In a complex deal brokered by the U.S. government, Russia has freed reporter Evan Gershkovich and 15 other political prisoners in exchange for the release of eight of its nationals in the West — including Vadim Krasikov, a killer especially valued by Russian President Vladimir Putin who was serving time for murder in Germany.

This agreement was, as President Joe Biden said, a striking diplomatic feat and a testament to effective cooperation among the U.S. and its allies. Unfortunately, if the U.S. and its friends take no further steps, it will do nothing to deter, and might very well encourage, future hostage-taking.

The regimes ruling Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela all use opaque and corrupt legal systems to advance their interests, and they’ve found “hostage diplomacy” especially useful. It works because it weaponizes the value that Western democracies place on the safety of their citizens.

Gershkovich’s prosecution was also a direct attack on the principle of press freedom. He was arrested and charged with espionage while reporting on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a war that has spurred a vicious crackdown on dissent.

In Putin’s Russia, journalism is a crime. The regime has banned dozens of media outlets, including the Moscow Times, a highly regarded English-language newspaper that the Kremlin called an “undesirable organization.” Most foreign media have pulled staff out of Russia; those remaining are at risk of harassment and arrest.

Western governments have no good options when it comes to winning the freedom of nationals seized by hostile states. It would be inhuman not to work for their release and naive to think that refusing to negotiate would act as a credible deterrent. (Invariably, governments that promise not to deal eventually do.)

Still, rewarding hostage-takers puts other potential victims at greater risk — not to mention lets ruthless assassins walk free. In recent years, the U.S. has improved its institutional tools for negotiating and winning the release of its people, led by the State Department’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. The successes should be celebrated, without losing sight of the fact that many others have been wrongly imprisoned or forgetting the dangers posed by rewarding evil.

What more can be done? Governments need to be more forthright in warning citizens about travel to offending countries. They should publicize arbitrary or wrongful detentions. Most important, the U.S. and its friends need to cooperate in punishing the perpetrators, including mid-level and local officials. Sanctions, travel bans, asset freezes and other measures should be deployed more widely — and, to repeat, in concert.

The United Nations’ 1979 convention against hostage-taking was written for a different era and is too weak on the question of penalties. It needs to be recast. Such conventions may seem toothless, but note that Russia and other autocracies take the trouble to cloak their hostage-taking with a facsimile of judicial process. That hypocrisy should be more thoroughly exposed and shamed. The goal should be to increase the costs and risks of such conduct through every available forum.

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By GERALD IMRAY Associated Press

It’s 15 years ago this month that a teenage runner from South Africa was publicly scrutinized over her sex at a major sports event. The lesson everyone was meant to take from that was: never again.

Yet, the humiliation Caster Semenya faced has been repeated for two women competing in boxing at the Paris Olympics, exposing more female athletes to hurtful remarks and online abuse in a contentious divide over sex, gender and identity in sports.

While Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan could be basking in the pride of winning fights for their countries, they are instead having their sex questioned in front of the world after the Olympics-banned boxing federation claimed they failed sex verification tests last year but has given little information about them.

Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting preapres to fight Turkey’s Esra Yildiz in their women’s 57 kg semifinal boxing match at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Olympic officials have called the arbitrary testing “so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it” and stressed that both boxers were assigned female at birth, identify as women and are eligible to compete in women’s competitions. The two have still been bombarded with hateful remarks, sometimes from prominent people outside of the sports world.

“This has effects, massive effects,” Khelif said in Arabic in a recent interview with SNTV, a sports partner of The Associated Press. “It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit and mind. It can divide people.”

Their stories bear many resemblances to that of Semenya, the runner whose arrival in elite track and field at the 2009 world championships forced the sports world to confront an issue that is highly complex and also still largely characterized by the same misconceptions as back then.

Semenya was just 18 when she was thrust into the spotlight 15 years ago. She was subjected to sex verification tests and became the focus of unsavory rumors over the details of her body.

She went on to become a two-time Olympic champion in the 800-meter race but is likely better known as the woman whose medical condition has meant she is effectively banned from competing in female track competitions unless she medically reduces her testosterone levels.

The noise around Khelif and Lin has mostly been ill-informed outcry, with many repeating false claims — which have been amplified by Russian disinformation networks — that the two are men or transgender. Semenya experienced the same vitriol. Her reaction to the degrading treatment of Khelif and Lin has been to ask how sports authorities couldn’t stop this from happening again.

“Sport is for all people and the constitution says no to discrimination. But the minute they allowed women to be disgraced, it confuses us,” Semenya said in an interview this week with the website SportsBoom.com. She called for leadership that “safeguards, protects and respects women.”

FILE – South Africa’s Caster Semenya celebrates after winning the woman’s 800m final at Carrara Stadium during the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, Australia, Friday, April 13, 2018. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false claims that they are male or transgender.

Semenya was born with one of a number of conditions known as differences of sex development, or DSDs. She was assigned female at birth and has always identified as a woman. Her condition gives her an XY chromosome pattern and elevated levels of testosterone.

Some sports, including track, say that gives her and other women like her an unfair advantage and have crafted eligibility rules that exclude her on that basis. Semenya has challenged the rules, and the correlation between testosterone and athletic advantage isn’t conclusive.

Another female athlete, Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, also has waged a legal battle against the testosterone regulations and several other runners have been affected and sidelined over the last decade in track and field, the sport that has been most affected by the issue.

FILE – India’s Dutee Chand crosses the finish line in her women’s 100m semifinal during the athletics competition at the 18th Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue, File)

Male athletes are not required to regulate their natural levels of testosterone.

More masculine-presenting female athletes have long been bullied and questioned about their sex. That effect is magnified for those whose sexes are questioned at a highly watched international event.

In one of the most personal details of her struggle, Semenya said she was so angry, hurt and confused by her treatment at the 2009 championships that she told athletics officials she would show them her vagina as proof she was a woman. It took her more than a decade to tell that story publicly when she revealed it in an interview with HBO in 2022.

With it, Semenya offered something about how she felt her gender and her identity for her entire life was being overridden by others. She has called references to her being biologically male “deeply hurtful.”

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Christine Mboma, a young runner from Namibia, also has a DSD condition. She won a silver medal at the last Olympics in Tokyo when she was also 18, the first woman from her southern African country ever to win an Olympic medal.

But she returned home to more skepticism than praise after her condition became public. The recent “Tested” podcast by public broadcasters NPR in the U.S. and CBC in Canada featured Mboma, outlining how people in Namibia started asking whether she was really a woman.

“It’s a public humiliation,” Mboma’s coach, Henk Botha, said on the podcast. “We need to understand, this is the life of somebody.”

Like Semenya and Mboma, both Khelif and Lin will return home with medals of achievement but possibly burdened by what kind of reaction and misconceptions might follow them. Khelif is 25 years old. Lin is 28.

The incredibly difficult debate over whether women with certain medical conditions have an unfair athletic advantage is relevant for sports. But Semenya said the way Khelif and Lin have been treated is “about principles of life.”

Charles Gorrivan | (TNS) Bloomberg News

A hacking group linked to the Iranian government tried to breach the email accounts of presidential campaign staffers as part of a wider effort to gather intelligence ahead of the U.S. election, Microsoft Corp. said Friday.

Attackers connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in June used a compromised email address from a former political adviser to try phishing another high-ranking presidential campaign official, according to findings from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. That group, which Microsoft calls Mint Sandstorm, also unsuccessfully attempted to log in to the account of a former presidential candidate. The report didn’t identify the individual targets by name.

Other Iranian groups are using artificial intelligence technology to publish content online insulting former president Donald Trump and create inflammatory posts about controversial issues such as gender reassignment surgery, according to the report.

Microsoft researchers also said that Iranian groups that have historically tried to undermine trust in the electoral system have since March been preparing to launch influence operations. Using websites with fabricated and plagiarized content, supposed media operations launched by Iranian groups also have sought to amplify polarizing political messaging about topics such as presidential candidates and Israel’s war against Hamas, researchers found.

“Iran’s cyber capabilities are defensive and proportionate to the threats it faces,” Ali Karimi Magham, a spokesperson for Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York, said in an emailed statement. “Iran has neither the intention nor plans to launch cyber attacks. The U.S. presidential election is an internal matter in which Iran does not interfere.”

The findings are the latest evidence that foreign governments are conducting clandestine operations ahead of U.S. elections in November. American intelligence officials in July warned that Russia, China and Iran were recruiting people in the U.S. to spread propaganda. A representative from the Iranian government denied that allegation.

Iranian operatives in 2020 impersonated members of the right-wing Proud Boys group as part of a voter intimidation effort, according to the FBI, resulting in charges against two men. That same year, Iranian hackers breached a website that a municipal government in the U.S. used to publish election results, though the attackers were caught before carrying out any nefarious activity, U.S. cybersecurity officials said.

Nation-state hackers have long used email attacks to try infiltrating American political campaigns, such as the Russian hack in 2016 in which a state-sponsored group ultimately published internal emails from Hillary Clinton’s staffers.

The U.S. State Department on Wednesday identified six alleged Iranian hackers accused of compromising industrial control systems used by American public utilities.

(Updated to include response from an Iranian government representative in fifth paragraph.)

___

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

SAINT-DENIS, France (AP) — Noah Lyles said he tested positive for COVID two days before he finished third in the 200-meter final at the Paris Olympics on Thursday night.

Here’s what we know about the timeline of Lyles’ illness:

When did Lyles know he had COVID?

Lyles says he quickly got into quarantine after he had tested positive Tuesday morning. He participated in the 200-meter semifinal on Wednesday, where he finished second. Lyles’ coach afterward said the sprinter was “fine.”

Lyles, who usually always takes an opportunity to talk, did not speak to reporters after the semifinal.

The 100-meter champion said he was feeling better as the 200 final approached. He estimated he was about 90-95 percent when the starting gun went off.

“I still wanted to run,” he said after Thursday night’s race. “They said it was possible.”

What happened in his 200-meter race?

Lyles was trailing 200-meter champion Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo as they headed into the homestretch, which is usually where the American puts on a trademark closing finish that has always been the best part of his race. Before this week, he hadn’t lost a 200 since his third-place finish in Tokyo three years ago.

This time, Lyles could not close. Only a desperate push to the line then a collapse onto the purple track.

“To be honest, I knew if I wanted to come out here and win, I had to give everything I had from the get-go,” he said. “I didn’t have any time to save energy. So that was kind of the strategy for today.”

After crossing the line third for the second straight Olympics, Lyles fell to his back and writhed on the ground trying to catch his breath. He got to one knee and stayed there for nearly 30 seconds before getting up, asking for water and getting to the wheelchair.

Why was he allowed to run?

The U.S. track federation released a statement saying it and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee adhered to all Olympic and Centers for Disease Control guidelines.

“After a thorough medical evaluation, Noah chose to compete tonight,” the statement said. “We respect his decision and will continue to monitor his condition closely.”

Three years ago, at the Tokyo Olympics, a positive COVID test would have put an athlete in immediate isolation, forcing them to a special hotel with no contact with other Olympic participants. Even in 2022 at the Winter Games in China, daily tests and strict isolation measures were automatic. COVID rules have been changed in much of society, including sports, school and work. The USATF says they followed current policies.

France, which once had tight COVID restrictions, no longer has rules for people with the virus, just recommendations to those who test positive to self-isolate.

The World Health Organization said Tuesday that 40 athletes at the Olympics had tested positive for the virus amid growing cases worldwide.

What races does Lyles have left?

Lyles was expected to run the anchor leg of the 4×100 on Friday in what many thought would be a quest for a third gold medal in Paris. After the 200, he said he would talk to his relay teammates and come to a decision.

“I want to be very honest and transparent, and I’m going to let them make the decision,” Lyles said, describing himself as being at around 90 or 95%.

But early Friday morning in Paris, Lyles posted on Instagram: “I believe this will be the end of my 2024 Olympics,” indicating that he wouldn’t be on the relay team.