World

Jason Rezaian is being tried on allegations of "espionage for the hostile government of the United States"

(TEHRAN, Iran) — An Iranian security court on Tuesday began the closed-door espionage trial of an Iranian-American reporter for The Washington Post who has been detained for more than 10 months.

Jason Rezaian, the Post’s 39-year-old bureau chief in Tehran, is being tried in a Revolutionary Court on allegations of “espionage for the hostile government of the United States” and propaganda against the Islamic Republic, Iran’s official IRNA news agency reported.

The IRNA report did not elaborate. Rezaian’s brother, Ali, later told The Associated Press in Washington that the proceeding largely involved him hearing the charges. Rezaian’s lawyer, Leila Ahsan, could not be reached for comment.

The Post has said Rezaian faces up to 10 to 20 years in prison.

Rezaian, his wife Yeganeh Salehi and two photojournalists were detained on July 22 in Tehran. All were later released except Rezaian, who was born and spent most of his life in the United States, and who holds both American and Iranian citizenship. Iran does not recognize other nationalities for its citizens.

Salehi, wearing a traditional black Islamic veil, refused to talk to waiting reporters as she left the courthouse after the hearing Tuesday. She looked upset and covered her face with the scarf as she departed in a yellow taxi, sitting in the back seat next to an older woman. The Post later reported Rezaian’s mother, Mary Rezaian, had accompanied her to court, but also could not attend.

Last week, Rezaian’s lawyer said Salehi, who is a reporter for The National newspaper in the United Arab Emirates capital of Abu Dhabi, and a freelance photographer who worked for foreign media, also will stand trial. The photographer’s name has not been made public.

The Post and U.S. diplomats have criticized Rezaian’s detention and the handling of the case. Salehi has been barred from traveling abroad, the Post said, adding that its requests for a visa for a senior editor to travel to Iran went unanswered.

“There is no justice in this system, not an ounce of it, and yet the fate of a good, innocent man hangs in the balance,” Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said in a statement. “Iran is making a statement about its values in its disgraceful treatment of our colleague, and it can only horrify the world community.”

Ali Rezaian said he believed Iranian authorities had two main documents they were using at his brother’s trial.

One was a form letter Rezaian submitted online in 2008 after the election of U.S. President Barack Obama, offering to help “break down barriers” between America and Iran, his brother said. The other was an American visa application he filled out for his wife that asked for it to be expedited at the time because of a looming Iranian election, noting “sometimes it’s not the best place to be as a journalist,” his brother said.

“There are other specific pieces of evidence that we believe that they are going to use to support the charges, but what I can say is that those are two of the most significant ones,” Ali Rezaian said. “So I think you can see what kinds of evidence they are basing their entire case on, and that’s taken 310 days of my brother’s life.”

U.S. officials repeatedly have pressed Iran to release Rezaian and other jailed Americans, including during talks on the sidelines of negotiations over Tehran’s contested nuclear program. Iran and world powers hope to reach a comprehensive agreement on the program by the end of June to ease economic sanctions on Tehran in exchange for it limiting its uranium enrichment.

The judge assigned to hear Rezaian’s case, Abolghassem Salavati, is known for his tough sentencing. He has presided over numerous politically sensitive cases, including those of protesters arrested in connection with demonstrations that followed the 2009 presidential elections.

IRNA said Rezaian’s hearing ended after a few hours, and that Salavati would decide on the date of the next one, without providing further details.

His brother said Rezaian just wants to prove his innocence.

“He’d never do anything malicious to hurt Iran, or the United States,” Ali Rezaian said. “And we want to be as loud and clear to everybody in the world.”

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Associated Press writers Tracy Brown in Washington and Adam Schreck in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.

Apple co-founder says the NSA whistleblower "gave up his own life . . . to help the rest of us"

Steve Wozniak reaffirmed his staunch support for digital privacy in an interview over the weekend in which the Apple co-founder called National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden “a hero.”

Wozniak, who helped build Apple [fortune-stock symbol=”AAPL”] with Steve Jobs before leaving the tech giant in the mid-1980’s, has expressed an affinity for Snowden in the past. Over the weekend, Wozniak reiterated his admiration for Snowden in an interview with ArabianBusiness.com in which the inventor said Snowden “gave up his own life . . . to help the rest of us.”

Wozniak went on to tell the publication more on his feelings about Snowden:

“‘Total hero to me; total hero,’ he gushes. ‘Not necessarily [for] what he exposed, but the fact that he internally came from his own heart, his own belief in the United States Constitution, what democracy and freedom was about. And now a federal judge has said that NSA data collection was unconstitutional.'”

Two years ago, Wozniak favorably compared Snowden to Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Last year, Wozniak also told reporters that he briefly met Snowden at a small event in Moscow, where the former NSA employee is currently living.

Wozniak has expressed some regret in the past for the role technology has played in allowing the government to expand its surveillance efforts. “We didn’t realize that in the digital world there were a lot of ways to use the digital technology to control us, to snoop on us, to make things possible that weren’t,” Wozniak told CNN in 2013.

The Pontiff has sacrifced a lot to become the head of the Catholic Church

You’d think anyone with an important job would relish the chance to have a pizza delivered and devour it in front of the television.

Well, as Pope Francis keeps proving, he’s not just anyone.

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church, who has made waves waves reaching out to disaffected Catholics and insisting on making the poor a top priority, hasn’t watched TV since July 15, 1990, he revealed in an interview published in the Argentinian newspaper La Voz del Pueblo.

The pontiff did not reveal the last program he watched or why he gave up the boob tube, except to say he decided “no es para mi” (it’s not for me), before promising the Virgin Mary he wouldn’t watch again…

Read the rest of the story from our partners at NBC News

A move towards country-by-country reporting will expose the online retailer to much higher tax bills in key markets

Under pressure from E.U. authorities, Amazon.com Inc. has changed the way it books revenue from sales in Europe, a move that could lead to it paying much more in tax, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ reported at the weekend that it is now booking revenue through national branches in four of the five largest markets in the E.U.: the U.K., Germany, Italy and Spain. It attributed those details to “a person familiar with the matter,” but said a spokesman confirmed a change in practice as of May 1.

So far, Amazon has booked the overwhelming majority of its sales in the E.U. through a subsidiary registered in tiny Luxembourg, where it has arrangements that allow it to pay a fraction of the taxes that would be due if it traded through local subsidiaries. In 2012, it famously paid only 2.4 million pounds ($3.6 million) of tax on over £4 billion in sales.

The E.U.’s antitrust division said in January there were reasons to believe that this tax arrangement represented unfair state aid, and should be stopped. National governments have howled in protest that Amazon’s practices, which are legal under the E.U.’s Single Market legislation, are killing local retailers and eroding their own tax base.

The probe into Amazon is one of four of a kind that the E.U. started last year. Others affect a tax agreement between Apple Inc. and Ireland, and one between Starbucks and the Netherlands. It isn’t clear whether either company has yet followed Amazon’s lead.

This story first appeared on fortune.com

ISIS seized large parts of Anbar starting in early 2014

Move comes days after 150 prominent writers from around the world released a joint letter condemning the killings

Authorities in Bangladesh have banned a radical Islamist organization suspected of involvement in the murder of three secular bloggers who were hacked to death in the majority-Muslim South Asian nation earlier this year.

The attacks on Avijit Roy and Washiqur Rahman, who were murdered in the country’s capital city, Dhaka, in February and March, respectively, and Ananta Bijoy Das, who was killed earlier in May in northeastern Bangladesh, sparked domestic and international concern about the rise of fundamentalist violence in the country.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called the murder of Roy, a Bangladesh-born U.S. citizen who was hacked to death by masked men carrying machetes while he was returning with his wife from a book fair, a “shocking act of violence” that was “horrific in its brutality and cowardice.”

Rahman and Das were killed in similar attacks by machete-wielding men.

On Monday, Bangladesh’s Home Ministry responded by banning Ansarullah Bangla Team, a radical group that is suspected by the Bangladeshi police of being involved in the three killings. Members of the group had previously been charged with the murder of the blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider in 2013, AFP reports.

“The [Junior Home Minister] today signed a government order, outlawing the militant organization Ansarullah Bangla Team,” Sharif Mahmud, a Home Ministry spokesman, told the news agency.

The move comes days after the writers’ organization PEN International released a letter signed by 150 prominent writers from around the world — including Margaret Atwood, Amitav Ghosh, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Salman Rushdie — condemning the murder of the bloggers and calling on Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed to ensure that the attacks are not repeated.

Burma's persecuted Muslim minority takes unspeakable risks into order to flee to Malaysia

Less than a kilometer from Malaysia’s border with Thailand, the trappings of death are littered across the jungle: a stretcher made of branches to carry bodies, reams of white cloth used to wrap the deceased in Muslim tradition and, most menacing of all, empty boxes for 9-mm bullets.

On May 25, Malaysia’s Inspector General of Police, Khalid Abu Bakar, confirmed that there were at least 139 suspected graves strewn across the Perlis range of hills that rise from Malaysia into Thailand, in the vicinity of nearly 30 abandoned camps. How many bodies each possible grave contains is not yet clear, nor is it known how the people may have died. But these remains are believed to be a grim by-product of the human-smuggling trade that for years has transported persecuted Rohingya Muslims from Burma, as well as, increasingly, Bangladeshis desperate to escape poverty back home.

For years, desperate individuals have boarded rickety boats to cross the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, then trekked through Thailand’s southern jungles to their ultimate destination: Malaysia. But with the smuggling routes through Thailand into Malaysia disrupted by police investigations, thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshis are thought by the U.N. to be stuck at sea, as traffickers figure out how to salvage their human cargo and captains abandon the boats for fear of the official crackdown.

Around 3,500 Rohingya and Bangladeshis have managed to land in Malaysia and Indonesia in recent weeks, after months at sea. With Southeast Asian governments at first unwilling to take them in, the boats — their holds packed with hundreds of people, like modern-day slave ships — floated between different national waters in what the U.N. described as “human ping pong.” Only last week did the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia officially agree to offer shelter.

For now, the suspected graves in northern Malaysia’s Perlis state are marked with lone branches, the earth covered by a scattering of oversized rainforest leaves. On Tuesday, forensic teams — including one that recently returned from Ukraine, the site of the downed Malaysia Airlines jet — began sifting through the soil to recover bodies. It is a process that forensic analysts gathered at a makeshift police encampment in Wang Kelian, a few kilometers from the hill-top burial grounds, say will take weeks, if not months.

Only one body was discovered above ground. It was found in a wooden holding pen, the lower part wrapped in the sarong that is commonly worn in Burma and parts of Bangladesh. So badly decomposed was the body that forensic investigators removed it from the site in five separate bags.

Malaysia’s suspected burial ground is not the first to be discovered along the porous border with Thailand. Earlier this month, 33 bodies were unearthed in Thailand, less than 500 m from some of the Malaysian suspected graves on the opposite side. Initial police reports indicated that the cause of death for most of the bodies found in Thailand was either starvation or disease. Often, according to TIME interviews with more than 20 Rohingya who have taken the same trafficking route through Thailand into Malaysia, the agreed-upon price for the journey is jettisoned once the victims reach the jungle camps on the border. There, they are essentially held to ransom until family members either back home or in Malaysia pay much higher sums. Food is scarce and beatings common, say survivors.

Shanu binti Abdul Hussain says she, her three small children and her brother-in-law were imprisoned in a camp of the Thai side of the border for 26 days in December before her husband, who was already working in Malaysia’s Penang state, was able to meet a $4,150 ransom. (The family originally was told the voyage would cost one-third the price.) Her husband, Mohamed Rafiq, was given a Malaysian bank account number and sent the money through a cash-deposit machine in Penang. “Waiting after I sent the money was the hardest part,” he says. “I thought, what if the money was too late? What if one of my children has died?”

Since beginning their operation on May 11, Malaysian police have found a network of 28 camps deep in the Perlis jungle, one of which North Brigade police officer Mohd. Salen bin Mohd. Hussain estimates was abandoned just one week before it was discovered. Police believe one camp held 300 people, while others are far smaller. Crude holding pens girded by saplings hint at forced confinement, as does a coil of metal chains. Sentry tree houses poke through the foliage. “I am not surprised by the presence of smuggling syndicates,” Malaysian national police chief Khalid tells TIME. “But the depth of the cruelty, the torture, all this death, that has shocked me.”

This year, Malaysian police say they have arrested 37 people in connection with human smuggling, including two policemen from the state of Penang. In 2014, 66 people were charged in connection with the trade. But for human traffickers to have operated in border areas with such impunity for so many years — no matter how thick the foliage may be — it’s hard to imagine a complete lack of official complicity. Earlier this month, the mayor and deputy mayor of the Thai border town Padang Besar were arrested. Other local officials in Thailand have been detained.

Yet the trade has been going on for years, with the number of Rohingya fleeing Burma (officially known as Myanmar) escalating after Buddhist-Muslim tensions in Rakhine (or Arakan) state exploded in 2012, with the stateless Rohingya bearing the brunt of the violence. Hundreds of this Muslim minority are believed to have died, and around 140,000 have been herded into camps, where disease stalks a vulnerable population. Bereft of their homes and land, many Rohingya see opportunity in Malaysia, a Muslim-majority nation, no matter how hard the journey. Others allege they were kidnapped onto trafficking boats, as the smugglers struggle to find enough people to fill their holds. The traffickers are also targeting Bangladeshis from across the border with Burma; they, unlike the Rohingya, have little hope of ever gaining refugee status in Southeast Asia.

So far, Malaysian police have been combing a 50-km stretch of the Perlis jungle. What else will be found in the coming days? Locals speak of ghosts up in the hills by the Thai border. “I thought I would die,” says Dilarah, a Rohingya, of her 38-day journey from western Burma, through the camps on the Thai-Malaysian border. She is 6 years old.

Generations of Aboriginal children were wronged by misguided social engineering policies

In 1998, a coalition of Australian community groups declared May 26 “National Sorry Day”: an annual day of atonement for the social-engineering policy that ripped an estimated 50,000 children from their Aboriginal families between 1910 and the 1970s. But it took Australia’s government another decade to utter an official apology.

By some accounts, the policy of removing mostly mixed-race children from their Aboriginal tribes was well-intentioned. Officials and missionaries, arguing that the children would have more advantages in mainstream Australian society, took them to be raised in orphanages, boarding schools or white homes, according to a 2008 TIME story about the eventual apology. Other justifications smacked of eugenics, as with the argument by A. O. Neville, Australia’s Commissioner for Native Affairs in the 1930s, that people of Aboriginal descent could only be assimilated by “breeding out the color.”

The policy created six decades’ worth of what Australians call the “stolen generations,” children who lost their cultural and familial identities, and many of whom never saw their relatives again.

But Australian politicians were slow to embrace “National Sorry Day,” which has since been renamed “National Day of Healing.” In 1999, conservative Prime Minster John Howard expressed “deep and sincere regret that indigenous Australians suffered injustices under the practices of past generations,” but stopped short of apologizing. His administration argued, as TIME reported, that “it was not responsible for the actions of past governments and that admissions of wrongdoing could open the door to compensation suits.”

It took a new party and a new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, to say sorry. Rudd made the apology his government’s first parliamentary act, just after his 2008 swearing-in. He vowed “to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul, and in a true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia.”

Although Rudd ruled out the possibility of compensating those affected by the policy, he committed $4.5 billion to a project meant to break down barriers to healthcare, education and employment among indigenous people, the New York Times said.

That doesn’t mean that this complicated area of Australia’s history is necessarily a thing of the past. In recent years, protesters have argued that Aboriginal children are still being routinely removed from their families, only now under the auspices of child welfare, according to The Guardian.

Aboriginal grandmothers who survived the first wave of stolen generations told The Guardian, “We live in a state of fear again.”

Read more about Australia’s apology, here in the TIME archives: Resurrection Day