By THOMAS ADAMSON, Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — The robbery was over in minutes, the fallout long: Nearly a decade after robbers stormed Kim Kardashian’s luxury residence and tied her up at gunpoint, a Paris court will decide the verdict Friday in one of the most audacious celebrity heists in modern French history.

Nine men and a woman stand accused of carrying out or aiding the crime during the 2016 Fashion Week, when masked men dressed as police entered Kardashian’s Paris residence, bound her with zip-ties and vanished with $6 million in jewels.

Kim Kardashian, left, accompanied by her mother Kris Jenner leaves the justice palace after testifying, regarding a robbery of millions of dollars in jewels from her Paris hotel room in 2016, in Paris, Tuesday, May 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)

After delivering final statements in court, the defendants were dismissed Friday morning, with a verdict expected later in the day.

At the heart of the trial is 70-year-old Aomar Aït Khedache, the alleged ringleader and a veteran of Paris’ criminal underworld. Prosecutors have asked for a 10-year sentence. His DNA, found on the zip-ties used to bind Kardashian, cracked open the case. Wiretaps captured him giving orders, recruiting accomplices, and arranging to sell the diamonds in Belgium. The loot was never found.

Khedache claims he was only a foot soldier. He blamed a mysterious “X” or “Ben” — someone prosecutors say never existed. Khedache asked for “a thousand pardons,” communicated via a written note, according to French media. Other defendants also used their final words to express remorse.

The accused became known in France as “les papys braqueurs” — the grandpa robbers. Some arrived in court in orthopedic shoes and one leaned on a cane. Some read the proceedings from a screen, hard of hearing and nearly mute. But prosecutors warned observers not to be seduced by soft appearances.

The trial is being heard by a panel of three judges and six jurors, who will need a majority vote to reach a decision.

The defendants face charges including armed robbery, kidnapping and gang association. If convicted, some of them could face life in prison.

Kardashian’s testimony earlier this month was the emotional high point. In a packed courtroom, she recounted how she was thrown onto a bed, zip-tied, and had a gun pressed to her on the night of Oct. 2, 2016.

“I absolutely did think I was going to die,” she said. “I have babies. I have to make it home. They can take everything. I just have to make it home.”

She was dragged into a marble bathroom and told to stay silent. When the robbers fled, she freed herself by scraping the tape on her wrists off against the sink, then hid with her friend, shaking and barefoot.

She said Paris had once been her sanctuary — a city she would wander at 3 a.m., window shopping, stopping for hot chocolate. That illusion was shattered.

The robbery echoed far beyond the City of Light. It forced a recalibration of celebrity behavior in the digital age. For years, Kardashian had curated her life like a showroom: geo-tagged, diamond-lit, public by design. But this was the moment the showroom turned into a crime scene. In her words, “People were watching… They knew where I was.”

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Afterward, she stopped posting her location in real time. She stripped her social media feed of lavish gifts and vanished from Paris for years. Other stars followed suit. Privacy became luxury.

Defense attorneys have asked the court for leniency, citing the defendants’ age and health. But prosecutors insist that criminal experience, not frailty, defined the gang.

Even for France’s painstakingly thorough legal system, observers commented about how long it took for the case to be tried.

Kardashian, who once said “this experience really changed everything,” hopes the verdict will offer a measure of closure.

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Rescue efforts are underway in South Africa to bring 260 workers trapped in a gold mine for a day back to the surface, the Sibanye Stillwater mining company said on Friday.

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According to the company, an initial investigation showed that a sub-shaft rock winder skip door opened at the loading point and caused some damage to the mineshaft at the Kloof mine, west of Johannesburg.

“Following a detailed risk assessment, it was decided that employees should remain at the sub-shaft station until it is safe to proceed to the surface, in order to avoid walking long distances at this time,” the company said in a statement.

The National Union of Mineworkers, which represents workers at the Kloof mine, said the miners have been trapped for almost 24 hours, with the company repeatedly changing the estimated time for them to return to the surface.

“We are very concerned because the mine did not even make this incident public until we reported it to the media,” said NUM spokesman Livhuwani Mammburu.

The company said all miners were accounted for and safe, adding that it expected to hoist them back to the surface on Friday.

As wildfires spread in northeastern Minnesota earlier this month, updates from fire officials on the largest two — Jenkins Creek and Camp House fires — often included a line noting the fire was burning through “a landscape heavily impacted by the spruce budworm.”

A large outbreak of the eastern spruce budworm — a caterpillar native to the region that feeds off balsam fir and white spruce trees — is defoliating the trees and stressing or killing them, which can then help fuel wildfires.

Last year, the budworm affected some 712,000 acres, or 1,100 square miles, of Minnesota forests, almost all in the state’s Arrowhead region, the largest area since 1961, according to Eric Otto, a forest health specialist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in northeastern Minnesota. If you look at the last four years, it’s affected almost twice that area, according to the DNR’s most recent

“Spruce budworm, currently, is probably one of our biggest forest health issues, especially in regards to the amount of acres it damages each year,” Otto said.

In its caterpillar form, the spruce budworm eats away at the needles of white spruce and balsam fir. (Despite its name, it prefers — and does the most damage to — balsam fir.) Then, as a moth, it lays its eggs on the needles of those trees.

An outbreak in a specific area can last six to 10 years, which is about as long as the trees can withstand the budworm’s feeding, according to the DNR.

Otto said that when that food source is gone, the budworms move to an adjacent area, causing an outbreak there. After a 30- to 60-year cycle, they’re back at that first area.

That’s about as long as it takes the balsam fir in the understory to mature, replacing the trees that died in the last outbreak, and for the budworm population to take over again, said Anna Stockstad, an extension educator focused on forest ecosystem health with the University of Minnesota Extension.

Otto said the region last saw an outbreak in the 1990s.

Too much balsam fir

Budworm or not, balsam fir is good at spreading fire thanks to its flammable needles, low branches and resinous bark, Otto said.

Those properties act as a ladder fuel, spreading flames from the forest floor to the canopy, where trees otherwise resistant to low-intensity fires can catch fire.

“Even if we didn’t have this spruce budworm outbreak, with the way the forest is composed, we would probably still have these fires,” Otto said, noting the fires were likely human-caused, during exceptionally dry and windy conditions.

But, Otto said, the budworm outbreak probably altered the fire behavior, as dead balsam fir are particularly dry in the spring, some five to eight years after dying from budworm. It isn’t until 10 years or so after the balsam firs die that they start to decompose, increasing their moisture content.

There’s now an overabundance of balsam fir, the budworm’s preferred meal, thanks in part to fire suppression during the 20th and 21st centuries, Stockstad said.

Without regular, low-intensity fires clearing a mature forest’s underbrush, where shade-tolerant balsam firs thrive, the tree species can build up.

“So this means we have a lot of dense mature balsam fir on the landscape, which is just like candy for spruce budworm,” Stockstad said. “And so when we have more of the food source for spruce budworm, we’re going to see higher population in spruce budworm itself.”

As the region’s paper mills have shrunk or closed, so too has the market for balsam fir in northeastern Minnesota.

The closure of Duluth’s Verso paper mill in 2020 left UPM Blandin in Grand Rapids as the last mill buying fir in the region, but it’s too far from the budworm outbreak, Otto said.

While some loggers can bring balsam chips to Minnesota Power’s Hibbard Renewable Energy Center in Duluth, which burns wood waste to produce electricity, Chris Dunham, the Nature Conservancy’s associate director of resilience forestry in northeastern Minnesota, said that “doesn’t match the demand in any way, shape or form.”

Still, Stockstad said landowners should consider removing dead balsam, which could be chipped, piled to make wildlife habitats, or, under the right conditions, burned.

Then, landowners can start to consider planting other species of trees.

Striving for a diverse forest

Foresters don’t want to eliminate balsam fir — or even budworms — altogether. Instead, they want more of a variation of tree species, particularly those that can survive low-intensity fires and withstand a warming climate.

Dunham and the Nature Conservancy, which partners with government agencies and private landowners, are in the midst of planting 2.5 million trees in northern Minnesota this year. Species include red oak, bur oak, white cedar, yellow birch, tamarack, black spruce and white pine.

“Diversity is the superpower of the forest,” Dunham said. “That’s what enables us to hedge our bets against what is likely coming down the pike. We want to be diverse so that if there’s something that affects another species, we’re not just putting all our eggs in one basket.”

But planting millions of trees is just the first step.

Dunham said crews then must monitor and maintain planting sites for seven to 10 years to make sure they survive, by pruning for blister rust, clearing brush and guarding against deer.

White pine and white cedar are “absolutely beloved by deer,” Stockstad said, making it hard to establish those species without fencing and other protection. Meanwhile, balsam fir is not a preferred browse species for deer, allowing the tree species to flourish.

“We can’t just cut it and walk away,” Dunham said. “It’s going to take some intervention and investment.”

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By JON GAMBRELL and GIADA ZAMPANO, Associated Press

ROME (AP) — Iran and the United States prepared for a fifth round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program Friday in Rome, with enrichment emerging as the key issue.

U.S. officials up to President Donald Trump insist Iran cannot continue to enrich uranium at all in any deal that could see sanctions lifted on Tehran’s struggling economy. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi early Friday insisted online that no enrichment would mean “we do NOT have a deal.”

“Figuring out the path to a deal is not rocket science,” Araghchi wrote on the social platform X. “Time to decide.”

The U.S. will be again represented in the talks by Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and Michael Anton, the State Department’s policy planning director. Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi is mediating the negotiations as the sultanate on the Arabian Peninsula has been a trusted interlocutor by both Tehran and Washington in the talks.

A car carrying Araghchi arrived at the Omani Embassy in Rome’s Camilluccia neighborhood around 12:30 p.m. Witkoff had yet to be seen, but the embassy previously served as the site of another round of talks.

Enrichment remains key in negotiations

The talks seek to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of some of the crushing economic sanctions the U.S. has imposed on the Islamic Republic, closing in on half a century of enmity.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to unleash airstrikes targeting Iran’s program if a deal isn’t reached. Iranian officials increasingly warn they could pursue a nuclear weapon with their stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels.

FILE – This combo of pictures show President Donald Trump, left, addressing a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, March 4, 2025, and a handout of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attending a ceremony in Tehran, Iran, March 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis – Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP)

“Iran almost certainly is not producing nuclear weapons, but Iran has undertaken activities in recent years that better position it to produce them, if it chooses to do so,” a new report from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said. “These actions reduce the time required to produce sufficient weapons-grade uranium for a first nuclear device to probably less than one week.”

However, it likely still would take Iran months to make a working bomb, experts say.

Enrichment remains the key point of contention. Witkoff at one point suggested Iran could enrich uranium at 3.67%, then later began saying all Iranian enrichment must stop. That position on the American side has hardened over time.

Asked about the negotiations, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said “we believe that we are going to succeed” in the talks and on Washington’s push for no enrichment.

“The Iranians are at that table, so they also understand what our position is, and they continue to go,” Bruce said Thursday.

One idea floated so far that might allow Iran to stop enrichment in the Islamic Republic but maintain a supply of uranium could be a consortium in the Mideast backed by regional countries and the U.S. There also are multiple countries and the International Atomic Energy Agency offering low-enriched uranium that can be used for peaceful purposes by countries.

However, Iran’s Foreign Ministry has maintained enrichment must continue within the country’s borders and a similar fuel-swap proposal failed to gain traction in negotiations in 2010.

Meanwhile, Israel has threatened to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities on their own if it feels threatened, further complicating tensions in the Mideast already spiked by the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

Araghchi warned Thursday that Iran would take “special measures” to defend its nuclear facilities if Israel continues to threaten them, while also warning the U.S. it would view it as being complicit in any Israeli attack. Authorities allowed a group of Iranian students to form a human chain Thursday at its underground enrichment site at Fordo, an area with incredibly tight security built into a mountain to defend against possible airstrikes.

Talks come as US pressure on Iran increases

Yet despite the tough talk from Iran, the Islamic Republic needs a deal. Its internal politics are inflamed over the mandatory hijab, or headscarf, with women still ignoring the law on the streets of Tehran. Rumors also persist over the government potentially increasing the cost of subsidized gasoline in the country, which has sparked nationwide protests in the past.

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Iran’s rial currency plunged to over 1 million to a U.S. dollar in April. The currency has improved with the talks, however, something Tehran hopes will continue as a further collapse in the rial could spark further economic unrest.

Meanwhile, its self-described “Axis of Resistance” sits in tatters after Iran’s regional allies in the region have faced repeated attacks by Israel during its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The collapse of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government during a rebel advance in December also stripped Iran of a key ally.

The Trump administration also has continued to levy new sanctions on Iran, including this week, which saw the U.S. specifically target any sale of sodium perchlorate to the Islamic Republic. Iran reportedly received that chemical in shipments from China at its Shahid Rajaei port near Bandar Abbas. A major, unexplained explosion there killed dozens and wounded over 1,000 others in April during one round of the talks.

Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writer Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.