VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

VOI, Jakarta - Iraq's Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called on the Iraqi government and lawmakers on Friday to close the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in response to Washington's "unfettered support" for Israel.

"If the government and parliament do not abide by this demand, we will go for further actions which we will later announce," the statement said.

The populist leader counts millions of Iraqis among his followers and has shown in the past he can stir up gatherings by hundreds of thousands of supporters, mostly working-class Shi'ite Muslims, if he wishes to exert political pressure.

Sadr has opposed Iranian influence in Iraq, setting him apart from other Shi'ite leaders who have close ties to Tehran. He has also opposed the U.S. and called for the departure of the last remaining U.S. troops in Iraq.

In June, his followers stormed and set fire to the Swedish embassy in Baghdad in connection with the burning of a Koran in Sweden. The demonstration was called by Sadr's supporters.

Last year, he commanded his followers to storm Baghdad's heavily secured Green Zone - which houses government buildings and embassies - and occupy parliament.(Reuters)

VOI, Jakarta - Social media platform TikTok said on Friday accusations by the Malaysian government that it was blocking pro-Palestinian content were "unfounded".

Muslim-majority Malaysia on Thursday warned of action against social media firms TikTok and Meta, saying their platforms had been accused of restricting content supporting Palestinians.

Meta responded on Thursday, saying there was "no truth" to the accusation and it was not deliberately suppressing voices on its Facebook platform.

A TikTok spokesperson, in an email to Reuters on Friday, also rejected Malaysia's accusation that it was blocking pro-Palestinian content.

"The claim is unfounded. Our community guidelines apply equally to all content on TikTok, and we're committed to consistently enforcing our policies to protect our community," the spokesperson said.

Both Meta and TikTok designate Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement that governs Gaza, a "dangerous organisation" and ban content praising it.

Hamas members attacked communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Israel says some 1,400 people including children were killed, and more than 200 people, some of them infants, were taken hostage in the assault.

The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry said on Thursday that 7,028 Palestinians had been killed in Israel's retaliatory air strikes, including 2,913 children.

Reuters could not independently verify the tolls.

Since the violence erupted, both social media firms have taken steps to improve moderation, and remove or label graphic visuals.

Meta said in mid-October that it had taken down or labelled nearly 800,000 pieces of content in Hebrew and Arabic in the days after the Oct. 7 attack.

Similarly, TikTok said this week it had removed more than 775,000 videos and 14,000 livestreams since the attack.(Reuters)

VOI, Jakarta - Dr. Richard King was driving home from the Central Maine Medical Center on Wednesday night when he received an urgent call from a fellow trauma surgeon alerting him that victims of a mass casualty event were flooding the hospital.

King, the trauma medical director, immediately turned around and sped through Lewiston's streets with his hazard lights flashing, arriving to discover what he later described in an interview as a nightmarish scene. The emergency room was overflowing with wounded and bleeding patients, casualties of the latest mass shooting to hit an American city.

Within minutes, King went to work performing a "damage control" surgery on one gunshot victim to stop their bleeding and save their life before hustling into a different operating room to begin work on another.

"It was a situation of organized chaos," King said. "It was really quite surreal. We read about these events all too frequently, and then to be a part of one ..."

The staff of Central Maine Medical Center on Wednesday joined a growing list of fellow doctors, nurses, orderlies and technicians working in cities from Colorado Springs, Colorado to Highland Park, Illinois and El Paso, Texas, who have seen their hospitals upended by incessant mass shootings in recent years.

King told Reuters by phone from inside the heavily guarded hospital that the 250-bed medical center had never seen anything resembling the fallout from the Lewiston shooting, which left 18 people dead and more than a dozen wounded.

Lewiston, a former textile hub, is home to only about 38,000 people, but still stands as the second largest city in Maine, the state ranked by the FBI as the least violent in the nation.

The number of those killed on Wednesday was only slightly below the average number of homicides in Maine for an entire year.

But King said the medical center's staff has undergone mass casualty event training and that it felt like "the entire hospital" rushed into the facility to help out. Eight shooting victims, including five who are stable and three in critical condition, remained in the hospital on Thursday.

"We really just did what we would normally do, just at maximum capacity and with maximum effort," King said. "It was inspiring to see how all our staff responded, how everybody stepped up to the plate."

While there is one on-call after hours surgeon, upward of 30 surgeons were on site within minutes of the first ambulances arriving at the hospital, King said.

As one victim after another was rushed into the emergency room - more than a dozen gunshot victims eventually arrived - doctors grew concerned that the medical center's blood supply would not hold out. That forced King and other surgeons to do everything medically possible to stem the loss of blood among patients.

Supplies held out, King said, in large part due to work by the medical center's trauma program manager, Tammy Lachance, to quickly secure extra blood from nearby hospitals.

In the aftermath of the shooting, King said the most difficult thing for him and other staff members, some of whom had family and loved ones who were killed, is coming to terms with the loss of life and tragedy that befell Lewiston, especially as the adrenaline of treating victims wears off.

With the shooter still at large on Thursday, law enforcement officers outside the hospital carrying long guns and wearing bulletproof vests were seen guarding entrances and keeping onlookers away.

"This is a close-knit community. Maine is fairly small, everybody knows everybody to some extent," King said. "This shooting hits really hard in a city like Lewiston and a state like Maine."(Reuters)

VOI, Jakarta - The United States has information that the Russian military is executing soldiers who do not follow orders related to the war with Ukraine, the White House said on Thursday.

"We have information that the Russian military has been actually executing soldiers who refuse to follow orders," White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.

"We also have information that Russian commanders are threatening to execute entire units if they seek to retreat from Ukrainian artillery fire," Kirby said.

Representatives from the Kremlin, the Russian defense ministry, and the Russian embassy to the United States did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the issue.

Russia's ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, in a comment on the Telegram messaging app, made no reference to the White House allegations.

But referring to the latest military aid package to Ukraine of $150 million, Antonov branded the U.S. move as "provocative and inflammatory actions in the international arena that look more like pouring oil on the fire" than trying to ease conflict.

"It is long past time to halt the mindless multi-billion dollar flow to the bankrupt Kyiv regime," Antonov wrote on Telegram. "Time to stop showing total disdain towards the opinions of your own citizens and indifference to the growing number of victims dying from American weaponry."

Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday that Russian forces were disregarding heavy losses and pressing on with a drive to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka.

The United States has strongly condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine and has been providing significant aid to Kyiv.

Kirby said Russia's mobilized forces were undertrained, underequipped, and unprepared for combat. He said the military was using "human wave tactics" by throwing groups of poorly trained soldiers into the fight.

Kirby said threats to execute the soldiers was barbaric.

"I think it's a symptom of ... how poorly Russia's military leaders know they're doing and how bad they have handled this from a military perspective," he said. (Reuters)