BEIRUT Ahrar al-Sham, a powerful Syrian rebel group, on Friday said the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State was behind a deadly mosque attack near Syria’s Aleppo that a war monitor said killed dozens of people on Thursday evening. Jets hit around a mosque in al-Jina village near Atarib in the western part of Aleppo province, a few miles (km) from Idlib province on Thursday, killing at least […]
By John Davison | MOSUL, Iraq MOSUL, Iraq After five months of intense fighting, Iraqi forces have begun to drive back Islamic State into the dense and narrow-alleyed Old City of Mosul, with the mosque where its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate in 2014 firmly in sight. Iraqi leaders say the battle to recapture Mosul is reaching its final stages, trumpeting each gain made against […]
Messaging apps WhatsApp and Telegram had a severe security flaw that allowed hackers to hijack users’ account with just one image, security researchers reveal. Check Point Security researchers just disclosed a serious vulnerability that allowed hackers to hijack hundreds of millions of WhatsApp and Telegram accounts simply by sending a malware-laden image. The hack targeted the method in which both Telegram and WhatsApp process images and multimedia files. […]
A Saudi soldier was killed by gunmen late on Tuesday in the Eastern city of Qatif, in an incident the interior ministry said was carried out by “terrorist elements”. The security patrol came under fire upon approaching a suspicious vehicle, the statement carried by state news agency SPA, adding that the gunmen fled the area. Eastern Province is home to much of Saudi Arabia’s oil production as […]
The publisher of “Pill City” told Poynter on Wednesday it stands by the book, a Baltimore true-crime story whose bona fides have been questioned by the Baltimore Police Department and other agencies. “St. Martin’s Press supports Kevin Deutsch and his book,” Rebecca Lang, publicity manager for St. Martin’s Press, told Poynter in a statement. The backing from St. Martin’s Press comes in the wake of an investigation […]
BEIRUT Two suicide bomb attacks killed at least 31 people and wounded dozens more in Damascus on Wednesday, state media reported, in the second such spate of bombings in the Syrian capital in five days. The first suicide bomber targeted the Palace of Justice, the main courthouse in central Damascus near the Old City. Justice Minister Najem al-Ahmad told reporters the initial death toll was 31, mostly […]
A grand jury in California has charged four people — including two Russian intelligence officers — in a pair of computer hacks against Yahoo that victimised hundreds of millions of consumers, the US Justice Department said on Wednesday. The men penetrated Yahoo’s email accounts, often using “spear phishing” emails, and used information they obtained to access other accounts at Yahoo and Google. Among those targeted were Russian […]
War is eternal, the urge to create conflict a deep-seated human impulse – that’s the depressing, sledgehammer take-home from An Iliad, a modern one-man retelling of Homer’s epic poem currently running at The Arts Centre at NYU Abu Dhabi. At the evening’s emotional climax, our narrator spouts a list of dozens of conflicts, from ancient times right up to Aleppo. What slaps the psyche hardest is not […]
AMSTERDAM Two publicly-funded websites used by Dutch voters to help them decide which party to vote for in their national election were inaccessible on Wednesday, apparently victims of a cyber attack. The sites, “Stemwijzer” and “Kiescompas”, are extremely popular, with nearly half of eligible voters using one or the other in the last national election in 2012. However, most voters use them in the weeks ahead of […]
By Andrew Osborn | MOSCOW MOSCOW First, armed police seized some of its books. Next, its director was put on trial accused of stirring up ethnic hatred. And now, quietly, its shelves have been emptied and its volumes packed up, ready to be merged into another library’s collection. A year and a half after Russia’s only state-run Ukrainian language library, Moscow’s Library of Ukrainian Literature, was dragged […]
NEW YORK — Millions of records from a commercial corporate database have been leaked. The database, about 52 gigabytes in size, contains just under 33.7 million unique email addresses and other contact information from employees of thousands of companies, representing a large portion of the US corporate population. Dun & Bradstreet, a business services giant, confirmed that it owns the database, which it acquired as part of […]
By Patricia Zengerle | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON The chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee said on Tuesday he plans to hold public hearings on possible links between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, although he did not say when they would take place. “It will happen,” Republican Senator Richard Burr told reporters after a closed committee meeting. Asked if he knew when, he said, “I don’t yet, […]
Singapore needs to keep a close watch on teachings or statements that are exclusivist and divisive, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean said yesterday. These have had repercussions in other countries, he noted at a gathering of Islamic religious teachers. “Attacks claimed to be in the name of Islam have led to a rise in Islamophobia, with anti-immigration rhetoric and negative reactions among other communities,” he said. […]
By Katharine Houreld | NAIROBI NAIROBI Pirates have hijacked an oil tanker with eight Sri Lankan crew on board, Somali authorities said on Tuesday, the first time a commercial ship has been seized in the region since 2012. Security forces have been sent to free the Aris 13, a regional police official said late on Tuesday. Graphic on track of suspected hijacked tanker: http:// fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/ce/3/868/868/ARIS13.png Graph showing […]
Photo A damaged classroom after shelling in the rebel-held town of Hass in Idlib Province. Credit Ammar Abdullah/Reuters GENEVA — Syrian military airstrikes on rebels were responsible for severing water supplies to 5.5 million people in the Damascus region for weeks starting last December, the United Nations said on Tuesday, rebutting government claims that insurgents were to blame. In a bombing campaign to drive rebel forces from […]
By Ahmed Kingimi | MAIDUGURI, Nigeria MAIDUGURI, Nigeria Islamist militant sect Boko Haram on Tuesday released a video purporting to show the execution of three men the group accused of being Nigerian military spies. The seven-minute clip, the first online video posted in two years of an execution said to be by Boko Haram, showed three men wearing orange jumpsuits. One is decapitated by masked men while […]
LONDON/PARIS An activist hedge fund has said it objects to plans by Walt Disney (DIS.N) to take full control of debt-laden Paris theme park operator Euro Disney (EDLP.PA), according to a letter seen by Reuters. Paris-based CIAM, which owns 1.4 percent of Euro Disney shares, has written to the board of the French company to object to what it believes are plans by Walt Disney to force […]
MOGADISHU // Pirates have hijacked an oil tanker off the coast of Somalia, officials and a piracy expert said on Tuesday. It is the first hijacking of a large commercial vessel there since 2012. The Aris 13 on Monday reported being approached by two skiffs, said John Steed from the organisation Oceans Beyond Piracy. Mr Steed said eight crew members were aboard the ship, which had been […]
Hackers can exploit the insecurity of IoT devices for the purposes of espionage or DDoS attacks Image: iStock Cyberattacks exploiting the insecurity of the Internet of Things and hackers increasingly attempting to compromise industrial connected devices represent some of the biggest threats to the UK, those responsible for ensuring national security have warned. Citing incidents including the internet crippling Mirai botnet cyberattack and vulnerabilities in a children’s […]
YANGON Dozens of Myanmar soldiers have been killed in several clashes between ethnic rebels and the army along the border with China, state media reported on Tuesday, threatening leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s chief goal of ending decades of ethnic strife. More than 20,000 people from Myanmar have crossed China’s border in recent weeks to escape the bitter fighting in the north, prompting Beijing to call for […]
SEOUL North Korea warned the United States on Tuesday of “merciless” attacks if an aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS Carl Vinson, which is joining South Korean forces for exercises, infringes on its sovereignty or dignity. North Korea, which has alarmed its neighbours with two nuclear tests and a string of missile launches since last year, said the arrival of the U.S. strike group was […]
Authored by Thierry Meyssan via VoltaireNet.org, This article is a warning – in November 2016, a vast system of agitation and propaganda was set up in order to destroy the reputation and the authority of President Donald Trump as soon as he arrived in the White House. It is the first time that such a campaign has been scientifically organised against a President of the United States, […]
The San Francisco Department of Public Health has revealed that two people are critically ill and are now in the hospital after drinking toxic herbal tea that they bought at a Chinatown shop. The patients, a woman and a man, became ill within an hour of drinking tea made from leaves they bought from Sun Wing Wo Trading Co. The two individuals quickly experienced weakness, which was followed […]
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has loomed over European politics for more than a decade, entangled in the awkward embrace of reluctant allies. This weekend he burst into the middle of a fraught electoral season. The Dutch were behaving like Nazis, the Germans too, he said, by banning his foreign minister from speaking at rallies in their countries and setting police dogs on Turks who protested the […]
