Top Stories — Sunday, April 12, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- U.S. Moves to Deport Son of Prominent Figure in Iranian Revolution — nyt News
- Killing of Masood Masjoody Exposes Deep Rifts in Canada’s Iranian Diaspora — nyt News
- Sam Altman responds to ‘incendiary’ New Yorker article after attack on his home — TechCrunch
U.S. Moves to Deport Son of Prominent Figure in Iranian Revolution
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/11/2026, 11:26:20 PM
The Trump administration arrested and said it would deport the son of an Iranian woman who gained fame as a spokeswoman for the Iranian militants who stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979.
Federal agents arrested Seyed Eissa Hashemi, his wife Maryam Tahmasebi and their son, who was not identified by name, after the United States this week revoked their permanent resident status, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Saturday. The three are now in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement pending deportation.
A State Department statement on the matter did not accuse the three arrested of any specific unlawful or harmful acts but stated that the Trump administration “will never allow America to become a home for foreign nationals tied to anti-American terrorist regimes.”
Mr. Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, who served as the English-language spokeswoman for the Islamist embassy captors during the 444-day hostage crisis. Mr. Hashemi had been the subject of recent reports in conservative media outlets that portrayed him as living comfortably in Los Angeles while working as a psychology professor.
The State Department branded Ms. Ebtekar a “propagandist” who made false claims that the American hostages were treated well. Its statement noted that U.S. media reports sometimes referred to her as “Screaming Mary,” though she was more often known simply as “Mary,” her nom de guerre.
Ms. Ebtekar evolved into an Iranian reformist politician holding senior government positions advocating for the environment and the rights of women, and served as Iran’s vice president from 2013 to 2021. She has sought to move beyond her revolutionary past: In a 1998 interview with The New York Times, she asked a reporter not to focus on her role during the hostage crisis.
Mr. Hashemi entered the United States with his family in 2014 on an F-1 student visa, according to Department of Homeland Security. They were granted green cards and permanent resident status in 2016. The department said that status is revoked when the United States has “reason to believe a green card holder poses a threat to the U.S.”
The planned deportations follow similar U.S. actions against the niece of the slain Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassim Suleimani and her daughter. The commander was killed in a 2020 U.S. airstrike authorized by President Trump.
Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Killing of Masood Masjoody Exposes Deep Rifts in Canada’s Iranian Diaspora
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/11/2026, 11:04:27 PM
Masood Masjoody’s warnings over the years seemed unsettling, even sometimes outlandish: He was not safe in Vancouver. His university was protecting agents of Iran’s regime. His fellow Iranian activists wanted him dead.
After he was fired from a job teaching math at a university in British Columbia, Mr. Masjoody, 45, became preoccupied with Iranian pro-monarchy activists. He alleged they were plotting his demise because he had begun to oppose the group’s advocacy around restoring a shah, or “king” in Farsi, in their homeland.
Then, in February, Mr. Masjoody vanished. A few weeks later, on March 9, the police discovered his body.
The authorities have charged two people who are Iranian anti-regime activists with first-degree murder in Mr. Masjoody’s killing. Both had been sued by Mr. Masjoody, who claimed they had threatened his life after a clash over political beliefs.
Lawyers for the defendants, Mehdi Ahmadzadeh Razavi, 48, and Arezou Soltani, 45, declined requests for comment.
Investigators have not said how Mr. Masjoody was killed or provided a motive.
But that has not stopped chatter within the Iranian diaspora in Vancouver and beyond about whether his death was a consequence of his activism.
“He was right,” Nik Kowsar, a cartoonist who fled Iran in 2003 for Canada, said of Mr. Masjoody. Mr. Kowsar, now a water security analyst in Washington, D.C., said he had met with Mr. Masjoody two years ago in Vancouver to discuss online threats made against them after falling out with the pro-monarchy movement.
The killing has put a spotlight on years of divisions within the Iranian diaspora that have escalated since the 1979 revolution that toppled Iran’s shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and ushered in the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
“There is little trust among many activists,” Mr. Kowsar said. “That’s why we haven’t had a united front in the last 47 years.”
The war in Iran and the possibility, however remote, that it could threaten the regime’s survival has intensified debate among the diaspora about their homeland’s fate.
On one side are those who support re-establishing a monarchy, led by Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed shah, who from exile in the United States has long promoted himself as the country’s future leader.
On another side are Iranians who support democracy and remember the shah’s rule for its authoritarianism, suppression of political dissent and corruption. Many contend that activists who defend the shah have targeted them with online harassment campaigns.
Mr. Masjoody documented those suspicions on social media and in lawsuits. So regularly did Mr. Masjoody make legal claims that, last year, a judge declared him a vexatious litigant, limiting new filings.
Still, he was in the middle of suing Mr. Pahlavi and local activists, accusing them of defamation and harassment. Mr. Pahlavi, in an affidavit responding to the suit, denied knowing Mr. Masjoody.
Mr. Pahlavi did not respond to requests for comment.
Some activists have blamed online harassment and misinformation for stoking disaccord that has left many Iranian-Canadians fearful of expressing their political views.
In the “Little Tehran” neighborhood of North Vancouver, dozens of businesses display Iran’s pre-revolution lion and sun flag, a symbol today of nostalgia for the secular, more tolerant society under the shah.
Masoud Nejati has the flags hanging outside his hair salon and a portrait of the exiled Mr. Pahlavi in the window.
Mr. Nejati, who said he knew Mr. Masjoody for a decade, brushed off the idea that the Iranian community is divided. But he and others severed ties with Mr. Masjoody when the activist began making accusations that monarchists were threatening his life.
Monarchy is the only ruling system that can unify Iranians of all political stripes, Mr. Nejati said. “It’s like a father that loves all the children,” he said.
While Mr. Nejati views the paternalism of the pro-monarchy movement as benevolent, others find it menacing.
Saba Ghassemi, a saleswoman at an interior design firm, said she was ejected from a recent rally in Vancouver against the Iran war for refusing to chant pro-monarchy slogans or Mr. Pahlavi’s name.
Ms. Ghassemi said she preferred a different slogan — “Women! Life! Freedom!” — popularized during anti-government marches after the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died in police custody in Tehran after being accused of violating laws on wearing a hijab.
“I personally feel very lonely among the diaspora,” Ms. Ghassemi said from her home on a recent Friday as she prepared to ring in the Persian New Year, Nowruz, marking the start of spring. She was reluctant to celebrate this year because of the war.
On social media, arguments between Pahlavi supporters and pro-democracy activists have spiraled into insults and attacks, said Shirin Khayambashi, a sociology professor specializing in Iranian diaspora communities at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“We are a community that is grieving,” said Dr. Khayambashi, pointing to the death toll from protests in January brutally put down by the Iranian regime and, now, the war.
The relationship between Mr. Masjoody and the two people accused in his killing, Ms. Soltani and Mr. Razavi, began in rapport and focused on campaigning against the Islamic regime, according to accounts in court documents filed by Mr. Masjoody and other parties in his lawsuit.
They collected information about agents of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the regime’s ideological security force, who Ms. Soltani believed were employed at Canadian universities, according to the court documents.
She and Mr. Masjoody, who had a doctorate in mathematics, were friendly enough that she supported him when he went on a hunger strike after he was dismissed by his employer, Simon Fraser University, for professional misconduct and claims he was harassing a female colleague.
Mr. Razavi, a stone worker, began to distance himself from Mr. Masjoody in February 2023 over their conflicting political beliefs, according to the court documents.
About two months before he disappeared, Mr. Masjoody wrote in an affidavit that he believed Ms. Soltani and Mr. Razavi had “sought a substance with which to murder me.”
Iranian activists on opposite sides of the monarchy debate clashed outside a courthouse after a bail hearing last month for Ms. Soltani and Mr. Razavi, and were dispersed by sheriffs. The defendants remain in custody.
Other recent violent acts have shaken Canada’s Iranian community. In Toronto, police are investigating shots fired at a boxing gym affiliated with the pro-monarchy movement. Canada’s intelligence agency has also warned of Iranian cyber threats and espionage against Canadian citizens.
Three months before he disappeared, Mr. Masjoody said in an interview on a Farsi YouTube channel that online harassment is an oppressive tactic.
“These actions,” he said, “are used as a strategy to silence pro-democracy voices.”
Farnaz Fassihi and Parin Behrooz contributed reporting from New York.
Vjosa Isai is a reporter for The Times based in Toronto, where she covers news from across Canada.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Sam Altman responds to ‘incendiary’ New Yorker article after attack on his home
Source: TechCrunch • Published: 4/11/2026, 10:48:22 PM
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a blog post on Friday evening responding to both an apparent attack on his home and an in-depth New Yorker profile raising questions about his trustworthiness.
Early Friday morning, someone allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home. No one was hurt in the incident, and a suspect was later arrested at OpenAI headquarters, where he was threatening to burn down the building, according to the SF Police Department.
While the police have not identified the suspect publicly, Altman noted that the incident came a few days after “an incendiary article” was published about him. He said someone had suggested that the article’s publication “at a time of great anxiety about AI” could make things “more dangerous” for him.
“I brushed it aside,” Altman said. “Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.”
The article in question was a lengthy investigative piece written by Ronan Farrow (who won a Pulitzer for reporting that revealed many of the sexual abuse allegations around Harvey Weinstein) and Andrew Marantz (who’s written extensively about technology and politics).
Farrow and Marantz said that during interviews with more than 100 people who have knowledge of Altman’s business conduct, most described Altman as someone with “a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart.”
Echoing other journalists who have profiled Altman, Farrow and Marantz suggested that many sources raised questions about his trustworthiness, with one anonymous board member saying he combines “a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction” with “a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”
Among the mistakes, he said, is a tendency towards “being conflict-averse,” which he said has “caused great pain for me and OpenAI.”
“I am not proud of handling myself badly in a conflict with our previous board that led to a huge mess for the company,” Altman said, presumably referring to his removal and rapid reinstatement as OpenAI CEO back in 2023. “I have made many other mistakes throughout the insane trajectory of OpenAI; I am a flawed person in the center of an exceptionally complex situation, trying to get a little better each year, always working for the mission.”
He added, “I am sorry to people I’ve hurt and wish I had learned more faster.”
Altman also acknowledged that there seems to be “so much Shakespearean drama between the companies in our field,” which he attributed to a “‘ring of power’ dynamic” that “makes people do crazy things.”
Of course, the correct way to deal with the ring of power is to destroy it, so Altman added, “I don’t mean that [artificial general intelligence] is the ring itself, but instead the totalizing philosophy of ‘being the one to control AGI.’” His proposed solution is “to orient towards sharing the technology with people broadly, and for no one to have the ring.”
Altman concluded by saying that he welcomes “good-faith criticism and debate,” while reiterating his belief that “technological progress can make the future unbelievably good, for your family and mine.”
“While we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally,” he said.
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Read the full story at TechCrunch.
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