Namazi previously spoke with Amanpour by phone in March 2023 from inside Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, in what was an unprecedented interview. He was the longest-held Iranian-American prisoner, excluded from three separate deals that freed other detained Americans during the Obama and Trump administrations. ‘The smell of freedom’ On 18 September 2023, Namazi stepped off the plane and onto American soil. At ...

Hurricane John struck Mexico’s southern coast on Monday night after rapidly strengthening into a major Category 3 storm, triggering warnings of ‘life-threatening’ floods and mudslides. Packing maximum sustained winds of 120 mph (193 kph), the storm made landfall south-southwest of the city of Marquelia in Guerrero state at around 9:15 p.m. local time, according to the National Hurricane Center. Just ...

Israel launched an intense barrage of airstrikes across swathes of Lebanon on Monday in what was the deadliest day for the country since at least the 2006 war fought between Israel and the powerful Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Terror and despair gripped Lebanese residents as Israeli bombs killed at least 492 people, including dozens of children and wounded more than ...

Tokyo, Japan (AP) — Japan said its warplanes used flares to warn a Russian reconnaissance aircraft to leave northern Japanese airspace on Monday. Japanese Defense Minister Minoru Kihara told reporters that the Russian Il-38 plane breached Japan’s airspace above Rebun Island, just off the coast of the country’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido, for up to a minute in three ...

Wole Soyinka became the first Black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, and is now one of the continent’s most revered authors. But two decades earlier, he was sent to prison without trial for speaking out about the civil war in his native Nigeria. While in solitary confinement he scrawled notes and poems using meat bones, ...

Michael Kovrig, one of two Canadian men detained in China for more than 1,000 days on alleged spying charges, has described being put in solitary confinement for six months and relentlessly interrogated in what he said was psychological torture. Dubbed the “Michaels,” Kovrig and fellow Canadian national Michael Spavor were at the heart of a bitter tussle between Beijing and Ottawa ...

TikTok has said it’s removed accounts associated with Russian state media for “engaging in covert influence operations”. It’s part of the site’s efforts to prevent disinformation in the run up to November’s US presidential election. Accounts affected are those from media group Rossiya Segodnya, which owns the RIA Novosti and Sputnik news services; and TV-Novosti, the parent body of the ...

Some of the country’s most notorious cold cases could be solved with the help of an artificial intelligence tool that can do 81 years of detective work in just 30 hours. Avon and Somerset Police are trialling the technology which can identify potential leads that may not have been found during a manual trawl of the evidence. The Soze tool ...

One of the central characteristics of the 2024 presidential election is its steadiness. That’s counterintuitive, certainly; rarely has any contest seen as much tumult as we’ve seen in the past several months. Attempts on Donald Trump’s life, President Joe Biden’s withdrawal, Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascent. And the result is an election in which it’s impossible to predict who might ...

There is vanishingly little doubt that Project 2025 has become one of the most unpopular political programs or ideas in recent history. The question is increasingly how much voters intend to hang that millstone around Donald Trump’s neck. A new NBC News poll Sunday is the latest to show that Project 2025, a detailed policy plan put together by a ...