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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
JERUSALEM — Palestinian youths, some of them masked, clashed with Israeli police officers who entered Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque compound early Sunday in what appears to have become an increasingly familiar occurrence on the eve of Jewish holidays. This time, the police said, they had intelligence that youths had holed up in the mosque overnight and were planning confront Israeli security forces in an attempt to prevent […]
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. […]
Russian-speaking hackers with the cyberespionage group Turla have found a way to exploit weaknesses in global satellite networks to steal data while disguising the locations of their computers, the security firm Kaspersky Lab has revealed. Researchers at the firm said the hacking group, which has infected hundreds of computers in nearly four dozen countries over its eight-plus years of operation, has found an “exquisite” way to steal […]
Middle East Palestinian supporters of mourabitat demonstrated last week against Israeli plans to forbid the group to enter the compound in Jerusalem that Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary, or Al Aqsa, and that Jews call the Temple Mount. By DIAA HADID September 9, 2015 RAMALLAH, West Bank — Israel on Monday officially outlawed an organization of Muslim women who chase and shout at Jewish visitors to a contested holy […]
HAIFA, Israel — THE day after six world powers reached a nuclear agreement with Iran in July, the Israeli Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee called on Israel’s government to “continue to closely follow the precise and strict implementation” of the agreement “to ensure that Iran is not continuing to fool the international community as it did in the past, while strengthening the historic alliance between the […]
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry told his Russian counterpart on Saturday that the United States was deeply concerned by reports that the Kremlin may be planning to vastly expand its military support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, warning that such a move might even lead to a “confrontation” with the American-led coalition, the State Department said. Mr. Kerry called Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, “to […]
BAGHDAD — In the early morning darkness on Wednesday, masked gunmen in military uniforms rolled up in more than a dozen black sport utility vehicles to a construction site on the edge of Baghdad, subdued the guards and roused 17 Turkish workers and their Iraqi translator from sleep and kidnapped them. Iraqi security officials spent the day scrambling to find the men, who were building a soccer […]
Middle East Memo From the West Bank In the 10th year of a four-year term in the absence of national elections, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has lost the public’s confidence. A poll published on Tuesday showed trust in him falling to 16 percent from 22 percent in March. By JODI RUDOREN September 1, 2015 RAMALLAH, West Bank — Mahmoud Abbas, the aging Palestinian president, may be paving the way […]
TEHRAN — Iran’s judiciary sentenced two people to 10 years in prison on Sunday for spying for the United States and Israel, but their names were not released, local media reported. It was not clear if the Iranian-American reporter Jason Rezaian, who faces similar charges, was one of them. It is not uncommon in Iran to hand down sentences without revealing names of the convicted, especially in […]
Middle East By KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA August 27, 2015 LONDON — A 21-year-old hacker from Birmingham, England, who tapped into American military networks and was a central figure in the Islamic State militant group’s online recruitment campaign, has been killed in Syria by an American airstrike, according to three senior American officials. The hacker, Junaid Hussain, was a leading member of the CyberCaliphate, an Islamic State unit that broke into […]
CAIRO — Saudi Arabia has arrested the accused mastermind of a 1996 bombing that killed 19 American airmen, a Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed officials. The suspect, Ahmed al-Mughassil, was identified in an American federal indictment as a senior leader of an Iranian-backed Saudi militant group that sought to kill American military personnel in the Persian Gulf. The bombing destroyed an eight-story building in […]
News Analysis By DAVID E. SANGER August 21, 2015 To the most strident opponents of President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the suspicious behavior at a military base about 12 miles southeast of Tehran has become a rallying call to defeat the accord, especially as it now appears that Iranian officials may be allowed to take their own environmental samples at the site and turn them over to inspectors. It […]
SANA, Yemen — After five months of war in which more than 4,000 people have been killed, Yemen’s government, exiled in Saudi Arabia, faces a fateful decision: leverage recent battlefield gains to negotiate a cease-fire with a weakened Houthi rebel movement, or try to rout the rebels once and for all. Backed by air support and ground troops from Persian Gulf nations, fighters allied with the government […]
The lowest crude prices since 2009 might still not be enough to end the U.S. energy renaissance. Some parts of North Dakota’s Bakken shale play are profitable at less than $30 a barrel as companies tap bigger wells and benefit from lower drilling costs, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis. That’s less than half the level of some estimates when the oil rout began last year. The […]
Chinese airlines and European luxury car makers are emerging as the early losers after the People’s Bank of China let the yuan fall the most in two decades. China’s surprising move to cut its daily reference rate by 1.9 percent Tuesday rippled through global markets. Policy makers called the change a one-time adjustment and said its fixing will become more aligned with supply and demand. While it […]
A Tunisian police officer stood guard at the scene of a shooting attack in June at the Imperial Marhaba hotel in the Mediterranean resort of Sousse. By CARLOTTA GALL August 9, 2015 MONASTIR, Tunisia — A dozen police officers, one with an assault rifle across his knees, guard the presidential mausoleum in this sleepy seaside resort, easily outnumbering the foreign visitors on a recent morning. It was here, the […]
Big Blue just spent $1 billion to give Watson the ability to see. IBM’s supercomputer is getting an upgrade with technology acquired from Merge Healthcare, which will add data and images to Watson’s advanced image analytics and cognitive abilities. Merge Healthcare has made a name for itself providing medical image handling and processing, interoperability and clinical systems that work to advance healthcare quality and efficiency. The company’s […]
JERUSALEM — He has the pedigree: Meir Ettinger is the grandson and namesake of Meir Kahane, the slain American-Israeli rabbi considered the father of far-right Jewish militancy. He has the record: For years, Mr. Ettinger has joined the radical group of Israeli settlers known as the hilltop youth in clashes with Palestinians and Israeli forces, leading to a ban on his entering Jerusalem or the occupied West […]
DOHA, Qatar — Persian Gulf monarchies issued a cautious endorsement on Monday of the accord Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated last month to constrain Iran’s nuclear program. “This was the best option among other options,” said Khalid al-Attiyah, the foreign minister of Qatar, who hosted a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council that Mr. Kerry attended. In a news conference with Mr. Kerry, Mr. Attiyah said […]
By ANNE BARNARD and ERIC SCHMITT July 31, 2015 BAGHDAD — A Syrian insurgent group at the heart of the Pentagon’s effort to fight the Islamic State came under intense attack on Friday from a different hard-line Islamist faction, a serious blow to the Obama administration’s plans to create a reliable military force inside Syria. The American-led coalition responded with airstrikes to help the American-aligned unit, known as Division 30, in […]
