Category: Western Media

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

Halifax, Canada — A dangerous encounter between a Chinese jet fighter and a Canadian helicopter over the South China Sea has called attention to Canada’s heightened interest in the Western Pacific, including participation in patrols through the disputed Taiwan Strait. In the October 29 incident, first reported by CNN, a helicopter was flying off the deck of the frigate HMCS Ottawa…

  A US nuclear-powered Ohio-class submarine is in the Middle East to help prevent the Israel-Hamas war from spiraling into a broader conflict, the Pentagon said Monday.   The US Central Command posted a picture of the submarine the day before on social media platform X that appeared to show it transiting Egypt’s Suez Canal. It is “now in the…

Thomas Flohr, owner of luxury airline VistaJet, must fight a claim that he defrauded a Guernsey investment partnership two decades ago after London’s High Court refused to dismiss the case.  Flohr, who denies the allegations, had tried to have the case thrown out on technical grounds related to the circumstances of the case, in which a previously dissolved partnership was…

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned Russian national Ekaterina Zhdanova for laundering millions in cryptocurrency for various individuals, including ransomware actors. Zhdanova used her expertise in cryptocurrency and blockchain networks to move money through various platforms such as Garantex (sanctioned in April 2022 for aiding the Hydra Market) to evade “Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism” (AML/CFT) controls. A report…

Telecom Italia SpA has agreed to sell its land-line network to KKR & Co. in a government-backed deal valued at around €22 billion ($23.6 billion), according to people familiar with the matter. The phone carrier’s board of directors, after a marathon meeting that started on Friday, approved the grid sale to the US private equity giant on Sunday without making it conditional on…

Hackers have accessed approximately 632,000 emails from the Department of Defense and other federal agencies this year, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) confirmed. The report detailed a large-scale cyberattack in May 2023 in which emails from US government offices, private sectors, airlines, and academic entities were accessed by a suspected Russian group called “CL0P.” Alongside electronic personal data,…

The Islamic State jihadist group claimed on its Telegram channel Friday that it was behind a blast at a sports club that killed four people in the Afghan capital the night before. The Sunni Muslim extremist group said it had used a parcel bomb that “IS fighters placed in a room where Shiites gather.” The explosion occurred Thursday evening at a commercial center in the Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood of…

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Defense Department on Friday announced the government is moving forward with developing a new version of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb. The bomb, designated B61-13, would have a yield similar to the B61-7 and replace some of those older gravity bombs, the Pentagon said in its announcement. The B61-7′s yield is higher than the B61-12, the…

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried began testifying at his fraud trial on Friday, saying the innovative business he hoped would move the cryptocurrency ecosystem forward ended up doing the opposite and hurting customers. The onetime cryptocurrency golden boy lost his businesses and his reputation as a pioneering entrepreneur in an emerging facet of finance when a rush of customers withdrew their…

The US Air Force (USAF) has launched two new detachments at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia to bolster the force’s electronic warfare capability. Detachments from the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing (SWW) and the 87th Electronic Warfare Squadron (EWS) will be tasked with responding to electronic threats by developing new countermeasures. The launch is part of the standup process for…