Habib Siddiqui

  Adnan Syed will remain free despite his conviction for the 1999 murder of his high school ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, a Maryland judge ruled. In a court order Thursday,   Judge Jennifer Schiffer granted Syed a sentence reduction to time served, allowing him to remain free. Syed’s conviction was vacated in 2022 and he was released and has remained out of prison since, even though the Maryland Supreme Court upheld a lower appellate court’s decision to reinstate his conviction last year. “After considering the entire record, the court concludes that the Defendant is not a danger to the public and that the interests of justice will be better served by a reduced sentence,” Schiffer wrote in the court order.   Schiffer will officially impose the reduced sentence at a hearing to be held in the next two weeks. The victory for Syed, however, is not tied to his innocence. Syed’s attorneys petitioned the court last December for the sentence reduction under Maryland’s Juvenile Rest...

  Nobel Peace Prize laureate and education activist Malala Yousafzai returned to her Pakistan home village on Wednesday, 13 years after surviving an assassination attempt by militants. Yousafzai was a 15-year-old schoolgirl when Pakistan Taliban militants boarded a bus and shot her in the head in the remote Swat Valley near the Afghanistan border. She has made rare visits to the valley since, but it was the first time she returned to her childhood home in Shangla since being evacuated to the United Kingdom after the attack. "As a child, I spent every holiday in Shangla, Pakistan, playing by the river and sharing meals with my extended family," she said on X. "It was such a joy for me to return there today -- after 13 long years -- to be surrounded by the mountains, dip my hands in the cold river and laugh with my beloved cousins. This place is very dear to my heart and I hope to return again and again." Yousafzai was accompanied by her father, husband and brother fo...

  Abdullah al-Yazuri, 13, told MEE he has faced harassment over his role narrating the film but that the BBC has not reached out to apologise Abdullah al-Yazuri said that he had hoped the documentary could 'spread the message of the suffering that children in Gaza witness' (screengrab) By  Khaled Shalaby  and  Imran Mulla Abdullah al-Yazuri is 13 years old and has witnessed death and  devastation  on a scale that most could never imagine. Having survived  Israel’s deadly war on Gaza , which has killed at least 48,380 Palestinians so far, Abdullah’s dream is to study journalism in distant Britain, where his father got his PhD. But in recent weeks, Abdullah has found himself at the centre of a national row in Britain, triggered by his role narrating a BBC documentary on Gaza’s children,  Gaza: How To Survive a Warzone . Speaking to Middle East Eye this week, Abdullah described spending hours being filmed in the besieged enclave during the war. ...