Latest news with #Bulgarian-born
New York Post
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Harry Potter' star Stanislav Yanevski hospitalized, undergoes emergency surgery after losing ability to breathe
'Harry Potter' star Stanislav Yanevski revealed Friday that he was rushed to the hospital when he lost the ability to breathe following his 40th birthday. Yanevski, who starred as the powerful Viktor Krum in 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,' underwent emergency surgery soon after he celebrated his major milestone, but is now on the road to recovery. 'I was taken into surgery and the photo was taken right after I had come out of the surgical room,' Yanevski said in an Instagram post alongside an image of him in a hospital bed with a bandage wrapping around his nose. 3 'Harry Potter' star Stanislav Yanevski went to the hospital after losing his ability to breathe. Instagram/stan_yanevski The Bulgarian-born actor did not publicly specify what he was diagnosed with. 'As always and those who know me closer, I went through this in silence as I didn't want to scare or worry anybody,' Yanevski added. 'I've always been this way. I fight through struggles in quiet. Of course I had support from the few I had told and my family for which I'm very thankful.' Yanevski assured his fans that he is 'recovering' and his doctors are 'surprised' by his progress. 'I will be able to breathe freely, experience all scents of life, which was something I had lost over the past months,' Yanevski shared. 'I will be able to sleep without struggles, recover properly with peaceful sleep and be at my full powers very soon.' But the fitness buff admitted that it might take a while to speak professionally on camera. 'I still have a few pieces planted in my nose, so I'm not able to talk freely, so please have some patience with Cameo – I stopped it, so I'm not available for bookings until I can talk properly again.' 3 Yanevski is known for playing Viktor Krum in 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.' Murray Close 3 Yanevski turned 40 before he was rushed to the hospital. Getty Images Yanevski portrayed the love interest of Hermione Granger — played by Emma Watson — in the fourth installment in the film series based on J. K. Rowling's books. He seemingly lives a very active lifestyle and often posts about his workouts on his Instagram page. Yanevski believed the habits he formed would help his recovery efforts. 'I had a checkup with my doctor today and he said that I'm recovering really well and was actually quite surprised with my progress. I guess all the healthy diets, training and self control and belief help in such cases,' Yanevski wrote. Yanevski's role in the 2005 'Harry Potter' film was his first gig as an actor. His last acting credit came in 2021 for the action thriller 'Last Man Down.' He was scheduled to make a two-day appearance at Swiss Comic Con on May 30 and 31. Last month, actor Nick Moran, who portrayed Scabior in 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I' and Part 2, was hospitalized after suffering from 'life-threatening' spinal cord injury. Moran has since returned home and was 'on his way to a full recovery.'
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Meet the Russian Propagandist Who Joined White House Press Briefing
The White House has officially opened its doors to a website accused of spreading Russian propaganda. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt welcomed Zero Hedge's Liam Cosgrove to the new media seat Monday—who predictably proceeded to relay conspiracy theories when given an opportunity to ask the first question at the morning press briefing. Zero Hedge is a financial blog started under a penname by Bulgarian-born former investment banker Daniel Ivandjiiski, and has been accused by U.S. intelligence officials of publishing articles crafted by Moscow-controlled media. The site has also spread conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, and circulated fake quotes from politicians. The site amassed a large alt-right (now mainstream) audience, including racists, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists. Now, it's being granted an even larger platform and preferential treatment from the White House. Cosgrove asked two questions. The first was about whether Donald Trump planned to stop 'financing foreign wars' in Ukraine and Gaza, during which Cosgrove managed to laud Trump and take a shot at Joe Biden. The second was about an old conspiracy theory resurfaced by the president himself. 'So, over the weekend, President Trump posted Truth Social, a video highlighting what most people call the 'Clinton body count,'' Cosgrove said. 'Which is the strange number of suicides that seem to happen in Clinton circles—' As Cosgrove spoke, Leavitt was visibly holding back a smile. Cosgrove took issue with reporting from The Washington Post that Trump's Truth Social post had amplified 'false' conspiracy theories. Although it wasn't mentioned in the video shared by the president, Cosgrove raised the apparent suicide of Mark Middleton, a former aide to President Bill Clinton who had been a point of contact between the White House and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, as his own evidence of the 'Clinton body count.' 'That's just a lead-in to my question about the most famous Clinton-related suicide, which is that of Jeffrey Epstein. There's still a lot of questions about the Epstein files—' Cosgrove continued, asking whether the White House planned to release information that would connect Epstein's trafficking activities to intelligence agencies, 'even potentially as part of a blackmail ring with potential ties to the Israeli government.' In a classic Leavitt non-answer, she said that more information about Epstein would be released soon because Attorney General Pam Bondi had said she would release more information soon. The White House opened up its briefing room to 'new media' in January, and has made way for a revolving door of professional journalists, podcasters, and influencers. This crowd has inevitably included several MAGA talking heads, including content creators from Breitbart, the right-wing video platform Rumble, BreakingPoints, the Daily Wire, former Newsmax host Mark Halperin, and the right-wing substack Washington Reporter.
BBC News
26-03-2025
- BBC News
Derry: Doctor acquitted of care home manslaughter
A doctor has been acquitted of the manslaughter of a female patient who died in a care Pepelyashkov was due to stand trial on a charge of unlawfully killing Michele McGuigan in Londonderry in May 48-year old, from Riverside in Antrim, had denied the charge and appeared at Belfast Crown Court on the jury was sworn in, Madam Justice McBride was addressed by a prosecution barrister who said, after taking instruction from the director of public prosecutions, the Crown would not be offered any evidence against Dr Pepelyashkov. Madam Justice McBride then addressed the 12 jurors and instructed the foreman to enter a plea of "not guilty by direction".Following this the prosecution told the court there was "nothing further" against Dr judge then told the Bulgarian-born doctor: "You have been found not guilty on the direction of the jury and you are therefore free to go."Despite no details being given in court on Wednesday, it is understood the charge related to an incident in the Owen Mor Care Centre in Culmore Road in Derry.A second defendant, Easteden Limited which is based on the Erganagh Road in Omagh, has also been charged with an offence arising from the company, which owns the care home, has been charged with a health and safety breach - namely that it failed to ensure the safety of a non-employee on a date between 10-14 May Limited has denied the charge and a trial is due to be held at a later date.
The Independent
25-03-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
What it's really like to be on Putin's kill list and hunted down by his murderous thugs
When you imagine receiving the news that you're on the kill list of one of the world's cruellest dictators, you perhaps don't imagine it while holding a glass of champagne. But, in January 2023, that's exactly – or, almost exactly – what happened to Christo Grozev, an internationally renowned investigative journalist who I had been filming for a documentary about his work for months, and who told me at a glitzy awards ceremony in New York that Vladimir Putin wanted him dead. The Bulgarian-born journalist had long been rustling feathers at the Kremlin – his exceptional work for Bellingcat (a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group that Grozev headed up from 2015) exposed Putin's killing network of spies and assassins. Known as a 'modern-day Sherlock', he also unmasked the perpetrators involved in poisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, winning him global accolades. Still, neither of us quite expected that, while the rest of the room waited for their wine to be topped up, the grim reality of the situation would be revealed. He simply said, 'I can't go home.' The message said that intelligence had revealed there could be a 'red team' waiting for him at home in Vienna, Austria. Now, the hunter had become the hunted. By the time Grozev became one of Putin's most wanted, I'd been following him around with a camera for more than a year. We were working on a documentary – Kill List: Hunted by Putin's Spies – which started out as a story about Bellingcat. They were unparalleled in their work using open source investigation to identify, track and expose assassins and spies working for the dictator across Europe. Over the three years we were filming, the doc went far beyond that brief. Rather than explaining the poison programme itself, the narrative changed. What we answered was what you risk when you speak out against the regime – the threats, the fear and the very human cost of putting yourself on the line to expose the truth. We'd taken pretty extreme security measures from the very beginning – our story began with a whistleblower in possession of state secrets who risked everything to speak out against Putin's poison programme. We spoke in code words using encrypted apps, worked out of a bunker-like room cut off from the rest of the production office. If I'm totally honest, after a while, I thought: this is a bit silly. I half convinced myself that we were being over the top; that no one really cared about what we were doing. You feel like you're acting in a spy movie. And then police arrested part of a Bulgarian spy ring living in the UK. And then it all became real. In New York, the day after the award ceremony, things were eerily normal. Grozev was definitely shaken by it – no doubt – but we naively thought that perhaps it could be resolved in a week or so; at that point, we didn't realise the extent of the plot. We were really in the rhythm of filming by then and, to some extent, I think my presence made the knowledge that he couldn't risk returning to Vienna, where his wife and children awaited him, a little easier to digest. Not because he wasn't making huge and devastating sacrifices, but because it softened reality somehow – it was all happening through a lens. Still, he was watchful. He had an app installed on his phone which was able to check hotel rooms for bugs. Occasionally he attempted to wear a disguise, but they were always so bad – a terrible wig and some sunglasses that actually made him stand out more if anything. He only used tightly encrypted apps like Signal for work, and sometimes used a false name to travel under. His levels of stress were unimaginably high. In the documentary, he reveals that he went to a doctor who said they'd never seen such enormous, constant, unfluctuating stress in someone's body. Shortly after we found out he couldn't go home Grozev called his dad, who was worried of course, as were his wife and children. It was these moments, when the enormous personal impact began to emerge that began to hammer home what Grozev had given up in pursuit of justice. While the world sees him as an international superstar of investigative journalism, his family certainly doesn't – to them, he's dad who his children can't see. 'Look at the mess you created,' his wife – who remains in remarkably good spirits – told him over the phone. Sadly, the worst was yet to come. Three weeks after his name appeared on Putin's kill list, his father stopped answering the phone. Grozev's dad had always been a big influence on him – while his mother started him listening to Radio Free Europe (which was illegal) when he was nine years old, he described his dad as a 'rebel' – anti-establishment, a bit of a hippy. 'He was the only person who was really proud of what I was doing,' Grozev told me on camera after his dad was eventually found dead – no foul play was ever identified, but a later trial at the Old Bailey heard that spies had identified his father's house, which raised his suspicions. He dealt with the loss and the guilt by throwing himself into work as usual. He had long wanted to take Putin down, but this was now getting about as personal as it gets. The more the story unfolded, the more surprising I found it. Bellingcat was started by citizen journalist and online sleuth Eliot Higgins in 2014, and cleverly uses information openly posted online to investigate war zones, human rights abuses and, of course, the criminal underworld. When Grozev joined he took it a step further, because he understands the dark web and black marketplace for Russian data – phone records, passport travel records, parking fines, anything. If there was a moment that the world needs reminding once more that Putin is a brutal murderer, a war criminal – this is it Grozev found that most of the criminals following him were not trained 'professional' Russian spies, they were just hired criminals. Which – as odd as this might sound looking in – is in one way reassuring: these guys are not going to get novichok and put it on your door knob. But that doesn't mean they're not dangerous. They were incredibly well-resourced, had sophisticated equipment and their ambitions were pretty sinister. And, if you can just use money to get criminals to do bad stuff on tap, it's much harder for someone like Grozev or the police to combat that threat. From their messages we know that, for instance, the first time we filmed Grozev the spies knew as soon as he booked his flight to London that he was coming. There are some messages we don't have, so we don't know if they followed him from the airport to where we met. But they knew what he was doing, that's for sure. So, by extension, they knew what we – what I – was doing too. I didn't really ever fear my own safety, though. There was one moment when, after three members of a Bulgarian spy ring in the UK were arrested for spying on behalf of Russia, I discovered a chilling detail. These spies, for some reason, posted almost all of their trips on Google reviews. So, when they were tailing Grozev in Valencia or Vienna, they would post a review – one of them I saw was a complaint about not having fresh towels, for example. I thought, they can't be this stupid, there must be a reason they're doing it; communicating in code, or something. Then, weirdly, two days before the spies were arrested, there was a review from a beauty salon less than a minute from my house. The spy may not have even been there, and if she was it might not have been to do with me. But it definitely stopped me in my tracks, if felt like too much of a coincidence. Grozev is still boldly continuing his work. And, as the documentary airs, I hope his brilliance is further recognised and more discussion prompted. You would think that a film saying 'Putin is a bad guy' wouldn't exactly be breaking news. But I think given what's happening in the world at the moment, and Putin almost being welcomed back into the civilized groups of nations – Trump cosying up to him – it's important. I've never called myself an activist filmmaker before, despite tackling politically loaded subjects like the drug war in the Philippines, the untold devastation inflicted on children in Gaza and, more recently, the Chernobyl disaster. But if there was a moment that the world needs reminding once more that Putin is a brutal murderer, a war criminal – this is it.
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘They came across as muppets': Christo Grozev on being target of Bulgarian spy ring
Christo Grozev was sitting in a New York cafe in February 2023, expecting to fly back to his home in Vienna that evening, when US law enforcement officials delivered some news that changed his life. 'I was told that it's not a good idea for me to leave back to Austria, because there's been some intelligence suggesting there's a red team waiting for you,' said Grozev, a Bulgarian-born investigative journalist who has infuriated the Kremlin by exposing numerous Russian intelligence operatives in recent years. 'My question was, 'Could this be just hacking and surveillance?' And they said, 'From what we've seen, it's definitely more than that.' That was the only information Grozev was given, but he did not board that flight. A few weeks later, news came of coordinated arrests in Britain of members of a Bulgarian spy ring believed to be working for Russian intelligence. Last week at the Old Bailey, a jury found three of the group – Katrin Ivanova, Vanya Gaberova and Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev – guilty on espionage-related charges. Over many weeks of court hearings, the jury heard how the trio were part of a group that travelled to Vienna and other European locations to surveil Grozev. Plans were developed to kidnap and deliver him to Russian operatives, which ultimately were never implemented. The plotters' ideas were sometimes more bluster than substance, and occasionally prompted laughter from the jury, but Grozev said he was relieved at the guilty verdict nonetheless. 'They may have come across as muppets, but it's clear that their plans could have been incredibly dangerous,' he said. Grozev first came to prominence with his work for Bellingcat, a group of online sleuths who used traditional journalistic tools combined with combing leaked Russian databases to identify Russian operatives – first uncovering the suspects in the 2018 Salisbury novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, who were from Russia's GRU military intelligence agency. Two years later, he identified the FSB poisoning squad behind the attempt to kill the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, also with novichok nerve agent. At the time, Navalny called him 'a modern-day Sherlock Holmes'. These investigations apparently put Grozev firmly in the sights of Russia's vengeful intelligence apparatus, along with his collaborator, the Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov, with whom he now works for the online outlet the Insider, and who was also surveilled by the Bulgarian ring. While he knew there was a danger of reprisals for his work, the appearance of a concrete threat forced him to introduce new security measures into his life. But just as he was adapting to them, in the weeks after the initial warning in New York, he received more unwelcome news – his father had died unexpectedly in Austria. 'I had to breach all of these instructions and fly there to attend to the funeral,' he said. On that visit, he spent three days living in a safe house, but there was no burial because Austrian police impounded his father's body for tests to see if there was anything suspicious. Grozev said he never received a conclusive answer as to whether there was any foul play, but seeing evidence presented in the London trial of how the Bulgarian ring had located his father's apartment led to increased suspicion. 'I had written it off as a coincidence, but something that brought that story back is the photo of Ivanova in front of my dad's apartment with an arrow on how to get into it. I guess we'll never know,' he said. During the brief trip back for his father's funeral, the Austrians told Grozev the group tracking him apparently had links to Jan Marsalek, the Austrian-born fugitive chief executive of Wirecard, who is accused of coordinating his actions with handlers in the Russian intelligence structures. Marsalek contracted a Bulgarian living in Britain, Orlin Roussev, to run the spy ring. Roussev pled guilty and did not stand trial, but the evidence included thousands of messages exchanged between him and Marsalek, who is believed to be in Moscow. Grozev had published numerous investigations into Marsalek, an unusual player in the global espionage game. He is wanted in Europe over a €1.9bn (£1.6bn) bank fraud, and disappeared soon after news of the scandal broke in 2020. Reporting by Der Spiegel suggests he may have been recruited by Russia as early as 2014. In the messages presented to the Old Bailey, Marsalek repeatedly refers to discussions with 'our friends' over mission planning, suggesting that he became a trusted freelancer for the Russian intelligence services. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Grozev sees in Marsalek a successful businessman who developed supervillain ambitions: 'He got so much money so early on, he scammed so many people early on, and he just wanted to be bigger than just a super-rich guy, he wanted to be an international player,' he said. Numerous intelligence agencies would have tried to recruit Marsalek, Grozev believes, as his Wirecard company offered 'cash conversion capabilities' that every intelligence agency needs. 'But not everyone offered that he could become one of them, and the Russians did,' he said. Engaged by Marsalek, Roussev ordered his Bulgarian ring to track Grozev and Dobrokhotov. Over a period of many months, the team followed Grozev, covertly recorded him, had Gaberova friend him on Facebook with the goal of setting up a honey-trap sting, and even claimed to have broken into his Vienna apartment. A plan was discussed to launch a kidnap mission during a visit to Kyiv, but this was called off by Marsalek at the last minute. Grozev does not recall ever spotting his unwanted followers, but his teenage daughter may have done so. On one occasion, when he took her to an outdoor restaurant in Vienna for lunch, she told him she thought there was a Russian spy surveilling them. 'She told me, 'He's been walking back and forth like four times, and every time I look at him, he raises his camera and he pretends to be filming or take photographs of the building above us. And this building is very ugly, so there's nothing to photograph!'' At the time, Grozev told his daughter to leave the spy tracking to him, but much later, it transpired that this was the day on which Ivanchev had been tracking Grozev in Vienna. These days, he prefers not to disclose too much about his current living arrangements, but he has been forced to stay away from Vienna. 'I have no idea where my home is. Apparently it cannot be Bulgaria, it cannot be Austria or any Schengen country. There is a feeling of unrootedness that has plagued me for two years now.' Antidote, a documentary film featuring Christo Grozev and his investigations, is in select cinemas from 14 March, and will be shown as Kill List: Hunted by Putin's Spies on Channel 4 on 25 March.
