Category: Western Media

Whatever the weather in Cuba this February, people may be feeling gloomy about the cost of living. The Cuban government is set to raise fuel prices fivefold at the start of next month. Havana says the move is a must, as it seeks funds to trim its deficit spending and buy needed goods from abroad. The change is not expected to have much of an immediate impact on the costs of vacation packages for Canadians looking to get away to the popular…

A 29-year-old man in Ukraine was arrested this week for using hacked accounts to create 1 million virtual servers used to mine $2 million in cryptocurrency.  As announced today by Europol, the suspect is believed to be the mastermind behind a large-scale cryptojacking scheme that involves hijacking cloud computing resources for crypto-mining. By using the computing resources of others’ servers to mine cryptocurrency, the cybercriminals can profit at the expense of the compromised organizations, whose CPU and GPU performance is degraded…

Canada, Britain, Sweden and Ukraine on Monday formally complained to the U.N. aviation council in their bid to hold Iran accountable for the downing of a Ukrainian passenger airliner in January 2020 that killed 176 people, they said on Monday. Most of the dead were citizens from the four nations, which created a coordination group that seeks to hold Iran to account. “Today we have jointly initiated dispute-settlement proceedings before the International Civil Aviation Organization against the Islamic Republic of…

Adult media giant Aylo has blocked access to many of its websites, including PornHub, to visitors from Montana and North Caroline as new age verifications laws go into effect. This move also impacts other adult sites owned by the company, including Tube8, RedTube, and Brazzers. As of January 1st, new age verification laws went into effect in Montana and North Carolina that require adult websites to verify the age of visitors from those states.  Under these new laws, failure to…

Latvia’s former central bank governor was sentenced to six years in prison for bribery on Wednesday after a trial over the most prominent of a series of recent financial scandals to hit the Baltic country. Ilmārs Rimšēvičs, head of the Latvian central bank from 2001 until 2019, was found guilty by the Riga district court of accepting bribes and a fishing trip to Russia from shareholders of a now defunct bank. He was sentenced to six years in jail and…

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) confirmed that attackers stole the personal information of more than 45,000 individuals after breaching its cloud-based Oracle HCM HR management platform last month. INL is one of 17 U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) national laboratories, and it employs 6,100 researchers and support staff involved in national security and nuclear research. On November 20, it confirmed a “cybersecurity data breach” that impacted its off-site Oracle HCM system one day before. CISA and FBI are looking into…

Hunter Biden was indicted on nine tax charges in California on Thursday as a special counsel investigation into the business dealings of the U.S. president’s son intensifies against the backdrop of the looming 2024 election. The new charges — three felonies and six misdemeanors — come in addition to federal firearms charges in Delaware alleging Hunter Biden broke a law against drug users having guns in 2018. He had been previously expected to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges as part…

A U.S. federal court jury has decided that Google’s Android app store has been protected by anti-competitive barriers that have damaged smartphone consumers and software developers, dealing a blow to a major pillar of a technology empire. The unanimous verdict reached Monday came after just three hours of deliberation following a four-week trial revolving around a lucrative payment system within Google’s Play Store. The store is the main place where hundreds of millions of people around the world download and…

Toyota Financial Services (TFS) is warning customers it suffered a data breach, stating that sensitive personal and financial data was exposed in the attack. Toyota Financial Services, a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation, is a global entity with a presence in 90% of the markets where Toyota sells its cars, providing auto financing to its customers. Last month, the company confirmed that it detected unauthorized access on some of its systems in Europe and Africa, following a claim from Medusa ransomware about…

Security researchers developed a new attack, which they named AutoSpill, to steal account credentials on Android during the autofill operation. In a presentation at the Black Hat Europe security conference, researchers from the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) at Hyderabad said that their tests showed that most password managers for Android are vulnerable to AutoSpill, even if there is no JavaScript injection. How AutoSpill works Android apps often use WebView controls to render web content, such as login pages within…

A French juvenile court on Friday convicted six teenagers for their roles in the beheading of a teacher by an Islamist extremist that shocked the country. Teacher Samuel Paty was killed outside his school in 2020 after showing his class cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad during a debate on free expression. The attacker, a young Chechen who had radicalized, was killed by police. The court found five of the defendants, who were 14 and 15 at the time of the…

Mercer Financial Advice has been ordered by the Federal Court to pay a $12 million penalty for breaching fee disclosure obligations and for wrongly charging fees to customers, ASIC has reported. “This is a significant penalty for a financial advice provider,” said Sarah Court (pictured above), ASIC deputy chair. “Mercer failed in its obligation to provide fee disclosure statements to clients, provided misleading information in the disclosure statements it did provide, and charged its clients fees for services it was…

Beijing has defended its prosecution of two Canadians for espionage, after The Globe and Mail reported that Michael Spavor blames intelligence work done by Michael Kovrig for their nearly three-year-long detention. Mr. Spavor is seeking a multimillion-dollar settlement from Ottawa, two sources told The Globe, alleging he was arrested in China in late 2018 because he unwittingly provided intelligence on North Korea to Mr. Kovrig, which was later shared with Canada and allied spy services. In a statement Sunday, China’s…

With Russian tanks and troops descending on Ukraine in early 2022, Cyprus became a hotbed of financial activity. The island country has long been known as an offshore transit point for the fortunes of Russian billionaires, and as sanctions loomed over many of them last year, Cyprus financial services firms fielded a series of urgent demands to transfer funds and shareholdings, newly revealed records show. In one case, documents show that two Russian billionaires, Alexander Abramov and Alexander Frolov, needed…

Portugal’s central bank governor Mário Centeno is facing an ethics review by an independent watchdog after he was proposed as the next prime minister by Socialist premier António Costa, who quit last week over a corruption scandal. Costa’s proposal has triggered a public spat between Centeno and Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the president who has the power to appoint prime ministers. Costa, who resigned over allegations of corruption among public officials, had urged Rebelo de Sousa to appoint Centeno as…

With data showing Mexico as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists outside a war zone, and with the country’s long record of impunity for perpetrators, the country’s media look to one another for safety. VOA’s Jessica Jerreat has the story. VOA footage by Vicente Calderon, Nelson Vignolles. Cristina Caicedo Smit contributed.