JOINT BASE ANDREWS: Three Korean-Americans who were detained in North Korea for more than a year were greeted by President Donald Trump beneath a giant American flag after they returned to the mainland US early Thursday.
Despite a middle-of-the-night landing, first lady Melania Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and a host of senior administration officials joined Trump to celebrate the occasion. The men, Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak Song and Tony Kim, had been released Wednesday amid a warming of relations between the longtime adversaries.
The president and first lady boarded the medical plane on which the men traveled to take a private moment with them, then appeared at the top of the airplane stairway with the three and applauded as the men held up their arms in what appeared to be gestures of triumph.
“This is a special night for these three really great people,” Trump told reporters as he stood on the tarmac with the former detainees. On the US relationship with North Korea, Trump said, “We’re starting off on a new footing.”
In thanking North Korea’s Kim Jong Un for releasing the three Americans, Trump said he believes Kim wants to reach an agreement on denuclearizing the Korean peninsula. “I really think he wants to do something,” the president said.
After Trump’s remarks, the three men boarded a bus for Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The White House said earlier they would be evaluated and receive medical treatment at the Washington-area facility. Their families were not on hand for the ceremony.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had secured their release in Pyongyang after meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on final plans for a Trump-Kim summit. The Americans had boarded Pompeo’s plane out of North Korea without assistance and then transferred in Japan to a Boeing C-40 outfitted with medical facilities for the trip back to the US
Shortly after they touched down on American soil in Alaska — for a refueling stop Wednesday afternoon — the State Department released a statement from the freed men.
“We would like to express our deep appreciation to the United States government, President Trump, Secretary Pompeo, and the people of the United States for bringing us home,” they said. “We thank God, and all our families and friends who prayed for us and for our return. God Bless America, the greatest nation in the world.”
Trump made a point of publicly thanking North Korea’s leader for the prisoners’ release — “I appreciate Kim Jong Un doing this” — and hailed it as a sign of cooling tensions and growing opportunity on the Korean peninsula. Kim decided to grant amnesty to the three Americans at the “official suggestion” of the US president, said North Korea’s official news agency, KCNA.
North Korea had accused the three Korean-Americans of anti-state activities. Their arrests were widely seen as politically motivated and had compounded the dire state of relations over the isolated nation’s nuclear weapons.
The release capped a dramatic day of diplomacy in Pyongyang. After Pompeo’s 90-minute meeting with Kim Jong Un, he gave reporters a fingers-crossed sign when asked about the prisoners as he returned to his hotel. It was only after a North Korean emissary arrived a bit later to inform him that the release was confirmed.
The three had been held for periods ranging from one to two years. They were the latest in a series of Americans who have been detained by North Korea in recent years for seemingly small offenses and typically freed when senior US officials or statesmen personally visited to bail them out.
Trump welcomes freed Korean-Americans’ return to US
Trump welcomes freed Korean-Americans’ return to US
- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had secured their release in Pyongyang after meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on final plans for a Trump-Kim summit
- North Korea had accused the three Korean-Americans of anti-state activities
Pope Francis advisers say he’ll recover from pneumonia and a ‘new stage’ is opening for him
“The pope is recovering well. The doctors say that he needs some time, but it’s going well progressively“
ROME: Pope Francis is recovering well from pneumonia and that a “new stage” in his pontificate would open, two of his closest advisers said Friday, offering notes of optimism as the 88-year-old pontiff hit the five-week mark in his hospitalization.
Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra told AP that he had found Francis in good humor and serene during the three times he has visited the pope at the Gemelli hospital in Rome.
Peña Parra, who is the Vatican chief of staff, visited Francis on Feb. 24, March 2 and March 9 along with the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the lone Vatican officials who have called on him aside from his personal secretaries.
“The pope will recover,” Peña Parra said on the sidelines of a book launch. “The pope is recovering well. The doctors say that he needs some time, but it’s going well progressively.”
“I found him well, serene, in good humor, and — just like him — tough with the desire to go forward,” he said.
The Vatican press office reported Friday that Francis’ overall condition remained stable, with slight improvements as he continues respiratory and physical physiotherapy. He was continuing to reduce his reliance on high-flow supplemental oxygen he has needed to breathe during the day and no longer needs the mechanical ventilation mask at night.
In other comments Friday, another top friend and ally of the pope, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, said that “a new stage” was opening in Francis’ 12-year pontificate and that he expects some surprises from the pontiff when he’s released.
Fernández, the Argentine theologian whom Francis brought in as the Vatican’s doctrine chief, said that he had been in touch with Francis since his Feb. 14 hospitalization and was heartened that he had stabilized. He provided no time frame on when Francis might be released, but ruled out any thought that he might resign.
He said that he understood that Francis was responding well to treatment, but that doctors were keeping him at the hospital “to be 100 percent.” He said that Francis needed rehabilitation therapy to help him regain strength to speak after so many weeks on noninvasive mechanical ventilation and supplemental oxygen.
Fernández revealed that Francis had resisted going to the hospital when his bronchitis worsened, and only agreed to go after people close to him threatened to quit if he didn’t.
“I don’t know what swear words they used (to tell him) you have to go there, otherwise we go home and end our relationship here,” he said.
As a result, he said he knew that the hospitalization had been hard on Francis and had surely made him reflect.
“I think a new stage is opening for him. He is a man of surprises, who will surely have learned so many things in this month and he’ll pull who knows what out of the hat,” he said. “So even knowing that this has been a very heavy effort for him, a difficult time, I know it will be fruitful for the church and for the world.”
Francis hit the five-week mark in his hospitalization Friday. He was admitted Feb. 14 with a bad case of bronchitis that developed into a complex lung infection and double pneumonia. He has long battled respiratory illnesses and had part of one lung removed when he was a young man. He has admitted to being a bad patient and is a known workaholic.
“He wants to spend what little time he has left and says ‘I want to use it and not to take care of myself,’” Fernández said. “And then what happens? He comes back here and it’s not easy for him to follow the advice” of doctors.
That might change after this experience, he said.
“He has to certainly change, but I can’t say what those details might be,” he said.
Pope Francis is recovering well from pneumonia and that a “new stage” in his pontificate would open, two of his closest advisers said Friday, offering notes of optimism as the 88-year-old pontiff hit the five-week mark in his hospitalization. (AFP/File)
Muslim Tech Fest to award cash investment prize to promising startup
- MTF takes place on June 21 at Novotel London West hotel
LONDON: Muslim Tech Fest 2025 is set to provide a major boost to Muslim entrepreneurs, with a £30,000 investment prize up for grabs in its flagship MTF Pitch competition, it was announced on Friday.
The event, which will take place on June 21 at the Novotel London West hotel, aims to spotlight and support the next wave of Muslim-led tech startups.
The announcement follows the success of sold-out events in London and San Francisco in 2024, which cemented MTF’s reputation as a leading platform for Muslim entrepreneurs.
This year’s edition will feature a high-profile lineup of speakers, including Zubair Junjunia, founder of ZNotes, an education platform with over 6 million users; Ahmed Khalifa, founder of PurpleByte and a specialist in web accessibility; Mai Medhat, an entrepreneur who successfully exited her startup; Mariam Ahmed, co-founder of the YC-backed artificial intelligence startup Menza; and Arda Awais, an award-winning designer and founder of Identity 2.0.
With the launch of MTF Pitch, the festival is looking to support emerging startups that are shaping the future of technology and entrepreneurship.
Arfah Farooq, co-founder of MTF, said: “Muslim entrepreneurs have the talent, vision, and drive to transform industries, and MTF is here to amplify that. With initiatives like MTF Pitch, we are not just talking about change, we are making it happen.”
MTF has brought together some of the most influential Muslim founders, investors, and business leaders over the past few years, creating a space for networking, investment, and the sharing of knowledge.
At last year’s San Francisco event, Haroon Mokhtarzada, CEO of Rocket Money and co-founder of Truebill, spoke about scaling a $1.3 billion personal finance platform and achieving one of the largest exits by a Muslim founder.
Chris Blauvelt, the founder of LaunchGood, discussed the power of community-backed funding, highlighting how the platform had raised over $688 million from 2.1 million donors from 155 countries.
Rama Chakaki and Raed Masri, of Transform VC, a Silicon Valley-based impact-driven investment firm, led a discussion on how Muslim founders were shaping the future of ethical investing.
Attendees at the 2024 London show heard from Ismail Jeilani, co-founder and CEO of LiveLink, who shared his experience securing $3 million in funding from investors including Google and Biz Stone.
There was also a conversation with Ruhul Amin and Husayn Kassai, co-founders of Onfido, who spoke about building their AI-powered identity verification company, which was recently acquired in one of the largest tech exits of the decade in the UK.
US tells UN Hamas is to blame for deaths since Israel resumed Gaza hostilities
- “Hamas bears full responsibility for the ongoing war in Gaza and for the resumption of hostilities,” Shea told the 15-member council
- Israel effectively abandoned a two-month-old truce three days ago
UNITED NATIONS: The United States told the UN Security Council on Friday that the Palestinian militant group Hamas was to blame for the deaths in the Gaza Strip since Israel resumed hostilities there.
“Hamas bears full responsibility for the ongoing war in Gaza and for the resumption of hostilities. Every death would have been avoided had Hamas accepted the bridge proposal that the United States offered last Wednesday,” acting US Ambassador to the UN Dorothy Shea told the 15-member council.
Israel effectively abandoned a two-month-old truce three days ago, and has resumed its aerial bombardment and ground campaign, saying it wanted to press the militants to free remaining hostages.
Hamas said on Friday it was reviewing the US proposal to restore the ceasefire.
Of the more than 250 hostages originally seized in Hamas’ October 2023 attack on Israel — which triggered the war in Gaza — 59 remain in the enclave, 24 of whom are thought to be alive.
Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon told the council that, in recent days, Israel had “eliminated several top Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.”
Israeli airstrikes on Tuesday alone killed more than 400 Palestinians, with scant let-up since then.
“Hamas has a choice,” Danon said. “They can come back to the table and negotiate, or they can wait and watch their leadership fall, one by one. We will not stop until our people come home, all of them.”
French Ambassador Jerome Bonnafont urged Israel to “unconditionally resume humanitarian aid, to stop the bombing, to stick to the logic of negotiations, however slow they may be, and to stop responding to cruelty with the unleashing of violence.”
UN says aid drying up for malnourished children due to funding cuts
- “Even a brief halt of UNICEF’s critical life-saving activities risks the lives of millions of children at a time when needs are already acute,” van der Heijden said
- She said she had this week seen firsthand the consequences of the “sharp decline in funding support for our lifesaving work“
GENEVA: Dramatic global aid cuts are creating a “child survival crisis,” the UN said Friday, warning that treatment would soon run out for over a million severely malnourished children in Nigeria and Ethiopia alone.
The United Nations children’s agency decried the dire consequences for children globally of the recent sudden cuts to aid by the United States — traditionally the world’s largest donor — and other countries.
“Even a brief halt of UNICEF’s critical life-saving activities risks the lives of millions of children at a time when needs are already acute,” UNICEF’s deputy chief Kitty van der Heijden told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Nigeria.
Humanitarian organizations worldwide have been reeling since Donald Trump decided to freeze nearly all US foreign aid funding after his return to the US presidency in January.
Van der Heijden said she had this week seen firsthand the consequences of the “sharp decline in funding support for our lifesaving work” during visits to Ethiopia’s northern Afar region and the Maiduguri region in northeastern Nigeria.
“Due to funding gaps in both countries, nearly 1.3 million children under five suffering from severe acute malnutrition could lose access to treatment over the course of the year, leaving them at heightened risk of death,” she warned.
“Without these critical interventions, children’s lives are in peril,” she said, pointing out that only seven out of 30 mobile health and nutrition units that UNICEF supports in Afar were currently operational.
“This is a direct result of the global funding crisis,” she said.
Without fresh funding, van der Heijden warned that UNICEF was on track to quickly run out of so-called Ready-to-Use-Therapeutic-Food (RUTF) used to treat children suffering from severe wasting.
The stocks would be depleted in May in Ethiopia, where an estimated 74,500 children require treatment each month, she said.
And in Nigeria, where 80,000 children require such treatment each month, the agency risked running out of the supplies “sometime between this month and the end of May,” she said.
“This funding crisis risks (becoming) a child survival crisis that is totally preventable.”
Detained Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil appears in immigration case
- Khalil, 30, a legal US resident with no criminal record, sat alone next to an empty chair through a brief court session that dealt only with scheduling
- He smiled at two observers as they came into the room, where just 13 people ultimately gathered, including the judge, attorneys and court staff
LOUISIANA: Detained Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil appeared briefly Friday in immigration court at a remote Louisiana detention center as his lawyers fight in multiple venues to try to free him.
Khalil, 30, a legal US resident with no criminal record, sat alone next to an empty chair through a brief court session that dealt only with scheduling. His lawyer participated via video.
Khalil swayed back and forth in his chair as he waited for the proceeding to begin in a windowless courtroom inside an isolated, low-slung Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention complex. Ringed by two rows of tall barbed-wire fences and surrounded by pine forests, the facility is near the small town of Jena, roughly 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Louisiana’s capital, Baton Rouge.
Khalil smiled at two observers as they came into the room, where just 13 people ultimately gathered, including the judge, attorneys and court staff. Two journalists and a total of four other observers attended.
By video, lawyer Marc Van Der Hout said he’d just started representing Khalil and needed more time to speak to him, get records and delve into the case. An immigration judge set a fuller hearing for April 8.
Khalil’s lawyers also have gone to federal court to challenge his detention and potential deportation, which looms as his wife, a US citizen, is expecting their first child. A federal judge in New York ruled Wednesday that Khalil can contest the legality of his detention but that the case should be moved to a New Jersey federal court.
The Columbia University graduate student was detained by federal immigration agents on March 8 as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on what he calls antisemitic and “anti-American” campus protests. Khalil served as a spokesperson and negotiator last year for pro-Palestinian demonstrators who opposed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Protesters, some of them Jewish, say it’s not antisemitic or anti-American to criticize Israeli military actions and advocate for Palestinian human rights and territorial claims.
However, some Jewish students have said the demonstrations didn’t just criticize Israel’s government but launched into rhetoric and behavior that made Jews feel unwelcome or outright unsafe on the Ivy League campus. A Columbia task force on antisemitism found “serious and pervasive” problems at the university.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has asserted that Khalil organized disruptive protests that harassed Jewish students and “distributed pro-Hamas propaganda.” Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza and attacked Israel in October 2023, is designated by the US as a terrorist organization.
The US government is seeking to deport Khalil under a rarely used statute that allows for removing noncitizens who pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Khalil, an Algerian citizen who was born in Syria to a Palestinian family, has said in a statement that his detention reflects “anti-Palestinian racism” in the US Before his detention by the government, he said that a Columbia disciplinary investigation was scapegoating him for being an identifiable figure at the protests.
Columbia now is contending with broader pressure to address the Trump administration’s assertions of antisemitism, including demands for unprecedented levels of government control over the private university if it wants to continue receiving federal grants for research and other purposes.
