Afghan woman featured on iconic National Geographic cover arrives in Italy
CBC
Italy has given safe haven to Sharbat Gula, the green-eyed "Afghan Girl" whose 1985 photo in National Geographic became a symbol of her country's wars, Prime Minister Mario Draghi's office said on Thursday.
The government intervened after Gula asked for help to leave Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover of the country in August, a statement said, noting that her arrival was part of a broader program to evacuate and integrate Afghan citizens.
U.S. photographer Steve McCurry took the picture of Gula when she was a youngster, living in a refugee camp on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Her green eyes, peering out from a headscarf with a mixture of ferocity and pain, made her known internationally, but her identity was only discovered in 2002 when McCurry returned to the region and tracked her down. An FBI analyst, forensic sculptor and the inventor of iris recognition all verified her identity, National Geographic said at the time.
In 2016, Pakistan arrested Gula for forging a national identity card in an effort to live in the country.
Then-Afghan president Ashraf Ghani welcomed her back and promised to give her an apartment to ensure she "lives with dignity and security in her homeland."
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For years, many of Venezuela’s exiles in Spain — leading opposition figures and citizens — have hoped for a day when ousted president Nicolás Maduro would no longer be in power.
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Protests sweeping across Iran neared the two-week mark on Saturday, with the country’s government acknowledging the ongoing demonstrations despite an intensifying crackdown and as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world.
Russia didn’t just use a hypersonic missile to target a site in western Ukraine near the border with Poland, in the European Union, but high ranking officials then went on to boast about the power of the nuclear-capable weapon, in what some saw as a clear warning to the West.
The official White House narrative of how a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed a U.S. citizen in her vehicle in Minneapolis is bumping hard up against what can be seen in videos of the incident.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed a Minneapolis motorist on Wednesday during the Trump administration's latest immigration crackdown on a major American city — a shooting that federal officials claimed was an act of self-defence but that the city's mayor described as "reckless" and unnecessary.