Many tourists in Paris were disappointed Monday morning when the Louvre was closed after workers walked off the job during one of the busiest times of the year. The union is demanding better working conditions and urgent renovations at the museum.
Law enforcement authorities in California have arrested the son of film director and writer Rob Reiner, who was found dead with his wife Michele in their Los Angeles home over the weekend, according to media reports.
The news service Reuters reported that Reiner’s 32-year-old son Nick was arrested on Sunday evening and is being held on $4m bail, citing booking information from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
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The LA Police Department had said in a statement on Sunday that it was investigating the deaths as an apparent homicide, and the Associated Press reported that investigators believe the victims had been stabbed.
It is not yet clear what charges Reiner’s son could face if found guilty of the crime, and many details around the incident remain uncertain.
In a social media post on Monday, President Donald Trump seemed to blame the death of Reiner, a comedy giant who embraced progressive political causes, on his criticisms of Trump.
Trump’s post on Truth Social states that Reiner’s death was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”.
Damascus, Syria – Fouad Naal spent 21 years in prison under the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
He remained in the notorious Sednaya and Adra prisons until December 8, 2024, which was not only his liberation but also the liberation of Syria from al-Assad’s rule, he told Al Jazeera a day before the anniversary.
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Tall and slim with a long salt and pepper beard, Naal, 52, speaks with enthusiasm and moves fluidly despite his years in confinement.
He was a practising imam before his arrest and holds his faith closely, he explains in the salon of his modest apartment in Damascus’s Muhajreen neighbourhood, a 10-minute walk from al-Assad’s former residence.
On December 8, Syria celebrated the first anniversary of al-Assad fleeing Damascus for Moscow. His flight meant the end of five decades of al-Assad family rule, known for its brutality and ruthlessness.
Hundreds of thousands of people have disappeared in the al-Assad prison network. Even more experienced the brutal conditions and were left with physical or mental ailments, traumas or severe health conditions.
Naal said he was summoned by the regime “hundreds of times” before his arrest and imprisonment in 2004 for issuing a fatwa, a religious opinion, saying Syrians shouldn’t go fight the United States invasion in Iraq.
He and many others believed the Syrian state was encouraging Syrians to go to Iraq to fight against the US military, which had invaded the country in 2003.
Many Muslims Naal knew decided to go, but never made it to Iraq. The buses that had been provided to take them across the border into Iraq were bombed before leaving Syrian territory, he said.
Naal suspected the Syrian state was behind the attack on the convoy and put out his fatwa.
He was arrested with his wife and then-four-year-old daughter and given a life sentence. He said the regime accused him of planning to assassinate al-Assad and several other senior regime figures.
The charges were fake, he said, but he admitted to them under coercion to free his daughter and wife. He was sent to Sednaya, where he was held in what in later years would become known as the “Red Prison”.
He passed the time working out, reading and studying law. In 2005, after a full year in jail, he was allowed monthly visits.
Conditions in Sednaya were difficult. He recalled a time when his eyelid was inflamed but medicine was withheld. The prisoners were also not allowed to pray in groups or read the Quran together, he said.
Still, he never gave up hope of leaving prison. “I had a bag packed, ready to go, every single day,” he said.
“I always thought: ‘Tomorrow, I will get out.’”
After Naal had been in Sednaya for seven years, the Syrian uprising began.
He and his fellow prisoners had been following the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya but didn’t believe a similar event would happen in Syria.
“It was really surprising that in Syria this is happening,” he said.
“They were really great moments of joy. I was happy with the beginning of the revolution.”
In 2012, Naal said he was transferred from Sednaya to Adra Central Prison on the northeastern outskirts of Damascus, where he and other Muslims were put into a special political wing.
It seemed as though Sednaya was being emptied to receive Syrians who were being rounded up for opposing the regime.
In Adra, the conditions were easier. Naal was placed with other alleged Islamists. They could pray. They were granted weekly visits during which they got news of the outside world.
“Within a month of the first visits, everyone in the prison had one or two phones,” he said.
Furthermore, the prison administration in Adra was afraid of Naal and the other prisoners due to rumours that had spread about them. One day, a police officer approached him to ask about them. He was named Khadr, and Naal said he later defected and joined the opposition
“He said: ‘Can I ask you a question, sheikh?’ I told him: ‘Please.’
“He actually asked me if it were true that we used to cut off the heads of officers in Sednaya and play football with them.”
On December 7, 2024, Naal said he and his fellow inmates knew anti-Assad forces were heading their way. The excitement was palpable, and some prisoners suggested trying to break out.
“People couldn’t bear it any more,” he said.
By now, the prisoners knew that Aleppo had been liberated and were eagerly anticipating the rebels’ arrival in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city.
Naal was awoken by the smell of coffee being made by his fellow prisoners sometime in the wee hours of December 8, 2024. The prisoners were anxious but excited.
At one point, Naal rang a bell that alerted the guards that a prisoner was in need, but no one responded. He rang again and, again, nothing.
Although swearing was forbidden in the prison, Naal began swearing at the guards to try to elicit a response.
“Hey, you animals! Open the doors!”
At one point, a prisoner who could see out a window spread the news that the prison guards had lined up and were leaving the prison.
Shouts of “God is greatest” spread around the prison. The excitement began to grow to the point that Naal said inmates began breaking the prison doors themselves.
But the trauma that some of the prisoners suffered was so high that they were begging others to keep the doors locked, fearing repercussions. Some, he said, hid under their covers.
Others felt there was no turning back and continued breaking down their cell doors.
When they broke out of their cells, the prisoners found guard uniforms scattered on the ground as they ran to the prison’s weapons depot.
“People shot in the air out of joy,” Naal said.
The prisoners moved away from the prison and found an abandoned checkpoint. “There was a pot of mate still boiling on the burning wood,” he said. “Guns were on the ground next to abandoned military uniforms.”
As they continued walking, Naal said he and his fellow prisoners encountered soldiers. Some had removed the tops of their uniforms but kept their pants. Instead of firing at them, the soldiers were telling the prisoners: “We are with you. We are with you,” Naal recalled.
Naal said the power of this moment appeared to be a gift from the divine.
“You feel that even a person who has no faith in God Almighty would feel that there is a greater power than himself.”
Naal emerged from prison in much better physical condition than others who were in al-Assad’s prison system for shorter sentences.
“I exercised every day in prison,” he told Al Jazeera.
“I’m 51 years old,” he said, then corrected himself.
“I’m 52, but I still associate myself with the age I was when I left prison.”
But he has not emerged unscathed. He pointed to the closed door of the small room where he was giving the interview.
“I don’t like closed places. I don’t like it in general, but I don’t get affected by it psychologically,” he said.
“I don’t want to sleep with a closed door. I’m not upset, but I prefer to have it open,” he said.
He also said he and many of his fellow prisoners struggled to sleep after they escaped prison because they’d grown accustomed to the quiet there.
Just a couple of days before this interview, he revisited Sednaya Prison with a group of Syrians and Ukrainians. The visit was emotionally fraught for him, but he recognised its importance for finding justice for people in Syria and beyond.
“What does Bashar al-Assad feel today? He is listening to these words and sitting like a mouse hiding in a burrow in Russia. Even if this burrow is built of gold.
“We used to say that if the prison were a palace of gold, we still wouldn’t want it. We’d rather go home and live for an hour and die hungry for our freedom. Today, he is living the same way,” Naal said.
Before his imprisonment, Naal said he enjoyed doing everything at home. He used to not enjoy going to restaurants. “My mother raised me not to eat in front of people in case they couldn’t afford what I am eating,” he said.
“I’d prefer to get food and come back home to eat.”
Now, however, he enjoys leaving the house to walk around his neighbourhood. And he endures going to restaurants because he sees the value in sharing a communal experience in public, something that can’t be done in prison.
He also says it is important to remember that in Syria, “the children made a revolution.”
“The one who won the revolution was Hamza al-Khatib,” he said, speaking of the 13-year-old from Deraa who was likely brutally tortured to death by Syrian security forces for taking part in an anti-regime protest in 2011.
He also spoke of the teenagers in Deraa who graffitied a wall with the phrase “Your turn has come, oh doctor.” It referred to al-Assad, who studied ophthalmology in London.
“They were the trigger of this popular explosion, … the volcano,” Naal said
As Ukraine peace talks continue, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is meeting European and US officials in Berlin over security guarantees. Meanwhile, the EU is split on using frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s war effort. Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen reports from Brussels.
The European Union has launched an “air bridge” to bring eight planeloads of humanitarian aid into Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region.
The European Commission’s department overseeing overseas aid unveiled the measure on Monday and said the flights will carry 3.5 million euros ($4.1m) of “life-saving supplies” to the western region, where “mass atrocities, starvation and displacement” have left millions of people in urgent need.
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The first flight left on Friday, delivering about 100 tonnes of aid from “EU humanitarian stockpiles and partner organisations”, the commission’s Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations said in a statement.
Further flights will continue throughout this month and January, it said, listing water, shelter materials, and sanitation, hygiene and health items among the supplies being transported to “one of the world’s hardest places for aid organisations to reach”.
It noted that the fall of North Darfur’s capital, el-Fasher, which was seized by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in late October, marked a “major escalation of an already catastrophic humanitarian situation” and has made aid access even harder.
The RSF took control of el-Fasher after an 18-month siege that cut residents off from food, medicine and other critical supplies, prompting more than 100,000 people to flee, many to the town of Tawila, which has become the epicentre of the region’s spiralling humanitarian crisis.
Those who fled el-Fasher reported mass killings, kidnappings and widespread acts of sexual violence as the RSF raided the city. United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk accused the group of committing “the gravest of crimes”.
Sudan was plunged into chaos in April 2023 when a power struggle between the military and the RSF exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and elsewhere in the country.
Since the RSF took control of el-Fasher, which was the military’s last stronghold in Darfur, fighting has moved eastwards to the Kordofan region as the RSF and its allies seek to take control of Sudan’s central corridor.
The paramilitary has now set its sights on Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan State; Dilling, also in South Kordofan; and the North Kordofan State capital, el-Obeid. They lie on a north-south axis between the border with South Sudan and the national capital, Khartoum.
El-Obeid also lies on a key highway that connects Darfur to Khartoum, which the army recaptured in March.
The UN has repeatedly warned that the Kordofan region is in danger of witnessing a repeat of the atrocities that unfolded in el-Fasher.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he is prepared to abandon Ukraine’s pursuit of NATO membership in exchange for tighter Western security guarantees. His comments came as he has been holding talks with United States and European envoys aimed at ending Ukraine’s war with Russia.
US President Donald Trump, who has opposed NATO membership for Ukraine, has been pressuring Kyiv to sign a deal with Russia on terms that experts say favour Moscow.
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The move marks a big shift for Ukraine. Zelenskyy described the latest proposal as a concession by Kyiv, after years of pressing for NATO membership as the strongest deterrent against future Russian attacks.
So will Kyiv be able to get security guarantees from its Western allies? And what would be the parameter of the security deal?
In audio messages shared with journalists via a WhatsApp group ahead of the meeting, Zelenskyy said that Kyiv now expects alternative security guarantees comparable to those enjoyed by NATO alliance members.
“From the very beginning, Ukraine’s desire was to join NATO; these are real security guarantees. Some partners from the US and Europe did not support this direction,” Zelenskyy said.
“Bilateral security guarantees between Ukraine and the US, Article 5-like guarantees for us from the US, and security guarantees from European colleagues, as well as other countries – Canada, Japan – are an opportunity to prevent another Russian invasion,” he said.
“These security guarantees are an opportunity to prevent another wave of Russian aggression,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long said that Ukraine’s NATO aspirations are a threat to Russian security.
Zelenskyy said that Ukraine, the European Union and the US were reviewing a 28-point plan that could culminate in a ceasefire, though he reiterated that Kyiv was not holding direct talks with Russia.
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said “a lot of progress was made” as he and the US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with Zelenskyy in the German capital city of Berlin on Sunday.
The Ukrainian president also stressed that new security guarantees must be legally binding and endorsed by the US government. Looking ahead, he said he was expecting feedback following talks between Ukrainian and American officials in Germany.
For their part, however, many Ukrainians remain sceptical of this latest round of talks. Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera’s Audrey MacAlpine said that “it’s been months and months of false hope when it comes to diplomatic discussions. Many of them have historically fizzled out. So … the reality of peace still seems far away.”
On Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that “this [NATO] issue is one of the cornerstones and requires special discussion”, and that Moscow is now waiting for Washington “provide us with the concept that is being discussed in Berlin”.
The security guarantees now under discussion would fall short of NATO’s Article 5 – meaning an attack on one is an attack on all. Instead of joining NATO, Ukraine would receive bespoke guarantees from the US and key European powers – set out in bilateral or plurilateral treaties.
These guarantees would likely commit partners to swift and tangible support if Ukraine were attacked again, including military assistance, intelligence sharing, arms supplies, sanctions and financial aid.
Unlike in Article 5, however, the guarantees would not trigger automatic collective defence. Each guarantor’s obligations would be defined separately, potentially with conditions, and without NATO’s integrated command structures.
The final version of the deal, however, would only be known after Kyiv’s Western allies agree on it. It is still unclear how much progress has been made on the issue.
For months, Washington has tried to balance the competing demands of Russia and Ukraine. Trump has been pushing hard for a conclusion to the war, and is said to be growing increasingly frustrated with delays.
Efforts to find common ground have faced significant hurdles, including the future of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, much of which is under Russian occupation.
Putin has made it a central condition for peace that Ukraine withdraw its forces from the remaining areas of Donetsk under Kyiv’s control – a demand Ukraine has consistently rejected.
Zelenskyy said the US had proposed that Ukraine pull out of Donetsk and turn the area into a demilitarised free economic zone, an idea he dismissed as impractical. “I do not consider this fair, because who will manage this economic zone?” he said.
“If we are talking about some buffer zone along the line of contact … only a police mission should be there, and troops should withdraw, then the question is very simple. If Ukrainian troops withdraw 5-10 kilometres [3-6 miles], for example, then why do Russian troops not withdraw deeper into the occupied territories by the same distance?”
Calling the matter “very sensitive,” Zelenskyy said a freeze along the existing line of contact would be preferable, adding that “today a fair possible option is we stand where we stand”.
On the flip side, Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov told the business newspaper Kommersant that Russian police and national guard forces would remain in parts of Donetsk even if the region were designated a demilitarised zone under a future peace plan.
Ushakov cautioned that reaching a compromise could take considerable time, arguing that US proposals reflecting Russian demands had been “worsened” by revisions suggested by Ukraine and its European partners.
In remarks broadcast Sunday on Russian state television, Ushakov said that “the contribution of Ukrainians and Europeans to these documents is unlikely to be constructive”, warning that Moscow would have “very strong objections”.
He also said territorial issues were a major topic when Witkoff and Kushner met with Putin earlier this month. “The Americans know and understand our position,” Ushakov said.
On Sunday, Zelenskyy said he spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron shortly before meeting Trump’s envoys, thanking him on X for his support and noting, “We are coordinating closely and working together for the sake of our shared security.”
Macron responded, noting that “France is, and will remain, at Ukraine’s side to build a robust and lasting peace – one that can guarantee Ukraine’s security and sovereignty, and that of Europe, over the long term.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has led European support efforts alongside Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, said on Saturday that “the decades of the ‘Pax Americana’ are largely over for us in Europe and for us in Germany as well.”
However, he warned that Putin’s objective is “a fundamental change to the borders in Europe, the restoration of the old Soviet Union within its borders… If Ukraine falls, he won’t stop,” Merz said at a party conference in Munich on Saturday.
Putin has denied any intention to reestablish the Soviet Union, or to attack European allies.
However, for years, Putin has decried the expansion of NATO around Russia’s borders. On February 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Putin said in a televised address: “Any further expansion of the North Atlantic alliance’s infrastructure or the ongoing efforts to gain a military foothold of the Ukrainian territory are unacceptable for us.”
Over the weekend, Ukraine’s air force said that Russia had launched ballistic missiles and 138 attack drones overnight. Of those, 110 were intercepted or destroyed, though missile and drone strikes were recorded at six locations.
Zelenskyy said on Sunday that hundreds of thousands of families in the southern, eastern and northeastern regions of Ukraine remain without electricity, and that officials were working to restore power, heat and water after a large-scale attack the previous night.
He added that Russia had fired more than 1,500 strike drones, 900 guided aerial bombs and 46 missiles of various types at Ukraine over the past week. Russia’s Defence Ministry said its air defences shot down 235 Ukrainian drones late Saturday and early Sunday.
In the Krasnodar region, drones struck the town of Afipsky, which houses an oil refinery. Authorities said blasts shattered windows in residential buildings but reported no damage to the refinery.