Category: Spotlight

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had an “open, candid” conversation with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the early hours of Wednesday about a wide range of bilateral issues, a US official said. The top US diplomat arrived in Saudi Arabia late on Tuesday for a much anticipated visit amid frayed ties due to…

ROME — Magistrates in Italy are probing former Leonardo and Fincantieri officials as part of an investigation into alleged corruption. Police removed computer files from the homes of ex-Leonardo CEO Alessandro Profumo and a former Italian Italian prime minister, Massimo D’Alema, and are probing former Fincantieri executive Giuseppe Giordo amid claims bribes were offered to Columbian officials to buy planes…

Meta has been dragged kicking and screaming into another notable privacy concession in Europe: The German Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has announced a new account center incoming which will see the tech giant provide users of its social networking services with a greater degree of choice over whether they allow it to combine data on their activity across its services…

Treasury officials have been accused of being asleep at the wheel on breaches of confidential government information. Officials were grilled on their knowledge of potential breaches of confidential Treasury data by former PwC partner Peter Collins, who has been referred to federal police to investigate the allegations. Greens senator Barbara Pocock hit out at Treasury’s decision to sign new confidentiality…

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A federal judge says Tennessee’s first-in-the-nation law designed to place strict limits on drag shows is unconstitutional. In a 70-page ruling handed down late Friday night, U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker wrote that the law was both “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad.” He also added that the statute encouraged “discriminatory enforcement.” “There is no question that obscenity…

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force walked back comments reportedly made by a colonel regarding a simulation in which a drone outwitted its artificial intelligence training and killed its handler, after the claims went viral on social media. Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said in a June 2 statement no such testing took place, adding that the service member’s comments…

The United Nations officially launched its mission this week to prevent what it says could be an “environmental catastrophe” on the Red Sea. Sitting off the coast of Yemen lies a nearly half-century-old ship with roughly 1.14 million barrels of crude oil on board, the global agency said – and it’s “deteriorating rapidly.”  The massive 47-year-old supertanker, FSO Safer, rests…

We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts…

Epstein’s calendars show the financier meeting with A-listers including tech billionaires Bill Gates and Peter Thiel, music executive Tommy Mottola, artist Jeff Koons, magician David Blaine, and filmmaker Woody Allen – all after being required to register as a sex offender as part of the sweetheart plea deal that allowed him to serve less than two years under house arrest. …

WASHINGTON — More than 1 million F-35 spare parts worth at least $85 million have gone missing over at least the last five years, according to a new Government Accountability Office report criticizing the program’s supply tracking. Auditors said that because the government doesn’t have its own system tracking those parts, officials may not truly know how many spare parts…

Aderrien Murry, 11, called the police as his mother asked — but when officers arrived, one of them shot him in the chest. A new lawsuit says officials failed to train and supervise its officers. Courtesy of Nakala Murry The family of Aderrien Murry has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Indianola, Miss., and at least two police…

India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a complaint on Monday against British multinational aerospace and defense company Rolls Royce, the company’s former India director – Tim Jones, arms dealer Sudhir Choudhrie and his son Bhanu Choudhrie (who are UK citizens), and British Aerospace Systems (BAE Systems). The allegations include criminal conspiracy, cheating and corruption in a 2004 procurement of…

A former Federal Security Service officer said Putin could be overthrown by Wagner. The Wagner Army is Putin’s private military army, largely made up of mercenaries. The Army chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, could pose an active threat to Putin, said the war analyst. Vladimir Putin could be ousted by Russia’s private military group, the Wagner army, according to Igor Girkin, a…

Schwartz was using ChatGPT for legal research for the first time when he put it to work drafting the ten-page brief he hoped would convince Manhattan Federal Judge P. Kevin Castel not to dismiss his case, he told the court in an affidavit on Thursday, explaining that he “therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”…

PORTLAND, Ore.—After a six-week trial in Portland, a federal jury found three former executives of Aequitas Management, LLC, and associated companies, guilty today for their roles in a vast fraud conspiracy. Evidence at trial showed the conspirators raised nearly $300 million from defrauded investors. Robert J. Jesenik, 63, former chief executive officer of Aequitas and resident of Lake Oswego, Oregon;…

Mila Antonova – a bridge player who multiple media reports this week claim had an affair with Gates starting in 2009 – was captured in a newly unearthed photograph walking alongside Chapman in New York City. The picture, which is believed to have been taken in 2009 or 2010, around the same time as Gates’ alleged trysts with the decades-younger…