Tag: Region Americas

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is under investigation over allegations he failed to disclose shares his wife owns in a child care business that stands to benefit from his government’s budget, a parliamentary watchdog disclosed. Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards Daniel Greenberg opened an inquiry last week for possible violations of the code of conduct that calls on members to be…

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.

It doesn’t look like Fox News is going to get away with badmouthing Dominion Voting Systems for weeks following Donald Trump’s unsurprising loss in the 2020 election. Evidence already handed over to Dominion in its libel lawsuit shows many Fox News executives — as well as anchors and commentators — were aware the claims were false but chose to give…

Various treaties and multi-national proposals to combat cybercrime have been around for years. I’m not exaggerating. These have been floating around for more than a decade. (Do you want to feel old? This cybercrime treaty proposal would be old enough to legally obtain a social media account in the United States if it were still viable.)

The UN has been pushing its own version. But its idea of “crime” seems off-base, especially when it’s dealing with a conglomerate of countries with varying free speech protections. The “Cybercrime Treaty” proposed by the UN focuses on things many would consider ugly, distasteful, abhorrent, or even enraging. But it’s not things most people consider to be the sort of “crimes” a unified world front should be addressing — not when there’s plenty of financially or personally damaging cybercrime being performed on the regular.

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….

One of the most notorious privacy-breaching tech companies in operation, Clearview AI, has, according to its CEO, scraped 30 billion social media photos, packaged and curated them, and passed them along to the surveillance state authorities to do with what they will (in the dark, with no oversight, naturally, as the Founders warned such authorities would if left unchecked). Clearview’s…

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…

In a preliminary victory in the continuing fight against privacy-invasive software that “watches” students taking tests remotely, a French administrative court outside Paris suspended a university’s use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which monitors students through facial recognition and algorithmic analysis.

TestWe software, much like Proctorio, Examsoft, and other proctoring apps we’ve called out for intrusive monitoring of exam takers, constantly tracks students’ eye movements and their surroundings using video and sound analysis. The court in Montreuil, France, ruled that such “permanent surveillance of bodies and sounds” is unreasonable and excessive for the purpose preventing cheating.

There’s growing evidence that passing a comprehensive privacy law at the state level is a multiyear endeavor. There are anomalies among existing laws on the books, but most legislatures take two years or more to pass a bill.

Indiana is the latest example of how the process plays out, as it’s on the verge of adding to the pile of comprehensive state privacy laws. The Indiana House took a unanimous 98-0 vote to grant final passage to Senate Bill 5 on consumer data protection a year after the bill stalled in the same chamber.

The Indiana Senate, which already voted 49-0 to approve SB 5 on 9 Feb., will vote on concurrence, a perceived formality before the bill heads to Gov. Eric Holcomb, R-Ind., for a final signature. Holcomb has seven days upon transmission to act on the bill, with a definitive veto the only way it will not become a law.

Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has been rebuffed in her attempt to stay out of federal prison while she appeals her conviction for the fraud she committed while overseeing a blood-testing scam.

Almost 6 in 10 U.S. adults in a new poll report they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck amid an economic landscape fraught with inflation and recession fears.

A CNBC-Momentive survey on financial confidence found that 58 percent of Americans say they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, and that 70 percent said they feel stressed about their personal finances.

Nearly 80 percent of respondents making less than $50,000 and 74 percent making between $50,000 and $99,999 said they’re stressed about their finances. And even among those making $100,000 or more, 57 percent still said they’re stressed.

Nearly 80 percent of respondents making less than $50,000 say they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, compared to just 32 percent of those making $100,000 or more.

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.

Calls to break up Big Ag have resurfaced after a large egg producer in the U.S. announced windfall profits. A March 28 press release by Cal-Maine Foods said the Mississippi-based egg producer recorded a total revenue of $997.5 million – a 109 percent increase – for the quarter ending Feb. 25. Cal-Maine Foods’ profit for the same period shot up by 718 percent to $323.2 million.

“Our results are reflective of a dynamic market environment with higher average selling prices and favorable demand,” said Cal-Maine President Sherman Miller. “Elevated market pricing continues, primarily due to the impact of the ongoing epidemic of highly pathogenic avian influenza, which has significantly reduced the nation’s egg-laying capacity.”

“U.S. egg inventories were 29 percent lower in the final week of December 2022 than at the beginning of the year,” said the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It added that more than 43 million egg-laying hens were lost to either the avian flu itself or culling measures to stop the disease since the outbreak began in February 2022. (Related: Government says “bird flu” responsible for rising egg prices.)

Twitter chief Elon Musk fired three top executives when he took over the social media platform. The then company CEO Parag Agrawal, policy chief Vijaya Gadde along with CFO Nel Segal were removed from their positions a day after Musk took over. Turns out they have all filed lawsuits against Musk demanding reimbursement for litigation costs, investigations and inquiries related to their former jobs. Agrawal, along with the company’s former chief legal and financial officers, claim in the lawsuit that they are owed over $1 million, which Twitter is legally obligated to pay.

As per AFP report, The court filing listed various expenses associated with inquiries by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), but did not disclose the nature of the investigations or if they are still ongoing. Agrawal and former chief financial officer Ned Segal testified to the SEC last year and continued to engage with federal authorities. The SEC is examining whether Musk complied with securities rules when he purchased Twitter shares.