday bombings and see it as part of this ongoing democracy struggle. The call to overhaul this divisive form of politics itself is a form of justice.”

Thyagi Ruwanpathirana, a researcher with rights watchdog Amnesty International victims, says it has been a long wait for justice for the families of the 2019 bombings. “And this is not unsurprising given Sri Lanka’s decades-long impunity crisis,” she said.

“Sri Lanka is still waiting for justice for grave international human rights and humanitarian law committed by parties to the conflict which nearly 13 years ago.”

Ruwanpathirana said that, in the aftermath of the 2019 attacks, the government scapegoated members of the Muslim community in the name of justice, including by targeting Muslims such as lawyer Hejaaz Hizbullah, poet Ahnaf Jazeem, medical doctor Mohamed Shafi Shihabdeen and dozens of others by using the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), a draconian law often used to suppress dissent and marginalise Sri Lankan minorities.

Hizbullah was accused of having links with the 2019 bombers and jailed for nearly two years, despite rights groups saying the charges lacked credible evidence. After the prosecutors failed to provide evidence, he was instead charged with inciting “racial hatred” under the PTA.

“It is similar to how the Tamil population was targeted during the war,” says Ruwanpathirana.

She added that the recent protests demonstrate that people are resisting these divisive measures by demanding the PTA’s repeal and accountability for Easter attacks by prosecuting “the real perpetrators”. She said the people are coming together to “push back against the inter-ethnic hate-mongering campaigns run by politicians for electoral benefit”.

“This is certainly a silver lining during the dire economic situation,” she told Al Jazeera.

Human rights defender and writer Ruki Fernando has three demands as far as the 2019 bombings are concerned: truth, reparations and accountability, “not just for the victims of Easter Sunday bombings, but all the citizens”.

“After the dissipation of initial anger, people have accepted that only a few extreme elements were for the bloody violence. In my experience, I observe how the ethnic and religious communities are drawing closer to each other, again,” he told Al Jazeera.

Fernando said there is an opportunity now for Sri Lankan Christians to seek justice for the crimes committed against the country’s various ethnic groups for decades.

“What we now need is a united front for all of them without divisions.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed “success” in Mariupol but ordered his forces not to storm the site where the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance in the besieged port city is holding out.

In a rare televised meeting at the Kremlin on Thursday, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told Putin that the sprawling Azovstal steel plant was “securely blocked” while the rest of the strategically vital city was “liberated.”

Putin said that rather than risk Russian soldiers’ lives by launching a final ground assault on the remaining Ukrainian stronghold in the city, they should instead blockade it “so that not even a fly comes through.”

Ukrainian forces have held out under weeks of heavy bombardment that have decimated much of the city and prompted international condemnation of Moscow’s tactics. A commander in Mariupol on Wednesday issued a video plea for help, saying his troops were facing their final days. Kyiv has been desperately seeking ways to evacuate the soldiers and thousands of civilians still trapped in the city without much food or aid.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Seven weeks after Kreminna’s pro-Kremlin mayor was found dead with gunshot wounds, Russian forces seized the Ukrainian town on Tuesday as part of a renewed eastern offensive.

Volodymyr Struk, a truck driver-turned brewery owner, was a lawmaker with the Party of Regions, Ukraine’s largest pro-Russian force, from 2012 until 2014, in the southeastern region of Luhansk.

After separatists turned part of the area into a Moscow-backed “People’s Republic”, Struk moved there from Kreminna, a Ukraine-controlled town of 18,000 two hours northwest of Luhansk.

Ukrainian prosecutors charged Struk with separatism, but he returned to Kreminna – and was elected its mayor last November with nearly 52 percent of the vote.

While facing two arrest warrants, the balding 57-year-old proudly wore a banned pro-Moscow symbol – a black-and-orange ribbon.

Days before his death, Struk had said the Russian invaders were welcome in Kreminna. Then unknown men in camouflage abducted him from his house and, on March 1, his body was found.

“The entire state apparatus of Ukraine – the SBU [intelligence service], the Interior Ministry, prosecutors, courts – could not do anything with the openly separatist Struk for eight years because he had a lot of money. Most likely support from the Russian Federation,” Anton Herashchenko, an aid to the interior minister, wrote on Telegram on March 2.

He was “executed by unknown patriots as a traitor”, Herashchenko said of the killing – and attached a photo of Struk’s remains to his post.

Who are the pro-Russian Ukrainians in the east?

Between 2014, when the pro-Russian separatist uprising began and February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, more than 13,000 people were killed in the conflict between the two nations.

Millions were displaced, and the rebel-held “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, became totalitarian quasi-states, where hundreds have been jailed and tortured for pro-Ukrainian sympathies.

A stone’s throw away from the rebels, there are Ukrainian adherents of the “Russian world”, the Kremlin’s theory that denies the very existence of Ukraine – and prescribes its “liberation” through subjugation to Moscow.

According to observers, there is a predominant mentality in the rustbelt, the Russian-speaking regions of coal mines, steel factories and chemical plants, a “special kind of paternalism that emerged from the region’s industrial core,” Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch Al Jazeera.

Its residents were used to Soviet-era benefits such as free healthcare and education, and now feel abandoned by the cash-strapped central government.

He said “centrist” Ukrainian parties are not able to address the population’s needs and “oligarchic” forces such as the Party of Regions and its political scions filled the niche.

“Our electorate is pro-Russian,” Sergey Vaganov, a 63-year-old retired photographer from Mariupol, told Al Jazeera. “No major Ukrainian party even tried to work here, honestly. No one was fighting for the volume.”

Mariupol, the southernmost city of the Donetsk region, was briefly occupied by separatists in 2014 and became the region’s de-facto administrative capital when Ukraine regained control, but failed to win hearts and minds.

Given widespread apathy, turnout is generally low throughout Ukraine, and elderly, Soviet-born Ukrainians are among the most diligent voters; their ballots propelled Struk to the mayor’s seat.

Nostalgic about their Communist-era youth, they consume Russian television broadcasts and the Russian border is just hours away from almost anywhere in Donbas – where many have relatives and friends on the other side.

Ihor Saldyha, a 38-year-old resident of Kharkiv, which lies 40km (25 miles) from the Russian border, said some of the elderly people he meets on the streets of the besieged city remain pro-Russian.

Only Russian bombardment changes their mind, he says.

“When someone gets an incoming [shell] in his house, in his back yard – they all of a sudden begin to understand things,” he told Al Jazeera.

A community activist from Donetsk agrees.

“Putin did really enlighten some with his bombings. The least hopeless ones,” Nadia Gordiuk from the southeastern town of New York, which is near the separatist areas, told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, in some of Ukraine’s eastern towns and villages, years of “brainwashing” made many youngsters vehemently anti-Ukrainian, a displaced woman from Donetsk said.

“An entire generation that hates Ukraine with every cell of their body grew up there in the past eight years,” Oksana Afenkina, who fled for Kyiv in 2020 after receiving death threats, told Al Jazeera.

Sometimes, the actions of Ukrainian servicemen catalyse pro-Russian sympathies.

In 2014, during the conflict’s hottest phase, Ukrainian forces entered the village of Georgievka outside Luhansk – and found that Andrey Lubyanoi was the only man of fighting age there.

Others had fled to Russia or joined the separatists, but the 44-year-old construction worker had nowhere to go and stayed in the village to look after his three young daughters.

The Ukrainian servicemen tortured him and shot a bullet through his legs after he refused to confess, he told this reporter in 2016, having mistaken him for a rebel spy.

“No big deal, my legs healed,” he said with a look of desperate optimism.

The servicemen also threw a grenade in his basement, turning sacks of potatoes, slabs of smoked meat and dozens of jars of pickles into a pungent mess – and dooming his family to a winter of malnutrition, he claimed.

He said he detested the idea of ​​living under Kyiv but could not take his family to Russia, because one of his daughters had no identification documents.

The latest Russian invasion has made life for pro-Russians on Ukrainian soil more complex.

Apart from Kreminna, four more town mayors in Ukrainian-controlled parts of Luhansk became turncoats, regional governor Serhiy Haidai said on April 3.

“After our victory, we will see how the laws on collaborating with the enemy will work on these people,” he said in televised remarks.

But for now, during the renewed eastern Russian offensive that has been dubbed The Battle of Donbas, they can leak information on the whereabouts of Ukrainian servicemen, military and fuel storage, as well as urge others to collaborate.

They also parrot the Kremlin’s accusations against the pro-Western government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of an attempted “genocide” of Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

“I was shocked by the genocide towards us on the part of the Ukrainian Nazism,” Serhiy Khortiv, a mayor of the town of Rubizhne said in a YouTube-posted video in early April.

“You are fascists, Europe and America spawned you, and you dance and sing for their money on our blood,” he said, addressing the government.

Later, the General Prosecutor’s Office said Khortiv faced up to 10 years in jail for “entering into a criminal conspiracy” with separatists and Russia.

BEIRUT (AP) — For journalist Amer Matar, a decade-long search for his younger brother has defined him and changed the course of his life, now dedicated to researching and documenting crimes committed by the Islamic State group in Syria.

His brother, Mohammed Nour Matar, vanished in Syria’s northern city of Raqqa in 2013 while reporting on an explosion that hit the headquarters of an insurgent group. His burnt camera was found at the scene of the blast, and his family soon after got word he was in an IS prison. But there has been no other sign of him since.

Mohammed Nour is among thousands of people believed to have been seized by the Islamic State, the extremist group that in 2014 overran large parts of Syria and Iraq, where it set up a so-called Islamic Caliphate and brutalized the population for years.

Three years after its territorial defeat, thousands are still missing and accountability for their captors remains elusive. Families of the missing feel abandoned by a world that has largely moved on, while they struggle alone to uncover the fate of their loved ones.

“These violations may constitute crimes against humanity, war crimes, and even genocide in some,” the Washington-based Syria Justice and Accountability Center said in a report published Thursday. “These families have the right to know the truth about the fate of their loved ones.”

The rights group says that between 2013 and 2017, when IS ruled much of northern and eastern Syria, the militant group detained thousands who remain missing and whose families continue to live in a state of grief and uncertainty.

In its report titled “Unearthing Hope: The Search for the Missing Victims of ISIS,” SJAC said that approximately 6,000 bodies have been exhumed from dozens of mass graves dug by IS in northeastern Syria, and retrieved from buildings by airstrikes of the destroyed US- led coalition during the military campaign that eventually brought down IS.

This may amount to approximately half of the total number of missing people in the northeast, according to the group, although estimates of the missing vary.

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Mohammed Nour Matar had become a citizen journalist during Syria’s civil war, and he was often out with his camera documenting the conflict. He went missing on Aug. 13, 2013 while covering an explosion in Raqqa that went off outside the offices of the Ahfad al-Rasoul faction, one of several insurgent groups that were rivals of IS. He was 21 at the time and was working on a documentary about Raqqa and its residents’ opposition to IS.

Four months later, Raqqa became Syria’s first provincial capital to fall under the full control of IS. When the extremists declared a so-called caliphate in June 2014, the city became their de-facto capital. The group ruled Matar’s hometown of Raqqa with fear, setting up scores of detention centers in different parts of the city, brutalizing opponents and even placing heads of beheaded victims in the city’s Naim Square — Arabic for “Paradise.”

In the report, SJAC documented for the first time the vast web of detention facilities that were central to IS disappearances. Different wings of the IS security apparatus systematically used this network of 152 police stations, training camps, and secret security prisons to detain kidnapped civilians and members of rival armed groups, in some cases before issuing death sentences or summarily executing them.

It listed 33 detention facilities in the city of Raqqa alone.

SJAC says alleged perpetrators who may hold evidence necessary to identify remains languishing in prisons of the US-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces “with no fair judicial procedures in sight.” It says other former IS members live in their home countries where they returned after the group was defeated.

“The permanent defeat of ISIS cannot be secured without justice for the victims of the organization’s crimes, including those who remain missing,” it said.

Amer Matar, who now lives in Berlin with his parents and siblings, said they were told at one point that Mohammed Nour was being held in a jail in the city. Some former prisoners who had seen him there provided personal details that only the family knew.

But as of 2014, the family lost any proof of life.

Amer Matar has traveled to Syria several times over the past years to try get information about his brother, even going to mass graves as bodies were being removed.

The International Commission on Missing Persons has started collecting DNA samples from families of the missing but they are moving slowly, and Matar said his family has not given samples yet.

Also a journalist, Matar began a few years ago collecting thousands of IS documents and 3D photographs of IS detention centers. He now works with moved from Syria, Iraq, Germany, France, Japan and the US to set up a virtual museum about the extremists.

He said the aim is to have a platform where families of the missing can find information about their loved ones, they can walk virtually inside the jails, see names of where detainees, read documents and witness sites of mass graves and information about those buried there, whether in Syria or in Iraq.

Asked if his family has hope, Matar said that “the most difficult question is about hope. Sometimes I lose hope because logic says there is no hope.”

Asked if in his research he found evidence about Mohammed Nour, Matar said, “My mother asks me this question every month or every few weeks. My answer regrettably is, ‘We found nothing.”’

Kristalina Georgieva says Beijing has room to take measures to support the world’s second-biggest economy.

China’s actions to support the economy will be vital to the global recovery, the head of the International Monetary Fund has said, warning that a prolonged slowdown would have substantial spillover effects.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Thursday Beijing had room to take measures to prop up growth amid a deteriorating outlook for the world’s second-biggest economy.

In a video speech to the annual Boao Forum for Asia in China’s Hainan province, Georgieva said policy support could include “shifting the focus toward vulnerable households to strengthen consumption, which can also help support China’s climate goals by steering economic activity to lower-carbon sectors “.

“Stronger policy efforts in the property sector can also help secure a balanced recovery,” Georgieva said.

Major financial institutions including UBS, the Bank of America, Barclays, and Standard Charted have downgraded their growth forecasts for 2022 in recent days, pouring doubt on Beijing’s target of about 5.5 percent.

On Tuesday, the IMF cut its forecast for China to 4.4 percent, down from 4.8 percent. Beijing’s strict “dynamic zero COVID” strategy has forced much of China into lockdown, disrupting production at factories and curbing consumption among the general public.

Among China’s top 100 cities by economic size, all but 13 are under pandemic restrictions, with the intensity of controls on the rise, according to a recent analysis by investment research firm Gavekal.

China’s economy grew 4.8 percent year on year in the first quarter, according to government data. While beating expectations, the figure covers only a small period of the ongoing lockdown in Shanghai, China’s most populous city and financial capital, where residents have complained of food shortages and made rare public displays of dissent.

Global supply chains

“China had already been moving from a nation of shippers to a nation of shoppers, with a focus away from exports to domestic consumption and investment,” Tim Harcourt, chief economist at the Institute for Public Policy and Governance at the University of Technology Sydney, told Al Jazeera.

“They also needed to slow down the economy to take into account environmental considerations. So the recent COVID outbreak has done just this. But the world economy still needs to be watchful of China because of its pivotal role in global supply chains.”

Last week, the People’s Bank of China announced a cut to the amount of deposits banks must hold in reserve in an effort to support growth, releasing about 530 billion yuan ($82bn) of liquidity into the economy – below market expectations. Despite expectations of interest rate cuts in recent weeks, the central bank has kept steady rates since January in an indiction policymakers remain careful about fueling excessive debt.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly defended the “zero COVID” approach, even as the rest of the world learns to live with the virus.

Speaking at the same forum on Thursday, Xi said China’s economy remained resilient and called for cooperation to “defend people’s lives and health”.

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Lu Muying died on April 1 in a government quarantine facility in Shanghai, with her family on the phone as doctors tried to resuscitate her. She had tested positive for COVID-19 in late March and was moved there in line with government policy that all coronavirus cases be centrally isolated.

But the 99-year-old, who was just two weeks shy of her 100th birthday, was not counted as a COVID-19 death in Shanghai’s official tally. In fact, the city of more than 25 million has only reported 25 coronavirus deaths despite an outbreak that has spanned nearly two months and infected hundreds of thousands of people in the world’s third-largest city.

Lu’s death underscores how the true extent of the virus toll in Shanghai has been obscure by Chinese authorities. Doctors told Lu’s relatives she died because COVID-19 exacerbated her underlying heart disease and high blood pressure, yet she still was not counted.

Interviews with family members of patients who have tested positive, a publicly released phone call with an official health government and an internet archive compiled by families of the dead all raise issues with how the city is counting its cases and deaths, almost certainly resulting in a marked undercount.

The result is a blurred portrait of an outbreak that has sweeping ramifications for both the people of Shanghai and the rest of the world, given the city’s place as an economic, manufacturing and shipping hub.

An Associated Press examination of the death toll sheds light on how the numbers have been clouded by the way Chinese health authorities tally COVID-19 statistics, applying a mucher, less transparent, and at times inconsistent standard than the rest of the world narrow.

In most countries, including the United States, guidelines stipulate that any death where COVID-19 is a factor or contributor is counted as a COVID-related death.

But in China, health authorities count only those who died directly from COVID-19, excluding those, like Lu, whose underlying conditions were severeed by the virus, said Zhang Zuo-Feng, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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“If the deaths could be ascribed to underlying disease, they will always report it as such and will not count it as a COVID-related death, that’s their pattern for many years,” said Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong’s medical school.

That narrower criteria means China’s COVID-19 death toll will always be significantly lower than those of many other nations.

Both Jin and Zhang said this has been China’s practice since the beginning of the pandemic and is not proof of a deliberate attempt to underreport the death count.

However, Shanghai authorities have quietly changed other standards behind the scenes, in ways that have violated China’s own regulations and muddied the virus’ true toll.

During this outbreak, Shanghai health authorities have only considered virus cases where lung scans show a patient with evidence of pneumonia as “symptomatic,” three people, including a Chinese public health official, told the AP. All other patients are considered “asymptomatic” even if they test positive and have other typical COVID-19 symptoms like sneezing, coughing or headaches.

This way of classifying asymptomatic cases conflicts with China’s past national guidelines. It’s also a sharp change from January, when Wu Fan, a member of Shanghai’s epidemic prevention expert group, said that those with even the slightest symptoms, like fatigue or a sore throat, would be “strictly” classified as a symptomatic case.

Further adding to the confusion, the city has overlapping systems to track whether someone has the virus. City residents primarily rely on what’s called their Health Cloud, a mobile application that allows them to see their COVID-19 test results. However, the Shanghai health authorities have a separate system to track COVID-19 test results, and they have the sole authority to confirm cases. At times, the data between the systems conflict.

In practice, these shifting and inconsistent processes give China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “wiggle room” to determine COVID-related deaths, said the Chinese health official, allowing them to rule out the coronavirus as being the cause of death for people who didn’t ‘t have lung scans or positive test results logged on their apps. The official spokes on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic.

In response to questions about Shanghai’s COVID-19 figures, China’s top medical authority, the National Health Commission, said in a fax that there is “no basis to suspect the exact of China’s epidemic data and statistics.” Shanghai’s city government did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

Statements from the authorities are little comfort to the relatives of the dead. Chinese internet users, doubting the official figures, have built a virtual archive of the deaths that have occurred since Shanghai’s lockdown based on firsthand information posted online. They have recorded 170 deaths so far.

Chinese media reports on the unrecorded COVID-19 deaths have been swiftly censored, and many criticisms of Shanghai’s stringent measures expunged online. Instead, state media has continued to uphold China’s zero-COVID approach as proof of the success of its political system, especially as the world’s official death toll climbs past 6.2 million.

Earlier this month, doubts over the data burst into public view when a Shanghai resident uploaded a recording of a phone conversation he had with a CDC officer in which he questioned why city health authorities told his father he had tested positive for COVID-19 when data on his father’s mobile application showed up as negative.

“Didn’t I tell you to not look at the Health Cloud?” said the official, Zhu Weiping, referring to the app. “The positive cases are only from us notifying people.”

Others skeptical of the data include relatives of Zong Shan, an 86-year-old former Russian translator who died March 29. Despite testing positive and being moved to a government quarantine facility, online test results showed Zong supposedly was negative for COVID-19 on the day of her death.

“My relative, like most of the other people in Shanghai who were notified as positive, all reported negative results” on the Health Cloud app, one of Zong’s relatives said, declining to be named for fear of retribution.

Zong was taken to a government quarantine facility from the Donghai Elderly Care Hospital on March 29, and died there that night. The family was told by hospital staff she was being transferred after she tested positive for COVID-19. But they didn’t think the virus was the biggest threat to her health — rather, it was the dearth of nursing care at the quarantine facility. Zong needed to be fed liquids and couldn’t eat without assistance.

She had been in stable condition before the transfer, said a relative. When the family asked for the cause of death, doctors didn’t give a clear answer.

“They gave me very vague answers. One minute they said it was stroke, then they said this was also just a hypothesis,” said the relative. “But on one point, they were very clear, they said it had nothing to do with COVID. Her lungs were clear.”

Lu, who was also transferred from the Donghai hospital, would have celebrated her 100th birthday April 16; Her relatives had ordered a cake and got permission to host a small celebration Thursday. But when she tested positive, the family made mental preparations for her death, acknowledging she had lived a long life.

But the strange thing, a relative said, was the night before she died, the doctor had specifically called the family to let them know Lu was now testing negative for COVID-19. Ultimately, the doctor said she died because the virus had worsened her underlying illnesses, said the relative, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue.

Further, the family knew of another patient from the same hospital, a neighbor, who died the day after being transferred to a quarantine facility on March 25 and also had not been counted.

Jin, the Hong Kong virologist, noted the potential political benefits from Shanghai’s low official COVID-19 death toll.

“They might claim this is their achievement, and this is their victory,” Jin said.

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Kang reported from Beijing. Associated Press video producer Olivia Zhang contributed from Beijing.