#Singapore’s top envoy Vivian Balakrishnan urged North Korea to engage constructively with the region and keep channels for dialogue open, during a rare visit to the isolated state

Biden sues to stop U.S. #Justice Department from releasing interview recordings

#Iranians are back online after a monthslong shutdown but still face heavy restrictions.

Authorities justified the outage as a military imperative after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. Their decision to lift some restrictions this week came as negotiators appeared to be closing in on a more permanent truce. But many Iranians feared access could be cut off again at a moment’s notice.

Internet tracking company Netblocks said Iran’s connectivity, which measures the ability of devices to connect to the internet, is at around 86 per cent of capacity from before the cutoff. Internet analysis firm Kentik said internet traffic, which measures the amount of data transferred and is a good illustration of usage, was at around 40 per cent.

Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity analyst, said there were still widespread disruptions. “It’s too early to say the shutdown is over,” he wrote on X.
An unprecedented shutdown

Iran’s roughly 90 million people have been cut off from the internet for most of 2026, one of the world’s longest and strictest national shutdowns. Young people with online careers saw their incomes evaporate. Job losses and the closure of online businesses added to the war’s steep economic costs.

The cutoff made it difficult for Iranian families to communicate through months of unrest and war. At some points, phone lines were also cut off, though they were later restored.

A woman living in Tehran said that for months she was barely able to speak to her sons living abroad. She couldn’t believe authorities had restored access, saying she had assumed they would find some justification to prolong the outage.

A taxi driver said service was restored but weak. He expressed hope it would improve so he could use messaging apps with family and friends. Both spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Prices spiked during the shutdown, with residents in Tehran at times paying around $7.50 per gigabyte. Prices are back down to around $2.25 for 30 gigabytes, roughly where they were before the protests.

Even then, Iran tightly controlled access to popular social media sites, leading many to rely on virtual private networks, or VPNs. The cost of those workarounds soared during the shutdown, making them unaffordable for many as the economy was battered.
A slow return to service

Businesses have started reappearing online, announcing their return with posts on sites like Instagram and Telegram.

A gamer and tech influencer in the central city of Isfahan said the shutdown had caused him to lose a lot of his audience on YouTube and Instagram, where he had spent years building up a large following.

“All my views and interactions are way down. I’ve been erased from the algorithm,” he said in a voice note sent by WhatsApp, adding that his internet connection was still slower than before the shutdown.

“The situation is such that many content producers have had their income reduced to zero, have moved on to other jobs, or have been forced to sell their equipment to survive,” he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Iran claimed the shutdown was a wartime necessity

Iranian authorities first shut down the internet in January during mass anti-government protests that were eventually stamped out in a violent crackdown. Thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands detained.

That cutoff was just starting to ease when the government imposed a complete internet blackout after the start of the war, when U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader and other top officials.

The government faced criticism for the prolonged shutdown, which caused even more harm to an economy devastated by inflation, strikes on key industries and a U.S. blockade on Iranian ports.

The internet cutoff cost an estimated $30-40 million daily, with indirect losses likely twice that much, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Afshin Kolahi, told a local newspaper last month. About 10 million people have jobs that depend on internet connectivity, according to Communications Minister Sattar Hashemi.

Iranians still had access to a national net, but that has a far narrower reach, and users complained of poor service and heavy censorship. Senior government officials are given SIM cards granting them access to the global internet. Under pressure, the government expanded access to the SIM cards to some professions during the shutdown.

Amir-hussein Radjy, The Associated Press

U.S. President Donald Trump increased the refugee admissions ceiling by 10,000 for this year to allow more white South Africans to come into the country, a signed presidential determination reviewed by Reuters showed.

Wander Franco criminally responsible for abuse, judge finds, but spared punishment in Dominican case

U.S. military strikes Iranian #boats, #missile launch sites: #CENTCOM

#US and #Israeli jets struck a number of Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, local media reported, hours after President Donald Trump had suggested negotiations with #Tehran over an interim deal were progressing.

#Cave diving is fraught with danger, but the reward is sights like nothing else on Earth. The light fades as divers disappear farther into a cave system, until the greenish hue from their flashlight is all that’s visible, bouncing off walls, picking out creatures humans might never have seen before, and illuminating a world otherwise confined to total darkness.

These caverns can extend for hundreds of miles, dangerous, otherworldly mazes unlike anywhere else on Earth.

Any cave diver is well aware of the dangers involved in exploring these alien zones. In a 2024 documentary, “Diving Into the Darkness,” veteran Canadian cave diver Jill Heinerth recalls swimming “through the graves of my friends all the time. That list is well over a hundred people.”

The dangers of this highly specialized discipline were underscored once again this month when five Italian divers died while exploring the Vaavu Atoll caves in the Maldives on May 14, and Maldivian military diver Sgt. Mohamed Mahudhee also died attempting to recover their bodies.

Diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti’s body was found at the mouth of the cave, and the other four divers — Monica Montefalcone, an associate professor of ecology at the University of Genoa; her daughter, Giorgia Sommacal; Federico Gualtieri, a marine biologist; and Muriel Oddenino, a researcher — were all found in the deepest part of the cave system.

But even though they are acutely aware of the dangers, something constantly draws back cave divers who dedicate, and sometimes sacrifice, their lives to exploring these strange underwater worlds.

Navigating only with flashlights and a guideline — the thin thread that allows divers to find their way back to the cave entrance — they glimpse another side to life on Earth.

Cave divers often describe their chosen habitat as space-like, a whole other world filled with stalagmites, stalactites and alien-like creatures. Diving in these underwater cave systems is like “swimming through the veins of Mother Earth,” said Heinerth, who has completed more than 8,000 dives.

“Astronauts have that overview effect where they talk about looking back on the great blue planet, and they can never look at Earth the same way again,” she told CNN on Tuesday. “I guess I’m having a similar effect from being inside the planet … I’m literally within the sustenance of the planet that’s supplying the water for humanity, wildlife and even all of the industries we require for our modern life.”
‘All the things that could go wrong’

So many things can go wrong during a cave dive. Equipment can fail; guidelines can break; visibility can become nigh on impossible. And, if things go wrong, you cannot just ascend to the surface as in other types of scuba diving. You are reliant on your own wits, and your dive buddy.

While exploring these systems, cave divers will routinely squeeze through incredibly tight spaces. Sometimes, “my shoulders are scraping the ceiling and my belly is on the floor, and I can see less than a metre in high flow as the sand and silt is blasting me in the face,” Heinerth said.

So, before any dive, before she does anything else, Heinerth will “rehearse all of those things that could go wrong, all of the things that could kill me in this environment.”

“Like, what if this hose suddenly breaks and I’m losing gas, can I reach this valve in the gear that I’m wearing today?” she says.

“But it’s also a deep self-assessment. Am I ready to do such a dive? And the last two questions I ask myself are, ‘Am I ready for self-rescue today with the gear that I have in the environment that I’m in?’ and ‘Am I willing and able to conduct a buddy rescue in the same situation?’”

At the same time, she added, cave divers are normally incredibly well-trained and prepared for any scenario.

“The last step I take is I leave the emotions on the surface … You really have to stay in a pragmatic brain ready to deal with any situation that can occur,” she said.

It isn’t yet known why the five Italian divers never surfaced from their dive in the Maldives, though an investigation is underway to establish what happened — and how they all reached such depths.

The group had permission to dive deeper than the 30 metres (98 feet) to which recreational dives in the Maldives are normally restricted, local authorities said.

But it still isn’t clear whether they went deeper than planned, or if they had the appropriate equipment for such a technical, risky dive.

Caves like these are a rarity in the Maldives, Vladimir Tochilov, a technical diving instructor who has explored this system before, told CNN. It’s only 200 metres (656 feet) long and consists of several halls, but its depth “requires serious, serious training.”
Underwater treasure troves

#Underwater cave systems are treasure troves of information, providing an important source of data for #biologists, #physicists, #paleontologists and #historians.

“These caves are like museums of natural history, providing information on the Earth’s past climate, on animals that live their entire life in the darkness, and also on ancient #civilizations that have viewed these places as portals to another world,” Heinerth said.

Some cave systems host endemic species, meaning that they are found in no other place on the planet. By documenting such species, cave divers have helped inform our understanding of the planet’s evolutionary history.

Heinerth has visited some caves that no other human has ever explored, and probably never will again. As an underwater photographer, “bringing back images from these places that makes people’s jaws drop is very fulfilling because it gives me a chance to share the adventure,” she said.

Always, however, she is wary of the dangers. “My choices about risks will not just affect me, but it’ll be my family, my community,” she said. “So we need to learn from accidents, communicate honestly about what went wrong and how we can prevent them in the future.”

#Moscow will appeal to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the violation of Russians' rights in the Baltic states, as Russia's attempts to resolve the issue through negotiations have been unsuccessful, the Russian Foreign Ministry told the Izvestia newspaper.

"We have repeatedly called on Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to hold themselves accountable internationally for these ongoing violations. However, the authorities of these countries refuse to cease their unlawful policies, and all attempts to resolve the differences through negotiations have proven fruitless. Therefore, we will obviously have to take our claims to court by appealing to the UN's principal judicial body," the ministry stated.

The ministry clarified that it is working to draw the UN's attention to the repression of public figures and human rights defenders of the Russian-speaking population in the Baltic states.

"Under the trumped-up pretext of combating 'Russian propaganda,' the purge of any 'dissent' from the Latvian information space continues," the Russian Foreign Ministry noted.

#Global #markets and major trading partners can expect updates on Indonesia’s new commodity export policy within weeks as the government works on the legal and structural rollout of its new centralized export agency