John Limbert belongs to an exclusive club — the 52 American diplomats held hostage by Iran for 444 days during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Since that crisis, which began 40 years ago next month, the two countries shared an enmity that has only grown worse under President Trump. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo raised the […]
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BEIRUT — Since disappearing in Syria nearly two years ago, an American therapist has missed the birth of one grandchild, then another. His family in the United States does not know where he is, who is holding him, whether he has the diabetes medication he needs or even whether he is still alive. They have […]
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WASHINGTON — Top British officials confronted a dilemma last spring. Should they offer to help the United States prosecute two British nationals accused of abusing hostages as part of an Islamic State cell in Syria? Or would the conditions of their proposal scare off the Trump administration and worsen relations? In an internal debate over […]
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BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The suspect in a car bombing that left 21 people dead on Thursday in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, was a member of the largest guerrilla group remaining in the country, the Colombian government said Friday. José Aldemar Rojas Rodríguez, the suspect who was also killed that day, was part of the National […]
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GORDON, Wis. — Neighbors watch one another’s homes in the winter around here. They notice when there are unfamiliar tire tracks in the snow. Most of the 34 graduates of Northwood High School’s Class of 2015 keep in touch through text message. Gordon is a tiny place, with a single convenience store, and until last […]
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BARRON, Wis. — The man accused of kidnapping Jayme Closs and killing her parents told investigators that he had spotted 13-year-old Jayme getting onto a school bus last fall and decided then that “that was the girl he was going to take,” according to court documents released Monday. The man, Jake Patterson, 21, was charged […]
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BARRON, Wis. — The man accused of kidnapping Jayme Closs and killing her parents told investigators that he had spotted 13-year-old Jayme getting onto a school bus last fall and decided then that “that was the girl he was going to take,” according to court documents released Monday. The man, Jake Patterson, 21, was charged […]
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CHICAGO — When Jayme Closs, 13, appeared along a rural Wisconsin road on Thursday, she ended an 88-day search by hundreds of investigators. Chris Fitzgerald, the sheriff of Barron County, Wis. — where Jayme’s parents were found dead in their home on the night that Jayme disappeared — was at the helm of that desperate […]
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GORDON, Wis. — A 21-year-old man was being held in the disappearance of a teenager, Jayme Closs, who had vanished from her rural Wisconsin home on the same fall night that her parents were found fatally shot there. Jake T. Patterson, 21, was being held pending formal charges of murder and kidnapping, the authorities announced […]
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LONDON — Mary Robinson, a world-renowned human rights advocate, stepped into the strange affair of an Arab princess this week, and found herself accused of giving political cover to rights abuses by the royal family of Dubai. The case involves Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, a daughter of Dubai’s ruler, who left the Gulf emirate […]
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One night during Hanukkah this year, two Jewish children disappeared from their home about two hours northwest of New York City. Two days later, they were with members of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect in Mexico, according to a complaint filed in Federal District Court in White Plains, N.Y. A Brooklyn man, Aron Rosner, was arrested […]
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Three Canadian citizens being detained by China appear to have become pawns in a political impasse between the two countries and, by extension, the United States. They should be released immediately. China, already an aggressive rising power known to flout the rule of law and disregard human rights, now seems to be using hostage-taking to […]
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On a cool October evening, in a Brooklyn studio crowded with canvases, some still wet, Diane Foley stood before an oil painting of two solemn grade-school boys in the Libyan civil war. One of the boys held aloft a photo of a middle-aged man, a relative, who was missing. “I like this one,” Mrs. Foley […]
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The State Department denied a temporary visa to a Guatemalan father trying to attend the funeral on Saturday for his teenage daughter, who was kidnapped outside her North Carolina home last month and was later found dead off a rural road, the man’s lawyer said on Thursday. The father of the girl, 13-year-old Hania Aguilar, […]
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Somali pirates kidnapped and held Michael Scott Moore, a journalist, hostage for two-and-a-half terrifying years until a ransom payment secured his release in September 2014. Two months later, Mr. Moore received a surprising message on Facebook. “How are you, Michael?” the message said. “I am ur friend Mohammed Tahlil. I wants to speak with u.” […]
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DAKAR, Senegal — Dozens of students kidnapped from a boarding school in a restive region of Cameroon were freed late Tuesday after being held hostage for about two days, according to local and military officials. The circumstances of the mass kidnapping were mired in confusion, but more than 70 teenage students were dropped off at […]
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DAKAR, Senegal — Numerous students were kidnapped from a boarding school early Monday in a part of Cameroon where separatists are waging a violent battle to break away and form their own country. The students were kidnapped either late Sunday or early Monday from a Presbyterian boarding school in Nkwen, a small village not far […]
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ROME — In June 1983, Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee, vanished on her way home from a music lesson. In the intervening 35 years, Emanuela’s disappearance has been one of Italy’s most intriguing cold cases. So much so that the mere discovery on Monday of human bones in a building in […]
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Should the world worry about WhatsApp? Has it become a virulent new force in global misinformation and political trickery? Or, rather, should the world rejoice about WhatsApp? After all, hasn’t it provided a way for people everywhere to communicate securely with encrypted messages, beyond the reach of government surveillance? These are deep and complicated questions. […]
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The woman called an Uber car in Manhattan late one night in February to take her home to the nearby suburb of White Plains, N.Y. She was exhausted and fell asleep in the back seat. She woke to discover that the car had stopped and the driver was in the back seat with her, his […]
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