Category: Defense and National Security

Iranian forces on Thursday seized a Marshall Islands-flagged oil tanker that was bound for Texas, according to the U.S. Navy.

The Navy’s 5th Fleet said the oil tanker Advantage Sweet was seized by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the Gulf of Oman, which lies between the Arabian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz.

The American naval fleet said the merchant ship issued a distress call, and the U.S. is monitoring the situation.

“Iran’s actions are contrary to international law and disruptive to regional security and stability,” the 5th Fleet said in a statement. “The Iranian government should immediately release the oil tanker.”

The 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee passed an amendment to the Counter-Espionage Law on Wednesday. The revised law refines the definition of espionage activities, explicitly categorizing “collaborating with spy organizations and their agents” and “conducting cyber-attacks against state organs, confidential-related units, or critical information infrastructure and etc.” as espionage activities.

The revised law will come into effect on July 1.

The UK government has signaled it will break its pledge to carry out a “bonfire” of legislation dating from Britain’s membership of the European Union, risking the fury of Conservative Brexit supporters.

Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch told a private meeting of Euroskeptic Conservative MPs on Monday that it would not be possible to remove the laws — which number around 4,000 pieces of legislation — by that deadline, according to a person present at the meeting.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has repeatedly promised that he would review or remove all EU laws from the British statute book by the end of 2023, arguing that doing so would be a tangible benefit of Brexit.

In court papers filed late Wednesday, the Justice Department lawyers said releasing 21-year-old Jack Teixeira from jail while he awaits trial would be a grave threat to the U.S. national security. Investigators are still trying to determine whether he kept any physical or digital copies of classified information, including files that haven’t already surfaced publicly, they wrote.

“There simply is no condition or combination of conditions that can ensure the Defendant will not further disclose additional information still in his knowledge or possession,” prosecutors wrote. “The damage the Defendant has already caused to the U.S. national security is immense. The damage the Defendant is still capable of causing is extraordinary.”

A detention hearing is scheduled for Thursday in the federal court in Worcester, Massachusetts, for Teixeira, who has been in jail since his arrest earlier this month on charges stemming from the highest-profile intelligence leak in years.

The Kremlin warned on Wednesday that Russia could widen the list of foreign companies subject to temporary asset seizures in case of the “expropriation” of Russian assets abroad.

The comments came after Putin signed a presidential decree approving the takeover of operations of two Western energy groups in Russia — Finland’s Fortum and Germany’s Uniper — and threatened to do the same with others.

“If necessary, the list of companies could be expanded,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, a day after President Vladimir Putin signed a decree allowing asset seizures.

The US Supreme Court rejected Wednesday the claim of sovereign immunity by a Turkish bank accused of violating Iran sanctions, in a case that has added tensions to ties between Washington and Ankara.

Halkbank was hit with US criminal charges in 2019 that it took part in a yearlong scheme to launder billions of dollars worth of Iranian oil and natural gas proceeds, violating sanctions on Iran.

The funds were used to buy gold and the transactions were disguised as food and medicine purchases in order to fall under a humanitarian exemption to the sanctions, according to court documents.

As part of the scheme, Halkbank allegedly used front companies to funnel $20 billion to Iran, including $1 billion through the US financial system, the US Justice Department said.

The United States charged the bank with six counts of fraud, money laundering, and sanctions offenses, calling it one of the most serious sanctions-breaking cases it has seen.

A Pennsylvania grand jury in recent months accused nine men with connections to the Jehovah’s Witnesses of child sexual abuse in what some consider the nation’s most comprehensive investigation yet into abuse within the faith.

The sets of charges filed in October and February have fueled speculation the jury may make public more about what it has uncovered from a four-year investigation.

A similar grand jury investigation into child sexual abuse by Catholic priests culminated in a lengthy 2018 report that concluded hundreds of priests had abused children in Pennsylvania over seven decades and church officials had covered it up, and more recently a similar report was issued in Maryland.

But documents made public so far include nothing about what critics have long maintained has been a systemic cover-up and mishandling of child molestation within the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The U.S. allegedly eavesdropped on private conversations between United Nations Secretary General António Guterres and other U.N. officials, according to documents obtained by the Washington Post. The classified documents highlight conversations that Guterres had with top U.N. officials and world leaders, including one about how he was angry that he was not allowed to visit the Tigray region of Ethiopia,…

  LONDON (AP) — A diamond and art dealer was sanctioned Tuesday by the U.K. and U.S. governments for allegedly funding Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group. The U.K. Treasury said it froze Nazem Ahmad’s assets in the U.K. because he financed the Iranian-backed Shiite militant organization that has been designated an international terrorist group. Under the sanctions, no one in the…

Defendants Are New York City Residents Who Allegedly Operated the Police Station in Lower Manhattan and Destroyed Evidence When Confronted by the FBI A complaint was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, charging two defendants in connection with opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of…

So, we’re just handing out top secret security clearance to everyone, I guess. It was clear from the documents posted to Discord (before spreading everywhere), the person behind them would soon be located.

The folded security briefings were obviously smuggled out of secure rooms in someone’s pocket and then photographed carelessly, in one case on top of a hunting magazine. I mean, that narrows it down to people who still buy stuff printed on physical media, a number that shrinks exponentially by the day.

On top of that, the entry level for the leaked info — much of it related to the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia — was Discord, which no one has considered to be the equivalent of Signal or any other secure site for the dissemination of sensitive material.

Some of Turkey’s largest airport ground handler firms stopped providing services to western-made aircraft owned by Russian airlines earlier this month, multiple sources told Middle East Eye.  The sources, who are within the aviation industry and are familiar with the issue, said Havas, Turkey’s largest ground service provider, as well as Turkish Ground Services (TGS), stopped serving the US-made Boeing and European Airbus aircraft…

The US on Wednesday slapped sanctions on several entities based in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates which it said had violated US export controls and helped Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. The firms were included in a new list of sanctions rolled out by the US Treasury Department against more than 120 targets across over 20 countries and jurisdictions….

When Member of Parliament Kenny Chiu was contacted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) ahead of Canada’s federal election in 2021, he was puzzled. He had never expected to be part of a CSIS investigation, let alone one that required an in-person talk at the height of Canada’s COVID-19 pandemic. “At that time, everything had moved online, so it was…

Western media seems to be actively trying to create an “information tsunami” about the topic, according to Pushilin, who suggested it could mean the leaks may have been deliberate.

“Who knows, this could be the preparation of the global community for a possible reduction in support for Ukraine on the eve of the highly publicized counteroffensive by the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” Pushilin wrote. He also said, however, that regardless of the content of the leaked documents or the true intentions of the West, Russia’s task is to continue working and not respond to provocations.