Interviewing the Taliban: 'Still now I am terrified'

Afghanistan has gone through a lot of transformation in the last 20 years and is a different country to the one the Taliban left in 2001, the author of The Kite Runner has said. Khaled Hosseini told BBC World News that his one sliver of hope was that the Taliban would realise the country had…

Belarus’s authoritarian leader says it is “absolutely possible” his forces helped migrants cross into Poland, but denies they were invited. Alexander Lukashenko has been accused by the EU of orchestrating the border crisis with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia in recent months in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Belarus for its brutal crackdown on opponents who…

An elk who spent two years wandering around Colorado with a tyre around its neck has had a weight lifted off its shoulders by wildlife officials. Officers resorted to tranquillising the bull elk and removing its antlers, after they were unable to cut through the steel lining of the tyre. Scott Murdoch of Colorado Parks…

Yemen is approaching six years of conflict, described by aid agency Unicef as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis”. The World Health Organization’s representative to Yemen, Dr Adham Rashad Abdel-Moneim, told BBC World News as well as trying to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, the country was also trying to tackle other communicable and non-communicable diseases….

Victims of ransomware gangs are being urged to report it rather than pay the criminals behind the attacks. The gangs use malicious software to scramble and steal an organisation’s computer data and demand money to restore it. Megan Stifel, executive director of the Global Cyber Alliance, which seeks to reduce cyber risk, told BBC World…

BBC Click’s Marc Cieslak looks at the best tech news stories of the week including: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and the European Union announce a $1bn (820m euro, £710m) partnership to accelerate clean technology A drone films itself crashing into Iceland’s erupting Fagradalsfjall volcano A robot which can mimic the expressions of people around it…