AP
 — 

Belarus has freed Sergey Tikhanovsky, a key dissident figure and the husband of exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, following a rare visit by a senior US official, Tikhanovskaya’s team announced on Saturday.

Tikhanovsky, a popular blogger and activist who was jailed in 2020, arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, alongside 13 other political prisoners, his wife’s team said. The release came just hours after Belarusian authorities announced that authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko met with US President Donald Trump’s envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, in Minsk.

A video published on his wife’s official Telegram account showed Tikhanovsky disembarking a white minibus, with a shaved head and broad smile. He pulled Tikhanovskaya into a long embrace as their supporters applauded.

“My husband is free. It’s difficult to describe the joy in my heart,” Tikhanovskaya told reporters. But she added her team’s work is “not finished” while over 1,100 political prisoners remain behind bars in Belarus.

Tikhanovsky was jailed after announcing plans to challenge Lukashenko in the 2020 election. Following his arrest, his wife ran in his stead, rallying large crowds across the country. Official results of the election handed Lukashenko his sixth term in office but were denounced by the opposition and the West as a sham.

As unprecedented protests broke out in the aftermath of the vote, Tikhanovskaya left the country under pressure from the authorities. Her husband was later sentenced to 19 1/2 years in prison on charges of organizing mass riots.

Other prominent dissidents remain in Belarusian jails, among them Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski, a human rights advocate serving a 10-year prison sentence on charges widely denounced as politically motivated. Also behind bars is Viktor Babaryka, a former banker who was widely seen in 2020 as Lukashenko’s main electoral rival, and Maria Kolesnikova, a charismatic leader of that year’s mass protests.

Released alongside Tikhanovsky was longtime Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent Ihar Karnei, the US government-funded broadcaster confirmed. Karnei, who had also worked with prominent Belarusian and Russian newspapers, had been serving a three-year service on extremism charges he rejected as a sham.

RFE/RL’s Belarusian service had been designated extremist in the country, a common label handed to anyone who criticizes Lukashenko’s government. As a result, working for it or spreading its content has become a criminal offense.

“We are deeply grateful to President Trump for securing the release of this brave journalist, who suffered at the hands of the Belarusian authorities,” the broadcaster’s CEO Stephen Capus said Saturday in a press release.

Karnei was detained several times while covering the 2020 protests. Unlike many of his colleagues, he chose to stay in Belarus despite the ensuing repression. He was arrested again in July 2023, as police raided his apartment seizing phones and computers.

Belarus also freed an Estonian national who had set up an NGO to raise funds for Belarusian refugees. According to the Estonian Foreign Ministry, Allan Roio was detained last January, and sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison on charges of establishing an extremist organization.

London
CNN
 — 

By 8 p.m., three London tour groups are jostling for room in Mitre Square, where murder victim Catherine Eddowes was found with her face mutilated and kidney removed. “I once saw two guides get into a fistfight over space here,” claims Charlotte Everitt, a guide with London-based Rebel Tours.

Tourists often arrive in London with a checklist: Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge, afternoon tea — and a Jack the Ripper tour. Every night, hundreds of tourists retrace the supposed steps of Jack the Ripper — an unidentified serial killer who brutally murdered at least five women in 1888, yet went on to become one of Britain’s most lucrative cultural exports.

But for some locals, the industry has gone too far. The opening of the Jack the Ripper Museum in 2015 prompted protests. In 2020, Britain’s official mapping body, the Ordnance Survey, axed its tour of London entitled Guts and Garters in the Ripper’s East End following a client request citing “editorial standards.” A mural of the serial killer was painted over with the name Catherine Eddowes — one of his victims — in the same year.

Tourism centered around murder isn’t unique to this corner of London. A recent Netflix show about the Menendez brothers — who were convicted of their parents’ 1989 murders — brought crowds to the family’s Beverly Hills mansion. The site of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana has recently opened to tour groups. In Milwaukee, a “Cream City Cannibal Tour” takes visitors to sites associated with serial killer — and fellow Netflix documentary subject — Jeffrey Dahmer.

“Our dead can give us warnings from history, as it were, but it’s how we remember them, and that’s where the difficulty lies — it’s quite often a politics of remembrance of who we remember and why,” Philip Stone from the Dark Tourism Institute at the UK’s University of Central Lancashire told CNN. “And quite clearly, Jack the Ripper has been remembered because of his atrocities and his infamy, but he’s also been very much romanticized.”

According to Stone, there’s a “push and pull factor” when it comes to the popularity of Jack the Ripper. “The modern Ripper industry certainly markets itself really, really well. But I think there’s an inherent fascination with the story.”

“Time is the greatest healer. But it’s also time that can reinvent the story. There’s a theory of ‘chronological distance,’ the idea of chronologically becoming more and more distant, and being kind of subsumed into popular culture.”

“Jack the Ripper has kind of morphed into this fictional character. He’s been romanticized, it’s been morphed into public culture, and that kind of extends the boundaries or blurs the boundaries between what’s real and what’s not real.”

The tours are undoubtedly popular, and references to the infamous killings around London’s Whitechapel district have become fixtures of the local landscape. A barbershop trades under the name Jack the Clipper. A nearby takeaway shop is called Jack the Chipper. Designer fashion retailer AllSaints has named its flagship store in the area Jack’s Place. Until recently, there was a baked potato vendor called Jacket the Ripper.

“The issue isn’t discussing the Whitechapel murders,” Everitt said. “The issue is how they’re discussed.” Rebel Tours launched an alternative walking tour in 2022 — Jack the Ripper: What About the Women? Initially, the team considered leaving the murderer’s name out of the title entirely but found that doing so made it significantly harder to attract interest.

“People hear about what we’re doing and say, ‘Oh, that’s amazing,’” Everitt said. “But we’re not seeing the numbers. And I’m not saying we want those numbers — we’re a small-group company, and we like that. But it’s telling how many people still choose the other kind of guide.”

For her, the use of graphic imagery, as well as the insistence that all victims were sex workers despite concrete evidence to the contrary, are among the most troubling aspects.

“Some guides show photos of Mary Jane Kelly’s body,” she said. “If you wouldn’t show the body of a modern-day victim, why is it okay to show hers? She was just as real.”

Local writer The Gentle Author has written more than 5,000 blog posts about the history of the East End on their blog Spitalfields Life — but none on the Whitechapel murders. “The people who live here are really incensed by the tours. On any given evening, you can have hundreds of people marching through these streets. It’s off-the-scale offensive.”

They recall neighbors who moved away shortly after having a child. “They said they couldn’t raise a baby in a home where, every night, a man would stand outside the window and say, ‘This is where someone was cut from lip to navel.’ It’s grim.”

“They project real images of the crime scenes onto walls. There are jokes in these tours about real women being killed. You walk past and people are laughing.”

Four years ago, The Gentle Author began offering their own tours — focused on the East End’s working-class history, immigrant communities, and recent gentrification. Their aim, they say, is to “reclaim the streets for the community.” Still, reaching a broader audience remains difficult. “Most of our customers are readers of the blog. The Ripper tours have monopolized the market.”

“I’ve seen a guide chase guests around a church with a giant butcher’s knife. Another one played the “Psycho” theme at every murder location,” Jessica O’Neil, founder of The Museum Guide and former Jack the Ripper tour guide, told CNN. As a guide, she was against showing crime scene images. “People say it’s educational. If you’re studying forensics in a university setting, maybe. But this isn’t education. It’s presented as entertainment.”

She quit doing Ripper tours five years ago after being publicly confronted. “A sex worker came up to me in the middle of a tour, screaming, ‘Why don’t you care about me and my friends? What’s wrong with you?’” she recalled. “I went back later to try and find her. I don’t know why — maybe to be absolved. I wanted to tell her I was different. But I wasn’t.

“They’re not all awful, some of them do try to talk about the women. I tried to bring compassion. But it’s a ghoulish endeavor,” she said. “And I like ghoulish things. But on those tours, in almost every case, the women are the butt of the joke.”

In 2015, the Jack the Ripper Museum opened, adding to the area’s commercial references to the case — and igniting controversy. The museum had been granted planning permission on the basis that it would showcase the history of women in the East End, with the application describing a space that would honor “the historic, current and future contribution of the women of the East End.”

“Everyone was quite excited that a museum telling the history of the women of London’s East End would be opened. And then we discovered it would actually be a Jack the Ripper museum with some thinly veiled attempts at telling the story of the East End. That’s when there was a backlash,” Catherine Owen, Chair of the East End Women’s Museum — which was founded to counter the Jack the Ripper Museum — told CNN.

The museum’s founder, Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, told local media in 2015 that the museum’s full title is Jack the Ripper and the History of Women in East London, that the sign was incomplete, and that: “We are not glorifying the murders or celebrating the murders; we are doing a forensic examination of the murders and setting that in the historical context of the period.”

A decade later, the museum continues to operate under the name Jack the Ripper Museum; the gift shop’s merchandise includes teddy bears dressed as the Ripper and T-shirts with the killer’s silhouette. The Jack the Ripper Museum did not respond to CNN’s request for an interview but highlighted its positive reviews on TripAdvisor.

CNN
 — 

It looks like Lima is going to be welcoming a lot of fine-dining fans in the coming months.

Two restaurants in the Peruvian capital landed in the top 10 on the 2025 list of the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants,” including the coveted number one spot.

The awards — considered the Oscars of innovative fine dining — were handed out at a ceremony in Turin, Italy on Thursday night, with Lima’s Maido walking away with the top prize.

Ranked number five on last year’s list, it’s owned and run by chef Mitsuharu “Micha” Tsumura.

Maido serves what’s known as Nikkei cuisine, “blending meticulous Japanese techniques with vibrant Peruvian ingredients to create a dining experience that is both culturally rich and innovatively modern” according to the 50 Best organization.

“This is going to be 16 years of Maido,” said Tsumura while accepting the award.

“I think gastronomy — food and hospitality — can do amazing things. They can make dreams come true.”

Coming in second was Asador Etxebarri in Atxondo, Spain, while Mexico City’s Quintonil snagged third place, followed by Diverxo in Madrid (No.4) and Copenhagen’s Alchemist rounding out the top five.

Moving to Asia, Bangkok emerged as the big winner of the night, with six restaurants making the top 50 list, including Gaggan at number six.

At number seven was Tokyo’s Sézanne, followed by Table by Bruno Verjus in Paris at number eight. Ninth place went to Kjolle in Lima, with fellow South American restaurant Don Julio in Buenos Aires holding onto the tenth spot — exactly where it landed last year.

The only US restaurant to make the top 50 list was New York’s Atomix, at number 12, which also walked away with the award for “Outstanding Hospitality” at the recent James Beard Awards.

Meanwhile, the Thai capital also saw the highest new entry in the top 50 — Bangkok restaurant Potong snagged the 13th spot this year in its inaugural appearance on the list.

Opened in 2021 in the city’s Chinatown area by chef Pichaya “Pam” Soontornyanakij, it’s set in a five-story historic building that, from 1910, housed the family’s Chinese herbal medicine business. Potong’s innovative tasting menu, featuring Thai-Chinese cuisine, has earned it fast fans and a Michelin star.

London restaurant Ikoyi secured the highest climber award by moving up 27 spots from the 2024 list to land at number 15 this year. Serving what 50 Best refers to as “category free cuisine” it scooped the the One To Watch prize in 2021.

Ikoyi has since moved to London’s The Strand, where diners can enjoy its signature dish —smoked jollof rice — from a menu inspired by sub-Saharan West Africa.

The annual list is compiled based on the votes of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants Academy, which is made up of more than 1,100 international restaurant industry experts including food writers and chefs, in 28 regions around the world.

Restaurants can only win the top prize once, after which they’re entered into a separate “Best of the Best” program.

Members of that elite group include Geranium and Noma in Copenhagen, as well as New York’s Eleven Madison Park, The Fat Duck near London, Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, Mirazur in Menton, France and Central of Lima. Last year’s “50 Best Restaurants” winner, Barcelona’s Disfrutar, is also now on that list.

1. Maido (Lima, Peru)

2. Asador Etxebarri (Atxondo, Spain)

3. Quintonil (Mexico City, Mexico)

4. Diverxo (Madrid, Spain)

5. Alchemist (Copenhagen, Denmark)

6. Gaggan (Bangkok, Thailand)

7. Sézanne (Tokyo, Japan)

8. Table by Bruno Verjus (Paris, France)

9. Kjolle (Lima, Peru)

10. Don Julio (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

11. Wing (Hong Kong)

12. Atomix (New York City)

13. Potong (Bangkok)

14. Plénitude (Paris, France)

15. Ikoyi (London, England)

16. Lido 84 (Gardone Riviera, Italy)

17. Sorn (Bangkok, Thailand)

18. Reale (Castel di Sangro, Italy)

19. The Chairman (Hong Kong)

20. Atelier Moessmer Norbert Niederkofler (Brunico, Italy)

21. Narisawa (Tokyo, Japan)

22. Suhring (Bangkok, Thailand)

23. Boragó (Santiago, Chile)

24. Elkano (Getaria, Spain)

25. Odette (Singapore)

26. Mérito (Lima, Peru)

27. Trèsind Studio (Dubai, UAE)

28. Lasai (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

29. Mingles (Seoul, South Korea)

30. Le Du (Bangkok, Thailand)

31. Le Calandre (Rubano, Italy)

32. Piazza Duomo (Alba, Italy)

33. Steirereck (Vienna, Austria)

34. Enigma (Barcelona, Spain)

35. Nusara (Bangkok, Thailand)

36. Florilège (Tokyo, Japan)

37. Orfali Bros (Dubai, UAE)

38. Frantzén (Stockholm, Sweden)

39. Mayta (Lima, Peru)

40. Septime (Paris, France)

41. Kadeau (Copenhagen, Denmark)

42. Belcanto (Lisbon, Portugal)

43. Uliassi (Senigallia, Italy)

44. La Cime (Osaka, Japan)

45. Arpege (Paris, France)

46. Rosetta (Mexico City, Mexico)

47. Vyn (Skillinge, Sweden)

48. Celele (Cartagena, Colombia)

49. Kol (London, England)

50. Restaurant Jan (Munich, Germany)