In India's deportation drive, Muslim men recount being tossed into the sea
After three days at sea, Shah said, they stood him on the edge of the vessel with a life vest, untied his hands, uncovered his eyes and gave him a final order at gunpoint: 'Jump into the water,' Shah remembered the officers saying.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Associated Press
4 hours ago
- Associated Press
Stella Rimington, Britain's first female MI5 spy chief, dies at 90
LONDON (AP) — Stella Rimington, the first female chief of Britain's MI5 intelligence agency and later a successful thriller writer, has died, her family said Monday. She was 90. The first woman to head a U.K. intelligence agency, Rimington was the inspiration for Judi Dench's portrayal of MI6 chief M in seven James Bond films. Her family said in a statement that Rimington died on Sunday 'surrounded by her beloved family and dogs and determinedly held on to the life she loved until her last breath.' MI5's current director-general, Ken McCallum, said that 'as the first avowed female head of any intelligence agency in the world, Dame Stella broke through long-standing barriers and was a visible example of the importance of diversity in leadership.' Born in London in 1935, Rimington studied English at Edinburgh University and later worked as an archivist. She was living in India with her diplomat husband in the mid-1960s when she was recruited by MI5, Britain's domestic security service, as a part-time clerk and typist in its New Delhi office. She joined the agency full-time after moving back to London in 1969 and rose through the ranks, overcoming rules that kept the most prestigious roles, such as recruiting and running agents, for men only. She worked in each of MI5's operational branches — counterespionage, counterterrorism and counter-subversion — at a time when MI5's work included sniffing out Soviet spies, infiltrating Northern Ireland militant groups and, controversially, spying on leftists, trade union leaders and other alleged subversives. Rimington acknowledged in 2001 that the organization 'may have been a bit over-enthusiastic' in some of its snooping on domestic targets during the Cold War. Rimington was appointed MI5 director-general in 1992, the first head of the organization to be named in public, and her tenure saw the secretive organization become slightly more open. Dench's first appearance as M, a role formerly played by men, was in 'GoldenEye' in 1995. The film's producers said the casting was inspired by Rimington's appointment. After stepping down in 1996, Rimington was made a dame, the female equivalent of a knight, by Queen Elizabeth II. Rimington later published a memoir, 'Open Secret' — to the displeasure of the government — and a series of spy thrillers featuring fictional MI5 officer Liz Carlyle. 'The Devil's Bargain,' published in 2022, introduced a new heroine, CIA officer Manon Tyler. Other women followed her top intelligence jobs. Eliza Manningham-Buller led MI5 between 2002 and 2007. Anne Keast-Butler became head of electronic and cyber-intelligence agency GCHQ in Metreweli was named in June as the first female head of the overseas intelligence agency, MI6. Rimington and her husband, John Rimington, separated in the 1980s, but moved back in together during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. 'It's a good recipe for marriage, I'd say,' she said. 'Split up, live separately, and return to it later.' She is survived by her husband, two daughters and five grandchildren.
Washington Post
14 hours ago
- Washington Post
Afghans forced back from Iran fear for their future under Taliban rule
When the Taliban overran Kabul in 2021, Sonita, an Afghan human rights activist, fled with her family to neighboring Iran. Last month, they were forced back to Afghanistan, where Sonita fears she is still a marked woman. She recalled pulling up her face mask at the border, leaving only her eyes uncovered, and walking hurriedly past the Afghan guards, accompanied by her husband and two young children. On the 24-hour bus ride from the Iranian border to the Afghan capital, every checkpoint prompted panic, she said.
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Yahoo
Violent arrest of Black student shows benefits of recording police
A video capturing the brutal arrest of a Black college student, who was beaten by police officers in Florida, has led to calls for drivers to consider placing cameras in their cars. William McNeil Jr. was pulled from his car and punched in the head during the ordeal in February. He captured the incident – which began as a traffic stop – on his phone, which was mounted above his dashboard. It provided the only clear video of the violence, including the punches to his head, which could not be seen clearly in police body camera footage released by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. As McNeil had the foresight to record the incident from inside the vehicle, 'we got to see firsthand and hear firsthand and put it all in context what driving while Black is in America,' civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of several lawyers advising McNeil, said. 'All the young people should be recording these interactions with law enforcement," Crump said. 'Because what it tells us, just like with George Floyd, if we don't record the video, we can see what they put in the police report with George Floyd before they realized the video existed.' Officers pulled McNeil over saying his headlights should have been on due to bad weather, his lawyers said. The video shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sits in the driver's seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, according to a police report. The incident reports do not describe the officer punching McNeil in the head. The officer, who pulled McNeil over and then struck him, described the force this way in his report: 'Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground.' The video went viral after McNeil posted his video online in July. The sheriff's office then launched an internal investigation, which is ongoing. A sheriff's office spokesperson declined to comment about the case this week, citing pending litigation, though no lawsuit has been filed over the arrest. McNeil said the ordeal left him traumatized, with a brain injury, a broken tooth and several stiches in his lip. His attorneys accused the sheriff's office of trying to cover up what really happened. 'On 19 February 2025, Americans saw what America is,' said another of McNeil's lawyers, Harry Daniels. 'We saw injustice. You saw abuse of police power. But most importantly we saw a young man that had a temperament to control himself in the face of brutality.' The traffic stop, he said, was not only racially motivated but 'it was unlawful, and everything that stemmed from that stop was unlawful." McNeil is not the first Black motorist to record video during a traffic stop that turned violent — Philando Castile's girlfriend livestreamed the bloody aftermath of his death during a 2016 traffic stop near Minneapolis. But McNeil's arrest serves as a reminder of how cellphone video can show a different version of events than what is described in police reports, his lawyers said. Christopher Mercado, who is retired as a lieutenant from the New York Police Department, agreed with McNeil's legal team's suggestion that drivers should record their police interactions and that a camera mounted inside a driver's car could offer a unique point of view. "Use technology to your advantage," Mercado, an adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said. 'There's nothing nefarious about it. It's actually a smart thing in my opinion.' Rod Brunson, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, said he thinks it is a good idea for citizens to film encounters with police — as long as doing so does not make the situation worse. 'I think that's a form of protection — it's safeguarding them against false claims of criminal behavior or interfering with officers, etc.,' Brunson said. Although the sheriff's office declined to speak this week, Sheriff T.K. Waters has spoken publicly about McNeil's arrest since video of the encounter went viral. He pushed back against some of the allegations made by McNeil's lawyers, saying that McNeil was told more than a half-dozen times to exit the vehicle. At a news conference in July, Waters also highlighted images of a knife in McNeil's car. The officer who punched him claimed in his police report that McNeil reached toward the floor of the car, where deputies later found the knife. Crump, though, said McNeil's video shows that he 'never reaches for anything,' and a second officer wrote in his report that McNeil kept his hands up as the other officer smashed the car window. A camera inside a motorist's vehicle could make up for some shortcomings of police bodycams, which can have a narrow field of view that becomes more limited the closer an officer gets to the person being filmed, Mercado said. However, after the police murder of Floyd, some states and cities debated how and when citizens should be able to capture video of police. The Constitution guarantees the right to record police in public, but a point of contention in some states has been whether a civilian's recording might interfere with the ability of officers to do their job. In Louisiana, for example, a new law makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet (7.6 meters) of a police officer in certain situations. Waters acknowledged those limitations at a news conference in 2024, as he narrated video of a wild brawl between officers and a fan in the stands at EverBank Stadium during a football game between the universities of Georgia and Florida. The sheriff showed the officers' bodycam videos during the start of the confrontation near the top of the stadium. But when the officers subdued the suspect and were pressing against him, the bodycam footage did not capture much, so the sheriff switched to stadium security video shot from a longer distance away. In McNeil's case, the bodycam video did not clearly capture the punches thrown. If it had, the case would have been investigated right away, the sheriff said. For the past 20 years, Brunson has been interviewing young Black men in several U.S. cities about their encounters with law enforcement. When he first began submitting research papers for academic review, many readers didn't believe the men's stories of being brutalized by officers. 'People who live in a civil society don't expect to be treated this way by the police. For them, their police interactions are mostly pleasant, mostly cordial," Brunson said. 'So it's hard for people who don't have a tenuous relationship with the police to fathom that something like this happens,' he said. "And that's where video does play a big part because people can't deny what they see.'
