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And eat up not one another’s property unjustly (in an illegal way e.g. stealing, robbing, deceiving, etc.), nor give bribery to the rulers (judges before presenting your cases) that you may knowingly eat up a part of the property of others sinfully (Qur'an 2:188) Prayer times Fajr 4.40Zuhr 11.46Asr 3.07Maghrib 5.39Isha 7.09Fasting timesIftar today 5.39pmImsak tomorrow 4.29am 

A scramble for gold reserves dug up in illegal mines is fuelling violence by criminal gangs in parts of Nigeria, officials, expert reports and local residents say, with much of it smuggled to a Middle Eastern destination.Northwestern and central Nigerian states have long been terrorised by criminal gangs locally called "bandits" who raid villages, abduct residents and loot and burn homes.While the decades-long violence started as clashes between herders and farmers over limited grazing land and water resources exacerbated by climate change, the conflict has since morphed into organised crime — at a time when the price of the precious metal has been soaring.Nigeria is well known for its oil, yet also has significant gold deposits of some 754,000 ounces (21.37 tonnes), worth $1.4bn, accounting for 0.5% of global production, according to the 2023 Gold Mining Industry report.A recent wave of kidnappings, including hundreds of school children, brought the violence into fresh international focus.Local artisans extract gold for their livelihoods, attracting others from neighbouring countries, officials, including Kebbi State Governor Nasir Idris, say.The bandits tax the miners and demand a cut from the extracted ore as a levy to allow them access to the pits, villagers and experts say."Gold has become an increasingly important revenue stream for armed bandit groups in north-west Nigeria since 2023," said the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime in an October report.Nigeria's political and business elite use mining companies as proxies to buy artisanal miners' gold through middlemen.Most of the illegally-mined gold is smuggled out to a Middle East nation, from where it is laundered into the global supply chain in Europe, the US, Asia and South Africa."This gold is almost entirely smuggled out of the country and shipped to a Middle East nation," said a 2024 SwissAid report.Solid Minerals Minister Dele Alake said Nigerian gold often ends up in the Middle East "unlawfully".Alake has previously said illegal miners sponsor "banditry and terrorism".Nigeria's counter-terrorism boss Major General Adamu Garba said recently that illegal mining "intersects with banditry, insurgency, arms trafficking and cross-border smuggling".Against the backdrop of recent kidnappings, governors and traditional chiefs from 19 northern states recently dubbed illegal mining a "major contributory factor to the security crises".They want a six-month suspension of mining to clean up the sector.But umbrella union the Nigerian Miners Association warns a blanket mining ban would disrupt locals' livelihoods, "deepen poverty and increase insecurity".Miners who resist paying levies come into the bandits' firing line. In October bandits killed 16 miners and villagers while in April 19 people were killed in different parts of the region.Supported by bandits, some miners raid gold-rich villages, pushing out residents to access deposits, said Mamman Alassan, who fled his village in Niger's Shiroro district three years ago following raids."People usually protest and the miners respond by launching deadly raids to take over the area," Alassan said after resettling in Minna city.The villages also sit on deposits of other minerals including tantalite, copper and lithium, in strong demand for its use in electric vehicles and clean energy tech.Intelligence sources say even licensed companies are forced to pay bandits to gain access to mining sites.Niger State governor Umar Bago recently questioned how miners can "freely access" sites in remote areas without getting attacked.Officials also blame the influx of foreigners for the worsening insecurity, with Kebbi state governor Idris singling out illegal miners from Mali, Chad and as far afield as Tanzania.The violence has been exacerbated by the increasing alliance between bandits and militants from the northeast who have in recent years established a strong presence in northwest and central regions, security officials and analysts say.Although they have no ideological leanings and are mainly motivated by financial gains, the bandits' alliance with militants has exposed them to better arms, tactics and brutality, they say.INEFFECTIVE BANSAround 35% of Nigeria's gold deposits lie beneath impoverished northwestern villages, according to Ismail Suleiman, who owns a mining company that extracts minerals across the northwest.Some state governments have at various times banned mining to curb banditry but the violence has continued unabated.In October, Niger state's Bago announced an indefinite ban on mining, with plans to recruit 10,000 government-sponsored militia to protect Niger's rural communities.In 2019, the federal government imposed a five-year mining ban in Zamfara state but lifted it in January, citing "improved security" despite increased killings and kidnappings there.Artisanal mining has continued on a much larger scale since the ban was lifted and violence has raged, said the miners' union. 

When a US federal judge ruled in late November that Meta does not maintain an illegal monopoly in social media, it was a reminder that even the strongest evidence can look weak when enforcers act too late. Rejecting the US Federal Trade Commission’s narrow market definition, the court instead concluded that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, competes against a broad array of rivals such as TikTok and YouTube. While legal scholars can and will dissect the opinion, the biggest takeaway is that timing matters in dynamic markets, implying that antitrust authorities must develop a preventive approach, rather than relying solely on reactive measures. The case centred on Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, when both were unmistakably competitive threats. Facebook said so itselfBut the case collapsed under the weight of today’s market reality. Instead of considering the world as it existed when the mergers occurred, the court (incorrectly) cited the rise of TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube Shorts as evidence that Facebook lacked monopoly power. The flaws in the court’s reasoning reflect a deeper problem with litigating consummated mergers: it asks judges to travel back in time and forget what they now know. Questions like “Would Instagram have become this significant without Facebook’s investment?” or “What competition might have emerged if the acquisitions had not taken place?” are inherently counterfactual. It is very difficult to measure the impact of competition that never existed. This suggests that the acquisitions should have been challenged when they were first proposed – a difficult task, but not as hard as challenging consummated deals. Predicting the future is less formidable than reconstructing the present on the basis of an imaginary past. The flaws of late enforcement were also on display in the Google antitrust trial. Even as a US federal judge ruled in 2024 that Google had illegally monopolised general-search services, the remedy was softened by the perception that AI chatbots were already reshaping the market. Even the boldest proposed remedies centred less on restoring competition in search and more on ensuring that the next tech frontier remains open. Regulators should have prevented Facebook from acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp in the first place, but erred on the side of caution, fearing false positives and believing that the market would self-correct. But that decision has proved impossible to unwind, even though Facebook’s acquisition of direct competitors in a competitive market should have been a straightforward win for antitrust authorities – the very kind of textbook harm the law is designed to prevent. To their credit, the FTC and the department of justice under former US president Joe Biden had begun to develop and use their preventive toolkit. They challenged several mergers (including Nvidia-Arm, Illumina-GRAIL, and Microsoft-Activision Blizzard), examined practices in nascent industries such as AI partnerships, and launched early probes into emerging monopolies in the cloud computing and semiconductor markets. But the pendulum has swung back under Donald Trump’s second administration, which has pursued merger settlements, dialled back investigations into AI giants, and revived the myth that tech firms are the guardians of innovation and national security. It doesn’t have to be this way. US antitrust regulators now have stronger merger guidelines and a clearer understanding of how digital markets work. What they need is the political will to act early and decisively. The same applies to other governments. The most consequential tech mergers are reviewed simultaneously in multiple jurisdictions, and regulators in the European Union and the UK also have powerful preventive tools, including merger review and market studies. Even just initiating an investigation can create enough friction and uncertainty for parties to abandon a deal, as happened with Nvidia-Arm and Visa-Plaid. But the global scramble to attract AI investment has pushed competition enforcement into retreat. Amid increasing geopolitical turbulence, regulators are forgetting the hard-earned lessons of the platform era and pulling back precisely when they should be applying those lessons to block anti-competitive AI mergers and prevent the emergence of AI monopolies. The result is a classic collective-action problem, even though all it takes is one courageous competition authority to block a global deal and change the trajectory of an entire market. The Meta decision can seem like much ado about nothing: one case that was too difficult to win despite overwhelming evidence. But viewed in a broader context, it becomes clear that timing makes all the difference in antitrust enforcement. Regulators must learn to flex their preventive muscle to have any hope of taming Big Tech. - Project Syndicate 

Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue — or $16bn — from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15bn “higher risk” scam advertisements — those that show clear signs of being fraudulent — every day. Meta earns about $7bn in annualised revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain — but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer — Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalisation system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests.The details of Meta’s confidential self-appraisal are drawn from documents created between 2021 and this year across Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. Together, they reflect Meta’s efforts to quantify the scale of abuse on its platforms — and the company’s hesitancy to crack down in ways that could harm its business interests.Meta’s acceptance of revenue from sources it suspects are committing fraud highlights the lack of regulatory oversight of the advertising industry, said Sandeep Abraham, a fraud examiner and former Meta safety investigator who now runs a consultancy called Risky Business Solutions.“If regulators wouldn’t tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn’t tolerate it in tech,” he told Reuters.In a statement, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the documents seen by Reuters “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams”. The company’s internal estimate that it would earn 10.1% of its 2024 revenue from scams and other prohibited ads was “rough and overly-inclusive”, Stone said. The company had later determined that the true number was lower, because the estimate included “many” legitimate ads as well, he said. He declined to provide an updated figure.“The assessment was done to validate our planned integrity investments — including in combatting frauds and scams — which we did,” Stone said. He added: “We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it and we don’t want it either.”“Over the past 18 months, we have reduced user reports of scam ads globally by 58 percent and, so far in 2025, we’ve removed more than 134mn pieces of scam ad content,” Stone said.Some of the documents show Meta vowing to do more. “We have large goals to reduce ad scams in 2025,” states a 2024 document, with Meta hoping to reduce such ads in certain markets by as much as 50%. In other places, documents show managers congratulating staffers for successful scam reduction efforts.At the same time, the documents indicate that Meta’s own research suggests its products have become a pillar of the global fraud economy. A May 2025 presentation by its safety staff estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US Meta also acknowledged in other internal documents that some of its main competitors were doing a better job at weeding out fraud on their platforms.“It is easier to advertise scams on Meta platforms than Google,” concluded an internal Meta review in April 2025 of online communities where fraudsters discuss their trade. The document doesn’t lay out the reasons behind that conclusion.The insights from the documents come at a time when regulators worldwide are pushing the company to do more to protect its users from online fraud. In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Meta for running ads for financial scams, according to the internal documents. In Britain, a regulator last year said it found that Meta’s products were involved in 54% of all payments-related scam losses in 2023, more than double all other social platforms combined.The SEC and the UK regulator didn’t respond to questions for this report. Meta’s Stone referred Reuters to the company’s latest SEC disclosures, which state that the company’s efforts to address illicit advertising “adversely affect our revenue, and we expect that the continued enhancement of such efforts will have an impact on our revenue in the future, which may be material.”The regulatory pressure on Meta to do more to fight scams occurs as the company, in a race with competitors, is pouring money into artificial intelligence and plans as much as $72bn this year in overall capital expenditures. While acknowledging the spending is “a massive amount of capital,” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has sought to reassure investors that Meta’s advertising business can bankroll it.“We have the capital from our business to do this,” he said in July, when announcing that to support AI, Meta was constructing a data centre in Ohio that will be the size of New York City’s Central Park.In the internal documents, Meta weighs the costs of beefing up its enforcement of scam ads against the toll of financial penalties from governments for failing to protect its users.The documents make clear that Meta aims to reduce its illicit revenue stream in the future. But the company is concerned that abrupt reductions of scam advertising revenue could affect its business projections, according to a 2025 document that discusses the impact of “violating revenue” — income from ads that violate Meta’s standards, such as scams, illegal gambling and dubious health products.The documents note that Meta plans to try to cut the share of Facebook and Instagram revenue derived from scam ads. In the meantime, Meta has internally acknowledged that regulatory fines for scam ads are certain, and anticipates penalties of up to $1bn, according to one internal document.But those fines would be much smaller than Meta’s revenue from scam ads, a separate document from November 2024 states. Every six months, Meta earns $3.5bn from just the portion of scam ads that “present higher legal risk,” the document says, such as those falsely claiming to represent a consumer brand or public figure or demonstrating other signs of deceit. That figure almost certainly exceeds “the cost of any regulatory settlement involving scam ads”.Rather than voluntarily agreeing to do more to vet advertisers, the same document states, the company’s leadership decided to act only in response to impending regulatory action.Stone disputed the strategy documents’ assertions that Meta should only act if forced. That isn’t the company’s policy, he said.Meta has also placed restrictions on how much revenue it is willing to lose from acting against suspect advertisers, the documents say. In the first half of 2025, a February document states, the team responsible for vetting questionable advertisers wasn’t allowed to take actions that could cost Meta more than 0.15% of the company’s total revenue. That works out to about $135mn out of the $90bn Meta generated in the first half of 2025.“Let’s be cautious,” wrote the manager overseeing the effort, noting that the allowed revenue hit included both scam ads and “benign” ones that were mistakenly blocked. “We have specific revenue guardrails.”Meta’s Stone said that the 0.15% figure cited came from a revenue projection document and was not a hard limit.Amid intensifying pressure to do more to combat scams on Meta’s platforms, executives presented Zuckerberg with a plan in October 2024 for what they called a moderate approach to scam enforcement. Instead of a rapid crackdown, the company would focus its efforts on countries where it feared near-term regulatory action, according to a document that outlined the strategy.Following the meeting with the CEO, Meta executives in charge of enforcing the integrity of the company’s platforms settled on trying to reduce the percentage of revenue attributable to scams, illegal gambling and prohibited goods from an estimated 10.1% in 2024 to 7.3% by the end of 2025. By the end of 2026, Meta aims to further cut that figure to 6%, and then to 5.8% in 2027, the strategy memo and other documents show.In 2022, a document from that year notes, Meta discovered a six-figure network of accounts pretending to be members of the US military deployed in war zones. The accounts were sending millions of messages a week trying to charm Facebook users into losing their money. Sextortion — in which scammers obtain sexual images of a user, often a teenager, under false pretenses and then blackmail them — also was becoming commonplace on Meta’s platforms. And a torrent of fake accounts pretending to be celebrities or represent major consumer brands were bamboozling users worldwide.But despite the surge in online fraud, another 2022 document notes the company’s “lack of investment” in automated scam detection back then. Meta classified scam ads as a “low severity” problem — viewing them as a bad “user experience,” the document says.Internal documents show that Meta directed staffers then to focus mainly on fraudsters masquerading as celebrities and usurping major brands. Such “impersonation scams” risked upsetting advertisers and public figures, one 2022 document notes, and thus threatened to reduce user engagement and revenue.But ongoing layoffs at Meta were hindering enforcement. A planning document for the first half of 2023 notes that everyone who worked on the team handling advertiser concerns about brand-rights issues had been laid off. The company was also devoting resources so heavily to virtual reality and AI that safety staffers were ordered to restrict their use of Meta’s computing resources. They were instructed merely to “keep the lights on.”Stone said that while layoffs had occurred, the company had substantially expanded the number of staff addressing scam advertising in recent years.Meta also was ignoring the vast majority of user reports of scams, a document from 2023 indicates. By that year, safety staffers estimated that Facebook and Instagram users each week were filing about 100,000 valid reports of fraudsters messaging them, the document says. But Meta ignored or incorrectly rejected 96% of them.Meta’s safety staff resolved to do better. In the future, the company hoped to dismiss no more than 75% of valid scam reports, according to another 2023 document.Erin West, a former Santa Clara County prosecutor who now runs a nonprofit devoted to combating scams, said Meta’s default response to users flagging fraud was to ignore them.“I don’t know I’ve ever seen something taken down as the result of a single user report,” she said.Last October, a recruiter for the Royal Canadian Air Force woke up to find herself locked out of her Facebook account. The woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of her military status, had been hacked.Soon a picture of a fake employment badge with her face on it appeared on her account — along with the text, “I’m super happy to announce I’m crypto currency certified.”The recruiter said she immediately filed multiple reports with Meta. As weeks went by without a response, her account began claiming that she had struck it rich with crypto — even acquiring land for a dream home — and she wanted to give her friends the same opportunity.The recruiter said her supervisor tried to get the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to help, but was told that Meta doesn’t usually respond to hacked-account reports from the Mounties. So the recruiter warned her friends not to interact with her account and asked them to report her account to Meta, too.Asked about the incident, the RCMP said it regularly raises reports of abuse on platforms such as Meta, but declined to comment on the specific case.Nothing happened. After about a month, Mike Lavery, a former Canadian army officer who the recruiter had worked with years before, called her. He’d lost C$40,000 (about $28,000) after investing in the crypto scam.“I thought I was talking to a trusted friend who has a really good reputation,” Lavery told Reuters about the recruiter’s hijacked Facebook account. “Because of that, my guard was down.”The recruiter said she cried when Lavery told her what had happened. “People were being harmed because they trust me,” she said. She said she pleaded with friends to continue reporting her rogue account.“Dozens of people reported it, multiple times each,” she said, estimating that Meta received more than 100 reports. By the time Meta finally took her hacked account offline, at least four other military colleagues had been defrauded, she said.Brian Mason, an Edmonton Police investigator, was able to help track C$65,000 of the victims’ stolen funds to Nigeria. But recovering the money would likely be difficult or impossible, he told Reuters, because “the money was converted into bank accounts in Nigeria that we can’t touch”.Meta declined to comment on the air force recruiter’s hacked account or its victims.Internally, Meta refers to scams like this one as “organic”, meaning they don’t involve paid ads on its platforms. Organic scams include fraudulent classified ads placed for free on Facebook Marketplace, hoax dating profiles and charlatans touting phony cures in cancer-treatment groups.According to a December 2024 presentation, Meta’s user base is exposed to 22bn organic scam attempts every day. That’s on top of the 15bn scam ads presented to users daily.Meta polices fraud in a way that fails to capture much of the scam activity on its platforms, some of the documents indicate.After police in Singapore gave the company a list of 146 examples of scams targeting that country’s users last fall, Meta staff found that only 23% actually violated the platform’s policies. The other 77% “violate the spirit of the policy, but not the letter”, a Meta presentation about the police reports notes.The deceptive marketing flagged by Singaporean police that Meta didn’t act on included “too good to be true” offers of 80% off a designer fashion brand, promotions for fake concert tickets, and job ads posted by entities falsely claiming to be major tech companies.Other Meta safety staffers also documented instances in which the company’s rules on scams didn’t appear to cover obviously bad behaviour. In April, staffers noted that they’d discovered $250,000 in scam crypto ads from an account claiming to belong to Canada’s prime minister.“Current policies would not flag this account!” an internal document says. Meta’s Stone said the ads were removed for other reasons. The prime minister’s office didn’t reply to a request for comment.Even when advertisers are caught red-handed, the rules can be lenient, the documents indicate. A small advertiser would have to get flagged for promoting financial fraud at least eight times before Meta blocked it, a 2024 document states. Some bigger spenders — known as “High Value Accounts” — could accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down, other documents say.Fraudulent ad campaigns can reach massive size: Four removed by Meta earlier this year were responsible for $67mn in monthly advertising revenue, a document reviewed by Reuters shows.To draw attention to the company’s perceived failures, an employee earlier this year began issuing reports highlighting that week’s “Scammiest Scammer”. The report profiled whichever advertiser had earned the most user complaints about scams in the past week.Colleagues praised the initiative. But being name-checked in the report wasn’t always enough for such accounts to get shut down. A check by Reuters of five accounts cited in one Scammiest Scammer report found that two were still live more than six months later, including one that was running ads for unlicensed online casinos. After Reuters flagged those two accounts to Meta, they were taken down.Reuters was unable to reach the entities behind the accounts.The company last year developed a novel approach to reduce scam advertising and keep its enforcement costs low: It began charging suspected fraudsters more.To advertise on Meta’s platforms, a business has to compete in an online auction. Before the bidding, the company’s automated systems calculate the odds that an advertiser is engaged in fraud. Under Meta’s new policy, likely scammers who fall below Meta’s threshold for removal would have to pay more to win an auction.Documents from last summer called such “penalty bids” a centrepiece of Meta’s efforts to reduce scams. Marketers suspected of committing fraud would have to pay Meta more to win ad auctions, thus impacting their profits and reducing the number of users exposed to their ads.For Meta, the financial impact was mixed: While the company would sell fewer scam ads, it would make more money from those that it did, offsetting some of the lost revenue.Stone said that the goal of the effort was to reduce overall scam advertising by making suspicious advertisers less competitive in Meta’s ad auctions.In the months following the implementation of the penalty bid program, he said, testing showed both a decline in scam reports and a slight decline in overall ad revenue.

Libyan authorities announced the arrest of hundreds of irregular migrants during a security operation in the city of Sabratha. The Sabratha Security Directorate's media office reported that the migrants were arrested during a large-scale campaign conducted by security forces, targeting their presence at workers' stations and public places. On August 5, Libya's Anti-Illegal Immigration Agency announced the arrest of 350 irregular migrants of various nationalities during a large-scale security operation in the Tobruk municipality. Libya announced the deportation of 10,069 irregular migrants in 2023. Libya is a major transit point for irregular migrants seeking to reach Europe.

Non governmental organizations (NGOs) called on countries and companies, particularly European ones, to cease their commercial dealings with illegal settlements run by Israel in occupied Palestinian territories.More than 80 NGOs, including the Human Rights Association and Oxfam, published a report on the business with illegal settlements: how foreign states and companies enable Israel to carry out its illegal settlement policy, which specifically targets companies and institutions that continue their business activities with illegal settlements, which directly contribute to the humanitarian crisis caused by Israel's prolonged occupation.The report referred to a French retail chain whose business partnerships in Israel directly support the settlement economy by enabling the sale of its products.It also mentioned a British machinery company that manufactures equipment used to destroy Palestinian homes, damage their crops, and build illegal settlements.The report accused foreign banks of financing commercial activities in the settlements, and a German company of contributing, according to NGOs, to transportation infrastructure that benefits the settlements.The campaign organizers urged countries, particularly those in the EU and the UK, to explicitly ban business activities with Israeli settlements, including the provision of services and investments.The report also called for preventing banks and financial institutions from granting loans to companies that finance projects in the settlements.This report follows a previous report submitted in July by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories by Francesca Albanese to the UN Human Rights Council.According to Albanese, the settlements are expanding with funding from banks and insurance companies, and are being normalized by tourism platforms, large retail chains, and academic institutions.The UN expert noted that consumers have the power to hold these companies accountable.