Category: x.JT

The U.S. government has been hit in a global hacking campaign that exploited a vulnerability in widely used software, the nation’s cyber watchdog agency said on Thursday. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said several federal bodies had experienced intrusions following the discovery of a weakness in the file transfer software MOVEit, Eric Goldstein, the agency’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement. “We are working urgently to understand impacts and ensure timely remediation,” he said….

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are investigating allegations China tried to intimidate a federal legislator, one of more than 100 inquiries into foreign meddling, the RCMP commander said on Tuesday. Canada has accused China of trying to interfere in its affairs through various schemes, including illegal police stations and the targeting of lawmakers. Beijing has strongly denied all such allegations. Ottawa expelled a Chinese diplomat last month for allegedly seeking to target opposition lawmaker Michael Chong’s family in Hong Kong…

At least 13 people were injured early Sunday when an apparent street party in Syracuse, New York, turned violent. Syracuse police Lt. Matthew Malinowski told reporters that at least four people suffered gunshot wounds and five others suffered apparent knife wounds. The other victims were apparently accidently struck by vehicles fleeing what the department called a “large gathering of hundreds of people” on the city’s West Side. All of those injured, three males and 10 females between the ages of…

Nine people were wounded in a mass shooting in San Francisco’s Mission District on Friday night, but police said all were expected to survive. The shooting “appears to be targeted and isolated,” the San Francisco Police Department tweeted. No suspects or arrests were announced, but police said there was “no known threat to the public.” The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the shooting happened shortly after 9 p.m. during a party hosted by a clothing store near the intersection of…

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) said on Thursday it was suspending food aid to Ethiopia because its donations were being diverted from people in need. A spokesperson said USAID had determined, in coordination with the Ethiopian government, that a “widespread and coordinated campaign is diverting food assistance from the people of Ethiopia”. The statement did not say who was behind the campaign. The United States is by far the largest humanitarian donor to Ethiopia, where more than 20…

China completed a second phase of joint air patrols with Russia over the Western Pacific on Wednesday, following flights on the previous day over the Sea of Japan and East China Sea, prompting concerns in Japan over national security. Both South Korea and Japan scrambled fighter jets on Tuesday, when the Chinese and Russian joint patrols got underway as part of their militaries’ annual cooperation plan. The flights are a “serious concern” for Japan’s national security, and those concerns were…

Hong Kong authorities on Friday condemned a British government call for the removal of a China-imposed national security law that Britain said had been used to persecute, “silence and discredit” pro-democracy opposition figures. Britain’s Foreign Secretary James Cleverly wrote in his government’s latest six-monthly report on Hong Kong that he had highlighted at a U.N. hearing in February how Hong Kong authorities had used the security law to crack down on opposition figures, many of whom are in jail or…

A Lebanese judge questioned the country’s embattled central bank governor Wednesday and confiscated his Lebanese and French passports following an arrest warrant from France over corruption charges, judicial officials said. Riad Salameh left immediately after questioning by Judge Imad Kabalan in Beirut, the officials said on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. The questioning lasted about 80 minutes, they said. France, Germany and Luxembourg are investigating Salameh and his associates over myriad alleged financial crimes, including illicit enrichment and…

The French government plans to move homeless people out of Paris ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in the capital, sparking criticism from some mayors of regional towns and villages which are expected to house them. From mid-March, the government began asking officials around France to create “temporary regional accommodation facilities” that can handle an outflux of homeless people from the capital, many of them migrants. Housing Minister Olivier Klein explained to parliament earlier this month that the changes were…

  Labor authorities have recognized that the mental illness suffered by an executive of the Japanese leg of Swiss watchmaker Swatch Group Ltd was caused by bullying at the hands of the branch’s president, constituting an industrial accident, the employee’s union said Wednesday. The executive, a Japanese woman in her 50s, claims she was relentlessly scolded by the president of Swatch Group (Japan) KK, a female foreign national, and subjected to power harassment, as workplace bullying is referred to in…

U.S. President Joe Biden told G7 leaders that Washington will support providing advanced warplanes including F-16s to Ukraine and will back efforts to train Kyiv’s pilots, a senior White House official said Friday. The U.S. move signals a major breakthrough for Kyiv, which has repeatedly — and until recently unsuccessfully — pushed its Western supporters to agree to provide high-tech jets as it fights to fend off Russia’s invasion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — who is set to meet Biden…

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen vowed on Saturday to maintain the status quo of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait amid high tensions with China, which has stepped up military pressure on the democratically governed island. Taiwan will not provoke and will not bow to Chinese pressure, Tsai said in a speech in the presidential office in Taipei marking the seventh anniversary of her governance. China, which considers Taiwan as its own and threatens to bring the island under its…

Leaders of the Group of Seven advanced economies are generally united in voicing concern about China. The question is how to translate that worry into action. Over the past two years, President Joe Biden’s administration has sought to reframe the relationship with Beijing and build support among like-minded nations for a strong response to what officials in Washington and some other Western democracies say is “economic coercion.” But the G7 also needs to cooperate with China on broader global issues…

Tens of thousands marched through Belgrade on Friday in an anti-government protest following two mass shootings that killed 18 people, blaming the deaths on a culture of violence that critics say authorities have allowed to fester unchecked. On May 3 a teenage boy killed nine pupils and a security guard in the first school mass shooting in Serbia, and a day later a 21-year-old man killed eight outside Belgrade. Opposition parties, which organized the demonstration, say the government led by…

The Russian branch of environmental group Greenpeace on Friday said it would shut down after authorities declared the group an “undesirable organization”, effectively banning it from operating. In a statement, Russia’s Prosecutor General said Greenpeace had tried to “interfere in the internal affairs of the state” and was “engaged in anti-Russian propaganda” by calling for sanctions against Moscow. The label “undesirable” has been applied to dozens of foreign groups since Moscow began using the classification in 2015, and effectively bans…

Russia has frozen the bank accounts of Finland’s diplomatic representations in Moscow and St. Petersburg, disrupting money flow and forcing the Nordic country’s missions to resort to cash payments, the Finnish foreign minister said Wednesday. Pekka Haavisto said Moscow’s move at the end of April breached the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Helsinki had delivered a diplomatic note on the matter to Russia. “We’re not alone with the money traffic problem,” Haavisto told reporters during a news conference. “Also,…