DUBAI // The late Sheikh Rashid bin Mohammed has been remembered as a “noble knight” who raised the flag of the UAE, as tributes continued to flow after his death on Saturday. Condolences were offered on Sunday at Zabeel Palace to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, for the death of his eldest son after a heart attack at the age of 33. […]
SANA, Yemen — A Saudi-led military coalition bombarded government buildings and residential neighborhoods in Sana, the Yemeni capital, overnight on Saturday, killing more than two dozen people, officials and witnesses said, and destroying homes in Sana’s Old City, a Unesco World Heritage site. The Saudi coalition, which includes nine other Arab nations and is supported by the United States, began fighting Yemen’s Houthi rebels in March, two […]
LONDON — Russia’s military buildup in Syria now includes surface-to-air missiles as well as combat aircraft with air-to-air capability, deployments that raise “serious questions” about Moscow’s role in the region, Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday. Russian officials have said that the purpose of the buildup at a base near Latakia, Syria, is to combat the Islamic State. But the deployment of air defense systems and […]
A magnifying glass is held in front of a computer screen in this picture illustration taken in Berlin May 21, 2013. Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. The U.S. Defense Department is building a massive, electronic system to provide an overview of the vulnerabilities of the military’s computer networks, weapons systems, and installations, and help officials prioritize how to fix them, the deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command […]
Middle East By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI and ERIC SCHMITT September 17, 2015 The government of Iran released five senior members of Al Qaeda earlier this year, including the man who stepped in to serve as the terrorist group’s interim leader immediately after Osama bin Laden’s death, and who is the subject of a $5 million bounty, according to an American official who had been briefed on the matter. Iran’s release of the […]
News Analysis President Obama in Washington on Wednesday. White House aides said Mr. Obama had always been skeptical about training Syrian rebels. By PETER BAKER September 17, 2015 WASHINGTON — By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually […]
Russian Hackers Targeting U.S. Government, F-Secure Says State-sponsored cyberattacks have been tied directly to a hacking group that gathers intelligence for Russia’s Kremlin. F-Secure Labs has just published a white paper that outlines seven years of attacks against governments in the United States, Asia and Europe. A malicious group called the Dukes uses a family of malware toolsets to steal information by infiltrating computer networks and sending […]
Middle East Maricela Rangel Davalos, one of the Mexican tourists wounded on Sunday in an Egyptian Army airstrike in the Western Desert, left a Cairo hospital for the airport on Thursday. By JARED MALSIN September 17, 2015 CAIRO — Egypt’s chief prosecutor issued a ban on news media coverage in the case of an attack by security forces that killed 12 people, including eight Mexican tourists and their Egyptian […]
A recently discovered vulnerability in Android Lollipop allows an attacker to bypass the password lockscreen on a mobile device and gain full access. The flaw was discovered by a security researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, who said he has already alerted Google about his findings. The exploit requires an attacker to have physical access to the device but it will only work if the […]
WASHINGTON — Only four or five Syrian individuals trained by the United States military to confront the Islamic State remain in the fight, the head of the United States Central Command told a Senate panel on Wednesday, a bleak acknowledgment that the Defense Department’s $500 million program to raise an army of Syrian fighters has gone nowhere. Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the top American commander in […]
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that Moscow had proposed talks between the United States and Russian militaries on the situation in Syria and the buildup of Russian forces there. Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, made the proposal, which Mr. Kerry indicated the administration was considering, in a phone conversation with him on Tuesday. Mr. Kerry said Mr. Lavrov proposed a “military-to-military” […]
September 15, 2015 Open Source By ROBERT MACKEY Two French illustrators have been denounced on social networks in recent days for publishing editorial cartoons inspired by harrowing photographs of Aylan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian boy whose drowning in the waters off Greece this month prompted an outpouring of sympathy for migrants. Most of the outrage has been directed at Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French newspaper that was […]
Middle East By ELISABETH MALKIN and RICK GLADSTONE September 15, 2015 Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that eight Mexicans had been killed in the Egyptian military’s mistaken assault on a tourist convoy in the desert over the weekend. The news quadrupled the number of Mexican tourists known to have been killed in the assault on Sunday in western Egypt’s storied White Desert area. At least 12 people were killed in all, […]
The Cisco Systems logo is seen as part of a display at the Microsoft Ignite technology conference in Chicago, Illinois, May 4, 2015. Reuters/Jim Young/Files FRANKFURT Security researchers say they have uncovered clandestine attacks across three continents on the routers that direct traffic around the Internet, potentially allowing suspected cyberspies to harvest vast amounts of data while going undetected. In the attacks, a highly sophisticated form of […]
ABU DHABI // The capital of the UAE is a symbol of the future, the co-founder of a project to circumnavigate the world in a solar-powered aircraft told an audience on Monday. “Abu Dhabi is an oil producer that is diversifying to clean energy technologies and I think it is the perfect symbol,” said Bertrand Piccard, who was in the capital after being named the first Middle […]
CAIRO — The mistaken airstrike by the Egyptian military that killed a dozen people on a Mexican tourist trip in the Western Desert hit at a picnic in the middle of the day, witnesses said Monday, raising new questions about both the extent of the error and the official explanations. The convoy of four sport utility vehicles was about three hours southwest of Cairo on a typical […]
RAMALLAH, West Bank — A Jewish man died early Monday morning after attackers pelted the road he was driving on with rocks as he was returning home from a dinner celebrating Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, the Israeli authorities said. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called an emergency meeting to discuss rock-throwing, mostly by Palestinian youths. The man was identified in local news reports as Alexander Levlovich, […]
GENEVA — The United Nations human rights chief called on Monday for an independent inquiry into violations in Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition and by the Houthi rebels the coalition is fighting. More than 2,000 civilians have been killed and 4,000 wounded in the Yemen conflict, and the United Nations official, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva that the fighting had left 21 […]
HAJJA, Yemen — The airstrike slammed into Al-Sham water-bottling plant at the end of the night shift, killing 13 workers who were minutes away from heading home. Standing among the strewn bottles, smoldering boxes and pulverized machines a few days after the airstrike here, the owner, Ibrahim al-Razoom, searched in vain for any possible reason that warplanes from a Saudi-led military coalition would have attacked the place. […]
ABU DHABI // The last of the Emirati soldiers who sacrificed their lives defending the people of Yemen arrived home on Saturday, bringing the total number killed to 52. The servicemen died alongside Saudi Arabian and Bahraini troops when a missile fired by Iran-backed Houthi rebels hit an arms depot in Marib province nine days ago. Their bodies were received in a ceremony at Al Bateen Airport, […]
Middle East News Analysis By PETER BAKER and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS September 11, 2015 WASHINGTON — Having beaten back a congressional campaign to derail his nuclear agreement with Iran, President Obama now faces a panoply of challenges that may be just as daunting: making the deal actually work while repairing relations with disaffected allies and constraining Tehran’s regional ambitions. He got started Friday even as the House was still voting by announcing […]
Middle East By C. J. CHIVERS and ERIC SCHMITT September 11, 2015 The United States has confirmed the presence of traces of sulfur mustard, a chemical warfare agent, on fragments of ordnance recently used by the Islamic State in attacks in Syria and Iraq, according to two American officials familiar with the results of laboratory analysis of the samples. The laboratory tests, which were also performed on scraps of clothing from victims, […]
President Obama at a meeting to discuss the Iran nuclear accord at the White House on Thursday. By JENNIFER STEINHAUER September 10, 2015 WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats delivered a major victory to President Obama on Thursday when they blocked a Republican resolution to reject a six-nation nuclear accord with Iran, ensuring that the landmark deal will take effect without a veto showdown between Congress and the White House. A […]
Video The Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton backed the Iran deal in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Wednesday. By DAVID E. SANGER and AMY CHOZICK September 9, 2015 WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday embraced the Iran nuclear deal that she paved the way for as secretary of state, but said it would work only “as part of a larger strategy toward Iran” that contained the […]
