Tag: All Regions

Recent developments raise the prospect that British intelligence agents could finally face justice for their little-known role in the CIA’s global torture program. Britain’s foreign and domestic intelligence apparatus is facing scrutiny by a tribunal tasked with intelligence oversight. On May 26, London’s infamously opaque Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) unanimously issued a landmark ruling which means the complaints of two Saudis brutally tortured at CIA black sites and jailed for years in Guantanamo Bay can finally be heard, at least…

The “missing” witness long touted by Republicans in Congress as the missing link to their probe into alleged Biden family corruption was accused Monday of being an unregistered foreign agent for China and international arms trafficker while violating U.S. sanctions on Iran and lying to investigators, among a laundry list of other federal charges. Dual U.S.-Israeli citizen Gal Luft had already skipped out on his bail while in Cyprus awaiting extradition to the U.S. for a separate case in March—though…

SINGAPORE – DBS Bank has agreed to sell a 77.8 per cent stake in electronic payment services provider AXS to Tower Capital Asia, a private equity firm based in Singapore. The bank will retain a minority stake of 9.9 per cent in AXS, it said on Tuesday. It did not disclose the stake’s sale price. The deal is slated to close by August, and is not expected to have a material impact on DBS’ earnings or net tangible assets for…

NEW YORK – Standard Chartered is ramping up its bullish Bitcoin prediction, targeting as much as US$120,000 (S$161,000) by the end of 2024 – almost quadruple the current price – as increasingly cash-rich miners reduce their sales of the token. “Increased miner profitability per BTC mined means they can sell less while maintaining cash inflows, reducing net BTC supply and pushing BTC prices higher,” Geoff Kendrick at Standard Chartered wrote on Monday. Bitcoin mining is an energy-intensive process in which…

TAIPEI/BENGALURU – Taiwan’s Foxconn has withdrawn from a US$19.5 billion (SS26 billion) semiconductor joint venture with Indian metals-to-oil conglomerate Vedanta, it said on Monday, in a setback to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s chipmaking plans for India. The world’s largest contract electronics maker signed a pact with Vedanta last year to set up semiconductor and display production plants in Mr Modi’s home state of Gujarat. “Foxconn has determined it will not move forward on the joint venture with Vedanta,” a Foxconn…

  The remains of a German real estate tycoon who has been missing since July 4 have been found inside a freezer of a rental home in the Thai city of Pattaya, according to local authorities. Hans Peter Mack, 62, had been reported missing by his wife, 24-year-old Thai national Piraya Boonmak, a day after his disappearance. According to local reports, Boonmak had grown concerned after her husband failed to return to their home in Pattaya after a scheduled meeting…

A threat actor referred to as ‘RomCom’ has been targeting organizations supporting Ukraine and guests of the upcoming NATO Summit set to start tomorrow in Vilnius, Lithuania. BlackBerry’s research and intelligence team recently discovered two malicious documents that impersonated the Ukranian World Congress organization and topics related to the NATO Summit to lure selected targets. The attackers used a replica of the Ukrainian World Congress website hosted on an “.info” domain instead of the real one that uses an “.org” top-level domain….

  WASHINGTON ― The White House on Monday told lawmakers it opposes a provision in the House’s annual defense policy bill that would create a special inspector general for Ukraine aid, modelled after the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The Ukraine inspector general was one of several provisions in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act that the White House, in an Office of Management and Budget statement on the bill, told Congress it wants removed. The statement also…

  SAN DIEGO — A 14-year-old girl was found in the barracks at a California Marine Corps base last month, two weeks after her grandmother in San Diego reported she had run away from home, and a Marine was detained for questioning, officials said Monday. The Marine has since been released to his command while federal law enforcement officials investigate, said Marine Capt. Charles Palmer of the 1st Marine Logistics Group at Camp Pendleton, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) north…

Here we go again. It was only a month ago that Karl Bode wrote about Disney’s absolutely and totally cool process of removing a bunch of content from its Disney Plus streaming platform not because the content sucks and nobody liked it, but because it gets to play accounting tricks as to its assets in order to receive giant tax breaks. To some extent, a big media company prioritizing quarterly profit reports over providing customers value in its streaming platform…

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Turkey’s leader has agreed to have Turkish parliament vote on Sweden’s bid to join the defense alliance. The announcement came via a tweet after Stoltenberg met with both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson in Vilnius, Lithuania, on the eve of the NATO summit there. “Glad to announce that after the meeting I hosted with @RTErdogan & @SwedishPM, President Erdogan has agreed to forward #Sweden’s accession protocol to the Grand…

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg announces that President Erdogan agrees to forward Sweden’s bid to Turkey’s parliament. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has agreed to back Sweden’s bid to join NATO after a year of blocking the move, citing Turkish security concerns. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced on Monday that Erdogan agreed to forward Sweden’s membership bid to Turkey’s parliament. After talks in Vilnius, Lithuania, with Erdogan and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, Stoltenberg said Turkey had agreed to move forward….

As you’ll recall, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman whined about what he called the “landed gentry” among moderators of subreddits that were protesting his ridiculous extractive API changes. He insisted that perhaps things should be more democratic. In response, many subreddits took a vote on how subscribers to those subreddits wanted the mods to handle things, and many urged the moderators to continue protesting. But, Huffman apparently couldn’t handle that kind of democracy. So he’s spent the last few weeks threatening…

After a weekend of broiling heat waves in the Southwest and South Florida, more extreme heat is forecast to build throughout the week. Forecasters say residents of both regions should stay out of the sun as much as possible. Across the country, heat waves are getting hotter, lasting longer and becoming more unpredictable. Jeff Goodell, the author of The Heat Will Kill You First, called it a dire consequence of climate change. “We know that as we continue to burn…

“The US Department of State has finally turned into the ‘Ministry of Truth’ predicted by George Orwell and actually dictates to the American media what exactly they should write and say. In June, the Department of State issued instructions to major telecommunications holdings such as AT&T, Comcast Corporation, Graham Media Group, Nash Holdings, Newsweek Publishing, and The New York Times Company to misrepresent events in and around Russia,” the SVR said in a statement, adding that the goal is to…

  Joe Biden blurted out to reporters on Sunday that his decision to send widely-banned cluster bombs to Ukraine was made because “we’ve run out of ammunition.” “Mr President– on cluster munitions, why now?” a reporter asked. “We’ve run out of ammunition,” Biden bluntly responded. Joe Biden wasn’t supposed to say the quiet part out loud: “We’ve run out of ammunition”. But now that the cat’s out of the bag, one must ask whether continued support of Ukraine’s military is…