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A worker who was trapped after part of a medieval tower collapsed in the heart of Rome, has died, according to hospital officials.

Octay Stroici was pulled free at 23:00 local time (22:00 GMT), nearly twelve hours after a section of the Torre dei Conti, on the edge of the famous Roman Forum and close to the Colosseum, gave way and trapped him beneath.

His heart stopped in the ambulance, and doctors at the hospital he was rushed to were unable to save him.

The Romanian foreign ministry said Stroici was a Romanian national, as was another worker among three others pulled from the rubble. One is said to be in a critical condition.

Stroici’s rescue was initially described as an exceptional feat by firefighters who had worked late into the night. Rescue teams used drones and rubble clearers to try to reach him, despite the risk that the fragile tower could collapse further.

He had been conscious and talking to the emergency workers throughout the rescue. His wife was also at the scene.

Stroici had been carrying out conservation work on the medieval tower which is part of the Roman Forum, one of this city’s busiest tourist sites. But this particular building had been empty and abandoned for many years.

The Rome Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the incident.

Efforts to rescue Stroici – reported to be in his 60s – were interrupted when a second section of the 29m (90ft) high tower began crumbling again, with bricks raining down, creating a huge cloud of dust.

Earlier, Rome prefect Lamberto Giannini had described it as a “very complex situation”. Giannini said that after the initial collapse firefighters had “put up some protection” around the trapped man, so when the second collapse happened, “they obviously shielded him”.

He added that the rescue was a long operation due to having to “mitigate…the enormous risks faced by the people trying to carry out the rescue”.

One firefighter was taken to hospital with an eye problem, according to local media, but the rest were unharmed, eventually resuming their search for the man.

A police chief said there was no imminent danger that the tower will disintegrate.

“My thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to the person currently fighting for his life beneath the rubble, and to his family, for whom I sincerely hope that this tragedy finds a positive outcome,” wrote Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on X before the rescue was complete.

Another worker, 67-year-old Ottaviano, who was inside at the time of the collapse but escaped from a balcony uninjured, told the AFP news agency: “It was not safe. I just want to go home.”

Rome’s mayor and Italy’s culture minister visited the scene.

The 13th Century tower is part of the Roman Forum, a major tourist attraction in the centre of Rome, but it is separated from the main visitors’ area by a road. The streets all around have been taped off by police as a precaution.

The medieval tower was built by Pope Innocent III as a residence for his brother.

Country awaits final presidential election result that could see 83-year-old Alassane Ouattara sworn in for fourth term.

Former Ivory Coast commerce minister Jean-Louis Billon has conceded defeat to incumbent Alassane Ouattara in the country’s presidential election, as early partial results show the latter with a strong lead nationwide.

“The initial results place the incumbent President, Mr Alassane Ouattara, in the lead, designating him the winner of this presidential election,” Billon said in a statement, congratulating the president on Sunday.

Billon was among four opposition candidates running against Ouattara, the 83-year-old former International Monetary Fund executive who is seeking a fourth term in office.

Billon failed to secure the endorsement of the opposition PDCI party, led by Tidjane Thiam – the ex-Credit Suisse chief who was barred from the ballot.

Earlier in the day, the country’s Independent Electoral Commission began announcing partial results from Saturday’s polls on national television.

“The results of 20 departments or divisions are being read out,” and 10 or 11 departments remain, Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Idris said, reporting from the economic capital, Abidjan on Sunday. This included diaspora votes from six countries.

“This is the most critical stage of this election, where results from various polling booths and centres are being collated and announced,” Idris said.

“From the initial results, it’s clear the incumbent is leading by a wide margin in many of the areas so far.”

Nearly nine million Ivorians were eligible to vote in an election marked by a divided opposition further hobbled by the barring of two leading candidates.

“Ivorians are watching closely what happens here,” said Idris. “And the result of this election will determine whether or not the streets will remain calm.”

So far, the streets of Abidjan have remained quiet and calm, Idris reported, “apart from reports of scattered violence in other parts of the country that has led to two deaths”.

“Security patrols are all over the place; at least 44,000 security personnel have been deployed for this election before, during, and after, in case trouble breaks out,” he added.

Ouattara’s leading rivals – former President Laurent Gbagbo and Thiam – were barred from standing, Gbagbo for a criminal conviction and Thiam for acquiring French citizenship.

This led to pre-election protests and calls from some quarters for a boycott of the polls.

While an official voter turnout is not yet known, the president of the election commission, Ibrahime Coulibaly-Kuibiert, earlier put the figure at about 50 percent.

Polling stations in Abidjan and historically pro-opposition areas in the south and west were nearly empty, the AFP news agency reported. Meanwhile, it said voters turned out in large numbers in the north, where Ouattara had most of his support.

With key contenders out of the race, Ouattara was the overwhelming favourite.

Saturday’s vote was reminiscent of the last election in 2020, in which he obtained 94 percent of the ballots with a turnout slightly above 50 percent in an election then boycotted by the main opposition.

None of the four candidates who faced Ouattara represented a major party or had the reach of the ruling Rally of Houphouetists for Democracy and Peace.

Presidential election is currently expected to take place in December.

Voters in Guinea have overwhelmingly backed a new constitution that could allow coup leader Mamady Doumbouya to run for president if he chooses to, according to partial results.

The constitution looked set to pass with 90.6 percent votes in favour and 9.4 percent against, the head of Guinea’s General Directorate of Elections, Djenabou Toure, told reporters late on Monday. Those figures were based on 91 percent of the votes cast in Sunday’s referendum.

An overall figure for voter turnout was not available, but officials had counted more than 4.8 million votes out of more than 6.6 million registered voters, meaning turnout had exceeded 70 percent.

Critics called the results a power grab, but the military government said the referendum paves the way for a return to civilian rule. The presidential election is currently expected to take place in December.

Reporting from the capital, Conakry, Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Idris said members of the opposition were opposed to the referendum.

“The elections were held all across Guinea with no incidents at all – 45,000 security forces were deployed. … The opposition said this is a way of harassing the voters,” he said.

Presidential election

Doumbouya, a 40-year-old former member of the French Foreign Legion, voted along with his wife at a health centre in Conakry, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap with a drawing of a traditional mask symbolising fertility.

He seized power in Guinea, home to the world’s largest reserves of bauxite, in 2021. It was part of a wave of eight coups that swept West and Central Africa from 2020 to 2023.

A charter adopted after the coup barred members of the transitional government from seeking office. But that language was not included in the constitution put to voters on Sunday.

Doumbouya has not said yet whether he intends to run for office.

The country’s two main opposition leaders, Cellou Dalein Diallo and deposed former President Alpha Conde, are among those who called for a boycott of the referendum.

Their political parties are currently suspended, and Human Rights Watch has accused the government of disappearing political opponents and arbitrarily suspending media outlets.

The government has denied any role in disappearances but has promised to investigate such allegations.

June 26 (UPI) — A federal judge let Meta off the hook for the use of books to train its artificial intelligence model, but it still might face legal challenges by the authors in other ways.

United States District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled Wednesday that it wasn’t unlawful for Meta to feed copyrighted material to its large language models, or “Llama,” because of the doctrine of “fair use.”

Chhabria wrote in his ruling that the use of copyrighted works by companies to train generative AI models, are using the materials in a creative fashion, which in copyright law is considered a “transformative” use as the Copyright Act says the use of copyrighted materials to teach, research, criticize, comment or report news is not infringement.

Conversely, the judge also noted that creating a new product by way of copying a protected work and then marketing that product could potentially harm the markets that carry the original materials.

“So by training generative AI models with copyrighted works, companies are creating something that often will dramatically undermine the market for those works,” Chhabria wrote.

He then questioned if companies that feed copyright-protected materials into their AI platforms without first getting permission from the copyright holders or paying to use the originals are doing something illegal.

“Although the devil is in the details, in most cases the answer will likely be yes,” wrote the judge.

Chhabria then referred to a similar case that concluded on Monday in which U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled the Anthropic artificial intelligence company didn’t violate any copyright laws when it used millions of copyrighted books to train its own AI.

“Judge Alsup focused heavily on the transformative nature of generative AI while brushing aside concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on,” Chhabria wrote.

“No matter how transformative [Llama] training may be, it’s hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars,” Chhabria wrote. “While enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books.”

However, part of the lawsuit filed by the authors also alleges that Meta had removed copyright management information, which would violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, and this will be overseen separately.

A case management conference on how the court will proceed in regard to the DMCA is scheduled for July 11.

WASHINGTON — Coming to court this week, a police officer’s widow wanted to prove that a man assaulted her husband during a mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol and ultimately was responsible for her husband’s suicide nine days later. A jury’s verdict on Friday amounted to only a partial victory for Erin Smith in a lawsuit over her husband’s death.

The eight-member jury held a 69-year-old chiropractor, David Walls-Kaufman, liable for assaulting Metropolitan Police Officer Jeffrey Smith inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They will hear more trial testimony before deciding whether to award Erin Smith any monetary damages over her husband’s assault.

But the judge presiding over the civil trial dismissed Erin Smith’s wrongful death claim against Walls-Kaufman before jurors began deliberating. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said no reasonable juror could conclude that Walls-Kaufman’s actions were capable of causing a traumatic brain injury leading to Jeffrey Smith’s death.

Reyes divided the trial into two stages: one on the merits of Erin Smith’s claims and another on damages. The damages phase is expected to stretch into next week.

Erin Smith claimed Walls-Kaufman gave her husband a concussion as they scuffled inside the Capitol. Jeffrey Smith was driving to work for the first time after the Capitol riot when he shot and killed himself with his service weapon.

His widow claims Walls-Kaufman struck her 35-year-old husband in the head with his own police baton inside the Capitol, causing psychological and physical trauma that led to his suicide. Jeffrey Smith had no history of mental health problems before the Jan. 6 riot, but his mood and behavior changed after suffering a concussion, according to his wife and parents.

Walls-Kaufman, who lived near the Capitol, denies assaulting Jeffrey Smith. He says any injuries that the officer suffered on Jan. 6 occurred later in the day, when another rioter threw a pole that struck Jeffrey Smith around his head.

Walls-Kaufman served a 60-day prison sentence after pleading guilty to a Capitol riot-related misdemeanor in January 2023, but he was pardoned in January. On his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump pardoned, commuted prison sentences or ordered the dismissal of cases for all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack.

Trump’s sweeping act of clemency didn’t erase Erin Smith’s lawsuit against Walls-Kaufman.

Erin Smith, the trial’s first witness, recalled packing a lunch for her husband and kissing him as he headed off to work on Jan. 15, 2021, for the first time after the riot.

“I told him I loved him, said I would see him when he got home,” she testified.

Within hours, police officers knocked on her door and informed her that her husband was dead. She was stunned to learn that he shot himself with his service weapon in his own car.

“It was the most traumatic words I’ve ever heard,” she recalled. “You just don’t know what to do.”

Walls-Kaufman’s attorney, Hughie Hunt, urged jurors to “separate emotion” and concentrate on the facts of the case.

“This is tragic, but that doesn’t place anything at the foot of my client,” Hunt said during the trial’s opening statements.

Jeffrey Smith’s body camera captured video of his scuffle with Walls-Kaufman. In his testimony, Walls-Kaufman said he was overcome by “sensory overload” and “mass confusion” as police tried to usher the crowd out of the Capitol.

“I couldn’t tell who was pushing who or from what direction,” he said.

The police department medically evaluated Jeffrey Smith and cleared him to return to full duty before he killed himself. Hunt said there is no evidence that his client intentionally struck Jeffrey Smith.

“The claim rests entirely on ambiguous video footage subject to interpretation and lacks corroborating eyewitness testimony,” Hunt wrote in a court filing in the case.

More than 100 law enforcement officers were injured during the riot. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick collapsed and died a day after engaging with the rioters. A medical examiner later determined he suffered a stroke and died of natural causes. Howard Liebengood, a Capitol police officer who responded to the riot, also died by suicide after the attack.

In 2022, the District of Columbia Police and Firefighters’ Retirement and Relief Board determined that Jeffrey Smith was injured in the line of duty and the injury was the “sole and direct cause of his death,” according to the lawsuit.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press.