The High Court of the Republic of Maldives, the country’s second-highest court, overturned on Thursday former President Abdulla Yameen’s conviction and cancelled his 11-year prison sentence.  In an oral decision, the court found that the 2022 Criminal Court trial, which found Yameen guilty of money laundering and bribery charges, was unfair and had procedural irregularities. [...]

The Basmanny District Court of Moscow announced on Monday that a tenth person, a Tajik citizen named Yakubjoni Yusufzoda, was arrested for the Crocus City Hall terror attack that killed 134 people.  “The court decided to satisfy the request of the investigator of the Investigative Committee, to select a preventive measure for Yusufzoda in the [...]

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the formerly popular cryptocurrency exchange FTX exchange was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion in assets by a federal judge in New York on Thursday. A jury found Bankman-Fried guilty of seven counts of wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering.  The sentence handed [...]

Spain’s National High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz ordered on Monday a temporary suspension of his own previous order to ban the social media app Telegram in Spain.  Pedraz said that he issued the suspension pending a report from the General Information Commissioner’s Office on the instant messaging platform requesting information about Telegram’s characteristics and the [...]

Armenia Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced Tuesday that the country would likely have to concede four frontier villages to Azerbaijan and return to its Soviet-era borders as part of a push for peace.  This comes as Pashinyan visited the border provinces of Tavush Marz, where he announced that Yerevan would do whatever was needed to [...]

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced Wednesday that Denmark plans to draft women into the country’s armed forces for the first time. Under current law, only men are required to register for the draft.  Frederiksen cited a desire to achieve “full equality between the sexes” as one of the drivers behind the proposed reform. According [...]

Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry announced Monday that he will formally resign after a transitional council is installed to lead the Caribbean state, which has been plagued by gang violence. Henry has been stuck in Puerto Rico, being prevented from returning following a trip to Kenya to discuss the deployment of a multinational task force to [...]

Vietnam announced on Thursday that it has listed two separatist Montagnard groups based in the US as terrorist organizations on Thursday. The Montagnard refers to an array of highland minorities distinct from the majority Viet population. Because of the two groups are now listed as terrorist organizations, anyone found by Vietnamese authorities to have engaged [...]

The Fact-Finding Mission of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concluded on Monday that there were no reasonable grounds to determine that toxic chemicals were used by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in October 2017 at Al-Yarmouk in the Syrian Arab Republic.  In its report, OPCW found that [...]

Bangladesh border services repatriated 330 Myanmar refugees, primarily from Myanmar’s Army and Border Guard Police (BGP), and their family on Thursday. According to local reports, the majority—302 of the 330 refugees—were BGP servicemen. The return was mediated by a five-member BGP delegation led by Myanmar Ambassador U Aung Kyaw Moe. “They were extended makeshift refuge [...]