LONDON: A woman accused of traveling across the U.S. claiming to be an Irish heiress and scamming several victims out of tens of thousands of dollars has been extradited to the United Kingdom, a U.S. official said Tuesday.
Marianne Smyth faces allegations that she stole more than $170,000 from the victims from 2008 to 2010 in Northern Ireland.
A U.S. magistrate judge in Maine ruled in May that there was sufficient evidence for extradition of the American, who accusers say has also fashioned herself as a witch, a psychic and a friend to Hollywood stars.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the extradition, and referred questions to law enforcement officials in Northern Ireland. An attorney for Smyth did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
Authorities overseas have said Smyth stole money that she had promised to invest and also arranged to sell a victim a home but instead took the money. Smyth’s victims in the U.S. included Johnathan Walton, a podcaster who warned others about her grifts.
A court in Northern Ireland issued arrest warrants for her earlier this decade. She was arrested in Maine in February.
Smyth drew comparisons to Anna Sorokin, a scammer who impersonated a German heiress to pay for a glamorous lifestyle in New York City, and became subject of a Netflix series. Sorokin, whose real name is Anna Delvey, was convicted in 2019 of conning $275,000 from banks, hotels and swank New Yorkers to finance her deluxe lifestyle.
Accused scammer who claimed to be Irish heiress has been extradited to UK to face charges
https://arab.news/4yc9m
Accused scammer who claimed to be Irish heiress has been extradited to UK to face charges
- Marianne Smyth faces allegations that she stole more than $170,000 from the victims
- A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the extradition
Ukraine to launch Starlink mobile Internet in 2026, becoming Europe’s first, Kyivstar says
Field tests have begun under an end-2024 deal with Space X’s commercial broadband constellation to allow tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s company to launch direct-to-cell services in the war-torn country.
Direct-to-cell devices connect to satellites equipped with modems that function like a cellphone tower, beaming telephone signals from space directly to smartphones.
“The first phase is over-the-top (OTT) messaging ... so messaging via WhatsApp, Signal, and other systems ... it will be in place at the end of this year,” Komarov told Reuters in Rome.
“And probably at the beginning of 2026, let’s be on the safe side, Q2 2026, we will be able to propose mobile satellite broadband data ... and voice.”
SpaceX did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
US carrier T-Mobile will introduce a data service on its satellite-to-cell network, powered by Starlink, at the start of October, the company said in June.
Komarov was speaking ahead of a Ukraine recovery conference Italy is hosting three years after the Russian invasion, with President Volodymyr Zelensky also due to attend.
He said his main aim at the conference, the fourth since the war began in February 2022, was to support the Ukrainian government and establish new business ties, some with Italian firms willing to expand in the country.
Kyivstar, owned by telecoms group VEON, is also working toward a US listing on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Komarov said the project was “moving forward” and hoped to finalize it in the third quarter of this year.
“I think it will be an exemplary move,” he added. “The first in history, the direct placement of (a) Ukrainian entity on the American stock exchange ... during the war.”
Komarov said Ukrainian telecom infrastructure was holding up well under Russia’s escalating assaults in recent weeks.
Last year one of its attacks on power grids and transmission lines caused daily blackouts in major cities after it knocked out about half Ukraine’s available generation capacity.
“I think that we are much more resilient than we used to be in 2022. Right now we can run our fixed and mobile services up to 10 hours during the blackouts, even national blackouts.”
Benin bets on free vets and schools to turn people away from extremism
Located just south of Niger and Burkina Faso — which together with neighboring Mali form the world’s terrorism epicenter — Benin’s north has come under increasing pressure from Islamist militants, many of them linked to Al-Qaeda.
Besides fighting off the militants, the 3,000 Beninese soldiers deployed to the region have worked to win the trust of northern communities both threatened by the militants’ advance and courted by well-funded Islamist groups.
In May, the army provided free treatment to more than 4,000 cattle belonging to herders in the Materi commune and delivered medical care to 1,700 patients in another village in the Atacora region bordering Burkina Faso.
“These projects show an obvious desire to restore trust between the defense forces and communities,” Lt. Doctor Mardochee Avlessi said in early June.
The army medic, who is in charge of a joint civilian-military committee in Materi, said the army wanted to work in the “spirit... of building security together.”
In this, the west African country hopes to learn from the errors of its neighbors in the Sahel — the army cannot root out extremism by itself.
Part of the problem is the lack of development in the region.
“The places which are the most insecure are the least developed in Benin,” Mathias Khalfaoui, a specialist in west African security, told AFP.
And as the United Nations points out, Benin’s north is the least developed part of the country.
Militants are winning over hard-up communities with cash, rather than ideological or religious arguments, a UN report dated May argued.
“In exchange for supplies and information, terrorist groups offer money to young locals,” the report found.
The most influential Islamist group in the north is the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims, known by its Arabic acronym JNIM.
By exploiting local frustrations, the JNIM has managed to rally Beninese to its cause after years of working to establish itself in the north.
“If we do not bring a response from the state and public services in these regions, where there is already a local sentiment of sometimes feeling perhaps a bit abandoned, it’s sure that the fight against militancy will become impossible,” said Khalfaoui, the security researcher.
Besides militants putting down local roots, the suspension of military cooperation between Benin and Niger and Burkina Faso has helped fighters launch ever-increasing assaults.
Benin experienced its first militant raids in 2021.
Within three years, the deaths had piled up, with militants killing 173 people in 2024, according to the UN report.
To develop social projects in the north, Benin has also received help from the international community.
In Atacora and the neighboring Donga commune, the French Acting for Life charity trains young Beninese in masonry and eco-friendly construction to help them find work.
“To best occupy the young, you have to train them and above all bring them into working life,” Abdoulaziz Adebi, the executive director of the association in charge of the project, told AFP.
“I have a future with this training,” said Boukary Moudachirou, a young person supported by the charity who hails from Djougou, north Benin’s most Muslim commune.
“Now we know there are good things we can do and move away from certain things,” he told AFP.
But observers fear the state’s social initiatives and the army’s program of well-digging and school-building will be too small to fulfill the growing needs of the north’s people.
The army’s ability to fight militants will remain limited without effective collaboration with Niger and Burkina Faso, with both of whom Benin is locked in a diplomatic spat.
“No state authority is present at the border of Burkina Faso, where the territory is controlled by armed groups, while Niger has closed its borders with Benin,” the UN has warned, worried that deals between the neighbors allowing the army to pursue militants are no longer in force.
Of further concern, given what is happening on its other frontier with Nigeria, where militants and criminal gangs have committed murderous attacks, “Benin has a larger area to defend,” added security researcher Khalfaoui.
Another UN report from February found that the JNIM was looking to advance toward Nigeria from north Benin and had linked up with Ansaru, a Nigerian militant group which splintered off from Boko Haram.
Other countries in the region threatened by militants, such as Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Mauritania, have likewise looked to development as a means to stave off unrest.
Italy opens Ukraine rebuilding conference as doubts of US defense help remain
- Italian organizers said 100 official delegations were attending and 40 international organizations and development banks
- The conference will pair investors with Ukrainian counterparts
ROME: Italy is hosting the fourth annual conference on rebuilding Ukraine even as Russia escalates its war, inviting political and business leaders to Rome to promote public-private partnerships on defense, mining, energy and other projects as uncertainty grows about the US commitment to Kyiv’s defense.
Premier Giorgia Meloni and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were opening the meeting Thursday, which gets under way as Russia accelerated its aerial and ground attacks against Ukraine, firing a record number of drones across 10 regions this week.
Italian organizers said 100 official delegations were attending and 40 international organizations and development banks. But there are also 2,000 businesses, civil society and local Ukrainian governments sending representatives to participate in a trade fair, complete with booths, on the grounds of the ministerial-level meeting at Rome’s funky new “Cloud” conference center in the Fascist-era EUR neighborhood.
The conference will pair investors with Ukrainian counterparts
The aim of the conference is to pair international investors with Ukrainian counterparts to meet, talk and hammer out joint partnerships in hopes of not just rebuilding Ukraine but modernizing it and helping it achieve the necessary reforms for admission into the European Union.
Already on the eve of the meeting, Italy announced several initiatives: The justice ministry said it would be signing a memorandum of understanding on penitentiary cooperation with Kyiv on Thursday, while the foreign ministry announced a deal to build a new pavilion for the Odesa children’s hospital and provide medical equipment for it, via 30 million euros of credit.
“It could feel a bit counterintuitive to start speaking about reconstruction when there is a war raging and nearly daily attacks on civilians, but it’s not. It’s actually an urgent priority,” said Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti, senior research fellow at the Rome-based Institute for Studies of International Politics, or ISPI.
It’s the 4th such meeting recovery
It’s the fourth such recovery conference on Ukraine’s recovery, with earlier editions in Lugano, Switzerland in 2022, London in 2023 and Berlin last year. The Berlin conference elaborated four main pillars that are continuing in Rome to focus on business, human capital, local and regional issues, and the necessary reforms for EU admission.
“It’s basically a platform where a lot of businesses, European businesses and Ukrainian businesses, meet up and network, where you can actually see this public-private partnership in action, because obviously public money is not enough to undertake this gigantic effort of restructuring a country,” said Ambrosetti.
The World Bank Group, European Commission and the United Nations have estimated that Ukraine’s recovery after more than three years of war will cost $524 billion (€506 billion) over the next decade.
This time, Ukraine’s partners are focusing on industries and issues
Alexander Temerko, a Ukrainian-British businessman and former defense minister under Boris Yeltsin, said the Rome conference was different from its predecessors because it is focused on specific industries and issues, not just vague talk about the need to rebuild. The program includes practical workshops on such topics as “de-risking” investment, and panel discussions on investing in Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, pharmaceutical and domestic defense industries.
“This is the first conference which is considering particularly projects in the energy sector, the mining sector, the metallurgical sector, the infrastructure sector, the transport sector, which need to be restored Ukraine and during the war especially,” he said. “That is the special particularity of this conference.”
The former US special representative for Ukraine negotiations, Kurt Volker, said Meloni could make the conference a success if she endorses a coordinating agency to provide follow-up that would give “focused political leadership” behind Ukraine’s recovery.
“If there is a sustainable ceasefire, Ukraine can be expected to experience double-digit economic growth. And yet a high-level focus on economic development is still lacking,” Volker wrote for the Center for European Policy Analysis.
In addition to Meloni and Zelensky, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, as well as economy and or foreign ministers from other European countries are coming.
French President Emmanuel Macron remained in Britain with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, but they and several of the participants of the Rome conference will participate in a videoconference call Thursday of the “coalition of the willing,” those countries willing to deploy troops to Ukraine to police any future peace agreement with Russia.
Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, President Donald Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, was in Rome and met with Zelensky on Thursday.
Coalition’s success hinges on US backup
The success of the coalition’s operation hinges on US backup with airpower or other military assistance, but the Trump administration has made no public commitment to provide support. And even current US military support to Ukraine is in question.
Trump said Monday that the US would have to send more weapons to Ukraine, just days after Washington paused critical weapons deliveries to Kyiv amid uncertainty over the US administration’s commitment to Ukraine’s defense. Trump’s announcement came after he privately expressed frustration with Pentagon officials for announcing a pause in some deliveries last week — a move that he felt wasn’t properly coordinated with the White House, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Burkina Faso’s only eye doctor for children sees the trauma of both play and conflict
- Dr. Yaméogo who started her practice late last year said the work is daunting and often requires her to visit at no cost, families who cannot afford care or cannot make their way to the hospital where she works
BOBO-DIOULASSO: Isaka Diallo was playing with friends when a stone struck his left eye. For two weeks, his parents searched hospitals in western Burkina Faso for an eye doctor. The village clinic only prescribed painkillers. Other health workers did not know what to do.
When they eventually found Dr. Claudette Yaméogo, Burkina Faso’s only pediatric ophthalmologist, the injury had become too difficult to treat.
“The trauma has become severe,” Yaméogo said of Diallo’s condition as she attended to him recently at the Sanou Sourou University Hospital in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso. “Cases like (Diallo’s) must be treated within the first six hours, but I’m seeing him two weeks later, and it’s already too late.”
It is a common problem in the country of about 23 million people, which has just 70 ophthalmologists.
Yaméogo , who started her practice late last year, said the work is daunting and often requires her to visit — at no cost — families who cannot afford care or cannot make their way to the hospital where she works.
While there is limited data available on eye defects in children in Burkina Faso or in Africa at large, an estimated 450 million children globally have a sight problem that needs treatment, according to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness.
Late intervention can significantly alter a child’s future, the organization said, with many such cases in less developed countries.
In Burkina Faso, an estimated 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas. And yet ophthalmologists are concentrated in the capital, Ouagadougou, and other main cities, making them unreachable for many.
While more than 2,000 ophthalmology procedures were performed in Burkina Faso’s western Hauts-Bassins region in 2024, only 52 of those were carried out in its more rural areas, according to the Ministry of Health. Most procedures were done in the area of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second city.
Not many people are aware of Yaméogo’s work. Even when they are, traveling to reach her often requires days of planning and financial saving.
In a further challenge to accessing care, Diallo’s family is among the 2 million people displaced by violence as extremist groups seize parts of the country.
To visit Yaméogo’s hospital from the village where they are sheltering, they had to travel about 40 kilometers (21 miles) on a motorcycle to Bobo-Dioulasso, spending 7,500 francs ($13) on transport, a high price for a small-scale farming family.
At least 70 percent of the trauma cases in children treated at the hospital come from rural areas where the risk of exposure — from conflict or from play — is higher, Yaméogo said.
Examining and treating a child is a delicate practice that requires a lot of time, something many families can’t afford. Many must return home to earn money for the treatment.
As she treated Diallo, Yaméogo noticed that the boy associated a drawing of an apple with a pepper, making her wonder: Is it that he can’t see it, or that he doesn’t know what an apple is? The fruit doesn’t grow in the region where he lives.
“There’s no fixed time for examining children,” she said. “You need a lot of patience.”
Yameogo’s work has had a “very positive impact on training future pediatricians and on the quality of ophthalmology services,” said Jean Diallo, president of the Burkinabè Society of Ophthalmology.
“A child’s eye is not the same as that of an adult, which is why we need specialists to treat problems early so the child can develop properly,” Diallo said.
He cited retinoblastoma, a retinal cancer mostly affecting young children, and congenital cataracts, eye diseases that can be cured if diagnosed early. Pediatricians won’t necessarily detect them.
During another consultation, Yaméogo told the family of 5-year-old Fatao Traoré that he would need cornea surgery as a result of an injury sustained while playing with a stick.
“Sometimes I feel a pinch in my heart,” Yaméogo said as she examined the boy after they arrived from their farm on the outskirts of Bobo-Dioulasso. “His iris has detached from his cornea, so he needs to be hospitalized.”
The father, looking overwhelmed, sighed, unsure of where the money for the child’s surgery would come. On paper, Burkina Faso’s government covers the cost of medications and care for children under 5, but often no drugs are available in hospitals, meaning families must buy them elsewhere.
A surgery like the one for Traoré can cost 100,000 CFA ($179), several months’ income for the family.
31 workers have been safely removed after part of an industrial tunnel in LA collapsed
LOS ANGELES: Thirty-one workers have been safely removed from an industrial tunnel under construction in Los Angeles after part of it collapsed on Wednesday, the Los Angeles Fire Department said.
The collapse occurred 5 to 6 miles (8 to 9.7 kilometers) from the tunnel’s sole entrance in an industrial section of the city. Aerial footage from local television showed workers being lifted up through the tunnel’s entrance.
Some workers on the other side of the collapsed portion of the tunnel scrambled over a 12 to 15-foot-tall (19.3 to 24.1-meter-tall) mound of loose soil and reached several coworkers on the other side. The workers were then shuttled several at a time by tunnel vehicle to the opening.
Paramedics were evaluating 27 of the workers removed from the tunnel.
The tunnel is under construction to eventually carry wastewater. It’s 18 feet (5.5 meters) wide, LAFD said.
More than 100 LAFD workers were assigned to the scene, including those who specialize in rescues from confined spaces.
