Tag: All Regions

Fox News on Wednesday notified Mr Tucker Carlson’s legal team that the former prime-time host violated his contract with the network when he launched his own Twitter show on Tuesday, Axios reported, citing a copy of a letter obtained by the news website. Mr Carlson released the first episode of his new show on Twitter on Tuesday, weeks after being taken off the air by Fox following a damaging defamation lawsuit over false claims of election fraud. Fox News general…

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 deepening disagreements on everything from Iran policy to regional security issues, oil prices and human rights. Washington has struggled 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 and ships. Gianluca Luongo, D’Alema’s lawyer told Defense News the men were accused of offering the bribes while seeking to…

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 or not. It will be the first time Meta has provided such a degree of choice over its cross-site tracking…

A Florida man has pleaded guilty to importing and selling counterfeit Cisco networking equipment to various organizations, including education, government agencies, healthcare, and the military. The 39-year-old resident of Florida, Onur Aksoy, conducted the scheme through 19 companies formed in New Jersey and Florida and in several online storefronts, collectively known as ‘Pro Network Entities,’  Aksoy had a criminal complaint filed against him approximately a year ago, with the Department of Justice accusing him of running the counterfeit scheme between 2014…

ATLANTA – Mr Chris Licht, the former television producer who oversaw a brief and chaotic tenure as chairman of CNN, is out at the network. Mr Licht’s 13-month run at CNN was marked by one controversy after another, culminating in his exit earlier this week. He got off to a bumpy start even before he officially started when he oversaw the shuttering of the pricey CNN+ streaming service at the request of its network’s new owners, who were sceptical about…

The BRICS bloc’s push to create a new trade and reserve currency that can serve as an alternative to the dollar could start chipping away at the greenback’s hegemony in less than three months’ time, former CIA and Department of Defense advisor and investment banker James Rickards has predicted. “It involves the rollout of a major new currency that could weaken the role of the dollar in global payments and ultimately displace the US dollar as the leading payment currency…

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 agreements with Mr Collins after they became aware of a possible breach. While Treasury officials told the committee they had…

WASHINGTON – US regulators sued Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao on Monday for allegedly operating a “web of deception,” piling further pressure on the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange and sending bitcoin to its lowest in almost three months. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint, filed in a federal court in Washington, DC, listed 13 charges against Binance, Zhao and the operator of its purportedly independent US exchange. The SEC alleged that Binance artificially inflated its trading volumes and…

The U.S. government has given Chinese and Russian entities at least $1.3 billion for various research programs over the past five years, according to an analysis released Wednesday by Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst and watchdog group Open the Books. The analysis revealed that millions of taxpayer dollars have been given to, among others, a Chinese software developer for military tech support, a Russian health insurance provider that has since been sanctioned and Chinese agriculture companies. And it showed the federal government…

“On Saturday, June 3, 2023, the President signed into law … H.R. 3746, the ‘Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023,’ which suspends the public debt limit through January 1, 2025, and increases the limit on January 2, 2025, to accommodate the obligations issued during the suspension period,” it said. The bill also rescinds certain unobligated balances, expands work requirements for a number of federal programs, modifies environmental review processes, and terminates the suspension of federal student loan payments. Earlier, Biden said…

SINGAPORE — Canada is pledging to step up its military posture in the Indo-Pacific, with its defense minister announcing the nation will annually commit to the region an additional warship. This will boost the size of the Royal Canadian Navy’s annual deployment to the Indo-Pacific from two to three ships, according to defense minister Anita Anand, who added that the deployment would grow Canada’s regional presence, particularly in the Indian Ocean. Anand was speaking here at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue,…

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 is not protected by the First Amendment. But there is a difference between material that is ‘obscene’ in the vernacular,…

NEW YORK, May 30 (Reuters) – Bankrupt OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma can shield its owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, from opioid lawsuits in exchange for a $6 billion contribution to the company’s broader bankruptcy settlement, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday. The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that U.S. bankruptcy law allows legal protections for non-bankrupt parties, like the Sacklers, in extraordinary circumstances. In a majority opinion written by 2nd Circuit Judge Eunice…

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 were likely “taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal.” “The Department of the Air Force has not…

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 just about 5 1/2 miles off of Yemen’s coast, where it has gone without maintenance for seven years.  “Its structural…