Latest news with #JamesFoley
Euronews
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Terror to tourism? Hostage-style video invites visitors to Afghanistan
Two men kneel on the ground — hands seemingly bound behind their backs and heads covered with black plastic bags — as the armed men looming over them stare into the camera and issue a chilling demand. "Ciao Italia. If you want your two citizens safely back in Italy, you must send us $5 billion via bitcoin," the men wielding a rifle say in a video widely shared on X, including by many Taliban-linked accounts. The supposed hostage video takes a twist when the captors remove the black bags to reveal two smiling young men, give a thumbs-up and say: "Welcome to Afghanistan!" The rest of the 30-second clip — which is in fact a promotional video made by a tour agency — shows the visitors visiting communities with their Afghan hosts, playing with children, photographing nature, eating local food and trying on clothes at a market. A previous video produced by Raza Afghanistan follows the same template, but with an ominous "Message for America" threatened before the purported victims are revealed to be US tourists, and an ensuing montage shows them enjoying a tour of the country. The video further shows the men examining a US-made assault rifle, laughing that the safety is not on, eating large watermelons and their Afghan hosts doing pullups on the barrel of a tank gun, among other scenes. The social media stunts are reminiscent of hostage execution videos such as the 2002 beheading of US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and the 2014 decapitation of James Foley, also a reporter from the US, by the so-called Islamic State group in Syria. Reactions to Raza Afghanistan's videos on X have ranged from praise for the "great promotion and unique concept" to criticism over a lack of women in the footage and an unwillingness to visit a country where women's and girls' rights are so severely curtailed. In a recent post on Instagram, the tour agency's founder Yosaf Aryubi explained how he wanted to challenge stereotypes — and said he had "no affiliation with any government". "You also understand that the media and Hollywood painted the mountains of Afghanistan and those who protect them, to be merciless and wicked," wrote Aryubi, 28, who grew up in the US and now splits his time between California and Kabul. "Such a blessing to share experiences in the country I couldn't travel much in due to the situation during the 20-year occupation." Taliban eye tourism boom Nearly four years after seizing control of Afghanistan, the Taliban is increasingly eager to attract tourists to the country and boost revenue for the fledgling industry. Afghanistan's isolation on the global stage, largely because of the Taliban's restrictions on women and girls, has left much of its 41 million people mired in poverty. As it struggles to attract foreign investment, the potential of tourism is far from lost on the government. "The Afghan people are warm and welcoming and wish to host tourists from other countries and engage with them," Deputy Minister of Tourism Qudratullah Jamal said in an interview last month. "Tourism brings many benefits to a country. We have considered those benefits and aim for our nation to take full advantage of them," he added. Nearly 9,000 foreign tourists visited Afghanistan last year, while some 3,000 people arrived in the first three months of this year, according to the tourism ministry. Four decades of near-continuous conflict kept nearly all tourists away from the landlocked country of towering mountains, deep gorges and millennia of history. The Taliban's takeover from a US-backed government in August 2021 stunned the world and sent thousands of Afghans fleeing. While the previous bloodshed from frequent bombings and suicide attacks is largely over, sporadic attacks do still occur — as do kidnappings and detentions of foreigners. IS gunmen killed six people, including three Spanish tourists, in a May 2024 attack in Bamiyan, one of the country's main tourist attractions where centuries-old giant Buddhas carved into the cliffs were blown up by the Taliban in 2001. In February this year, a British couple in their 70s who ran education programmes in Afghanistan were arrested by the Taliban. In April, a Taliban interior ministry spokesperson said Peter and Barbie Reynolds were being investigated over a "small matter" and that they would soon face a court's judgement based on Islamic law. Meanwhile, George Glezmann, a US tourist who had been detained by the Taliban while visiting Kabul in 2022, was freed in March after being held for more than two years.
Forbes
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Madonna's Quarter-Century-Old Song Almost Breaks Back Into The Top 10
Madonna's decades-old classic single "Erotica" returns to multiple charts in the U.K. as fans ... More prepare for her next chapter, which may include music and TV. American singer and actress Madonna filming the video for her song 'Papa Don't Preach' in New York City, 1986. The video is being directed by James Foley. (Photo by) For months now, Madonna has assured her enormous fanbase that she is hard at work on her next chapter — or chapters. The pop icon had been writing a screenplay intended to tell the story of her life, but after the movie was scrapped, she pivoted to television. It now appears that a limited series based on her rise to superstardom is in the works. At the same time, Madonna is also putting the finishing touches — or so it seems — on her next album. She has referred to the project as Confessions 2, making it sound like a sonic sequel to her Grammy-winning full-length Confessions on a Dance Floor. Nothing has been heard yet from the highly anticipated set (at least not by the general public), but people are already excited as the world waits to hear the first taste of Confessions 2. One of Madonna's oldest singles returns to multiple charts in the U.K. and nearly becomes a top 10 smash once again amidst all the excitement and uncertainty around what's coming next for her. 'Erotica'' Returns to the Charts "Erotica" appears this week on the Official Vinyl Singles and Official Physical Singles tallies. It's common for a tune to end up in similar positions on both rankings, as one focuses solely on the bestselling songs available on vinyl, while the other looks at the top-selling tracks of any style, as long as they are sold on a physical format, with vinyl being perhaps the most important at the moment. "Erotica" breaks back onto the vinyl-only list at No. 12 and lands at No. 17 on the Official Physical Singles chart. Madonna's Former No. 1 "Erotica" debuted at No. 1 on the Official Vinyl Singles chart in November 2022 and has since racked up 24 appearances on the format-specific ranking. Its journey on the Official Physical Singles chart is a bit different. On that list, "Erotica" opened at No. 88 in the summer of 2017. The smash wasn't seen for years, and when it returned in November 2022 — at the same time it debuted on the vinyl tally — it soared to a new peak of No. 2. "Erotica" has spent almost twice as long on the Official Physical Singles chart as it has on the vinyl ranking, as it is now up to 43 stays on that roster. 'Erotica' Introduced Madonna's Album of the Same Name Madonna originally released "Erotica" in the fall of 1992, coming up on a quarter-century ago. The track was another major hit for the pop superstar, peaking at No. 3 on both the main singles list in the U.K. and the Hot 100 in America. "Erotica" introduced the album of the same name, which also features beloved hits like "Deeper and Deeper," "Bad Girl," and "Fever."
The Guardian
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
James Foley obituary
The film director James Foley, who has died from brain cancer aged 71, was a self-effacing and shrewd stylist whose camerawork always served the actors and the psychology of the characters. This thespian focus was best showcased in his 1992 adaptation of David Mamet's stage play Glengarry Glen Ross; its heavyweight cast, which included Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey, might have overwhelmed a less purposeful supervisor. But in his hands this dissection of American capitalism, set in a beleaguered real-estate office, became an actors' masterclass; the cast would turn up on their days off to watch each other work. Foley had been convinced to direct it by a new version of Mamet's script that broke down what on stage had been cerebral monologues into pithy, visceral repartee. Accordingly, the director insisted on casting 'great actors, people with movie charisma, to give it watchability, especially since the locations were so restricted'. Recruiting Pacino as Ricky Roma, the star salesman, Foley had the luxury of a three-week rehearsal period. He used it to avoid a pitfall endemic to Mamet: 'There was a real danger that actors could get seduced by the superficial level of gratification that comes with saying great dialogue. I was much more interested in getting actors that had an interior, emotional life,' he told the WHYY radio station in Philadelphia. With many of the stars reducing their salaries to come on board, egos were on hold – a prerequisite for Foley. 'My litmus test is I have to be able to make fun of actors, and of who they are, and their fame,' he said. It paid dividends: the finished Glengarry Glen Ross had a commanding intensity and bite. The 'always be closing' pep talk – an added scene with Baldwin in the role of head office's ball-breaking envoy – later became a staple of acting classes. The film's prising open of male belligerence and insecurity was a recurrent feature in Foley's films, which were often noir-inflected, character-focused crime dramas. Its milieu of tawdry salesmanship, and the eternal imperative of the hustle, must surely have resonated with his struggle to rise up Hollywood's pecking order. Born in Bay Bridge, Brooklyn, New York, James was the son of Frances and James Sr, a lawyer, and grew up in Staten Island. After graduating in psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1974, he abruptly switched tack to cinema after taking a six-week course at New York University. He then studied for a master's degree at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in 1979. Foley was offered the chance to direct by Hal Ashby, an errant New Hollywood auteur; Ashby was impressed by one of the young man's films being projected on to a wall at a student party. They never made anything together, but what Foley described as Hollywood's 'weird calculus' meant Ashby's patronage was enough to earn him the directorial chair on his first feature: a derivative but energetic high-school romance, Reckless (1984). He followed it up with the crime drama At Close Range (1986), starring his friend Sean Penn as a Pennsylvanian latchkey teenager drawn into the orbit of his psychopathic father, played by Christopher Walken. Not only exhibiting Foley's way with actors, especially in Walken's flamboyant but subtly shaded performance, the director also imbued the film with an insistent romanticism. He later summed up his low-key approach to style as: 'I like getting the movie inside of the drama as if there was no director involved.' Foley's connection to Penn led to him directing the screwball comedy Who's That Girl (1987), starring the actor's then wife, Madonna (he was best man at the couple's wedding, and directed the music videos for Madonna's Live to Tell, Papa Don't Preach and True Blue, under the name Peter Percher). Who's That Girl was a critical and commercial bomb; Foley had to regroup in the wake of this atypical foray into lighter material: 'It was a major life experience. That first failure is so shocking,' he told Film Freak Central. He returned with the fraught and intense desert noir After Dark, My Sweet (1990), adapted from the 1955 Jim Thompson novel, which was Foley's only feature-writing credit. Although, like many of his films, it was a commercial failure despite critical admiration, it earned him Pacino's attention for Glengarry Glen Ross. Foley continued working throughout the 90s and early 2000s, with his two films with Mark Wahlberg – the teen sociopath thriller Fear (1996) and the actioner The Corruptor (1999) – finding moderate commercial success. But the critical lashing and commercial failure of the costly $60m cyberstalking neo-noir Perfect Stranger (2007), starring Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, led to him being consigned to 'director jail' for a time. For much of the 2010s, he worked exclusively in TV, a medium about which he expressed reservations; among other jobs, David Fincher – whose psychological slant he shared – hired him to direct 12 episodes of the Netflix series House of Cards. For his final features he accepted a franchise gig: directing the two sequels to Fifty Shades of Grey, in 2017 and 2018. Easily the most commercially successful films of his career, he viewed them with a certain pragmatism. 'The movie is not going to win Oscars,' he said of Fifty Shades Darker. 'But I don't think it's going to win Razzies [Golden Raspberry awards]. That's my goal – to not win a Razzie.' Having weathered several cycles of fortune within Hollywood, this journeyman took the long view: 'I'm interested in studying the history of directors, and why they make a few good films and then fall off the map. You look to the credits of episodic TV and there they are – and I think that it has so much to do with how you respond to failure.' He is survived by a brother, Kevin, and two sisters, Eileen and Jo Ann. James Foley, film director, born 28 December 1953; died 6 May 2025
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Mission launched to find body of Peter Kassig, Indianapolis native killed by Islamic State
A Qatari mission has begun searching for the remains of an Indianapolis native and other U.S. hostages killed by Islamic State in Syria a decade ago, two sources briefed on the mission said, reviving a longstanding effort to recover their bodies. Islamic State, which controlled swaths of Syria and Iraq at the peak of its power from 2014 to 2017, beheaded numerous people in captivity, including aid worker Peter Kassig, and released videos of the killings. Qatar's international search and rescue group began the search Wednesday, accompanied by several Americans, the sources said. The group, deployed by Doha to earthquake zones in Morocco and Turkey in recent years, had so far found the remains of three bodies, the sources said. A Syrian security source said the remains had yet to be identified. The second source said it was unclear how long the mission would last. The U.S. State Department had no immediate comment. The Qatari mission gets under way as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to visit Doha and other Gulf Arab allies next week and as Syria's ruling Islamists, close allies of Qatar, seek relief from U.S. sanctions. The Syrian source said the mission's initial focus was on looking for the body Kassig, who was killed by Islamic State in 2014 in Dabiq in northern Syria. The second source said Kassig's remains were among those they hoped to find. In a statement, the Kassig family said it was waiting for analysis seeking to confirm the identities of the dead. "We are grateful to all those who are involved in the effort to get these deceased individuals' remains identified and returned to their home countries and loved ones," the statement said. Kassig was the only child of Ed and Paula Kassig and grew up in Broad Ripple, graduating from North Central High School in 2006. He served in the Army before being honorably discharged. The Hoosier said he "found his calling" on a visit to Lebanon in 2012, where began by volunteering at a refugee hospital. He also founded an aid organization. Kassig was captured by Islamic State militants during a humanitarian mission to Syria in 2013. He converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdul-Rahman while in captivity. In November 2014, he was killed. U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were among other Western hostages killed by Islamic State. Their deaths were confirmed in 2014. U.S. aid worker Kayla Mueller was also killed in Islamic State captivity. Her death was confirmed in 2015. "We're grateful for anyone taking on this task and risking their lives in some circumstances to try and find the bodies of Jim and the other hostages," said Diane Foley, James Foley's mother. "We thank all those involved in this effort." The jihadists were eventually driven out of their self-declared caliphate by a U.S.-led coalition and other forces. Plans for the Qatari mission were discussed during a visit to Washington in April by Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and the Minister of State for the foreign ministry, Mohammed Al Khulaifi — a trip also designed to prepare for Trump's visit to Qatar, one of the sources said. Another person familiar with the issue said there had been a longstanding commitment by successive U.S. administrations to find the remains of the murdered Americans, and that there had been multiple previous "efforts with U.S. government officials on the ground in Syria to search very specific areas." The person did not elaborate. But the U.S. has had hundreds of troops deployed in northeastern Syria that have continued pursuing the remnants of Islamic State. The person said the remains of Kassig, Sotloff and Foley were most likely in the same general area, and that Dabiq had been one of Islamic State's "centerpieces" — a reference to its propaganda value as a place named in an Islamic prophecy. Two Islamic State members, both former British citizens who were part of a cell that beheaded American hostages, are serving life prison sentences in the United States. Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who seized power from Bashar al-Assad in December, battled Islamic State when he was the commander of another jihadist faction — the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front — during the Syrian war. Sharaa severed ties to al Qaeda in 2016. IndyStar contributed. Additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Erin Banco; writing by Tom Perry. This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Peter Kassig's body sought a decade after Islamic State killed him
Indianapolis Star
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Indianapolis Star
Mission launched to find body of Peter Kassig, Indianapolis native killed by Islamic State
A Qatari mission has begun searching for the remains of an Indianapolis native and other U.S. hostages killed by Islamic State in Syria a decade ago, two sources briefed on the mission said, reviving a longstanding effort to recover their bodies. Islamic State, which controlled swaths of Syria and Iraq at the peak of its power from 2014 to 2017, beheaded numerous people in captivity, including aid worker Peter Kassig, and released videos of the killings. Qatar's international search and rescue group began the search Wednesday, accompanied by several Americans, the sources said. The group, deployed by Doha to earthquake zones in Morocco and Turkey in recent years, had so far found the remains of three bodies, the sources said. A Syrian security source said the remains had yet to be identified. The second source said it was unclear how long the mission would last. The U.S. State Department had no immediate comment. The Qatari mission gets under way as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to visit Doha and other Gulf Arab allies next week and as Syria's ruling Islamists, close allies of Qatar, seek relief from U.S. sanctions. The Syrian source said the mission's initial focus was on looking for the body Kassig, who was killed by Islamic State in 2014 in Dabiq in northern Syria. The second source said Kassig's remains were among those they hoped to find. In a statement, the Kassig family said it was waiting for analysis seeking to confirm the identities of the dead. "We are grateful to all those who are involved in the effort to get these deceased individuals' remains identified and returned to their home countries and loved ones," the statement said. Kassig was the only child of Ed and Paula Kassig and grew up in Broad Ripple, graduating from North Central High School in 2006. He served in the Army before being honorably discharged. The Hoosier said he "found his calling" on a visit to Lebanon in 2012, where began by volunteering at a refugee hospital. He also founded an aid organization. Kassig was captured by Islamic State militants during a humanitarian mission to Syria in 2013. He converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdul-Rahman while in captivity. In November 2014, he was killed. U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were among other Western hostages killed by Islamic State. Their deaths were confirmed in 2014. U.S. aid worker Kayla Mueller was also killed in Islamic State captivity. Her death was confirmed in 2015. "We're grateful for anyone taking on this task and risking their lives in some circumstances to try and find the bodies of Jim and the other hostages," said Diane Foley, James Foley's mother. "We thank all those involved in this effort." The jihadists were eventually driven out of their self-declared caliphate by a U.S.-led coalition and other forces. Plans for the Qatari mission were discussed during a visit to Washington in April by Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and the Minister of State for the foreign ministry, Mohammed Al Khulaifi — a trip also designed to prepare for Trump's visit to Qatar, one of the sources said. Another person familiar with the issue said there had been a longstanding commitment by successive U.S. administrations to find the remains of the murdered Americans, and that there had been multiple previous "efforts with U.S. government officials on the ground in Syria to search very specific areas." The person did not elaborate. But the U.S. has had hundreds of troops deployed in northeastern Syria that have continued pursuing the remnants of Islamic State. The person said the remains of Kassig, Sotloff and Foley were most likely in the same general area, and that Dabiq had been one of Islamic State's "centerpieces" — a reference to its propaganda value as a place named in an Islamic prophecy. Two Islamic State members, both former British citizens who were part of a cell that beheaded American hostages, are serving life prison sentences in the United States. Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who seized power from Bashar al-Assad in December, battled Islamic State when he was the commander of another jihadist faction — the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front — during the Syrian war. Sharaa severed ties to al Qaeda in 2016.
