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Iran executed at least 975 people last year in a “horrifying escalation” of its use of capital punishment, two human rights groups said on Thursday.Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and French group Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) said the figure was the highest since IHR began recording executions in Iran in 2008.The figure “reveals a horrifying escalation in the use of the death penalty by the Islamic republic in 2024,” they said in a joint report, accusing Iran of using the death penalty as a “central tool of political oppression”.”These executions are part of the Islamic republic’s war against its own people to maintain its grip on power,” IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said.”Five people were executed on average every single day in the last three months of the year as the threat of war between Iran and Israel escalated.”Last year’s figure represented a 17 percent increase on the 834 executions recorded in 2023, the report said.Of the 975 people executed, four people were hanged in public and 31 were women, also the highest figure for the past 17 years.- Executions over protests -Human rights groups, who say that Iran is the world’s most prolific executioner after China, accuse the authorities of using the death penalty to sow fear among the public, particularly after nationwide protests broke out in 2022.Capital punishment remains a key pillar of the sharia-based judicial system established after the 1979 revolution ousted the Western-backed shah. Crimes punishable by death include murder, rape and drugs offences but also more vaguely worded charges like “corruption on earth” and “rebellion” which activists say are used against dissidents.In recent years, executions have been carried out by hanging, mostly in prison yards but occasionally in public, though other methods remain on the statute books.Two of last year’s executions were in connection with the nationwide protests that erupted in September 2022 after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman arrested for an alleged breach of Iran’s mandatory dress code.Mohammad Ghobadlu, 23, was executed in January 2024 on charges of killing a police officer with a car during a protest in October 2022. Human rights groups have charged that his trial was deeply flawed, with judges ignoring evidence presented by the defence that he suffered from bipolar disorder. Gholamreza Rasaei, 34, was executed in secret in August on charges of killing a Revolutionary Guard during a 2022 protest. Activists said his confession had been obtained by torture.The rights groups said there was evidence Iran might have carried out more executions last year that they were unable to confirm for their report.They said there were reports of an additional 39 executions in 2024 that they had been unable to corroborate through second sources.Already this year, Iran has carried out at least 121 executions, according to IHR’s count.

From office lights switched off to out-of-service lifts, Indonesian civil servants are feeling the pinch after President Prabowo Subianto ordered sweeping budget cuts across government that he said will fund his big-ticket campaign pledges.Many government offices in the capital Jakarta are now turning their lights and air conditioners off immediately when the work day ends …

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A failing Australian metals plant will be transformed into a hub for making “green iron and steel”, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Thursday as the government stepped in with a billion-dollar rescue package. More than 1,000 workers faced losing their jobs after the Whyalla steelworks in South Australia was swamped by mounting debts. Albanese on Thursday pledged …

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Hamas is due to hand over the bodies of four hostages Thursday, including those of the Bibas family, who have become symbols of the hostage crisis that has gripped Israel since the Gaza war broke out.The transfer of the bodies is the first such handover of remains by Hamas since its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel triggered the war.The Palestinian militant group said the return of the bodies of Shiri Bibas, her two young boys —- Kfir and Ariel -— and a fourth captive, Oded Lifshitz, would take place in the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis.Footage of their abduction, filmed and broadcast by Hamas militants during their attack on Israel, showed the mother and her sons Ariel, then four, and Kfir, just nine months old, being seized from their home near the Gaza border. Yarden Bibas, the boys’ father and Shiri’s husband, was abducted separately on October 7, 2023 and was released from the Gaza Strip in a previous hostage-prisoner exchange on February 1.The repatriation of their bodies is part of the first phase of a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which took effect on January 19 after more than 15 months of fighting in the Gaza Strip.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Thursday would be “a very difficult day for the State of Israel -— a heartbreaking day, a day of grief”.Under the ceasefire’s first phase, 19 Israeli hostages have been released by militants so far in exchange for more than 1,100 Palestinian prisoners in a series of Red Cross-mediated swaps.Of the remaining 14 Gaza hostages eligible for release under phase one, Israel says eight are dead.The Bibas family members have become national symbols of the hostage ordeal, encapsulating the despair that has gripped the nation since the Hamas attack.While their deaths are largely accepted as fact abroad after Hamas said they were killed in an Israeli air strike early in the war, Israel has never confirmed the claim and many remain unconvinced — including the Bibas family.Late on Wednesday, the Israeli campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said it had been informed about the “heart-shattering” news of the deaths of the three Bibas family members.The Bibas family said it would wait for a confirmation from official channels.”Should we receive devastating news, it must come through the proper official channels after all identification procedures are completed,” it said in a statement late Wednesday.Israeli authorities have not officially named any of those to be returned, but Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday that it had received a list of the hostages whose bodies were to be handed over and that the families had been informed.The national forensic medicine institute in Tel Aviv has mobilised 10 doctors to expedite the identification process, public broadcaster Kan reported on Wednesday.- Single swap -Israel and Hamas announced a deal earlier this week for the return of the remains of eight hostages in two groups this week and next, as well as the release of six living Israeli captives on Saturday. The hostages forum named the six as Eliya Cohen, Tal Shoham, Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert, Hisham al-Sayed, and Avera Mengistu.The ceasefire in Gaza has held despite accusations of violations on both sides.Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Tuesday that talks would begin “this week” on the second phase, which is expected to lay out a more permanent end to the war.Senior Hamas official Taher al-Nunu told AFP on Wednesday that Hamas was ready to free all remaining hostages held in Gaza in a single swap during phase two. He did not clarify how many hostages were currently being held by Hamas or other militant groups.Hamas and its allies took 251 people hostage during the attack, of whom 70 remain in Gaza, including 35 the Israeli military says are dead.That attack resulted in the deaths of 1,211 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 48,297 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory that the United Nations considers reliable.

Egypt’s antiquities authority says it has found the ancient tomb of King Thutmose II, the first royal burial to be located since the famed discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.The tomb, discovered near the Valley of the Kings in Luxor in southern Egypt, belonged to King Thutmose II of the 18th dynasty, who lived nearly 3,500 years ago.Thutmose II was an ancestor to Tutankhamun himself, and his half-sister and queen consort was Pharaoh Hatshepsut.Her giant mortuary temple stands on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor a few kilometres (miles) from where the tomb of Thutmose II was found.Although preliminary studies suggest its contents were moved in ancient times — leaving the tomb without the iconic mummy or gilded splendour of the Tutankhamun find — the antiquities ministry on Tuesday called the discovery “one of the most significant archaeological breakthroughs in recent years”.It has been excavated by a joint Egyptian-British mission, led by the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the New Kingdom Research Foundation.The tomb’s entrance was first located in 2022 in the Luxor mountains west of the Valley of the Kings, but was believed at the time to lead to the tomb of a royal wife.But the team then found “fragments of alabaster jars inscribed with the name of Pharaoh Thutmose II, identified as the ‘deceased king’, alongside inscriptions bearing the name of his chief royal consort, Queen Hatshepsut”, confirming whose tomb it was, the ministry said.Shortly after the king’s burial, water flooded the burial chamber, damaging the interior and leaving fragments of plaster that bore parts of the Book of Amduat, an ancient mortuary text on the underworld.Some funerary furniture belonging to Thutmose II has also been recovered from the tomb in “the first-ever find” of its kind, according to the ministry.It quoted mission chief Dr Piers Litherland as saying the team will continue its work in the area, hoping to find the tomb’s original contents.There has been a surge of major archaeological discoveries in recent years, as Egypt seeks to boost its tourism industry as a key source of foreign currency revenue.Last year, Egypt hosted 15.7 million tourists and aims to attract 18 million visitors in 2025.The crown jewel of the government’s strategy is the long-delayed inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum at the foot of the pyramids in Giza, which Egypt has said will finally open this year.