The reports cited a Twitter statement Friday as saying the social media company had “removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share disinformation in an automated fashion — a violation of our policies.”

CNN said the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had alerted Twitter to the accounts, which were removed in late September and early October.

“For the election this year we have established open lines of communication and direct, easy escalation paths for state election officials, DHS, and campaign organizations from both major parties,” the statement said.

Twitter said it appeared the account network was run out of the United States, but did not provide details on how the accounts worked.

For months, Twitter has sought to eliminate automated and bogus accounts designed to manipulate the public conversation on Twitter, in response to concerns over Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In October the platform said its number of active users fell by nine million in the past quarter as a result of these efforts.

US President Donald Trump recently complained that Twitter was removing some of his followers.

One of India’s most high-profile tiger hunts in decades ended Friday night when the mother of two 10-month old cubs — known to hunters as T1 but Avni to wildlife lovers — was shot dead in the jungles of Maharashtra state.

A team of more than 150 people had spent months searching for T1, using a paraglider and dozens of infrared cameras while sharpshooters had ridden on the backs of elephants.

However disputes quickly erupted after the killing as media reports said the tiger was shot in Yavatmal forest with no attempt to tranquilize her.

India’s Supreme Court had issued a hunting order for T1 — blamed for 13 deaths since June 2016 — in September, ruling that she could be killed if tranquilizers failed. Several appeals were made against the death sentence.

The tiger was killed at night, when tranquilizers are not allowed to be used, according to the Times of India and other media outlets.

T1 is said to have been shot dead by Ashgar Ali Khan, son of India’s most famous hunter Nawab Shafath Ali Khan, who was meant to be leading the hunt but was not present Friday night.

Forestry officials and the hunter did not answer calls to give details of the hunt.

Principal Chief Conservator of Forests A.K. Mishra told The Indian Express newspaper that a forest staffer had managed to dart the tiger with a tranquilizer at around 11.00 pm.

“But she charged at the team, forcing Ashgar to shoot in self-defence,” he said. “The tigress lay dead in a single shot.”

– Self-defence or ‘murder’? –

However Mishra’s account was contradicted by other reports, while many groups condemned the way the killing was conducted.

The Times of India quoted sources involved in the hunt as saying it looked as though a tranquilizer dart had been put into the tiger’s corpse after the killing. The sources said the dart had not been fired.

Forestry officials acknowledged to Indian media that no vet was present during the hunt, as required by the Supreme Court order.

Jerryl Banait, a vet and activist in Karnataka state who had launched appeals against the order, described the shooting as “cold-blooded murder”.

“Avni was killed illegally satisfying a hunter’s lust for blood,” said the Indian branch of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) group.

It said India’s Wildlife Protection Act and National Tiger Conservation Authority rules had been flouted, calling for the matter to be “investigated and treated as a wildlife crime”.

The tiger’s body has been taken to a zoo in the city of Nagpur for a post-mortem.

Despite the disputed circumstances, villages around the town of Pandharkawda celebrated the death with relief.

T1 claimed her first victim, a woman whose body was found in a cotton field, in June 2016. Since then most of the dead were male herders.

India has launched a major campaign to boost tiger numbers. At the last tiger census in 2014 the number had risen to more than 2,200 from a low of less than 1,500.

But urban spread as the population of 1.25 billion grows has increasingly eaten into the territory of wild animals.

Endangered elephants and tigers kill on average one person a day, according to government figures.

The lawmakers warned that a culture of impunity will result in more attacks against journalists, who play crucial roles in holding power to account and bringing information to the public, Efe news reported.

“Media is under increasing threat across Southeast Asia,” APHR member Teddy Baguilat, a Philippines lawmaker, said in a statement issued on the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists.

“It is abhorrent that brave journalists should have to put their personal freedom or even lives on the line when they are simply trying to do their jobs,” he said.

According to the APHR, the Philippines is one of the most dangerous country for journalists with a poor record of arresting and prosecuting those responsible for killing media people.

On June 7, unidentified gunmen shot dead Dennis Donora, editor of the Trends and Times weekly, in his car in Panabo City in the Davao del Norte province.

Justice in the murders of 47 journalists, who have been killed since 2008, was still pending.

The APHR also flagged the situation in Myanmar, a country which has been widely criticized for the seven-year prison sentence given to Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, on charges of violating an archaic official secrets act while they were investigating a story on the Rohingya crisis.

The group also criticized the government of Cambodia, the military junta of Thailand and the communist regimes of Laos and Vietnam for continuing to crack down on media freedom.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) comprises of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Member states of the organisation tasked with overseeing the sustainable exploitation of the Southern Ocean failed at an annual meeting Friday to agree over the a 1.8 million square kilometre (1.1 million square miles) maritime protection zone.

The proposed sanctuary — some five times the size of Germany — would ban fishing in a vast area in the Weddell sea, protecting key species including seals, penguins and whales.

Consensus is needed from all 24 members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the European Union.

But environmental groups say Russia and China — whose concerns over compliance issues and fishing rights have proved key stumbling blocks in the past — along with Norway, played a part in rejecting the plan.

“This was an historic opportunity to create the largest protected area on Earth in the Antarctic: safeguarding wildlife, tackling climate change and improving the health of our global oceans,” Greenpeace’s Frida Bengtsson said in a statement on Saturday.

“Twenty-two delegations came here to negotiate in good faith but, instead, serious scientific proposals for urgent marine protection were derailed by interventions which barely engaged with the science and made a mockery of any pretence of real deliberation.”

Antarctica is home to penguins, seals, toothfish, whales and huge numbers of krill, a staple food for many species.

They are considered critical for scientists to study how marine ecosystems function and to understand the impacts of climate change on the ocean.

Plans were set out in 2009 to establish a series of marine protected area (MPAs) in the Southern Ocean allowing marine life to migrate between areas for breeding and foraging, but it has been slow going.

The CCAMLR summit, held in each year in Hobart, Australia, was able in 2016 to establish a massive US and New Zealand-backed MPA around the Ross Sea covering an area roughly the size of Britain, Germany and France combined.

As well as the huge Weddell Sea sanctuary, proposals to estbalish two further MPAs in East Antarctica and the Western Antarctic Peninsula were also dashed this year. Together, the three zones would cover close to three million square kilometres.

Andrea Kavanagh, head of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Antarctic and Southern Ocean work, described the failure to achieve an MPA designation as “discouraging”.

“Without an East Antarctic MPA, critical foraging grounds for emperor and Adelie penguins, toothfish, and many other species will not be safeguarded,” she said in a statement.

The CCAMLR released a statement saying the new MPAs were the “subject of much discussion” and would be considered again at next year’s meeting.

Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (NLD) swept to power in 2015 in a landslide victory ending decades of military rule.

But her tenure has been marred by a failure to speak up for Rohingya Muslims driven out of the country by the army and stumbling peace talks with insurgent groups in lawless border areas.

A mere 13 positions are in play in the country’s second by-election since the national poll three years ago, but they are spread out across the country and include parliamentary and regional assembly seats.

Some two-dozen parties are in the mix and 69 candidates are taking part.

At one polling station in Yangon’s Tamwe township residents showed support for Suu Kyi while acknowleding some of the criticism.

“I voted NLD this morning,” Maung Maung, 34, a software engineer who lives in Tamwe, told AFP.

“I was a strong supporter of the NLD for years but during the years when NLD took power, there were some failures that they are working on,” he added, without going into detail.

Aye Soe, a 52-year-old street vendor, expressed full-throated backing.

“I will support her until I die,” she said.

Initial results are expected to be announced on Sunday.

Nobel laureate Suu Kyi’s reputation at home is more secure than it is abroad, where her image as a rights icon has been shattered by the Rohingya crisis.

More than 720,000 from the stateless Muslim minority have fled to Bangladesh since a military crackdown in August 2017.

Huddled in crowded camps, they have recounted stories of murder, rape and villages burned to the ground.

Myanmar has denied almost all of the allegations, saying soldiers were defending themselves against Rohingya militants.

UN investigators have called for the situation to be referred to the International Criminal Court and for senior members of the Tatmadaw, as the armed forces are known, to be investigated on genocide charges.