Russia’s security service said Wednesday that it has detained a suspect in the killing of a senior general in Moscow. The suspect was described as an Uzbek citizen recruited by Ukrainian intelligence services. Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov was killed Tuesday by a bomb hidden in a scooter outside his apartment building in Moscow, a day after Ukraine’s security service leveled criminal charges against him. His assistant also died in the attack. A Ukrainian official said the service carried out the attack. Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, didn’t name the suspect, but said he was born in 1995. According to a statement by the FSB, the suspect said himself that he was recruited by Ukrainian special services.

Since the fall of former Syrian President Bashar Assad, industrial-scale manufacturing facilities of the amphetamine-like stimulant Captagon have been uncovered around the country, which experts say fed a $10 billion annual global trade in the highly addictive drug. Among the locations used for manufacturing the drug were the Mazzeh air base in Damascus, a car-trading company in Latakia and a factory that once made snack chips in the Damascus suburb of Douma. Government forces seized the factory in 2018. “Assad’s collaborators controlled this place. After the regime fell … I came here and found it on fire,” Firas al-Toot, the original owner of the factory, told The Associated Press.

Negotiations between Israel and Hamas for a prisoner swap and ceasefire deal are in their final stages, according to the Hamas-affiliated Quds network. Discussions are focused on the names and sentences of Palestinian prisoners to be released as part of the agreement. Sources suggest that terrorist prisoners in Israel with heavier sentences would be exiled to Turkey and Iran, while others would be released to the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and other areas. A senior Palestinian Authority official, in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, described the talks as being in a “decisive and final phase” and outlined the structure of the proposed agreement. The deal reportedly includes three stages.

Wrapping up their own investigation on the Jan. 6 2021 Capitol attack, House Republicans have concluded it’s former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney who should be prosecuted for probing what happened when then-President Donald Trump sent his mob of supporters as Congress was certifying the 2020 election. The findings issued Tuesday show the Republican Party working to reinforce Trump’s desire to punish his perceived enemies including Cheney and members of the Jan. 6 committee that the president-elect has said should be in jail.

The U.S. has transferred two Malaysian detainees at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. military prison to their home country, after they pleaded guilty to charges related to deadly 2002 bombings in Bali and agreed to testify against the alleged ringleader of that and other attacks, the Pentagon said Wednesday. Prosecutors say Mohammed Farik bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir bin Lep worked for years with Encep Nurjaman, known as Hambali, an Indonesian leader of al-Qaida affiliate Jemaah Islamiya. That includes helping Nurjaman escape capture after Oct. 12, 2002 bombings that killed 202 people at two night spots in Bali, U.S. officials said. The two men entered guilty pleas to conspiracy and other charges in January.

The Federal Reserve cut its key interest rate Wednesday by a quarter-point — its third cut this year — but also signaled that it expects to reduce rates more slowly next year than it previously envisioned, largely because of still-elevated inflation. The Fed’s 19 policymakers projected that they will cut their benchmark rate by a quarter-point just twice in 2025, down from their previous estimate in September of four rate cuts. Their new quarterly projections suggest that consumers may not enjoy much lower rates next year for mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and other forms of borrowing.

The owner of Britain’s Guardian newspaper confirmed Wednesday that it has sold The Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, to Tortoise Media for an undisclosed fee. The Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group, said in a statement that Tortoise Media is purchasing The Observer through a combination of cash and shares. The Observer, which was founded in 1791 and became part of the Guardian Media Group in 1993, is a bastion of liberal values in Britain’s media landscape. Tortoise has promised readers that it will honor the paper’s historic values. Tortoise was launched in 2019 by James Harding, a former editor of the London Times and director of news at the BBC, and the former U.S. ambassador to London, Matthew Barzun.

A quarter of the hostages released from captivity in the Gaza Strip suffer from Stockholm syndrome, Kan News reported last week. Stockholm syndrome is manifested by the victim’s identification with their captors as a survival mechanism and even in the development of positive feelings towards them. The data is from a study conducted by Prof. Gil Zaltzman, the director of the Geha Mental Health Center in Petach Tikvah and chairman of the Health Ministry’s suicide prevention program. The researchers analyzed the medical data of 102 released hostages and presented their conclusions at a conference of the Israel National Institute For Health Policy Research regarding the treatment of additional released hostages in the future. According to Prof.

Underneath a granite hill in southern China, a massive detector is nearly complete that will sniff out the mysterious ghost particles lurking around us. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory will soon begin the difficult task of spotting neutrinos: tiny cosmic particles with a mind-bogglingly small mass. The detector is one of three being built across the globe to study these elusive ghost particles in the finest detail yet. The other two, based in the United States and Japan, are still under construction. Spying neutrinos is no small feat in the quest to understand how the universe came to be.

Nearly two million Israelis, including hundreds of thousands of children and seniors, were living below the poverty line in 2023, according to an annual report released by the National Insurance Institute (NII). The report underscores a troubling picture of economic inequality in Israel, placing the country near the bottom of the OECD rankings for poverty based on disposable income. The report reveals that 1.98 million people, or 20.7% of the population, lived in poverty last year. Among them were 872,400 children (27.9% of the child population) and 158,500 senior citizens (12.8% of the senior population). Rates of deprivation were particularly severe in Arab and Charedi communities, with Modiin Ilit—a predominantly Charedi city—identified as the poorest locality.