gedaliyah

Lindsay and Craig Foreman were arrested while travelling in Iran last January and subsequently charged with espionage, which they deny. They are currently being held at Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.

Ms Foreman’s son, Joe Bennett, was meeting with parliamentarians on Wednesday to tell them his parents have endured threats of execution, witnessed regular knife fights and been left visibly malnourished and suffering from chronic medical neglect in prison.

“Since their arrest on January 3rd 2025, more than 400 days ago, Mum and Craig have suffered a list of human rights abuses that is truly shocking,” he said in a statement.

Two of the House lawmakers who reviewed the files—Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Ro Khanna of California—said the redactions appeared to include one “high up” foreign government official and other prominent individuals whose names and photographs were obscured in the versions previously released to the public.

“There are six men, some of them with their photographs, that have been redacted, and there’s no explanation why those people were redacted,” Massie, a Republican, said after spending roughly two hours reviewing the documents inside a secure reading room at a Department of Justice satellite office.

cross-posted from: https://lemmings.world/post/41066929

Somehow the word allow is in the word swallow and in swallow two wholly different meanings: one to take in through the mouth and another what we call the common winged gnat hunter who is, in all probability, somewhere near us now. Once, I thought if I knew all the words I would say the right thing in the right way, instead language becomes more brutish: blink twice for the bird, blink once for tender annihilation. Who knows what we are doing as we go about our days lazily choosing our languages. Some days my life is held together by definitions, some days I read the word swallow and all my feathers show.

The FBI collected ample proof that Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused underage girls but found scant evidence the well-connected financier led a sex trafficking ring serving powerful men, an Associated Press review of internal Justice Department records shows.

Videos and photos seized from Epstein's homes in New York, Florida and the Virgin Islands didn't depict victims being abused or implicate anyone else in his crimes, a prosecutor wrote in one 2025 memo.

Iran sentenced Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi to over seven more years in prison after she began a hunger strike, supporters said Sunday.

Millions of reports of AI-enabled abuse haven't stopped xAI, Grok's parent company, from rolling out new and more powerful AI tools. On Sunday, xAI introduced a new version of its AI generative video model on X, Grok Imagine 1.0.

Nudification requests aren't allowed by other AI models, but Grok has no qualms about them: Its "spicy mode" can make suggestive and provocative imagery. What happened, however, went far beyond that. It was publicly shared, unfiltered, image-based sexual abuse.

Grok made 1.8 million deepfake sexual images over nine days in January, according to a report from The New York Times, comprising 41% of the total images made by Grok. A separate study from The Center on Countering Digital Hate estimated that Grok made approximately 3 million sexualized images over 11 days, with 23,000 of those deepfake porn images featuring children.

Dramatic cuts to the Washington Post are being met with outrage as employees and the broader journalism community try to understand how such a storied institution could unravel so quickly.

The perceived lack of empathy from top management and the company's billionaire owner Jeff Bezos is compounding the fury.

As of Wednesday night, neither CEO Will Lewis nor Bezos had made any public statements about the cuts, which will impact roughly 30% of the Post's staff.

"This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations," the Post's celebrated former editor-in-chief Marty Baron said in a lengthy statement.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has begun a hunger strike in an Iranian prison in protest of what she said was her unlawful detention, according to a statement from her family released on Wednesday.

Ms. Mohammadi, a prominent Iranian rights and democracy activist, has been arrested and imprisoned repeatedly on charges of threatening national security.

She was on a hunger strike most recently in 2023, when her family said she was being denied medical care while in detention. Ms. Mohammadi, 53, was allowed to temporarily leave prison for treatment in 2024 but was arrested again last December.

The statement said she had been on a hunger strike since Monday, protesting her continued detention, poor conditions of confinement and lack of contact with family or legal counsel. Many detainees in Iran face such conditions, it added.

“We are gravely concerned for her life,” said Kiana Rahmani, Ms. Mohammadi’s daughter and a co-president of the Narges Mohammadi Foundation, which represents her work. “She, along with all political prisoners in Iran, must be released immediately.”

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“The U.S. withdrawal exacerbated an already bad situation,” said Sherine Ibrahim, a former head of the Afghanistan office of the International Rescue Committee, which received three-quarters of its funding from the U.S. government. “No other donor has stepped in and no one will in those proportions.”

In 2024, the United States funded over half of Afghanistan’s nutrition and agricultural programs. Food insecurity has skyrocketed since last year’s cuts. More than 17 million Afghans — 40 percent of the population — now face acute levels of hunger, two million more than last year.

Seven provinces face critical food insecurity, the final stage before famine, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a group of international organizations that the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor global hunger. None were at this level a year ago.

Afghanistan is projected to lose 5 percent of its national income in 2026 as donors slash aid, according to the Center for Global Development. Researchers warn that will have long-term consequences for children, causing malnutrition that will stunt their development.

“That is a 20 to 30-year impact, not a one-year budget decision,” said Mohammad Mustafa Raheal, a research fellow at Lund University in Sweden who studies humanitarian aid delivery in Afghanistan. “You can’t just ‘switch the aid back on’ later and undo that damage.”

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Last year, overall vehicle sales in Europe barely ticked up, rising 2.2 percent from 2024. EV sales, meanwhile, increased by 29 percent, bringing market share to an impressive 19.5 percent.

That's according to data from automotive analyst JATO Dynamics, which finds that the big winner has been Volkswagen. Last year, its EVs outsold those from Tesla for the first time as sales of VW's electric offering grew by 56 percent, while Tesla's shrank by 27 percent.

To put that into concrete numbers, VW sold 274,278 EVs to Tesla's 236,357. And that's just the VW brand itself—the automaker also owns Skoda (in 4th place, with 171,703 sales), Audi (5th place, 153,845 sales), Cupra (15th place, 79,269 sales), and Porsche (21st place, 32,715 sales). Not a bad effort, considering just over a decade has passed since VW's Dieselgate scandal.