JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Lots of hair shedding, tons of fun and a constant invasion of your personal space.

That’s what you’re going to get with a pug, according to Cheryl Gaw, who has seen more than a few of the squashed-nosed pups in her time.

Gaw has rescued more than 2,500 pugs in South Africa over the years after she and her husband sold their house, lived in a trailer home for a while and generally reset their lives to help as many dogs in need as they could.

They eventually established their Pug Rescue South Africa in Johannesburg in 2010 because of an overflowing number of dogs in their house. It was “never part of the plan” when they looked ahead to their retirement, said Gaw, who is 63. “Of course, the pugs won,” she added.

The center is currently home to nearly 200 pugs, the latest batch who have hit hard times and need a helping paw. Some of them were abandoned, some sick, and many were given up by owners who couldn’t look after them anymore.

Gaw’s pug life started in 2008 when her husband, Malcolm, gave her one as a gift. At a pug club, someone asked if they’d be interested in providing a foster home for “a couple” of pugs. In the first year, the Gaws provided a temporary home to 60 pugs and had 19 in their home at one point — too much fur for one small house.

“They are known as the clowns of the dog world, and they can make you laugh,” said Gaw, giving her own breed guide. “Always in your space. They’re just an amazing, lovable breed. And you always have hair on you.”

The rescue center’s staff do their best to keep order. The routine is: 5.15 a.m., the dogs wake up and come out of the cottages where they sleep in groups according to their “age and personality,” said Gaw. Then there’s breakfast, medication for those that need it, bathtime, playtime, grooming time, midday snacks, afternoon rest, more playtime, evening meal, more medication, and all pugs back in their rooms between 6-7 p.m.

Fights occasionally break out. The veterinary bill for the center is nearly $40,000 a year, and it’s a constant process of rescue, rehabilitation, and then trying to rehome them, with more pugs arriving all the time.

“The operation doesn’t stop,” said Gaw.

There is a reason why so many pugs need a new home. Their short muzzles, a mark of the breed, give rise to breathing problems and other health issues like eye and ear infections, she said. A pug’s vet costs are not to be sniffed at and Gaw warns prospective owners to do their homework and get a good pet insurance policy: “You’re going to need it.”

Many of the pugs have come to the Gaws because their owners can’t afford those vet bills. Be prepared for their problems, she said, and also the hair, which she can’t stress enough.

“They shed an enormous amount of hair,” she said. ”You can brush them all day long, they still shed.”

Former al Qaeda member Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has been named as Syria’s president for a transitional period.

“We announce the appointment of Commander Ahmad al-Sharaa as head of state during the transitional period. He will assume the duties of the president of the Syrian Arab Republic and represent the country in international forums,” commander Hassan Abdel Ghani, spokesman for the Syria Military Operations Command, said in a statement Wednesday.

“The president is authorized to form a temporary legislative council for the transitional phase, which will carry out its duties until a permanent constitution is enacted and put into effect,” Ghani added.

The command also announced several resolutions, including the suspension of the country’s constitution, the dissolution of the country’s parliament, and the dissolution of the former regime’s army and its Baath party.

Al-Sharaa was the leader of the main militant group that spearheaded the lightning offensive that led to the overthrow last year of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime had been in power for several decades.

His task now will be rebuilding a country torn apart by more than a decade of civil war that has killed more than 300,000 people and displaced millions more, according to the UN. The conflict broke out during the 2011 Arab Spring when the Assad regime suppressed a pro-democracy uprising and soon plunged into a full-scale war that pulled in other regional powers from Saudi Arabia and Iran to the United States and Russia and enabled ISIS to gain a foothold – for a while – in the country.

Shortly before he was named president, Al-Sharaa said the Assad regime had “left behind deep societal, economic, political and other wounds, and fixing them requires great wisdom, hard work and doubled effort.”

A sense of duty was what Syria “needs today more than ever,” he said.

“Just as we were determined in the past to liberate it, our duty now is to be determined to build and develop it,” Al-Sharaa added.

Who is Ahmad al-Sharaa?

Al-Sharaa became a Syrian “foreign fighter” in his early 20s, crossing into Iraq to fight the Americans when they invaded the country in the spring of 2003. That eventually landed him in the notorious US-run Iraqi prison, Camp Bucca, which became a key recruiting ground for terrorist groups, including what would become ISIS.

Freed from Camp Bucca, he crossed back into Syria and started fighting against the Baathist Assad regime, doing so with the backing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would later become the founder of ISIS.

In Syria, he founded a militant group known as Jabhat al-Nusra (“the Victory Front” in English), which pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, but in 2016, he broke away from the terror group, according to the US Center for Naval Analyses.

Since then – unlike al Qaeda, which promoted a quixotic global holy war – Al-Sharaa’s group, now known by the initials HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), has undertaken the more prosaic job of trying to govern millions of people in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, providing basic services, according to the terrorism scholar Aaron Zelin who has written a book about HTS.

Previously little-known Chinese startup DeepSeek has dominated headlines and app charts in recent days thanks to its new AI chatbot, which sparked a global tech sell-off that wiped billions off Silicon Valley’s biggest companies and shattered assumptions of America’s dominance of the tech race.

But those signing up for the chatbot and its open-source technology are being confronted with the Chinese Communist Party’s brand of censorship and information control.

Ask DeepSeek’s newest AI model, unveiled last week, to do things like explain who is winning the AI race, summarize the latest executive orders from the White House or tell a joke and a user will get similar answers to the ones spewed out by American-made rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama or Google’s Gemini.

Yet when questions veer into territory that would be restricted or heavily moderated on China’s domestic internet, the responses reveal aspects of the country’s tight information controls.

Using the internet in the world’s second most populous country is to cross what’s often dubbed the “Great Firewall” and enter a completely separate internet eco-system policed by armies of censors, where most major Western social media and search platforms are blocked. The country routinely ranks among the most restrictive for internet and speech freedoms in reports from global watchdogs.

The international popularity of Chinese apps like TikTok and RedNote have already raised national security concerns among Western governments – as well as questions about the potential impact to free speech and Beijing’s ability to shape global narratives and public opinion.

Now, the introduction of DeepSeek’s AI assistant – which is free and rocketed to the top of app charts in recent days – raises the urgency of those questions, observers say, and spotlights the online ecosystem from which they have emerged.

‘Not sure how to approach this type of question’

One example of a question DeepSeek’s new bo, known as the R1, will answer differently than a Western rival? The Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989, when the Chinese government brutally cracked down on student protesters in Beijing and across the country, killing hundreds if not thousands of students in the capital, according to estimates from rights groups.

Chinese authorities have so thoroughly suppressed discussion of the massacre in the decades since that many people in China grow up never having heard about it. A search for ‘what happened on June 4, 1989 in Beijing’ on major Chinese online search platform Baidu turns up articles noting that June 4 is the 155th day in the Gregorian calendar or a link to a state media article noting authorities that year “quelled counter-revolutionary riots” – with no mention of Tiananmen.

When the same query is put to DeepSeek’s newest AI assistant, it begins to give an answer detailing some of the events, including a “military crackdown,” before erasing it and replying that it’s “not sure how to approach this type of question yet.” “Let’s chat about math, coding and logic problems instead,” it says. When asked the same question in Chinese, the app is faster – immediately apologizing for not knowing how to answer.

It’s a similar patten when asking the R1 bot – DeepSeek’s newest model – “what happened in Hong Kong in 2019,” when the city was rocked by pro-democracy protests. First it gives a detailed overview of events with a conclusion that at least during one test noted – as Western observers have – that Beijing’s subsequent imposition of a National Security Law on the city led to a “significant erosion of civil liberties.” But quickly after or amid its response, the bot erases its own answer and suggests talking about something else.

DeepSeek’s V3 bot, released late last year weeks prior to R1, returns different answers, including ones that appear to rely more heavily on China’s official stance.

Controlling the narrative?

Observers say that these differences have significant implications for free speech and the shaping of global public opinion. That spotlights another dimension of the battle for tech dominance: who gets to control the narrative on major global issues, and history itself.

An audit by US-based information reliability analytics firm NewsGuard released Wednesday said DeepSeek’s older V3 chatbot model failed to provide accurate information about news and information topics 83% of the time, ranking it tied for 10th out of 11 in comparison to its leading Western competitors. It’s not clear how the newer R1 stacks up, however.

DeepSeek becoming a global AI leader could have “catastrophic” consequences, said China analyst Isaac Stone Fish.

“It would be incredibly dangerous for free speech and free thought globally, because it hives off the ability to think openly, creatively and, in many cases, correctly about one of the most important entities in the world, which is China,” said Fish, who is the founder of business intelligence firm Strategy Risks.

That’s because the app, when asked about the country or its leaders, “present China like the utopian Communist state that has never existed and will never exist,” he added.

In mainland China, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has ultimate authority over what information and images can and cannot be shown – part of their iron-fisted efforts to maintain control over society and suppress all forms of dissent. And tech companies like DeepSeek have no choice but to follow the rules.

Because the technology was developed in China, its model is going to be collecting more China-centric or pro-China data than a Western firm, a reality which will likely impact the platform, according to Aaron Snoswell, a senior research fellow in AI accountability at the Queensland University of Technology Generative AI Lab.

The company itself, like all AI firms, will also set various rules to trigger set responses when words or topics that the platform doesn’t want to discuss arise, Snoswell said, pointing to examples like Tiananmen Square.

In addition, AI companies often use workers to help train the model in what kinds of topics may be taboo or okay to discuss and where certain boundaries are, a process called “reinforcement learning from human feedback” that DeepSeek said in a research paper it used.

“That means someone in DeepSeek wrote a policy document that says, ‘here are the topics that are okay and here are the topics that are not okay.’ They gave that to their workers … and then that behavior would have been embedded into the model,” he said.

US AI chatbots also generally have parameters – for example ChatGPT won’t tell a user how to make a bomb or fabricate a 3D gun, and they typically use mechanisms like reinforcement learning to create guardrails against hate speech, for example.

“That’s how every other company makes these models behave better,” Snoswell said.

“But it’s just that in this case, chances are that a Chinese company embedded (China’s official) values into their policy.”

Security concerns

There have also been questions raised about potential security risks linked to DeepSeek’s platform, which the White House on Tuesday said it was investigating for national security implications.

Concerns about American data being in the hands of Chinese firms is already a hot button issue in Washington, fueling the controversy over social media app TikTok. The app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance is being required by law to divest TikTok’s American business, though the enforcement of this was paused by Trump.

Unlike TikTok, which says as of July 2022 it stores all American data in the US, DeepSeek says in its privacy policy that personal information it collects is stored in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

A comparison of privacy policies between DeepSeek and some of its US competitors also show concerning differences, according to Snoswell.

Each DeepSeek, OpenAI and Meta say they collect people’s data such as from their account information, activities on the platforms and the devices they’re using. But DeepSeek adds that it also collects “keystroke patterns or rhythms,” which can be as uniquely identifying as a fingerprint or facial recognition and used a biometric.

“I’ve never seen another software platform that says they collect that unless it’s designed for (those purposes),” Snoswell said. He also noted what appeared to be vaguely defined allowances for sharing of user data to entities within DeepSeek’s corporate group.

“It’s way, way more permissive than anything you’d see from a Western software company,” he said.

Editor’s Note: This report contains details of death and injury that some may find distressing.

The stark testimony of their surviving colleagues, and the growing toll, portrays the obscure yet important role of American frontline fighters in a war President Donald Trump has called “ridiculous” and has pushed Russian President Vladimir Putin to end diplomatically.

Two American volunteers were killed in a single incident just outside Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine in late September, according to survivors and relatives. Neither’s body has been recovered. Former US soldier Zachary Ford, 25, from Missouri, and another American without military experience, whose family requested to be identified only by his callsign ‘Gunther,’ were killed by a drone while tasked with blowing up a bridge near the village of Novohrodivka.

The surviving American, who asked to be known by his callsign ‘Redneck,’ described a mission with a limited chance of success, where the group of three US volunteers were swiftly trapped by Russian fire in a trench about 500 meters from their bridge target.

Ford told his commanders on the radio they would abort the mission but was instructed to continue and that no evacuation was possible for another day, Redneck said. As the assault began, Redneck said he fired his machine gun at Russians directly in front of him, and that Ukrainians manning a grenade launcher and anti-tank Javelin weapon system died while holding back Russian armor.

He said he stepped into a bunker to get ammunition, narrowly missing the drone strike that wounded Ford and Gunther. Ford’s injuries required two tourniquets to stem the bleeding, Redneck said, which he applied before rejoining the defense and seeing a Ukrainian soldier fatally shot in the face in front of him.

“He knew we weren’t going to make it through another attack,” said Redneck of Ford, “so he started asking me to kill him so he wouldn’t be captured.” Redneck said he refused and told Ford they would find a way through this, before continuing to reload their weapons ahead of the anticipated assault.

“He went really quiet,” said Redneck of Ford. “A couple minutes later, (he) called me over and said he had loosened his tourniquets.” Redneck said he reapplied them, but Ford had lost too much blood.

Redneck said Ford’s last request was to see the sunlight as he died. “I laid him down with his head towards the door, so he could look out, see the sun, and I just held his hand. The last really intelligible thing he said was, ‘never let it be said that the bastards killed me.’”

Redneck said Ford had expressed a sentiment common among foreign fighters.

His most vivid memory of Ford was the tiny blue speaker he carried with him, on which he would constantly play the UK artist Artemas’ song, “I like the way you kiss me.” “He always was playing music and dancing around that speaker,” he said.

He said the likelihood of foreign volunteer fighters surviving on the front line depended on their level of experience but alsoon the tasks given by the brigades they joined. While some officers gave foreigners and Ukrainians equal tasks, he said, others “will sell you out and get you killed just as quick.”

He blamed the losses in his brigade on a “bad officer… who didn’t really see a difference between anyone. It was meat for the grinder, and he just sent whoever he could get.”

“At this point, you cannot say it’s not America’s fight,” he said. Critics of the war are “trying to say, ‘well, this is Ukraine’s problem. If we can just make peace now, we won’t have to deal with this.’ The truth is, it’s not going to stop,” Redneck added.

Redneck, speaking from the United States, said his unit was evacuated from the area and he later saw drone footage of Ford and Gunther’s bodies. The area where they fought is now under Russian control.

The process of retrieving the dead from the front lines is arduous and emotional. Former US Marine Corey Nawrocki, 41, from Pennsylvania, died fighting in Russia’s Bryansk region in October.

His body was paraded by Russian soldiers on Telegram, but after complex negotiations was one of nearly 800 dead returned to Ukraine by Russia on Friday, as was that of another missing American.

His mother, Sandy Nawrocki, wept as she described feeling a “whirlwind of emotions – relief, but sadness. A weight is lifted off my shoulder because now I don’t have to worry about what they might be doing to him over there.”

She described Nawrocki, a marine veteran of two decades with six tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, as a “smartass” who loved to make her laugh and was driven to fight in Ukraine because of the toll he had seen on civilians.

“Innocent people getting killed, babies being slaughtered,” she said. “I think that really bothered him.”

Nawrocki died after being shot while trying to help an injured colleague, his mother said she was told.

Images of his body and weapons were widely shared on Russian social media and she says her address and video of her home, were also posted. When she tried to notify Nawrocki’s Marine friends on social media of his death, pro-Russian trolls “would post all these nasty comments and, smiley faces,” she said.

She did not want her son to go to Ukraine but this “was an unprovoked war,” she said. “This is everyone’s war. If Russia wins, wins over Ukraine, that affects Poland, that affects all the European countries.”

The repatriation of dead Americans is the culmination of a complex and emotional path for those involved. Lauren Guillaume, an American living in Kyiv and working for the non-profit RT Weatherman Foundation, assists foreign families in finding their loved ones, often by trawling through morgues with the foundation’s Ukrainian investigator, Iryna Khoroshayeva.

Positive identification is possible through a combination of visual identification methods and DNA testing, Guillaume said.

Ukrainian officials said the task of identifying the dead is more complex when remains are returned from the Russian side. “After a body swap, we may be given a bag with 10 body remains belonging to different people,” said Artur Dobroserdov, Ukraine’s commissioner for missing persons under the Ministry of the Interior.

Dobroserdov confirmed that more than 20 Americans were missing in action, and said they could only release any part of the remains for repatriation once they had identified all of them, as they did not want families to bury part of a loved one only to be later given more remains.

One of the first cases in which Guillaume was able to assist was that of US Army veteran Cedric Hamm, from Texas, who was killed in the northern border region of Sumy in March. Hamm’s family were able to identify the unique mixture of Aztec and US military tattoos on his body in a video livestream Guillaume set up from the morgue. The body was then repatriated to San Antonio in December.

“I’m very proud of my son,” said his mother, Raquel Hamm, who said he had fought in Ukraine as he was keen to use his military past to travel. “His composure, even to the very end” had struck her, she said, describing how she was told “he saved another young man” during the gunfight that killed him.

“My expectation, honestly, was that my son was never going to be found,” said Hamm. “My son paid the ultimate price on the battlefield for Ukrainian freedom and that’s forever going to live with me. My child did not die in vain.”

Guillaume said foreigners can be declared dead through physical confirmation, like DNA testing on their remains, or through a court ruling, if there is significant evidence of their death. “It takes time,” she said. In March, her organization had a caseload of 16. It is now dealing with 88 dead or missing foreigners across 18 nationalities – half of them Americans. “Most of that is missing in action cases,” she said.

The true death toll among American volunteers in Ukraine remains unclear, Guillaume said.

She believes the rising number of dead and missing is down to foreigners being sent to tough, frontline areas where their prior military experience is needed. “We find that foreign operators do fill the gaps of very difficult, high-risk, high-reward operations. Their lives and their sacrifice are not wasted.”