PM urges Jamaicans to take precautions as hurricane season begins
With the 2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season now underway, Prime Minister Andrew Holness is urging Jamaicans to take the necessary precautions to protect life and property.
He said that individuals should listen for and adhere to warnings issued by the relevant authorities and ensure that they are accessing information from credible sources.
“More and more, the infodemic is becoming a major challenge… you have to manage the information you consume, because if you consume the wrong information, it could mean your life,” he pointed out.
The prime minister was addressing a National Disaster Risk Management Council Meeting on Thursday at the Spanish Court Hotel in New Kingston.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is forecasting a busy hurricane season with 12 to 17 named storms at winds of 39 miles per hour (mph) or higher.
Of those, five to nine could become hurricanes with winds of 74 mph or higher, including one to four major hurricanes at Category 3, 4, or 5, with winds of 111 mph or higher.
Meanwhile, the prime minister provided preparedness tips, including stocking up on simple first-aid supplies and medication and at least two days’ supply of water and food that does not need cooking or refrigeration.
The prime minister also advises the trimming of trees with branches near buildings or electrical lines, and the storage of essential documents in plastic to prevent them from getting wet.
He is imploring individuals who live in at-risk areas to be on alert and to relocate or visit a shelter when advised.
Holness said that Jamaica, like many Caribbean countries, is extremely vulnerable to natural disasters, noting that the human and economic costs are substantial.
“According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Jamaica’s exposure to natural disasters ranks in the top 20 globally, and this is primarily due to our low-lying coastal zones, which is where most of our population exist and our five major fault lines,” he said.
Holness pointed out that the country has withstood approximately 40 natural disasters on a national scale between 1950 and 2017. These include hurricanes and storms, severe droughts, floods, and epidemics.
Source- Jamaica Observer
Mexican police find 45 bags of human remains
Mexican authorities have found 45 bags containing human remains in a ravine outside the western city of Guadalajara.
Officials were searching for seven young call center workers, who had been reported missing last week when they found the bodies.
The remains include men and women, and the number of bodies is unknown.
The search is expected to continue for several days because of difficult terrain and poor lighting.
The state prosecutor's office for the western state of Jalisco said in a statement that, following a tip-off in the search for the seven people, they had begun searching at the Mirador del Bosque ravine where they found the bags that included body parts.
Firefighters and civil defense were working with police and a helicopter crew to recover the remains.
The first bag was found on Tuesday, but because of the rugged terrain and lack of sunlight, the investigation resumed on Wednesday and will continue until all remains are located, the prosecutor's office said.
Officials said they would continue working to determine the number of dead bodies, who they were, and their causes of death.
It added that it would continue trying to establish the whereabouts of the seven people reported as missing.
Although it has not yet been established how the bodies ended up in the ravine, crimes of disappearance are relatively common in Mexico.
More than 100,000 people are missing, government figures suggest, with many being victims of organized crime. Perpetrators are rarely punished.
Government data shows many disappearances have occurred since 2007 when then-President Felipe Calderón launched his "war on drugs".
Three-quarters of those reported missing were men and one-fifth were under the age of 18 at the time of their disappearance.
Relatives of the disappeared say that the government is not doing enough to find them and that officials are indifferent when they report their loved ones as missing.
The United Nations has called it "a human tragedy of enormous proportions".
Jalisco is the heartland of a violent drug war, and some of the most powerful groups operating there include the Jalisco New Generation cartel (CJNG), and their rival, Nueva Plaza, which split from the CJNG in 2017, sparking violence across Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco state.
Source- BBC
War crimes evidence erased by social media platforms
Evidence of potential human rights abuses may be lost after being deleted by tech companies, the BBC has found.
Platforms remove graphic videos, often using artificial intelligence - but the footage that may help prosecutions can be taken down without being archived.
Meta and YouTube say they aim to balance their duties to bear witness and protect users from harmful content.
But Alan Rusbridger, who sits on Meta's Oversight Board, says the industry has been "overcautious" in its moderation.
The platforms say they do have exemptions for graphic material when it is in the public interest - but when the BBC attempted to upload footage documenting attacks on civilians in Ukraine, it was swiftly deleted.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can remove harmful and illegal content at scale. When it comes to moderating violent images from wars, however, machines lack the nuance to identify human rights violations.
Ihor Zakharenko, a former travel journalist, encountered this in Ukraine. Since the Russian invasion, he has been documenting attacks on civilians.
The BBC met him in a suburb of Kyiv where one year ago men, women, and children had been shot dead by Russian troops while trying to flee occupation.
He filmed the bodies - at least 17 of them - and burnt-out cars.
He wanted to post the videos online so the world would see what happened and to counter the Kremlin's narrative. But when he uploaded them to Facebook and Instagram they were swiftly taken down.
"Russians themselves were saying those were fakes, [that] they didn't touch civilians, they fought only with the Ukrainian army," Ihor said.
We uploaded Ihor's footage onto Instagram and YouTube using dummy accounts.
Instagram took down three of the four videos within a minute.
At first, YouTube applied age restrictions to the same three, but 10 minutes later removed them all.
We tried again - but they failed to upload altogether. An appeal to restore the videos on the basis that they included evidence of war crimes was rejected.
Key figures within the industry say there is an urgent need for social media companies to prevent this kind of information from vanishing.
"You can see why they have developed and trained their machines too, the moment they see something that looks difficult or traumatic, to take it down," Mr. Rusbridger told the BBC. The Meta Oversight Board that he sits on was set up by Mark Zuckerberg and is known as a kind of independent "supreme court" for the company, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
"I think the next question for them is how do we develop the machinery, whether that's human or AI, to then make more reasonable decisions," Mr. Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, adds.
No one would deny tech firms' right to police content, says US Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaak: "I think where the concern happens is when that information suddenly disappears."
YouTube and Meta say that under their exemptions for graphic war footage in the public interest, content that would normally be removed can be kept online with viewing restricted to adults. But our experiment with Ihor's videos suggests otherwise.
Meta says it responds "to valid legal requests from law enforcement agencies around the world" and "we continue to explore additional avenues to support international accountability processes… consistent with our legal and privacy obligations".
YouTube says that while it has exemptions for graphic content in the public interest, the platform is not an archive. It says, "Human rights organizations; activists, human rights defenders, researchers, citizen journalists and others documenting human rights abuses (or other potential crimes) should observe best practices for securing and preserving their content."
The BBC also spoke to Imad, who owned a pharmacy in Aleppo, Syria, until a Syrian government barrel bomb landed nearby in 2013.
He recalls how the blast filled the room with dust and smoke. Hearing cries for help, he went to the market outside and saw hands, legs and dead bodies covered in blood.
Local TV crews captured these scenes. The footage was posted on YouTube and Facebook but has subsequently been taken down.
In the mayhem of the conflict, Syrian journalists told the BBC their own recordings of the original footage were also destroyed in bombing raids.
Years later, when Imad was applying for asylum in the EU, he was asked to provide documents that proved he was at the scene.
"I was sure that my pharmacy was captured on camera. But when I went online, it was taking me to a deleted video."
In response to this sort of incident, organizations like Mnemonic, a Berlin-based human rights organization, have stepped in to archive footage before it disappears.
Mnemonic developed a tool to automatically download and save evidence of human rights violations - first in Syria and now in Yemen, Sudan, and Ukraine.
They saved more than 700,000 images from war zones before they were removed from social media, including three videos showing the attack near Imad's pharmacy.
Each image might hold a key clue to uncover what really transpired on the battlefield - the location, the date, or the perpetrator.
But organizations like Mnemonic cannot cover every area of conflict around the world.
Proving that war crimes have been committed is incredibly hard - so getting as many sources as possible is vital.
"Verification is like solving a puzzle - you put together seemingly unrelated pieces of information to build a bigger picture of what happened," says BBC Verify's Olga Robinson.
The task of archiving open-source material - available to pretty much anyone on social media - often falls to people with a mission to help their relatives caught up in violent conflict.
Rahwa lives in the United States and has family in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, which has been wracked with violence in recent years, and where the authorities in Ethiopia tightly control the flow of information.
However, social media means there is a visual record of a conflict that might otherwise remain hidden from the outside world.
"It was our duty," says Rahwa. "I spent hours doing research, and so when you're seeing this content trickle in you're trying to verify using all the open-source intelligence tools you can get your hands on, but you don't know if your family is OK."
Human rights campaigners say there is an urgent need for a formal system to gather and safely store deleted content. This would include preserving metadata to help verify the content and prove it hasn't been tampered with.
Ms. Van Schaak, the US Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice, says: "We need to create a mechanism whereby that information can be preserved for potential future accountability exercises. Social media platforms should be willing to make arrangements with accountability mechanisms around the world."
Source- BBC
Amazon to pay $25m over Alexa and Ring privacy violations
Amazon is to pay $25m (£20m) to settle allegations that it violated children's privacy rights with its Alexa voice assistant.
The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents.
It was found to have kept hold of sensitive data for years.
Amazon's doorbell camera unit Ring will also pay out after giving employees unrestricted access to customers' data.
The ring will pay $5.8m to authorities, according to a filing in federal court in the District of Columbia.
According to the FTC complaint regarding Alexa, Amazon "prominently and repeatedly assured its users, including parents, that they could delete voice recordings collected" by the system.
But the company did not do this, keeping data for years and using it unlawfully to help improve its Alexa algorithm, the complaint said.
In a statement, Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, accused Amazon of "misleading parents, keeping children's recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents' deletion requests".
The company "sacrificed privacy for profits", he added.
Similarly, the FTC said Ring - which Amazon bought in 2018 - allowed "thousands of employees and contractors" to watch recordings of customers' private spaces.
They were able to view and download customers' sensitive video data for their own purposes, the body said.
Amazon told the BBC in a statement that "Ring promptly addressed the issues at hand on its own years ago, well before the FTC began its inquiry".
But according to the complaint, one employee viewed thousands of video recordings belonging to female users of Ring cameras that "surveilled intimate spaces in their homes such as their bathrooms or bedrooms".
The employee was only stopped once their actions were spotted by a colleague, it said.
"Ring's disregard for privacy and security exposed consumers to spying and harassment," Mr Levine said. "The FTC's order makes clear that putting profit over privacy doesn't pay."
Amazon said: "While we disagree with the FTC's claims regarding both Alexa and Ring and deny violating the law, these settlements put these matters behind us."
The company added that it will continue to invent more privacy features on behalf of customers.
Source- BBC
Ferrari on self-driving cars: ‘We don't care'
The ultraluxury brand doesn't plan to make software that will take over for the driver but is working toward releasing an EV by 2025.
Don’t expect a self-driving car from Ferrari anytime soon—if ever.
The Italian marque seems completely disinterested in autonomous driving technology if recent comments by CEO Benedetto Vigna are anything to go by. In fact, it sounds like the brand has barely given the idea any thought at all.
The executive recently spoke at the Financial Times’s Future of the Car Summit when he addressed the possibility of building an autonomous vehicle, according to Insider. While Vigna discussed the different types of software that go into today’s vehicles, it became abundantly clear how he feels about the technology.
“In a cabin, there are four kinds of software. There is performance software, there is comfort software, there is infotainment software, and there is autonomous,” he said. “The last one, we don’t care.”
Vigna’s comments shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. He has been saying the same thing since taking over as the Prancing Horse’s chief executive back in 2021. Last year, while outlining the brand’s slow-and-steady electrification strategy, he said, “No customer is going to spend money for the computer in the car to enjoy the drive,” according to Road & Track.
Vigna’s and Ferrari’s lack of interest in autonomous driving technology is what most enthusiasts will want to hear, though. Sure, the Prancing Horse has built some of the most beautiful and powerful cars of the last century, but what really separates its vehicles from the rest of the premium pack is how exhilarating they are to drive. Automakers such as Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, and just about everyone else can spend their time and money on the race to develop a car that can drive itself. Ferrari, meanwhile, will continue to build the kind of vehicles people love to get behind the wheel of.
Of course, that doesn’t mean there won’t one day, far in the future, be a Ferrari that can take over at least some of the driving duties. There was once a time the brand said it would never build an SUV, after all—and look what happened.
Source- Robb Report
Rapper 2Pac to get star on Hollywood Walk of Fame
Tupac Shakur is to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 26 years after the rapper's death.
The hip-hop star will be honoured with a ceremony on the prestigious Los Angeles walkway on 7 June.
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce confirmed the rapper would receive the posthumous honour to the LA Times.
Shakur, whose star will be the Walk of Fame's 2,758th, was a New York-born rapper who heavily influenced hip-hop, particularly the West Coast rap scene.
Sekyiwa "Set" Shakur, Tupac's sister, will accept the honour on his behalf during the formal opening ceremony for the star.
Los Angeles radio presenter Big Boy will lead the ceremony, while director Allen Hughes and writer Jamal Joseph will be the guest speakers.
Shakur, whose stage name was stylised as 2Pac, released his debut album in 1991 and went on to enjoy chart success with hits including California Love, All Eyez on Me, Changes and I Ain't Mad at Cha.
He died on 13 September 1996 at the age of 25, after he was shot four times in Las Vegas.
In 2004, his posthumous single Ghetto Gospel, which features a sample from Elton John's Indian Sunset, reached number one in the UK singles chart.
Source- BBC
Lionel Messi set for decision on future - and it won't be Barcelona
Lionel Messi is expected to decide in the coming hours where he will be playing his football next season - the only thing that seems certain is that it will not be at Barcelona.
Messi would have liked nothing more than to return to the place that was his home since he left Argentina as a 12-year-old in pursuit of his footballing dream.
But his camp has told Barcelona the decision on his future is imminent and they cannot wait any longer for a proposal from them that has not arrived, despite promises the Catalan club would have something in place by now.
The 35-year-old World Cup winner wants to stay in Europe but, after it was decided he would leave Paris St-Germain this summer, the forthcoming offers from the continent have not been attractive enough.
In Saudi Arabia, there are government officials already working on his arrival. They have been told Messi has accepted a very lucrative offer from Al-Hilal and are preparing for the move. This could simply be his camp preparing for his decision - or it is the most attractive proposition for the player.
American side Inter Miami is another option, although a reported loan deal between them and Barcelona - where he would end up temporarily at the Catalan club - is not on the cards.
The proposal put forward by Inter Miami, while not as financially lucrative as the offer from Saudi Arabia, includes close collaboration from brands like Adidas and Apple that would help bump up the deal.
However, the initial reaction from the Messi camp was that that offer was too complex and they were unconvinced.
The timing and announcement of his decision will be decided by his new club.
Once again the Barcelona media machine has been mobilized to persuade anyone and everyone that their failure to secure a deal is the fault of the player and La Liga.
A melange of misinformation, half-truths and outright lies emanating from a friendly press ignore the fact Barcelona have at no point put any proposal to the player and that they cannot offer any guarantee they will be able to do so before the September 1 deadline.
The Financial Fair Play limitations that will be in place for next season also make any ambitious plan to bring him back an impossibility.
But, rather than admit this, Barcelona prefers to give the impression they are making tireless efforts to bring him home - only for them to be pushed back either by Messi or the allegedly 'draconian' limitations put on them by the league's governing body.
It is simply not true.
Manager Xavi said yesterday that 99% of what was required for the player to return to the club was down to Messi himself. Perhaps that is what Xavi has been told, but it is all words and putting the emphasis on his decision is based on an intentionally wrong reading of the affair.
These are the moments when teams start to put their plans in place. And with plans for his return seemingly now dead in the water, it is damage limitation time for Barcelona as they set about trying to show they did everything possible to bring him home.
Messi's team made it clear he was prepared to play for whatever wage that would have helped Barcelona stay on the right side of FFP regulations and he would even be prepared to play for free if asked - although that is neither acceptable to La Liga nor even legal under Spanish law.
The French newspaper L'Equipe said there was the possibility of Messi being signed by Inter Miami and then going on loan to Barcelona. This is an idea that has come from the American club but never had any chance of going past the talking stage.
How can Inter convince Messi to be signed by them and go on loan to Barcelona for a few months? The player, for many the best ever, would feel like a commodity.
In any case, despite being discussed by the two clubs, at no point has any proposal along those lines been made to the player himself.
The accusation La Liga is to blame is risible. They are followed by nonsensical accusations La Liga also has in place anti-Barcelona regulations. It is the exact opposite.
La Liga rules are in place to protect clubs, Barcelona included, from owners and directors financially ruining them.
The temptation when directors get money is to invest it in players when the reality is they should be as much or more concentrated on paying debts and improving infrastructure.
Due to the usage of 'financial levers' that allowed Barcelona to invest in the club last season, but won't be able to be used again, they presented a liquidity plan recently to La Liga. This was in addition to the budget plans that all clubs have to provide, to prove to the league they are living within their means.
The reason they have to provide these plans is to reassure the league that any extra incoming money will not be spent in a way that could jeopardize the future of the club.
The temptation of spending on players, rather than on much-needed repairs or debt repayments, is akin to buying prohibitively expensive designer furniture to place in a living room, while there is a massive hole in the roof.
Clubs present budget plans which show their income minus all non-sporting financial commitments and any outstanding debts that need to be serviced.
What is left is the money available to pay players. It is up to Barcelona if they want to use all that money to pay for Messi, but they have never indicated they want to do that, instead suggesting they need to register Ronald Araujo or Gavi with their new contracts first.
The reality is the club still have massive debts to cover and their spending capacity will be very limited.
That information will arrive officially from La Liga to Barcelona in the next few days, but the club is very aware of those limits, which will not be announced to the public until after the markets have closed to not affect transfers.
Meanwhile, you hear false stories in the Catalan media about how La Liga and Barcelona are holding meetings to talk about Messi, and there is only a shortfall of around 40m euros (£34.6m) between what the club have presented and what La Liga wants to resolve their FFP situation. This, again, is untrue.
The most worrying aspect is that, with the distraction of Messi, people are not realising since the arrival of president Joan Laporta, the debt is neither being reduced at the rate it needs to be, nor being reduced in sufficient quantities to allow them to have a budget for the players that will allow them to be competitive in Europe.
Source- BBC
Weekend robberies under investigation
Officers of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Force are investigating four separate incidents of robberies that occurred over the weekend in Providenciales.
Based on preliminary reports, at around 9:22 p.m. on May 27th, a call was placed to the Police Control Room informing officers of a robbery on Sandbar Street, Five Cays. The victims of the robbery – a male and female- reported they were inside a parked vehicle when a vehicle pulled alongside them and four armed men exited. The armed men proceeded to rob the victims of their valuables and vehicle.
Around 9:27 p.m., a report was received from a male victim who stated whilst driving his vehicle behind the Paradise Baptiste Church, he was stopped by three males who were all wearing ski masks and heavily armed. The robbers got inside the victim’s vehicle, pointed a gun at him, placed him in the back seat, and drove off. The victim managed to jump out of the moving vehicle and escaped.
At 9:50 p.m., the Police Control Room received a call of a robbery in progress at a Bar located along Academy Way, Downtown. RTCIPF officers were dispatched to the scene. Based on reports, two armed men entered the establishment and proceeded to rob the patrons. Two male victims were struck on the head with firearms by the robbers. The robbers escaped in a silver vehicle.
At 10: 07 p.m., RTCIPF officers responded to a report of a robbery along Aviation Drive. The male victim stated that sometime after 9 p.m. he went to Glass Shack to drop off someone and in doing so was approached by four armed males who proceeded to rob him of his vehicle.
The victim stated he was struck and placed to the back of the said vehicle and driven to a financial institution to withdraw money from his account. He managed to escape.
At this stage, the offences are being linked and a dedicated investigation team has been established.
The public is being advised to notify the closest police station and give any information regarding these robberies or any illegal activity anonymously.
Bolt celebrates 15-year anniversary of first world record
Usain Bolt set the world record in the 100 meters with a time of 9.72 seconds at the Reebok Grand Prix in New York.
Bolt’s time was .02 seconds faster than the old record held by fellow Jamaican, Asafa Powell.
It was just the start of the then 22-year-old’s sprint dominance, and he would go on to lower the 100m world record two more times - 9.69 seconds, just months later at the Beijing Olympics to win gold, and then 9.58 seconds at the 2009 World Championships, which still stands up to this day.
On Wednesday, Bolt acknowledged the anniversary on social media by posting a video of the race with the caption, “May 31, 2008 #FactsnotOpinion”.
In a follow-up post, he posted a photo of himself competing in the race with the caption, “Call me legend and me nuh pass 40 #History #FactsnotOpinion.”
Source- Jamaica Observer
Top Australian soldier loses war crimes defamation case
Australia's most-decorated living soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has lost a historic defamation case against three newspapers that accused him of war crimes in Afghanistan.
The outlets were sued over articles alleging he killed unarmed prisoners.
The civil trial was the first time a court has assessed accusations of war crimes by Australian forces.
A judge said four of the six murder allegations - all denied by the soldier - were substantially true.
These included:
- A handcuffed farmer the soldier had kicked off a cliff - a fall which knocked out the man's teeth before he was subsequently shot dead
- A captured Taliban fighter who was shot at least 10 times in the back, before his prosthetic leg was taken as a trophy and later used by troops as a drinking vessel
- Two murders were ordered by Mr Roberts-Smith to initiate or "blood" rookie soldiers.
- Justice Anthony Besanko found the newspaper had not proven two other murder allegations, nor reports Mr Roberts-Smith had assaulted a woman with whom he was having an affair; nor a threat against a junior colleague.
But additional allegations that he had unlawfully assaulted captives and bullied peers were found to be true.
Mr Roberts-Smith, who left the defence force in 2013, has not been charged over any of the claims in a criminal court, where there is a higher burden of proof. The 44-year-old was not present for Thursday's judgement.
After the decision, a Taliban spokesman said the case was proof of "uncountable crimes" by foreign forces in Afghanistan, but added he did trust any court globally to follow them up.
Australian troops were deployed to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021. Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles declined to comment on the case, saying it was a civil matter.
An elite Special Air Service (SAS) soldier, Mr Roberts-Smith is Australia's most famous living war veteran.
He received the country's highest military award - the Victoria Cross - in 2011 for having single-handedly overpowered Taliban machine-gunners who had been attacking his platoon.
But his public image was shattered in 2018 when The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times started publishing articles about his misconduct between 2009 and 2012.
The soldier argued five of the killings reported by the newspapers had occurred legally during combat, and the sixth did not happen at all.
His defamation case - dubbed by some "the trial of the century" - lasted 110 days and was rumoured to have cost up to A$25m ($16.3m, £13.2m).
More than 40 witnesses - including Afghan villagers, a government minister and a string of current and former SAS soldiers - gave extraordinary evidence about every facet of Mr Roberts-Smith's life.
But the case also exposed some of the secretive inner workings of Australia's elite special forces.
The trial heard from soldiers who said potential misconduct was rarely reported due to a "code of silence" within the regiment, and others defended their actions as necessary.
Many giving evidence were there unwillingly, having been subpoenaed, and three refused to speak about some allegations fearing self-incrimination.
Much of the evidence against Mr Roberts-Smith relied on eyewitness accounts and recollections of discussions among soldiers. Justice Besanko had to weigh the reliability of witnesses against each other, with the media outlets contending theirs had no reason to lie.
Speaking outside the Federal Court in Sydney, the news outlets called the judgement a "vindication" for their reporting.
"It's a day of justice for the brave men of the SAS who stood up and told the truth about who Ben Roberts-Smith is: a war criminal, a bully and a liar," said investigative reporter Nick McKenzie, who wrote the stories alongside Chris Masters and David Wroe.
"[And] today is a day of some small justice for the Afghan victims of Ben Roberts-Smith."
The Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organisation also praised the role of investigative journalism in "uncovering the truth and raising public awareness" about what had taken place in the country.
Media magnate Kerry Stokes - who employs Mr Roberts-Smith at rival outlet Seven-West Media - said the judgement did "not accord with the man I know".
"I know this will be particularly hard for Ben, who has always maintained his innocence," said Mr Stokes, who had loaned the soldier money to fund his legal case. Mr Roberts-Smith had offered to hand in his Victoria Cross as collateral, local media reported.
The case comes three years after a landmark report found credible evidence that Australian forces had unlawfully killed 39 civilians and prisoners in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2013.
Accusations of war crimes have also been levelled at soldiers from the UK and US in recent years.
Local media say dozens of Australian soldiers are being investigated for their roles in alleged war crimes. But so far charges have only been laid against one, Oliver Schulz.
War historian Peter Stanley told the BBC ahead of the judgement that Mr Roberts-Smith's case was "a litmus test" for allegations of Australian wrongdoing in Afghanistan.
"The Ben Roberts-Smith episode is just a precursor to the major series of war crimes investigations, allegations, prosecutions, and possibly convictions that we'll see over the next few years."
Source- BBC