By Luc Cohen NEW YORK, Oct 8 (Reuters) – US prosecutors on Thursday charged ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores with conspiring to torture political opponents and American citizens, adding to the drug trafficking case the couple already faced. Separately, US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who is overseeing the case, denied a request ‌by Flores to be released from jail due to health concerns ahead of a trial scheduled for next year. Maduro, 63, and Flores, 69, were captured on January 3 ‌in their Caracas home during a US military operation ordered by President Donald Trump, and were flown to New York to face drug charges against them that were announced that same day. A superseding indictment filed in Manhattan federal court ​on Thursday added the torture count to the existing criminal case. Maduro and Flores each would face a mandatory minimum 50 years in prison if convicted of all the charges. They have pleaded not guilty to the original charges, but have not yet entered pleas to the new indictment, which detailed alleged torture against nine people, including three US citizens. In a statement, Maduro’s lawyer Barry Pollack said, “President Maduro denies the charges in the new indictment and looks forward to his day in court.” Flores’ lawyers Mark Donnelly and Andres Sanchez in a statement said their client denies the allegations. They questioned why prosecutors only revealed the ‌indictment, which court records showed was returned under seal by a grand ⁠jury on Tuesday, shortly before Thursday’s hearing. “We look forward to fully responding to the allegations in court at the appropriate time,” Donnelly and Sanchez said. Since Maduro’s capture, Venezuela has boosted cooperation with the US under the leadership of his former Vice-President Delcy Rodriguez. Relations between the United States and oil-rich Venezuela were tense ⁠during the socialist Maduro’s 13 years in power. US officials and human rights groups have long accused Venezuelan officials of torturing detainees, but Thursday’s indictment marked the first time Maduro faced criminal charges over the allegations. The indictment alleged that thousands of Venezuelans were threatened, arrested, tortured or killed at the hands of the state between 1999 and 2025. Before Maduro became president in 2013, both he and Flores held positions in the late Venezuelan ​President ​Hugo Chavez’s government. ‘A VIOLENT SYSTEM’ “Maduro, Flores and other high-ranking members of their inner circle used a violent system ​of torture and repression to maintain their power,” Jamie McDonald, the top ‌federal prosecutor in Manhattan, told reporters outside the courthouse after Flores’ bail was denied. Flores was Venezuela’s attorney general and led its National Assembly before becoming first lady. Many of the incidents of alleged torture described in the indictment occurred during times of political unrest in Venezuela or in response to perceived threats against Maduro. In one instance, prosecutors said, Maduro in 2013 ordered the arrest of a Venezuelan military officer he suspected of planning a coup. Members of Venezuela’s military counterintelligence directorate then interrogated the officer while shocking the individual with a live electric wire around 20 times and hung the individual by the hands and feet for several minutes at a time, prosecutors said. In 2022, an American citizen detained while entering Venezuela was accused of conspiring to assassinate Maduro and was tortured by military ‌counterintelligence officers through beatings and shocks to the person’s arms, legs and genitals, according to the indictment. FLORES DENIED ​RELEASE Flores’ lawyers had argued their client should be released on bail because she needs a cardiac procedure and wants to ​recover in a more comfortable environment. The lawyers proposed moving her to a residence in ​the New York City area with round-the-clock private security, and said she is not a danger to the community. In denying the motion for bail, Hellerstein ‌decided the evidence against Flores appeared strong. The judge also said Flores, who ​wore a dark prison T-shirt and a headset ​to listen to a simultaneous Spanish translation of the proceedings, appeared to be relatively healthy. “For whatever it’s worth, her appearance today is no worse and perhaps a little better than when I first met with her on her arraignment,” Hellerstein said, referring to her first appearance in court on January 5. “She was still bandaged up from the military invasion,” ​Donnelly said. Prosecutors in the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office opposed Flores’ release. They said ‌Flores has received adequate medical care at the detention center, and if released poses an “extreme” risk of flight and danger to the public, including possible witness intimidation. Hellerstein’s bail ​denial will not affect Flores’ trial or potential punishment. Maduro and Flores have been held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center since their capture. Their trial is scheduled for ​June 1, 2027. (Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Will Dunham) This article originally appeared on Reuters at https://uk.news.yahoo.com/cilia-flores-wife-venezuelas-maduro-100347530.html

President Donald Trump announced “major combat operations” against Iran on Feb. 28, with massive joint U.S.-Israeli strikes targeting military, government and infrastructure sites.Delegations from the U.S. and Iran entered negotiations in June aimed at a war-ending deal based on a memorandum of understanding signed by both countries.Those talks broke down as the U.S. and Iran continued to exchange strikes, with the strategic Strait of Hormuz as the primary flashpoint. Trump then said in August that the U.S. would launch a “crushing economic operation” to force Tehran into submission.Latest DevelopmentsOct 8, 12:43 PMTrump says US is having ‘productive discussions’ with Iran, won’t attack ahead of midtermsPresident Donald Trump said the U.S. is having “productive discussions” with Iran on Thursday, saying the U.S. will not be attacking Iran before the midterm elections. “I want to make it clear to everybody that, while Iran is in very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily, and while the Blockade will remain in full force and effect, with Oil flowing in Record Numbers of Barrels through the Hormuz Strait (22 Million Barrels, last night alone, with not one barrel coming from, or going to, Iran!), we will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd,” Trump said in a post on social media.Oct 6, 2:49 PMSaudi-backed Yemeni Armed Forces claim to have gained back control of key area around Red Sea WaterwayA military spokesperson for the Saudi-backed Yemeni Armed Forces claimed it has gained back control of the key area surrounding Red Sea waterway and the Bab Al Mandab. The Houthis refute these claims and insist they have “forced them to retreat without making any gains.” This is a disputed conflict zone with a daily battle underway, it’s hard to say who has actual control of the area, it is clear that there is an information war underway with both sides claiming to have control to this key geographic point. Mocha (Al-Mukha) is an important entry point and strategic port city to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a crucial maritime chokepoint connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal. -ABC News’ Desiree AdibOct 6, 12:37 PMSaudi Arabia says 2 of its airports were damaged in overnight strikesTwo Saudi Arabian airports in the cities of Jazan and Najran were targeted in ‌two overnight strikes Monday evening, injuring three people and causing material damage, the Saudi aviation authority said on Tuesday. The attacks came after Saudi Arabia and its allies in Yemen’s internationally recognized government launched a military campaign to reclaim Houthi-controlled territory. Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation said it was assessing the damage at the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Airport and Najran International Airport and taking measures to ensure the safety of passengers and staff and the security of the kingdom’s civil aviation system. Saudi Arabia did not identify who was responsible for the attacks, but this follows a Houthi announcement of attacks on Saudi oil facilities, airports and military bases on Monday.Click here to read the rest of the blog.This article originally appeared on Good Morning America at https://abcnews.com/International/live-updates/iran-live-updates-trump-us-attack-iran-ahead/?id=137063637

While Christa Pike didn’t act alone in the crime that landed her on death row, the two others involved in the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer met less severe punishments. Pike, Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson were all students at Jobs Corps, a training program in Knoxville, Tennessee, when they lured Slemmer, a classmate, into the woods on Jan. 12, 1995. There, Pike and Shipp, a couple at the time, tortured Slemmer and bludgeoned her to death. They were both later convicted of the crime, while Peterson pled guilty and walked away with probation, according to court records. The grisly crime has garnered renewed interest after Pike’s botched execution by lethal injection on Sept. 30. She was transported to a hospital and has since regained consciousness and is speaking, her attorney said on Oct. 7. Here’s what to know about the other assailants in the case that’s capturing national attention. Christa Pike accomplice Tadaryl Shipp serving life sentence Shipp was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder at a 1997 trial. He was sentenced to life and 25 years in prison, according to court and inmate records. Because Shipp was 17 at the time of the crime, he could not get the death penalty under state law. After Slemmer’s murder, Shipp told police he “had dabbled in satanism since he was 10 years old,” according to a 1998 appellate ruling. When he and Pike were taken into custody two days after the murder, they were both wearing pentagram necklaces, and Shipp told police he had “satanic paraphernalia” in his room at the Job Corps campus. Shipp told police he carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest because he thought she could be “a satanic sacrifice.” According to WATE and WBIR, Shipp was denied parole in October 2025. The 48-year-old will be eligible for parole again in 2031. Other accomplice, Shadolla Peterson, got probation Peterson, the other individual involved in the crime, pleaded guilty to being an accessory and received a sentence of six years probation, per court documents. She took a plea deal from prosecutors and received credit for 460 days in jail, according to a 1996 article in the Knoxville News Sentinel, part of the USA TODAY Network. While Peterson had initially been indicted on a murder charge, prosecutors said if the case had gone to trial, they would only have proof that she was present at the murder, not that she was involved in the killing, according to the article. The public defender who represented Peterson told the outlet at the time that she admitted to being present at the killing but denied taking part in the attack and did not know Slemmer was going to be murdered. What did Christa Pike do? On Jan. 12, 1995, Pike asked Slemmer to accompany her to a Blockbuster store before luring her into the woods, she told police. Pike – who had brought a box cutter and meat cleaver with her – and Shipp attacked Slemmer, bludgeoning her and eventually cutting her stomach and throat with the box cutter, according to court documents. During the attack, as Slemmer bargained for her life, Pike “told Slemmer to ‘shut up’ because it ‘was harderto hurt somebody when they’re talking to you,'” she later told police, per court documents. Shipp also carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, and Pike – who told police she believed Slemmer was interested in her boyfriend – later showed off a piece of Slemmer’s skull to a friend. Slemmer’s body was found on Jan. 13, 1995. A Tennessee Grounds Department employee first mistook her body for the corpse of an animal because of how badly she had been beaten, according to court records. Born on Sept. 20, 1975, Slemmer was raised in Orange Park, Florida, but moved to Knoxville to enroll in Jobs Corps, according to court records and the Nashville Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. More: Remembering Colleen Slemmer, the teenager killed by Christa Pike May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, told WBIR-TV that her daughter loved roller skating, computers and playing old games with her family. “She was a nerd,” Martinez told the station. “But a good nerd.” Christa Pike latest: Attorney says she is ‘angry’ after botched execution Officials in Tennessee attempted to execute Pike on Sept. 30, but she survived two doses of pentobarbital injections and was taken to a Nashville-area hospital. Pike’s attorney Randy Spivey said she woke up and began speaking on Oct. 7. He believes the first words she said were, “where am I and who are you?” “She is angry and confused about everything right now,” Spivey said, adding that she is “very aware the state tried to execute her.” Pike has a blood clot in one of her arms, pneumonia and swelling in her hands and arms, Spivey said. She is unable to swallow or move her arms and it’s unclear what kind of function she will regain. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has ordered an investigation into what went wrong and called off the state’s only remaining lethal injection this year. Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada also announced his resignation after the incident. Contributing: N’dea Yancey-Bragg, Molly Davis, Amanda Lee Myers, Evan Mealins Melina Khan is a national trending reporter for USA TODAY. Keep up with her on X @melinakh and Instagram @bymelinakhan. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Christa Pike wasn’t alone in her crime. What happened to accomplicesThis article originally appeared on USA TODAY at https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/crime/2026/10/08/christa-pike-tadaryl-shipp-shadolla-peterson-colleen-slemmer-murder/92137263007/

By Simon Johnson, Marie Mannes and Justyna Pawlak STOCKHOLM, Oct 8 (Reuters) – Canadian poet and writer Anne Carson, whose work often blends verse, prose, dialogue and translation in a genre-defying mix, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for what the Swedish Academy called her “bold and inventive oeuvre”. “Crazy, I think they’re all crazy,” Carson told Icelandic broadcaster RUV when asked how she was ‌feeling after learning she had won while on the Arctic island. “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book.” Carson, 76, who was born in Toronto and has a home in Iceland, had been ‌taken by surprise when called with the news, said Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Academy, which awards the prize worth 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million). “All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind,” ​Carlberg told a press conference in Stockholm after the announcement. She is widely known for her translations of classical Greek literature, which heavily influences her work that ranges from opera libretti to literary criticism and verse novels such as “Autobiography of Red” from 1998. “Genre is something for booksellers. It’s something you do in order to appeal to an audience and make them buy books. And on what shelf do you put Anne Carson’s books? It’s on a shelf of her own,” said Swedish novelist Steve Sem-Sandberg, who is a member of the award committee. “That’s what I like about her.” ‘NEW FORMS OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE’ In its citation, the Swedish Academy said it was recognising Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical ‌tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”. “Almost all her literary production has ⁠centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” the Academy said. “She has herself identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work. Her translations from Classical Greek may be regarded as independent works in their own right.” Her style is exemplified in “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” from 2019, ⁠a performance piece which mixes the stories of Helen of Troy in Euripides’ play “Helen” with Marilyn Monroe. LIFE WITHOUT PROUST Often heralded as her greatest work, “Autobiography of Red” demonstrates Carson’s ability to “actualise the classical literary tradition”, the Academy said. In the book, she re-examines age-old questions such as “What happens when you love someone who will ultimately destroy you?” Tapping into more modern inspirations, Carson reflected on the character of Albertine, one of the narrator Marcel’s love interests in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, in her own book “The Albertine ​Workout”. Carson ​had spent seven years reading Proust’s masterpiece and said in an interview with Canada’s CBC Radio One in 2016 that she ​suffered withdrawal symptoms after finishing, leading her to write “The Albertine Workout” as a way to ‌prolong the experience. “You think life goes on after Proust, but it seems so grey,” she said. BOXING LESSONS TO FIGHT PARKINSON’S Carson started taking boxing lessons when she was already in her 70s because of a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis. The sport is recommended as a therapy because it helps with paying attention to hand-eye coordination and the sequencing of actions. She reflected on the disease’s impact on her handwriting in an interview at the Louisiana Literary Festival in Denmark in 2024: “I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame … the shame of bad handwriting.” Carson, who has taught classics at universities in Canada and the United States, has said that she considers herself a visual artist as much as a literary one. “I think of making a poem as making an object. I have always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language,” she said in the CBC interview. Poetry, she ‌says, may be more attuned to the fast modern-day life than long-form writing. “I think it’s probably more useful than prose right ​now because it’s faster and everybody is in a hurry so basically it’s good because it is brief,” she told the Icelandic broadcaster ​on Thursday. When asked by the Nobel Committee about her own sources of inspiration, however, she listed ancient Greek ​poet Homer, author of “The Odyssey” epic. As to how the classical stories she has reinterpreted in her work might be relevant to modern audiences, she said: “I don’t think I’m interested in ‌relevance.” ‘AT HOME’ IN ICELAND AND NYC Carson and her husband, artist Robert Currie, first came ​to Iceland after the 2008 banking collapse and gradually spent ​more time there. “We got to know people and we liked the people,” Carson told Iceland Review in 2023. She has held citizenship of Iceland since 2022. Currie told the magazine Iceland was one of only two places that immediately felt like home to him, the other being New York City in the 1970s. Literature was the fourth of this year’s Nobels to be announced this week, following medicine, physics and chemistry. The peace ​prize winner will be announced in Oslo on Friday. Established in the will of Swedish ‌dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes have been awarded since 1901. Carson, who had been among the favourites this year, takes a place beside luminaries such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alice Munro and ​Ernest Hemingway as a recipient of the award. Last year’s prize was won by Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai. ($1 = 10.0190 Swedish crowns) (Reporting by Simon Johnson, Johan Ahlander, Niklas Pollard and Marie Mannes in ​Stockholm, Terje Solsvik in Oslo, Jonathan Allen in New York and Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw; Editing by Alex Richardson) This article originally appeared on Reuters at https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/canadian-writer-anne-carson-wins-110824980.html

The Trump administration has halted new and pending green-card applications involving Microsoft, Adobe and six IT services companies, widening its crackdown on skilled-worker immigration.Vice President JD Vance announced the move Thursday at a press conference, accusing Microsoft of abusing the visa system and prioritizing foreign workers over Americans. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the suspension covers permanent labor certification applications involving all eight companies.Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini will be barred from the program, Sonderling said at the press conference.“Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” Vance, who leads the administration’s anti-fraud task force, said at the press conference.The announcement is the result of an administrationwide effort to crack down on alleged abuse of work visa systems. Vance on Thursday accused tech giant Microsoft of fraud, citing the company’s decision to eliminate thousands of workers earlier this year.U.S. tech companies often rely on H-1B visas to hire foreign-born workers with specialized technical skills.“For every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one-and-a-half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said.A spokesperson for Microsoft in a statement to POLITICO said the company would provide the Trump administration with further information about the immigration status of its employees: “Of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. These were not to hire new people.”The spokesperson added that the company “only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category” and H-1B visa holders are paid the same as other employees doing “comparable work.”Spokespeople for Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Vance’s announcement comes on the same day President Donald Trump is expected to award Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation during a White House summit on “Science: A New Golden Age.”This article originally appeared on Politico at https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/08/vance-microsoft-adobe-h-1-b-green-cards-01111603