ROME — In solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin prison, Cecilia Sala sleeps on her cell’s bare floor, her family said. In a phone call to family on New Year's Day, the detained Italian journalist, 29, told them that with her eyeglasses confiscated by prison authorities, she cannot see the guards who bring her her meals. “Free me soon,” she said. 

 Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with Sala’s mother, Elisabetta Vernoni, at Palazzo Chigi, and spoke on the telephone with the podcaster’s father. Palazzo Chigi stressed its commitment to Sala’s “immediate release” in a statement and official sources said Meloni, under heavy fire from the opposition Democratic Party for dragging her feet over obtaining Sala's freedom, wants to persuade Iran to allow the journalist to be placed under house arrest inside the Italian Embassy in Tehran. 

 Unctuous Iranian ambassador to Italy Mohammad Reza Sabouri claimed that Tehran had provided Sala with “all the benefits necessary.” 

 Iran awaits Italy’s “expediting the release of” Mohammad Abedini-Najabafad, the Iranian-Swiss drone engineer arrested in Milan on American orders on Dec. 16, said the ambassador. The dodgy engineer's lawyers have asked that he be moved from prison to house arrest but a Russian suspect recently escaped from house arrest in Italy with the complicity of a Kremlin-hired band of Balkan thugs.

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