It was 6:29 a.m. when the blasting music stopped without warning. The brief silence that followed was pierced by the screams of a woman somewhere in the crowd in this remote site in the Negev Desert.

The woman and hundreds of others were reliving in real time the moment terrorists stormed the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel, marking the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks in which Hamas and other militant groups killed 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250 others, taking them back into Gaza.

The brutality of the attack on the festival shocked the world. As revelers danced and partied in the desert, scores of Hamas terrorists stormed the site, blocked off escape routes, and embarked on a killing spree. They ambushed groups trying to hide and murdered people as they tried to escape. They shot victims at point blank range in their cars and fired machine guns and anti-tank weapons indiscriminately at those who tried to flee on foot.

Over the past year, the site of the massacre – a remote location just a few miles from the Gaza perimeter – has been turned into a memorial.

Instead of the vast open space, there are now hundreds of near identical cenotaphs, each featuring the name and a picture of a victim.

The one commemorating Amit Itzhak David shows a young man with a big smile. To mark the anniversary of his death, his family huddled around the memorial on Monday, hugging each other and David’s picture.

The 23-year-old was killed here last year, shortly after returning from a trip to South America, where he had been celebrating the end of his compulsory military service.

Nor far away, Anat Magnezi, the mother of Amit Magnezi, was kneeling on the floor next to his photograph, sobbing. A music lover and a former junior wrestler, Amit too was murdered at the site.

The Nova Music Festival massacre was by far the deadliest of the October 7 attacks, accounting for nearly a third of the victims. There were so many dead and kidnapped that it took Israeli authorities months to determine how many people had been killed there.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Sunday that 347 people, most of them young, died at the site and some 40 others were kidnapped.

Gabriel Barel’s mother, three brothers, and a best friend from the army all turned up in matching tops featuring his photograph. Barel’s brother Yeoda said the family initially believed he might have survived the attack and been taken to Gaza.

But a few weeks later their hopes were crushed when Barel’s body was found. After shooting Barel dead, his attackers had set his car on fire. His remains were so badly burnt it took many weeks for him to be identified.

Witnesses to the massacre say other victims were raped and subjected to sexual violence by Hamas. Hamas has denied the accusations, but the evidence of sexual violence comes from different sources — survivors who witnessed the events, first responders, medical and forensic experts. The United Nations and the International Criminal Court have offered evidence that Hamas attackers committed sexual crimes.

War rages on

Monday marked the first anniversary of the Hamas terror attacks, and a year since Israel began its war against the militant group in Gaza.

More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since then. The war has sparked a major humanitarian disaster, displacing nearly all of the strip’s 2.2 million residents.

As people gathered across Israel, the reminders that the war in Gaza is still raging kept coming. Throughout the morning, loud booms of outgoing fire reverberated throughout southern Israel as the IDF hit targets in the Gaza strip.

Israel has said its goal in Gaza is to eliminate Hamas and bring back the remaining hostages, but neither has been achieved. Indeed, as the anniversary events got under way, several rockets were fired from Gaza towards Israel, injuring two people.

While increasingly rare, rocket launches such as these show that even after a year of intense war, militants in Gaza are still able to strike Israel.

During a memorial service in kibbutz Nir Oz, the smoke trail of the rockets fired from Gaza was clearly visible in the sky. The agricultural commune of 400 people was another site targeted during the October 7 attacks; one in four of its residents were murdered or kidnapped.

Yehud was a volunteer medic at Nir Oz and when he realized the kibbutz was under attack and there were wounded, he rushed out to provide help. He was killed, but his remains were not found and identified until June. Yehud’s pregnant wife Sigal and three children survived the massacre. His fourth child was born just nine days later.

Yehud’s sister Arbel was kidnapped and taken to Gaza with her boyfriend Ariel Cunio, alongside Cunio’s brother David, David’s wife Sharon Alony Cunio, and their three-year-old twin daughters.

Alony Cunio and the two girls were released during a ceasefire deal agreed in November, but the rest of the group remains in captivity.

“Dolev’s sister is still in Gaza. She’s one of the four or five civilian women still there alive. The most important thing now is to bring her and the rest of them back,” he said.

Lifshitz grew up in the kibbutz and while he left at 16, he still has deep links there. His grandparents Oded and Yocheved were kidnapped from their homes in the kibbutz during the attack.

Yocheved Lifshitz, who was 85 when kidnapped, spent more than two weeks in captivity. She was released alongside her neighbor and friend Nurit Cooper, 79, but both her and Cooper’s husbands were kept in Gaza.

Nurit Cooper and her family were told in June that Amiram Cooper, her 84-year-old husband and one of the founders of the kibbutz, was no longer alive. His body is still in Gaza.

Last October, Moshe’s grandmother Adina Moshe watched Hamas fighters storm her home and murder her husband David before kidnapping her and taking her to Gaza. She was released as part of a ceasefire deal in November last year.

Sitting by David’s grave during the memorial ceremony on Monday, Adina was sobbing, her body slumped as if crushed by the horrors of the past year. Her daughter Maya Shoshani Moshe hurried to her side, trying to comfort her before bursting into tears herself.

Moshe has previously spoken publicly about her ordeal in Gaza and has in the past made an emotional plea directly to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bring the remaining hostages back.

“Again, I am asking you, Mr. Netanyahu, everything is in your hands, you’re the one who can do it, and I’m extremely scared, that if you continue along this path…there won’t be any more hostages to release,” she said in February after Netanyahu rejected the terms of a ceasefire and hostage deal put forward by Hamas.

She expressed the views of many Israelis who are furious with Netanyahu. Mass protests against the prime minister and his government have once again become a common occurrence across the country and the anger burst into the public view on several occasions during the memorial events on Monday.

Early in the day, family members of the hostages marched to Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem, blasting a siren for two minutes outside his front door.

Netanyahu did not make an appearance at the event, or any other gatherings aside from a small ceremony in Jerusalem.

When hundreds of people gathered in Tel Aviv on Monday evening to commemorate the victims of the attacks, politics was meant to be off limits. But it soon became clear that for many of the family members who were speaking at the event, politics is too intertwined with the fate of their loved ones.

Jonathan Shimriz, the brother of Alon Shimriz who was taken hostage and later killed in Gaza during a failed rescue operation, called for a state inquiry into the handling of the hostage crisis.

“There is no personal example, no vision, no leadership, no accountability,” he told the crowd.

The mayor of a crime-ridden city in Mexico has been killed less than a week after taking office, the latest in a string of violent attacks targeting politicians in the country.

The killing of Alejandro Arcos, who took office as the mayor of Chilpancingo on October 1, comes just days after the city government’s secretary Francisco Tapia was shot to death, and has renewed concerns over security in a country that recently held its biggest and most violent general election in history.

On Monday, Mexico’s newly elected President Claudia Sheinbaum called Arcos’ killing “unfortunate” and said that her security cabinet would on Tuesday explain “with more details” the actions being taken to address the nation’s security problems.

“We will roll out the general strategy. We will work in some states with more presence, intelligence, and investigation in collaboration with the governors,” Sheinbaum said during her daily press conference.

Chilpancingo is the capital of Guerrero, a state with a reputation for violent crime which is also home to the tourist hot spot Acapulco.

The state governor Evelyn Salgado has condemned the killing and vowed to hold to account those responsible. “His loss is mourned by the entire Guerrero society and fills us with indignation,” Salgado wrote on X.

However, the violence facing Mexican politicians stretches far beyond Guerrero, as was demonstrated by the historic June 2 election that took Sheinbaum to power.

With 20,000 electoral positions up for grabs, the scale of bloodshed committed by those attempting to influence the vote was unprecedented.

During campaign season, at least 34 political candidates were assassinated by criminal organizations. And the violence did not stop there. Just hours after Sheinbaum’s election, the woman mayor of a town in western Mexico was shot dead.

According to a report by Integralia Consultants, criminal organizations in Mexico center politically motivated attacks at the municipal level because mayors can offer them impunity due to their links with law enforcement and the local economy.

It says that criminal gangs often finance campaigns during election season, intimidating candidates and violently intervening to compel politicians to cooperate with them.

Bangkok, Thailand (Reuters) — Powerful criminal networks in Southeast Asia extensively use the messaging app Telegram which has enabled a fundamental change in the way organised crime can conduct large-scale illicit activity, the United Nations said in a report on Monday.

The report represents the latest allegations to be levied against the controversial encrypted app since France, using a tough new law with no international equivalent, charged its boss Pavel Durov for allowing criminal activity on the platform.

Hacked data including credit card details, passwords and browser history are openly traded on a vast scale on the app which has sprawling channels with little moderation, the report by the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said.

Tools used for cybercrime, including so-called deepfake software designed for fraud, and data-stealing malware are also widely sold, while unlicensed cryptocurrency exchanges offer money laundering services, according to the report.

“We move 3 million USDT stolen from overseas per day,” the report quoted one ad as saying in Chinese.

There is “strong evidence of underground data markets moving to Telegram and vendors actively looking to target transnational organized crime groups based in Southeast Asia,” the report said.

Southeast Asia has emerged as a major hub for a multibillion-dollar industry that targets victims across the world with fraudulent schemes. Many are Chinese syndicates that operate from fortified compounds staffed by trafficked workers. The industry generates between $27.4 billion to $36.5 billion annually, UNODC said.

Russian-born Durov was arrested in Paris in August and charged with allowing criminal activity on the platform including the spread of sexual images of children. The move has put the spotlight on the criminal liability of app providers and also triggered debate on where freedom of speech ends and enforcement of the law begins.

Telegram, which has close to 1 billion users, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Following his arrest, Durov, who is currently out on bail, said the app would hand over users’ IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities making legal requests. He also said the app would remove some features that have been abused for illegal activity.

Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC’s deputy representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said the app was an easily navigable environment for criminals.

“For consumers, this means their data is at a higher risk of being fed into scams or other criminal activity than ever before,” he told Reuters.

The report said the sheer scale of the profits earned by criminal groups in the region had required them to innovate, adding they had integrated new business models and technologies including malware, generative artificial intelligence and deepfakes into their operations.

UNODC said it had identified more than 10 deepfake software service providers “specifically targeting criminal groups involved in cyberenabled fraud in Southeast Asia.”

Elsewhere in Asia, police in South Korea – estimated to be the country most targeted by deepfake pornography – have reportedly launched an investigation into Telegram that will look at whether it abets online sex crimes.

Reuters also reported last month that a hacker had used chatbots on Telegram to leak the data of top Indian insurer Star Health, prompting the insurer to sue the platform.

Using the chatbots, Reuters was able to download policy and claims documents featuring names, phone numbers, addresses, tax details, copies of ID cards, test results and medical diagnoses.

A year into the war in Gaza, the Israeli government’s objective of defeating Hamas still seems far from reach as Israel ramps up its military activity in the enclave with the announcement of new operations and civilian evacuation orders.

On Monday, as Israel marked a year since Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “continue to fight” and achieve the country’s war goals, including toppling Hamas and “eliminating any future threat from Gaza to Israel.”

The same day, the Israeli military issued fresh evacuation orders in both northern and southern Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been sheltering.

In northern Gaza, the military said it is “currently operating with great force in the area” and told residents to move to Al Mawasi, a southern region designated as a so-called humanitarian zone that is already crammed with refugees.

A new military ground operation was launched on Sunday in Jabalya, northern Gaza, where the military said it is encircling the area after it saw signs of Hamas rebuilding. Earlier this year, Israel’s military said it had defeated Hamas in northern Gaza, only to announce new operations there in May.

Hamas’s military wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, said its fighters are engaged “in fierce clashes at zero distance with the enemy forces” in Jabalya, an indication the group has maintained a presence there to keep fighting.

Casualties in the north have also mounted in recent days. Ahead of the Israeli military announcements Monday, hospitals said they had received five bodies and several injured people following Israeli “artillery fire” in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza.

Hours later, Kamal Adwan hospital said at least 10 people were killed, and 20 injured, in an Israeli airstrike on Jabalya. Footage from the scene showed multiple bodies lying in the street covered in blood. The strike happened about three hours after the Israeli military issued the evacuation order.

About an hour after the first evacuation order, the military issued another directive to leave parts of southern Gaza near Khan Younis. The military said it was responding with “extreme force” to Hamas actions in the area and also called on Palestinians to evacuate to Al Mawasi.

Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians are already sheltering in Al Mawasi after fleeing Israel’s bombardment in other parts of Gaza. The new evacuation orders mean more people will be displaced yet again, and crammed into a very small area — worsening an already critical humanitarian situation.

“We haven’t put our clothes in wardrobes, bathed comfortably, had a meal with any sense of peace, slept on a proper bed, or had clean drinking water in over a year,” said Lena, who now lives in a shelter in central Gaza.

The Israel military said it intercepted five projectiles launched from northern Gaza on Monday. Earlier in the day, nine projectiles were launched from southern Gaza, injuring two people, the military said.

When a Benin City boy like Nigerian Afrobeats sensation Rema rises to global stardom, selling out international shows and recording the first song led by an African-artist to surpass a billion streams on Spotify, what does he do next? He returns home for a victory lap.

“I already have the biggest song from Africa. I can continue chasing that or just do what I need to do for myself, my culture, and my family.”

Rema, whose real name is Divine Ikubor, found international stardom in 2022, with his smash hit “Calm Down.” A subsequent remix featuring Selena Gomez became the first African song to spend a year on the Billboard Hot 100.

Having made a name for himself with his brand of Afrobeats called Afro-rave, blending Afrobeats, dancehall, R&B, hip hop, and house sounds, the star is celebrating his fifth year in the industry by returning to his roots and amplifying his heritage, which he says is the foundation for his meteoric rise to the top.

“It’s been five years of global expansion,” the 24-year-old singer explained.  “I just feel like I needed to have a good body of work tied to my roots.”

This year, the musician has been celebrating his heritage, infusing cultural references to Benin City – such as the bats that are a frequent sight there – into his promotions, performances, and the artwork for his latest album, “Heis.” The album is a nod to his Nigerian roots, deeply percussive with a taste of rock, and its Greek title means “number one” in English.

In June, Rema dropped his lead single from the album, a collaboration with another Benin City native, Shallipoppi, called “Benin Boys,” a tribute to their hometown. Shortly after, Rema staged a homecoming show in the city, about 186 miles (300 kilometers) east of Lagos.

“The most exciting part of my show would be getting to sing the songs that my people have been listening to for years now and getting to share that experience with them in person,” the singer said.

“I just want to feel the love in the room,” he added.

On August 30th, fans lined the streets outside the 12,000-seat Samuel Ogbemudia Stadium, some camping out the night before in anticipation of Rema’s performance.

The opening acts were upcoming artists from the city, each chosen to showcase their different talents. They included the popular Nigerian rapper and singer Zerry DL, as well as Rema’s Mavin Records label mates Magixx, Ladipoe, and Crayon. Later, Rema dueted with OdumoduBlvck and Shallipoppi, with the event celebrating success and uplifting Nigeria’s homegrown talent.

“I feel like that is something we should do constantly,” the singer said.

“At the end of the day, we’re doing this for them [the fans], we love them, we appreciate them, and we appreciate the hardship that we all went through together – and I excelled, and you can do it too.”

Lamide Akintobi contributed to this report.