#uk national crime agency

[creativemedianews]

NCA: Cannabis couriers misled by traffickers by assuming UK authorities are lenient

NCA: Cannabis couriers misled by traffickers by assuming UK authorities are lenient #arrests #BorderForce

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Academic economists get big payouts when they help monopolists beat antitrust

After 40 years of rampant corporate crime, there's a new sheriff in town: Jonathan Kanter was appointed by Biden to run the DOJ Antitrust Divisoon, and he's overseen 170 "significant antitrust actions" in the past 2.5 years, culminating in a court case where Google was ruled to be an illegal monopolist:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Kanter's work is both extraordinary and par for the course. As Kanter said in a recent keynote for the Fordham Law Competition Law Institute’s 51st Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy, we're witnessing an epochal, global resurgence of antitrust:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-remarks-fordham-competition-law-0

Kanter's incredible enforcement track record isn't just part of a national trend – his colleagues in the FTC, CFPB and other agencies have also been pursuing an antitrust agenda not seen in generations – but also a worldwide trend. Antitrust enforcers in Canada, the UK, the EU, South Korea, Australia, Japan and even China are all taking aim at smashing corporate monopolies. Not only are they racking up impressive victories against these giant corporations, they're stealing the companies' swagger. After all, the point of enforcement isn't just to punish wrongdoing, but also to deter wrongdoing by others.

Until recently, companies hurled themselves into illegal schemes (mergers, predatory pricing, tying, refusals to deal, etc) without fear or hesitation. Now, many of these habitual offenders are breaking the habit, giving up before they've even tried. Take Wiz, a startup that turned down Google's record-shattering $23b buyout offer, understanding that the attempt would draw more antitrust scrutiny than it was worth:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wiz-turns-down-23-billion-022926296.html

As welcome as this antitrust renaissance is, it prompts an important question: why didn't we enforce antitrust law for the 40 years between Reagan and Biden?

That's what Kanter addresses the majority of his remarks to. The short answer is: crooked academic economists took bribes from monopolists and would-be monopolists to falsify their research on the impacts of monopolists, and made millions (literally – one guy made over $100m at this) testifying that monopolies were good and efficient.

After all, governments aren't just there to enforce rules – they have to make the rules first, and do to that, they need to understand how the world works, so they can understand how to fix the places where it's broken. That's where experts come in, filling regulators' dockets and juries' ears with truthful, factual testimony about their research. Experts can still be wrong, of course, but when the system works well, they're only wrong by accident.

The system doesn't work well. Back in the 1950s, the tobacco industry was threatened by the growing scientific consensus that smoking caused cancer. Industry scientists confirmed this finding. In response, the industry paid statisticians, doctors and scientists to produce deceptive research reports and testimony about the tobacco/cancer link.

The point of this work wasn't necessarily to convince people that tobacco was safe – rather, it was to create the sense that the safety of tobacco was a fundamentally unanswerable question. "Experts disagree," and you're not qualified to figure out who's right and who's wrong, so just stop trying to figure it out and light up.

In other words, Big Tobacco's cancer denial playbook wasn't so much an attack on "the truth" as it was an attack on epistemology – the system by which we figure out what is true and what isn't. The tactic was devastatingly effective. Not only did it allow the tobacco giants to kill millions of people with impunity, it allowed them to reap billions of dollars by doing so.

Since then, epistemology has been under sustained assault. By the 1970s, Big Oil knew that its products would render the Earth unfit for human habitation, and they hired the same companies that had abetted Big Tobacco's mass murder to provide cover for their own slow-motion, planetary scale killing spree.

Time and again, big business has used assaults on epistemology to provide cover for unthinkable crimes. This has given rise to today's epistemological crisis, in which we don't merely disagree about what is true, but (far more importantly) disagree about how the truth can be known:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

Ask a conspiratorialist why they believe in Qanon or Hatians in Springfield eating pets, and you'll get an extremely vibes-based answer – fundamentally, they believe it because it feels true. As the old saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason their way into.

This assault on reason itself is at the core of Kanter's critique. He starts off by listing three cases in which academic economists allowed themselves to be corrupted by the monopolies they studied:

George Mason University tricked an international antitrust enforcer into attending a training seminar that they believed to be affiliated with the US government. It was actually sponsored by the very companies that enforcer was scrutnizing, and featured a parade of "experts" who asserted that these companies were great, actually.

An academic from GMU – which receives substantial tech industry funding – signed an amicus brief opposing an enforcement action against their funders. The academic also presented a defense of these funders to the OECD, all while posing as a neutral academic and not disclosing their funding sources.

An ex-GMU economist, Joshua Wright, submitted a study defending Qualcomm against the FTC, without disclosing that he'd been paid to do so. Wright has elevated undisclosed conflicts of interest to an art form:

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/google-lawyer-secret-weapon-joshua-wright-c98d5a31

Kanter is at pains to point out that these three examples aren't exceptional. The economics profession – whose core tenet is "incentive matter" – has made it standard practice for individual researchers and their academic institutions to take massive sums from giant corporations. Incredibly, they insist that this has nothing to do with their support of monopolies as "efficient."

Academic centers often serve as money-laundries for monopolist funders; researchers can evade disclosure requirements when they publish in journals or testify in court, saying only that they work for some esteemed university, without noting that the university is utterly dependent on money from the companies they're defending.

Now, Kanter is a lawyer, not an academic, and that means that his job is to advocate for positions, and he's at pains to say that he's got nothing but respect for ideological advocacy. What he's objecting to is partisan advocacy dressed up as impartial expertise.

For Kanter, mixing advocacy with expertise doesn't create expert advocacy – it obliterates expertise, as least when it comes to making good policy. This mixing has created a "crisis of expertise…a pervasive breakdown in the distinction between expertise and advocacy in competition policy."

The point of an independent academia, enshrined in the American Association of University Professors' charter, is to "advance knowledge by the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators." We need an independent academy, because "to be of use to the legislator or the administrator, [an academic] must enjoy their complete confidence in the disinterestedness of [his or her] conclusions."

It's hard to overstate just how much money economists can make by defending monopolies. Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner gives the rate at $1,000/hour. Monopoly's top defenders make unimaginable sums, like U Chicago's Dennis Carlton, who's brought in over $100m in consulting fees:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-09-24-economists-as-apologists/

The hidden cost of all of this is epistemological consensus. As Tim Harford writes in his 2021 book The Data Detective, the truth can be known through research and peer-review:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

But when experts deliberately seek to undermine the idea of expertise, they cast laypeople into an epistemological void. We know these questions are important, but we can't trust our corrupted expert institutions. That leaves us with urgent questions – and no answers. That's a terrifying state to be in, and it makes you easy pickings for authoritarian grifters and conspiratorial swindlers.

Seen in this light, Kanter's antitrust work is even more important. In attacking corporate power itself, he is going after the machine that funds this nihilism-inducing corruption machine.

This week, Tor Books published SPILL, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/25/epistemological-chaos/#incentives-matter

Image: Ron Cogswell (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George.Mason.University.Arlington.Campus.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[ausetkmt]

Where It’s Most Dangerous to Be Black in America

Black Americans made up 13.6% of the US population in 2022 and 54.1% of the victims of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, aka homicide. That works out, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, to a homicide rate of 29.8 per 100,000 Black Americans and four per 100,000 of everybody else.(1)

A homicide rate of four per 100,000 is still quite high by wealthy-nation standards. The most up-to-date statistics available from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show a homicide of rate one per 100,000 in Canada as of 2019, 0.8 in Australia (2021), 0.4 in France (2017) and Germany (2020), 0.3 in the UK (2020) and 0.2 in Japan (2020).

But 29.8 per 100,000 is appalling, similar to or higher than the homicide rates of notoriously dangerous Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. It also represents a sharp increase from the early and mid-2010s, when the Black homicide rate in the US hit new (post-1968) lows and so did the gap between it and the rate for everybody else. When the homicide rate goes up, Black Americans suffer disproportionately. When it falls, as it did last year and appears to be doing again this year, it is mostly Black lives that are saved.

As hinted in the chart, racial definitions have changed a bit lately; the US Census Bureau and other government statistics agencies have become more open to classifying Americans as multiracial. The statistics cited in the first paragraph of this column are for those counted as Black or African American only. An additional 1.4% of the US population was Black and one or more other race in 2022, according to the Census Bureau, but the CDC Wonder (for “Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research”) databases from which most of the statistics in this column are drawn don’t provide population estimates or calculate mortality rates for this group. My estimate is that its homicide rate in 2022 was about six per 100,000.

A more detailed breakdown by race, ethnicity and gender reveals that Asian Americans had by far the lowest homicide rate in 2022, 1.6, which didn’t rise during the pandemic, that Hispanic Americans had similar homicide rates to the nation as a whole and that men were more than four times likelier than women to die by homicide in 2022. The biggest standout remained the homicide rate for Black Americans. 

Black people are also more likely to be victims of other violent crime, although the differential is smaller than with homicides. In the 2021 National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (the 2022 edition will be out soon), the rate of violent crime victimization was 18.5 per 1,000 Black Americans, 16.1 for Whites, 15.9 for Hispanics and 9.9 for Asians, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. Understandably, Black Americans are more concerned about crime than others, with 81% telling Pew Research Center pollsters before the 2022 midterm elections that violent crime was a “very important” issue, compared with 65% of Hispanics and 56% of Whites.

These disparities mainly involve communities caught in cycles of violence, not external predators. Of the killers of Black Americans in 2020 whose race was known, 89.4% were Black, according to the FBI. That doesn’t make those deaths any less of a tragedy or public health emergency. Homicide is seventh on the CDC’s list of the 15 leading causes of death among Black Americans, while for other Americans it’s nowhere near the top 15. For Black men ages 15 to 39, the highest-risk group, it’s usually No. 1, although in 2022 the rise in accidental drug overdoses appears to have pushed accidents just past it. For other young men, it’s a distant third behind accidents and suicides.

To be clear, I do not have a solution for this awful problem, or even much of an explanation. But the CDC statistics make clear that sky-high Black homicide rates are not inevitable. They were much lower just a few years ago, for one thing, and they’re far lower in some parts of the US than in others. Here are the overall 2022 homicide rates for the country’s 30 most populous metropolitan areas.

Metropolitan areas are agglomerations of counties by which economic and demographic data are frequently reported, but seldom crime statistics because the patchwork of different law enforcement agencies in each metro area makes it so hard. Even the CDC, which gets its mortality data from state health departments, doesn’t make it easy, which is why I stopped at 30 metro areas.(2)

Sorting the data this way does obscure one key fact about homicide rates: They tend to be much higher in the main city of a metro area than in the surrounding suburbs.

But looking at homicides by metro area allows for more informative comparisons across regions than city crime statistics do, given that cities vary in how much territory they cover and how well they reflect an area’s demographic makeup. Because the CDC suppresses mortality data for privacy reasons whenever there are fewer than 10 deaths to report, large metro areas are good vehicles for looking at racial disparities. Here are the 30 largest metro areas, ranked by the gap between the homicide rates for Black residents and for everybody else.

The biggest gap by far is in metropolitan St. Louis, which also has the highest overall homicide rate. The smallest gaps are in metropolitan San Diego, New York and Boston, which have the lowest homicide rates. Homicide rates are higher for everybody in metro St. Louis than in metro New York, but for Black residents they’re six times higher while for everyone else they’re just less than twice as high.

There do seem to be some regional patterns to this mayhem. The metro areas with the biggest racial gaps are (with the glaring exception of Portland, Oregon) mostly in the Rust Belt, those with the smallest are mostly (with the glaring exceptions of Boston and New York) in the Sun Belt. Look at a map of Black homicide rates by state, and the highest are clustered along the Mississippi River and its major tributaries. Southern states outside of that zone and Western states occupy roughly the same middle ground, while the Northeast and a few middle-of-the-country states with small Black populations are the safest for their Black inhabitants.(3)

Metropolitan areas in the Rust Belt and parts of the South stand out for the isolation of their Black residents, according to a 2021 study of Census data from Brown University’s Diversity and Disparities Project, with the average Black person living in a neighborhood that is 60% or more Black in the Detroit; Jackson, Mississippi; Memphis; Chicago; Cleveland and Milwaukee metro areas in 2020 (in metro St. Louis the percentage was 57.6%). Then again, metro New York and Boston score near the top on another of the project’s measures of residential segregation, which tracks the percentage of a minority group’s members who live in neighborhoods where they are over-concentrated compared with White residents, so segregation clearly doesn’t explain everything.

Looking at changes over time in homicide rates may explain more. Here’s the long view for Black residents of the three biggest metro areas. Again, racial definitions have changed recently. This time I’ve used the new, narrower definition of Black or African American for 2018 onward, and given estimates in a footnote of how much it biases the rates upward compared with the old definition.

All three metro areas had very high Black homicide rates in the 1970s and 1980s, and all three experienced big declines in the 1990s and 2000s. But metro Chicago’s stayed relatively high in the early 2010s then began a rebound in mid-decade that as of 2021 had brought the homicide rate for its Black residents to a record high, even factoring in the boost to the rate from the definitional change.

What happened in Chicago? One answer may lie in the growing body of research documenting what some have called the “Ferguson effect,” in which incidents of police violence that go viral and beget widespread protests are followed by local increases in violent crime, most likely because police pull back on enforcement. Ferguson is the St. Louis suburb where a 2014 killing by police that local prosecutors and the US Justice Department later deemed to have been in self-defense led to widespread protests that were followed by big increases in St. Louis-area homicide rates. Baltimore had a similar viral death in police custody and homicide-rate increase in 2015. In Chicago, it was the October 2014 shooting death of a teenager, and more specifically the release a year later of a video that contradicted police accounts of the incident, leading eventually to the conviction of a police officer for second-degree murder.

It’s not that police killings themselves are a leading cause of death among Black Americans. The Mapping Police Violence database lists 285 killings of Black victims by police in 2022, and the CDC reports 209 Black victims of “legal intervention,” compared with 13,435 Black homicide victims. And while Black Americans are killed by police at a higher rate relative to population than White Americans, this disparity — 2.9 to 1 since 2013, according to Mapping Police Violence — is much less than the 7.5-to-1 ratio for homicides overall in 2022. It’s the loss of trust between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve that seems to be disproportionately deadly for Black residents of those communities.

The May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer was the most viral such incident yet, leading to protests nationwide and even abroad, as well as an abortive local attempt to disband and replace the police department. The Minneapolis area subsequently experienced large increases in homicides and especially homicides of Black residents. But nine other large metro areas experienced even bigger increases in the Black homicide rate from 2019 to 2022.

A lot of other things happened between 2019 and 2022 besides the Floyd protests, of course, and I certainly wouldn’t ascribe all or most of the pandemic homicide-rate increase to the Ferguson effect. It is interesting, though, that the St. Louis area experienced one of the smallest percentage increases in the Black homicide rate during this period, and it decreased in metro Baltimore.

Also interesting is that the metro areas experiencing the biggest percentage increases in Black residents’ homicide rates were all in the West (if your definition of West is expansive enough to include San Antonio). If this were confined to affluent areas such as Portland, Seattle, San Diego and San Francisco, I could probably spin a plausible-sounding story about it being linked to especially stringent pandemic policies and high work-from-home rates, but that doesn’t fit Phoenix, San Antonio or Las Vegas, so I think I should just admit that I’m stumped.

The standout in a bad way has been the Portland area, which had some of the longest-running and most contentious protests over policing, along with many other sources of dysfunction. The area’s homicide rate for Black residents has more than tripled since 2019 and is now second highest among the 30 biggest metro areas after St. Louis. Again, I don’t have any real solutions to offer here, but whatever the Portland area has been doing since 2019 isn’t working.

(1) The CDC data for 2022 are provisional, with a few revisions still being made in the causes assigned to deaths (was it a homicide or an accident, for example), but I’ve been watching for weeks now, and the changes have been minimal. The CDC is still using 2021 population numbers to calculate 2022 mortality rates, and when it updates those, the homicide rates will change again, but again only slightly. The metropolitan-area numbers also don’t reflect a recent update by the White House Office of Management and Budget to its list of metro areas and the counties that belong to them, which when incorporated will bring yet more small mortality-rate changes. To get these statistics from the CDC mortality databases, I clicked on “Injury Intent and Mechanism” and then on “Homicide”; in some past columns I instead chose “ICD-10 Codes” and then “Assault,” which delivered slightly different numbers.

(2) It’s easy to download mortality statistics by metro area for the years 1999 to 2016, but the databases covering earlier and later years do not offer this option, and one instead has to select all the counties in a metro area to get area-wide statistics, which takes a while.

(3) The map covers the years 2018-2022 to maximize the number of states for which CDC Wonder will cough up data, although as you can see it wouldn’t divulge any numbers for Idaho, Maine, Vermont and Wyoming (meaning there were fewer than 10 homicides of Black residents in each state over that period) and given the small numbers involved, I wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock in the rates for the Dakotas, Hawaii, Maine and Montana.

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/14/where-it-s-most-dangerous-to-be-black-in-america/cdea7922-52f0-11ee-accf-88c266213aac_story.html)

[thehopefuljournalist]

Am I a little bit late for some of you? I might be. But anyways. Here's what went right around the world this past week :)

Youth climate activists won a huge climate lawsuit

Sixteens youths (aged five to 22) from Montana, US, have emerged victorious after suing state officials for violating their right to a clean environment.

In their lawsuit, they argued that Montana's fossil fuel policies contributed to climate change, which harms their physical and mental health. Montana is a major coal producer, with large oil and gas reserves. The state has rebuffed these claims, saying that their emissions were insignificant on a global scale.

Judge Kathy Seely, in a 103-page ruling, set a legal precedent for young people’s rights to a safe climate by finding in their favour. “Every additional tonne of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions exacerbates plaintiffs’ injuries and risks locking in irreversible climate injuries".

This win marks the very first time a US court has ruled against a government for a violation of constitutional rights based on climate change. It will now be up to Montana lawmakers to bring state policies in line.

“As fires rage in the west, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in Montana is a gamechanger that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos.” - Julia Olson, executive director of nonprofit law firm, Our Children’s Trust, which represented the youths in this case.

Number of Mexicans living in poverty fell by millions

Thanks to a new minimum wage boost and increases to pensions, the number of Mexicans living in poverty fell by 8.9 million between 2020-2022, according to new data published by the country’s social development agency, Coneval.

Coneval’s statistics suggest that the number of people living in extreme poverty also fell – from 10.8 million in 2020 to 9.1 million last year – although that figure is still up from a pre-Covid 8.7 million recorded in 2018.

There is still a long way to go, and some critics do claim that during the current president, López Obrador's presidency has been characterized by austerity.

An organised crime group trafficking endangered species has been jailed

The Wildlife Justice Commission (WJC), a small European wildlife charity, is apparently busting kingpins behind as much as half of the world's illegal trade in pangolin scales. The traffickers began six-year jail sentences a few weeks ago.

The wildlife charity went undercover to expose three Vietnamese and one Guinean national, members of an organised crime group trafficking body parts of endangered species including rhinos. 

They were arrested in May 2022, following a four-year investigation by the WJC, and were accused of trafficking 7.1 tonnes of pangolin scales, as well as 850kg of ivory. Last month they pleaded guilty to smuggling and were jailed for six years.

All eight species of pangolin are listed as threatened animals, four critically endangered - they are protected by international law.

“There has not been a reported seizure of pangolin scales in Asia originating from Africa in more than 550 days,” said Steve Carmody, WJC’s director of programmes. “There is no clearer example of the importance of disrupting organised crime networks.”

AI gave conservationists a breakthrough

The use of AI-controlled microphones and cameras seems set to revolutionise

biodiversity monitoring in the UK following groundbreaking work by researchers at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). They used the tech to record and analyse 3,000 hours of wildlife audio captured by monitors located near London railway lines.

The computers detected dozens of bird species, foxes, deer, bats and hedgehogs, and mapped their locations.

It’s hoped the innovation will help improve conservation and habitat management on Network Rail land.

This year is best ever for UK renewable energy installations

This years looks to be the best year so far for UK renewable energy installations, with record numbers of households fitting solar panels and heat pumps.

2023 marks the first time solar panel installations have topped an average of 20,000 a month, as homeowners look to harvest energy from the sun amid rising utility bills. 

Read the full story here.

The UK’s Tree of the Year shortlist was revealed

The Woodland Trust has announced the shortlist for its annual celebration of some of the UK’s most treasured ancient trees, and for 2023 the spotlight is on the urban landscape.

“Ancient trees in towns and cities are vital for the health of nature, people and planet,” said the charity’s lead campaigner Naomi Tilley. “They give thousands of urban wildlife species essential life support, boost the UK’s biodiversity and bring countless health and wellbeing benefits to communities.”

Article published August 17, 2023

Thank you so much for reading! Let me know what interested you, and if there's any specific topic you'd like me to dig into, my DM's are always open :)

Much love!

[aimeedaisies]

The Princess Royal’s Official Engagements in February 2024

01/02 Visited ReBoot (Moray Computer Recycling) in Forres. 🖥️

As Warden, opened the Queen Elizabeth II classrooms at Gordonstoun School. 🏫

Visited Lossie Community Hub at the Warehouse Theatre, in Lossiemouth. 🎭

Unofficial Sir Tim, as Chair of the Board of Trustees, attended the opening ceremony of the Zimingzhong 凝时聚珍: Clockwork Treasures from China's Forbidden City exhibition at the London Science Museum. 🐉🧧🕰️

03/02 With Sir Tim As Patron of the Scottish Rugby Union, attended the Six Nations Rugby Match between Wales and Scotland at Principality Stadium in Cardiff. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏉

05/02 Visited Dressability Clothing Alterations Charity in Swindon, to mark its 25th Anniversary. 👗🪡🧵

As Commandant-in-Chief (Youth) of St John Ambulance, attended the dedication of a new Community Response Unit in Devizes, Wiltshire. 🚑

06/02 Held an Investiture at Windsor Castle. 🎖️

As Patron of the Royal College of Occupational Therapists, attended the launch of Nottingham West Primary Care Network’s Interactive Group Therapy at Plumptre Hall. 🩺

As President of the UK Fashion and Textile Association Limited, visited GH Hurt and Son in Nottingham. 🪡

With Sir Tim As Royal Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, attended the announcement of the winner of The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering at the Science Museum in London. ⚙️🥂

07/02 As Colonel-in-Chief of The Royal Logistic Corps, visited the Defence Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Munitions and Search Training Regiment at St George’s Barracks in Bicester. 💥

As President of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, visited the Commission’s Headquarters in Maidenhead. 🪦

As Patron of Catch22, visited the Commissioned Rehabilitative Services at Community Links in London. 🔗

08/02 As Vice Patron of the British Horse Society, visited Wormwood Scrubs Pony Centre in West London. 🐎

As President of the Royal Yachting Association, attended the Annual Luncheon at Trinity House in London. 🛥️🥪

09/02 In Wales, Princess Anne; 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

As Royal Patron of the National Coastwatch Institution, visited Worms Head Station in Rhossili, followed by a Reception at South Gower Sports Club in Scurlage. 🔎🍾

Visited Newport Medieval Ship. 🚢

Visited Newport Transporter Bridge which is undergoing maintenance. 🌉

10/02 With Sir Tim As Patron of the Scottish Rugby Union, attended the Six Nations Rugby Match between France and Scotland at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh. 🇫🇷🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏉

12/02 As Patron of Swinfen Telemedicine, attended a Meeting at the Royal Society of Medicine. 💊

As Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, held a Dinner at Buckingham Palace. 🎓

13/02 Held an Investiture at Windsor Castle. 🎖️

As Master of the Corporation of Trinity House, chaired the Quarterly Meeting of the Court at Trinity House. 📆

14/02 As Royal Patron of the National Coastwatch Institution, visited Hengistbury Head Station near Bournemouth. 🌊

As Colonel-in-Chief of the Intelligence Corps, visited I Company at Hamworthy Barracks in Poole. 🕵️‍♀️

15/02 Visited the Ordnance Survey National Mapping Agency in Southampton. 🗺️

With Sir Tim Attended Evensong and the James Caird Society’s Dedication Service followed by a Reception in Westminster Abbey, to mark the 150th Anniversary of the birth of Sir Ernest Shackleton. 🔭🧭🇦🇶

16/02 Visited knife crime community group ‘Off the Streets’ North Northamptonshire in Wellingborough. 🚫🔪

20/02 As President of the UK Fashion and Textile Association, visited Laxtons Limited in Baildon near Bradford. 🧶

As President of the UK Fashion and Textile Association, visited Marton Mills in Otley, West Yorkshire. 🪡

21/02 In Doncaster, South Yorkshire, Princess Anne;

Visited Agemaspark Precision Engineering Company. ⚙️

Visited Haith Group Vegetable Processing Machinery Company. 🥕🥦

As Patron of the Butler Trust, visited HM Prison and Young Offender Institution Doncaster. 🚓👮‍♀️

As Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Carmen, attended a Joint Services Awards Dinner at Painters’ Hall in London. 🍽️

22/01 Visited London South Bank Technical College and Lee Marley Academy. ✏️👷

As Patron of Save the Children UK, visited Mary’s Living and Giving Shop in Wandsworth. 👚

23/02 unofficial Departed Heathrow Airport for Namibia 🇬🇧✈️🇳🇦

24/02 unofficial Arrived at Windhoek Hosea Kutako International Airport in Namibia. ✈️🇳🇦

Representing The King, Princess Anne called upon Mrs Monica Geingos (widow of Dr Hage Geingob). 🖤

Unofficial Sir Tim represented Princess Anne, Patron of the Scottish Rugby Union, at the Six Nations Rugby Match between Scotland and England at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏉

25/02 Representing The King, Princess Anne attended the Burial Service for Dr Hage Geingob at Heroes’ Acre. 🕊️

Later attended a State Luncheon given by The President of Namibia at State House. 🍽️

26/02 unofficial Arrived at Heathrow Airport from Namibia. 🇳🇦✈️🇬🇧

With Sir Tim Attended the British Horseracing Authority’s Thoroughbred Industry Employee Awards at Ascot Racecourse. 🐎🏆

27/02 With Sir Tim Attended a Service of Thanksgiving for the late King Constantine II at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle with members of 🇬🇧, 🇬🇷, 🇩🇰 and 🇪🇸 royal families.

28/02 As Patron of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, attended the Emergency Medicine Trainees' Association Annual Conference at Hilton Newcastle Gateshead. 💉💊

As Royal Patron of the Motor Neurone Disease Association, attended a Rugby League Reception at Leeds Rhinos Rugby Club, in Headingley, Leeds. 🦽🏉

29/02 unofficial Departed from Heathrow Airport for the United Arab Emirates 🇬🇧✈️🇦🇪

Unofficial Sir Tim, as President of Never Such Innocence, attended a 10th anniversary celebration for the charity at Edinburgh Castle. 🏰

Total official engagements for Anne in February: 44

2024 total so far: 85

Total official engagements accompanied by Tim in February: 6

2024 total so far: 23

FYI - due to certain royal family members being off ill/in recovery I won’t be posting everyone’s engagement counts out of respect, I am continuing to count them and release the totals at the end of the year.

[allthegeopolitics]

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination voiced concern, Friday, about continued hate crimes, hate speech and incidents against minorities and asylum seekers by politicians and public figures in Britain, Anadolu Agency reports.

“The Committee expressed its concern about the persistence of hate crimes, hate speech and xenophobic incidents on various platforms and by politicians and public figures,” Committee member, Gun Kut, told journalists at a press conference before presenting its findings on the UK and other nations in a report to the UN in Geneva.

“It has particularly concerned about recurring racist acts and violence against ethnic and ethnic-religious populations, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, by extremist far-right and white supremacist individuals and groups.”

He said these included the violent acts seen in the UK in late July and early August. [...]

Continue Reading.

[merelyroleplayers]

Now playing in the Main House

Act Two of Five: Search this house from bottom to top!

Coming next on 22 October – Peggy, the Crooked (Vigil Backstage)

Programme notes

This production contains strong language, drug use, gunfire, and gory fantasy violence.

Luvvie alert! We simply must introduce you to The Thorne Files, a fellow Monster of the Week actual play podcast detailing the exploits and mysteries explored by agents of Thorne Investigations, a paranormal investigations agency, in 1952.

Dramatis personae and other definitions

Peggy Tailor: The prodigal daughter of a local family that dabbles in fey frolicking and organised crime, back in town to lay low after a grift gone horribly wrong.

Calistarius Softbinding: A local horror writer with a cult following, who sponsored the construction of a whole new wing of Sherrydown’s library. Calistarius Softbinding is a nom de plume.

Ed Kincaid: A once promising, now disgraced MI5 agent assigned to investigate the more … esoteric threats reported to the national security hotline.

Jinny Greenteeth: Proprietor of the Grove of Oddities, a tacky Sherrydown tourist attraction. In a past life, Jinny was branded a witch after a series of drownings in her Lancashire village.

Department of Omissions (DO, DoOm): The UK government department tasked with preventing harm to citizens from supernatural phenomena. Severely defunded under Tory austerity policies and currently prioritising major urban population centres.

Sherrydown, Brackshire: A historic English market town. One of the first towns to lose its DoOm office.

Omission effect: The rejection of certain beings and phenomena by long-term memory. Recently lifted.

Credits

COMPERE: Matt Boothman

STARRING:

Ellie Pitkin as Peggy Tailor, the Crooked

Chris Buxey as Calistarius Softbinding, the Expert

Chris MacLennan as Ed Kincaid, the Professional

Josh Yard as Jinny Greenteeth, the Spellslinger

with Chris Starkey as Cameron Jarvis

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Monster of the Week, designed by Michael Sands

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

SOUND DESIGN BY: Matt Boothman

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

Find us

On Instagram @MerelyRoleplayers

On Tumblr @merelyroleplayers

www.MerelyRoleplayers.com

[gatheringbones]

[“Both the US and UK typically tie domestic workers’ visas to a specific employer. As a result, a staggering 80 per cent of migrant domestic workers entering the US find that they have been deceived about their contract, and 78 per cent have had employers threaten them with deportation if they complain. In the UK, these ‘tied visas’ were only introduced – by Prime Minister Theresa May, who was home secretary at the time – in 2012, so it is possible to see their effect very clearly. Migrant domestic workers who entered the UK after 2012 on a tied visa are twice as likely to be physically abused by their employers as those who arrived on a visa that gave them the right to change employers. Compared to migrant domestic workers on the previous, more flexible form of visa, those on tied visas are substantially more likely to be underpaid, assaulted, and overworked, to be expected to sleep on the floor, and to have their passports confiscated by their employers. Punitive immigration law produces harm.

However, much mainstream trafficking discourse characterises the abuse of migrants and people selling sex as the work of individual bad actors, external to and independent of state actions and political choices. Sometimes this discourse works not only to obscure the role of the state but to absolve it. One feminist commentator, for example, writes of the sex trade that ‘criminalisation doesn’t rape and beat women. Men do’. From this, we might conclude that changing the law is pointless because, what makes women vulnerable is simply men. This may feel true for women who do not have to contend with immigration law, police, or the constant fear of deportation, but we can see from the results of tied visas that the legal context – including migration law – is heavily implicated in producing vulnerability and harm.

For undocumented migrant workers looking to challenge bad workplace conditions, penalties do not stop at deportation; instead, these workers face criminalisation if they are discovered. In the UK, someone convicted of ‘illegal working’ can face up to fifty-one weeks in prison, an unlimited fine, and the prospect of their earnings being confiscated as the ‘proceeds of crime’. This increases undocumented people’s justified fear of state authorities and makes them even less able to report labour abuses. Such laws therefore heighten their vulnerability and directly push them into exploitative working environments, thereby creating a supply of highly vulnerable, ripe-for-abuse workers. Increasingly, border enforcement is infiltrating new areas of civic life. Landlords are now expected to check tenants’ immigration status before renting to them; proposals have been floated to freeze or close the bank accounts of undocumented people, and a documentation check was introduced in England when accessing both healthcare and education, as part of an explicit ‘hostile environment’ policy (although both have been challenged by migrants’ rights organisers, including in court). The UK devotes far more resources to policing migration than it does to preventing the exploitation of workers. Researcher Bridget Anderson notes that ‘the [National Minimum Wage] had 93 compliance officers in 2009 and the Gangmasters Licensing Authority [which works to protect vulnerable and exploited workers] had 25 inspectors … The proposed number of UK Border Agency Staff for Local Immigration teams … is 7,500.’

This is the context in which commercial sex frequently occurs. Undocumented or insecurely documented people are enmeshed within a punitive, state-enforced infrastructure of deportability, disposability, and precarity. Any work they do – whether it is at a restaurant, construction site, cannabis farm, nail bar, or brothel – carries a risk of being detained, jailed, or deported. In any work they do, they will be unable to assert labour rights. Even renting a home or accessing healthcare can be difficult. All this makes undocumented people more dependent on those who can help them – such as the people they paid to helped them cross the border, or an unscrupulous employer. It should therefore be no surprise that some undocumented migrants are pushed into sex work by those they rely on, or that some enter into it even if the working conditions are exploitative or abusive.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Lula urges UK authorities not to extradite Assange

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called on British magistrates not to grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's extradition to the United States, which is to be decided upon in London on Monday, Agencia Brasil reported.

The South American leader thus spoke in favor of the Australian journalist facing espionage charges in the United States and claimed Assange should have been rewarded for revealing “secrets of the powerful” instead of being imprisoned: “I hope that the persecution of Assange ends and he gets back the freedom he deserves as soon as possible.”

Assange faces 18 charges under the US Espionage Act. If convicted, he could face up to 175 years in prison. He is accused of having leaked 250,000 classified military and diplomatic documents that revealed war crimes and human rights abuses in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The US authorities want to convict Assange because his actions have damaged US national security by endangering the lives of US agents. His possible extradition has been criticized by journalists' organizations and human rights agencies.

Continue reading.

[calacuspr]

Calacus Monthly Hit & Miss – Khelif & IBA

Every month we look at the best and worst communicators in the sports world from the last few weeks.

IMANE KHELIF & IBA

Gender has become a huge issue in sport as well as society.

Ever since South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya underwent tests to prove her gender back in 2009, and the LGBTQ+ community has found a voice in mainstream society, there have been questions raised about fairness and eligibility.

The issue was thrown back into the limelight during the Paris 2024 boxing competition when Italian boxer Angela Carini broke down in tears and quit her bout against the Algerian Imane Khelif after 46 seconds in a fight that sparked huge controversy at the Olympics.

Khelif is one of two boxers permitted to fight at the Games despite being disqualified from the women’s world championships last year for allegedly failing gender eligibility tests.

The International Boxing Association, (IBA) has had a difficult few years, with concerns over governance and integrity ultimately seeing it removed as boxing’s Olympic governing body by the International Olympic Committee (IOC)  in 2023.

Former President Gafur Rakhimov was said to by the U.S. Treasury Department to have strong links to organised crime, which led the IOC to launch an inquiry and suspend IBA initially in 2019.

Rakhimov’s successor, Russian Umar Kremlev, is said to have strong links to state President Vladimir Putin while the governing body has been backed by Russian state energy firm Gazprom, which Kremlev said had ceased to be the case since 2023.

Concerns over the integrity of bouts and judging were underlined by report by sports investigator Richard McLaren which said “corruption abounded” when he concluded his report into IBA’s governance.

IBA is also under threat from the newly-formed World Boxing, which was set up by former IBA presidential candidate Boris van der Vorst, who have already held talks with the IOC about leading the boxing at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028 and have almost three dozen nations supporting them.

So it’s fair to say that IBA’s credibility continues to be stretched.

Last year, Khelif and fellow boxer Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan were disqualified from the World Boxing Championships.

“Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women,” the Association’s president, Umar Kremlev, told Russia’s Tass news agency at the time. “According to the results of the tests, it was proved that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from competition.”

It was a pure coincidence that Khelif had beaten Russian opponent Azalia Amineva in the semi-final, her disqualification ensuring that Amineva’s unbeaten record was restored.

Fast forward to Paris and Khelif, who was born and raised a woman, and does not identify as either transgender or intersex.

The controversy over her inclusion in the women’s 66kg boxing event prompted everyone from author JK Rowling, Tesla billionaire Elon Musk and former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss to pour scorn over Khelif’s inclusion.

Carini, meanwhile, expressed regret over her actions in the ring. "All this controversy makes me sad," Carini told Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport. "I'm sorry for my opponent, too. If the IOC said she can fight, I respect that decision. It wasn't something I intended to do.

"Actually, I want to apologise to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke."

The IOC made a statement criticising IBA’s governance and later IOC President Thomas Bach confirmed that the boxers were not transgender.

He confirmed: “We have two boxers who are born as women, who have been raised as women, who have a passport as a woman and have competed for many years as women. Some want to own a definition of who is a women.”

He went on to underline the IOC’s position while referring to the wider and politically motivated campaign by Russian interests against the IOC and the Paris Olympics.

He added: “What we have seen from the Russian side and in particular from the (IBA),” Bach said, “they have undertaken already way before these Games with a defamation campaign against France, against the Games, against the IOC.”

IOC Director of Communications, Mark Adams, dismissed the legitimacy of IBA’s testing and the frenzy it was attempting to capitalise on.

He said: “The whole process is flawed. From the conception of the test, to the way the test was shared with us, to the way the tests were made public, it's so flawed that it's impossible to engage with it.

“I'm not going to discuss the individual intimate details of athletes in public, which I think is quite disgraceful for those who leaked that material. Frankly, it must be terrible to be put in that position. On top of all the social media harassment these athletes have had to endure.”

Despite their lack of involvement from Paris 2024, IBA called a press conference to build upon the controversy and explain why they had banned Khelif from their own event last year.

Given their reputation as an organisation, and despite of the facts as laid out by the IOC, what IBA needed to do was show leadership, authority and professionalism.

That would send a message to the world that they are a serious organisation capable of representing the diverse boxing family and acting with integrity.

What transpired was quite the opposite.

Reporters were kept waiting for the press conference for over an hour amid technical difficulties which were to affect the translations, the live feed to Kremlev in Russia and the sound system.

One reporter described the event as “the most extraordinary, chaotic, shambolic and badly organised international sporting press conference I have ever attended,” and it was perhaps a fatal blow to IBA’s hopes of regaining Olympic Programme control for boxing.

The speakers rambled, avoided answering direct questions and there was no coherent messaging to convince the attendant media that IBA, and by extension its point of view, was credible.

IBA Chief Executive, Chris Roberts, a former British Army officer, revealed that blood tests carried out by a laboratory in Istanbul during the 2022 World Championship came up as inconsistent for Khelif and another boxer, with a similar test the next year leading to her disqualification.

He added that Roberts the controversy “wasn’t anything that we wanted. We delivered the test information to the IOC and they haven’t done anything with it because they believe in their own criteria, which is the passport. We never intended to raise any issues because this is not our event. We are now here because the media has questions.”

Kremlev used the opportunity to attack the IOC and President Bach again, claiming that he was standing up for women’s sport, despite all the speakers being men.

In a rambling tirade that prompted journalists to leave or ask him to stop talking, Kremlev said; “As a Christian, the Olympic opening ceremony was something horrible. Today we are destroying sport, especially feminine sport.

“We have genetic tests showing that these are men. We have not checked what’s between their legs. There are doctors and medics who can verify these things. We don’t know whether they were born like that or changes were made.

"Today we are witnessing the death of women's boxing, the corruption of judges. All this is happening while Mr Bach is president (of the IOC). Under no circumstances should we allow women's boxing to be destroyed. Today not only is women's boxing being destroyed, but I believe that in the future they will also try to destroy women's sport.”

Several journalists and other people who were attending left in disgust, at not just the language, but the tone of the answers from the IBA participants.

Nothing is ever off the record with journalists and it was laughable that Roberts then contradicted his President by confirming that Gazprom was still a sponsor and also undermining the validity of the 2023 tests by saying that there was no independent presence when they took place.

No wonder the IOC’s Mark Adams responded: “It was a chaotic farce. The organization and the content of this press conference tells you everything you need to know about their governance and credibility.

"It clearly demonstrates that the sport of boxing needs a new federation to run boxing. If you ever needed any evidence at all that the IBA is unfit to run boxing just look at the key members of the IBA who took part in that travesty yesterday.

"We would love to see boxing, we want to see boxing on the programme in LA. Now it is up to the boxing community to organise themselves for the sport and for the athletes." 

It wasn’t just Carini who came to Khelif’s defence.

Amy Broadhurst, who competed for Team GB at this summer's Games, recently spoke out on Khelif competing in Paris, having previously fought and beaten the Algerian in the final of the 2022 World Championships.

"Have a lot of people texting me over Imane Khelif," she posted on X. "Personally I don't think she has done anything to 'cheat'. "I thinks it's the way she was born and that's out of her control. The fact that she has been [beaten] by nine females before says it all."

Beyond the confusion, the chaos and the shambles that was IBA’s press conference, not once did any of the speakers show any sympathy for the online bullying and abuse that Khelif has faced.

Khelif (above in red) had earlier said the furore was having “massive effects” as she called for restraint. “I send a message to all the people of the world to uphold the Olympic principles and the Olympic Charter, to refrain from bullying all athletes, because this has effects,” she said.

After winning gold by beating Chinese world champion Yang Liu by a unanimous decision over five rounds to win welterweight gold, Khelif said: “I am fully qualified to take part in this competition. I’m a woman like any other woman.

"For eight years, this has been my dream, and I'm now the Olympic champion and gold medalist. That also gives my success a special taste because of those attacks.

"We are in the Olympics to perform as athletes, and I hope that we will not see any similar attacks in future Olympics.

 “I was born a woman, I lived a woman, I competed as a woman, there’s no doubt about that. [The detractors] are enemies of success, that is what I call them. And that also gives my success a special taste because of these attacks.

“As for the IBA, since 2018 I have been boxing under their umbrella. They know me very well, they know what I’m capable of, they know how I’ve developed over the years but now they are not recognised any more. They hate me and I don’t know why. I send them a single message: with this gold medal, my dignity, my honour is above everything else.”

Paris 2024 will go down as one of the greatest Olympiad of all time, with the Khelif affair a rare controversy which raised questions of fairness and safety. But Khelif has struggled in other competitions, her Olympic gold surely the peak of her career which has never been characterised by overly powerful punching.

Sadly for IBA, their communications and their shambolic Paris press conference end any hope they had of regaining the hearts and minds of the boxing community, or, more importantly, the support of the IOC.

[cyber-sec]

UK’s NCA Leads Major Cobalt Strike Takedown

Source: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/uks-nca-leads-major-cobalt-strike/

More info: https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/national-crime-agency-leads-international-operation-to-degrade-illegal-versions-of-cobalt-strike

[theculturedmarxist]

The US has used its veto at the UN security council to block a resolution calling for Israel to allow humanitarian corridors into the Gaza Strip, a pause in the fighting and the lifting of an order for civilians to leave the north of the besieged territory.

The text – supported by 12 of the 15 members of the security council on Wednesday – contained criticism of “heinous terrorist crimes by Hamas” and made no direct reference of Israel. In an attempt to win US support, the draft resolution did not explicitly call for a ceasefire, instead referencing a “humanitarian pause”.

But the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said the resolution, carefully crafted by Brazilian diplomats, was unacceptable because it made no mention of Israel’s right to self-defence. The UK abstained, saying the resolution lacked mention of the way Hamas was using ordinary Palestinians as human shields.

The US ambassador said she was horrified and saddened by the loss of life, but that the actions of Hamas had brought about the humanitarian crisis. She also called for time to let Joe Biden’s diplomacy play out.

Israel thanked the US for using its veto. China described the move as “nothing short of unbelievable” while Russia said it was an example of US double standards.

Two members of the G7 on the council – Japan and France – broke with the US by backing the motion.

The draft resolution also called for “humanitarian pauses to allow full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access for United Nations humanitarian agencies”. Its failure to pass represented another blow to the authority of the world body.

Meanwhile, a meeting of the 59-strong Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in Riyadh accused Israel’s forces of targeting al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza.

Tuesday’s explosion, which killed hundreds, was blamed by Palestinian officials on an Israeli airstrike. Israel said it was caused by a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, which denied responsibility.

Israel has been using media and diplomatic channels to try to convince leaders of Arab countries that blast was caused by militants, after even its regional allies rushed to blame it for the explosion.

In the only sign of a reassessment by Arab states, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the UN, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, called for an independent investigation into the hospital strike and said anyone found guilty should be held to account. But she said regardless of the culprit, the death toll of Palestinians was unacceptable.

The dispute over responsibility may have little resonance among the Arab public. A former French ambassador to the US, Gérard Araud, said: “The truth about who was responsible for the Gaza hospital strike is now irrelevant. Public opinion has decided: Israel is the culprit. All the explanations won’t do anything. This is a major defeat for Israel. It will have political consequences.”

Arab state foreign ministries have issued individual statements condemning Israel for the explosion, including Bahrain, which established ties with Israel in the Abraham Accords of 2020.

Morocco, another country that recognised Israel in 2020, also blamed it for the strike, as did Egypt, which became the first Arab country to normalise relations in 1979.

Saudi Arabia, which has ended talks on potential ties with Israel since the Israel-Hamas war flared, called the blast a “heinous crime committed by the Israeli occupation forces”.

The rapid apportioning of blame coincided with angry rallies across the region, with more planned on Wednesday after calls for a “day of rage”.

A mini-summit between Joe Biden and Arab states, as well as the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, was due to be held in Amman on Wednesday, but has been cancelled. The Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said the summit would be held only “when the decision to stop the war and put an end to [the] massacres” was taken.

The authority of most Gulf monarchies is secure, but they know what they risk if they are seen to be siding with Israel’s version of events at present. The popularity of Abbas, seen as a security subcontractor for Israel by some Palestinians, was already at a low ebb.

Years of patient work trying to build a new relationship between Israel and some Arab states looks set to be undone, a trend that will delight hardliners in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine. Some extremists in the Israeli government also have no interest in a relationship with Arab states if it involves compromise over the Palestinian question.

The Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, issued a warning that he could unleash protests inside Egypt if Israel did not back down.

He again said Israel was seeking to expel Palestinians over the Gaza southern border into the Sinai peninsula and said to Israel: “The Negev Desert [about 4,500 sq miles of land in southern Israel] is before you if you want to displace Palestinian citizens, but not Sinai, and then Sinai will not become a base to attack you and for you to use it as an excuse to attack Egypt.”

He has been demanding Israel allow aid into Gaza through the Rafah crossing into Egypt, but only with US-backed Israeli assurances that Israel will not attack the convoys. Israel fears the convoys will contain ammunition for Hamas, a central issue in the talks between Israel and the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken.

[mariacallous]

Last week, WIRED published a deep-dive investigation into Trickbot, the prolific Russian ransomware gang. This week, US and UK authorities sanctioned 11 alleged members of Trickbot and its related group, Conti, including Maksim Galochkin, aka Bentley, one of the alleged members whose real-world identity we confirmed through our investigation. Coincidence? Maybe. Either way, it's a big deal.

In addition to the US and UK sanctions, the US Justice Department also unsealed indictments filed in three US federal courts against Galochkin and eight other alleged Trickbot members for ransomware attacks against entities in Ohio, Tennessee, and California. Because everyone charged is a Russian national, however, it is unlikely they will ever be arrested or face trial.

While Russian cybercriminals typically enjoy immunity, the same may not remain true for the country’s military hackers. The lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) says the ICC will begin pursuing charges for cyber war crimes. The prosecutor, Karim Khan, did not name Russia, but the move follows a formal petition from the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley’s School of Law asking the ICC to prosecute Russia’s Sandworm hackers for war crimes. Part of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, Sandworm is responsible for causing blackouts in Ukraine, the only known instances of cyberattacks shutting down an electrical grid. Sandworm also released the NotPetya malware against Ukraine, which ultimately spread globally and caused an unprecedented $10 billion in damages worldwide.

Russia is far from the only country that engages in offensive cyberwar tactics. China-backed hackers have repeatedly targeted the US and other countries, and they may be getting some help finding unpatched vulnerabilities. A Chinese law passed in 2022 demands that any network technology company operating in the country share details about vulnerabilities in its products with the Chinese government within two days of their discovery. Information about these vulnerabilities may then be shared with China’s hackers. It’s unclear how many Western companies comply with the law or provide enough information to allow Chinese hackers to exploit the products’ flaws.

Speaking of Chinese hackers, Microsoft this week finally explained how China’s state-sponsored hackers managed to steal a cryptographic key that allowed the attackers to successfully access the Outlook email accounts of at least 25 organizations, including US government agencies. According to Microsoft, the hackers broke into the account of a company engineer using token-stealing malware. They then used that account to access a cache of crash data that accidentally contained the signing key they then stole and used to go on an Outlook hacking spree. None of this was supposed to be possible, and Microsoft says it has corrected several flaws in its systems that allowed the attack to happen.

Before he died in a mysterious plane crash last month following an attempted coup against Russian president Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin wasn’t just the leader of the Wagner Group mercenaries. He was also the head of the notorious Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian outfit responsible for widespread disinformation campaigns. While the IRA was reportedly shut down, new research shows that pro-Prigozhin trolls continue to push his agenda. Many of the accounts spreading disinformation on X (formerly Twitter) have been banned. But since when has that stopped them?

Elsewhere, we explained how prompt injection attacks against generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT take advantage of a flaw that’s difficult to fix. We detailed how hard it is to opt out of allowing Facebook to use your data to train its AI. We have a rundown on Proton Sentinel, a suite of tools that are similar to Google’s offerings but with a strong emphasis on privacy and security. We also co-published a story with The Markup into Axon’s quest to build Taser-armed drones. And we got the inside scoop on a meeting between top US spies and civil liberties groups over Section 702 of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, which is set to expire at the end of the year.

But that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Your New Car Is a Privacy Nightmare

Car companies are collecting and selling extremely detailed personal data from drivers who have no real way to opt out, a new report from the Mozilla Foundation found. Researchers spent hundreds of hours studying 25 privacy policies for major car brands and found that none of them met the foundation’s minimum standards around privacy and security.

According to the report, modern cars, stuffed to the roof with sensors, collect more information about you than just about any other product in your life. They know where you go, what you say, and how you move your body. Nissan’s privacy policy, for example, allows the company to collect and share drivers’ sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic information, according to the report.

Eighty-four percent of the brands that researchers studied share or sell this kind of personal data, and only two of them allow drivers to have their data deleted. While it is unclear exactly who these companies share or sell data to, the report points out that there is a huge market for driver data. An automotive data broker called High Mobility cited in the report has a partnership with nine of the car brands Mozilla studied. On its website, it advertises a wide range of data products—including precise location data.

This isn’t just a privacy nightmare but a security one. Volkswagen, Toyota, and Mercedes-Benz have all recently suffered data leaks or breaches that affected millions of customers. According to Mozilla, cars are the worst category of products for privacy that they have ever reviewed.

Update Your iPhone: Apple Fixes No-Click Zero-Days

Apple has just released a security update to iOS after researchers at Citizen Lab discovered a zero-click vulnerability being used to deliver Pegasus spyware. Citizen Lab, which is part of the University of Toronto, is calling the newly discovered exploit chain Blastpass. Researchers say it is capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without the target even touching their device. According to researchers, Blastpass is delivered to a victim’s phone through an iMessage with an Apple Wallet attachment containing a malicious image.

The Pegasus spyware, developed by NSO Group, enables an attacker to read a target’s text messages, view their photos, and listen to calls. It has been used to track journalists, political dissidents, and human rights activists around the world.

Apple says customers should update their phones to the newly released iOS 16.6.1. The exploit can also attack certain models of iPads. You can see details of the affected models here. Citizen Lab urges at-risk users to enable Lockdown Mode.

North Korean Hackers Target Security Researchers Again

North Korea-backed hackers are targeting cybersecurity researchers in a new campaign that is exploiting at least one zero-day vulnerability, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) warned in a report released Thursday. The group did not provide details about the vulnerability since it is currently unpatched. However, the company says it is part of a popular software package used by security researchers.

According to TAG, the current attack mirrors a January 2021 campaign that similarly targeted security researchers working on vulnerability research and development. Like the previous campaign, North Korean threat actors send researchers malicious files after first spending weeks establishing a relationship with their target. According to the report, the malicious file will execute “a series of anti-virtual machine checks” and send collected information—along with a screenshot—back to the attacker.

Georgia DA in Trump RICO Case Gets Doxxed

In order to shield prospective jurors from harassment, District Attorney Fani Willis asked the judge in Donald Trump’s racketeering trial to prevent people from capturing or distributing any sort of image or identifying information about them. The motion, filed in Fulton County Superior Court on Wednesday, revealed that immediately after the indictment was filed, anonymous individuals on “conspiracy theory websites" had shared the full names, ages, and addresses of 23 grand jurors with “the intent to harass and intimidate them.”

Willis also revealed that she had been the victim of doxxing when the personal information of her and her family—including their physical addresses and “GPS coordinates”—was posted on an unnamed website hosted by a Russian company. Willis, who is Black, had previously disclosed that she faced racist and violent threats after the announcement of her investigation into the former president.

[beardedmrbean]

A catfishing paedophile who targeted more than 30 children online has been jailed for four years and five months.

Daniel Lee, 29, solicited sexual photos and videos from girls as young as 12 on various social media sites and pretended to be a teenage girl to get images from boys, Newcastle Crown Court heard.

The National Crime Agency found thousands of messages sent by Lee over an 18-month period after being tipped off by X, formerly Twitter, and US authorities.

Lee, of Wallsend, North Tyneside, admitted 45 offences including causing children to engage in sexual activity.

Prosecutor Emma Dowling said seven victims were spoken to by police in the UK but there were many more that could not be identified including children in Italy, Germany and Denmark.

She said Lee offered children payment in exchange for sexually graphic pictures and videos and he groomed some of his victims, whom he targeted on social media sites including X, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat between 2021 and 2022.

'High risk'

Lee, of St Peter's Road, would ask children their age and often messages turned sexual very quickly, the court heard.

On some occasions he spent several weeks building an "emotional relationship" with his victims before asking them for nude pictures and videos of them performing sex acts, Ms Dowling said.

He posed as a teenage girl to contact young teenage boys, Ms Dowling said, adding he was a "catfish", a term used to describe someone masquerading as another person online.

Indecent images were found on his phone including 97 in the most serious category which included one featuring a toddler, the court heard.

In mitigation, the court heard Lee had a learning disability and had committed no more offences since his arrest in 2022.

Judge Penny Moreland said Lee posed a "high risk of serious harm" to children.

Lee was also made subject of a Sexual Harm Prevention Order to limit his internet usage indefinitely and must sign the sex offenders' register for life.

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Small boat arrivals fell by third last year

The UK Home Office published the latest figures on illegal migration and asylum claims on Thursday. There were 38,784 illegal arrivals in the 12 months to June 2024, representing a 26% drop from the previous year.

Of these, 81%, or 31,493, made the dangerous journey across the Channel in small boats. This figure is 29% lower than the 44,460 arrivals on small boats in the year ending June 2023.

Despite the overall drop in numbers, the average number of people per boat rose to 51, up from 44 in the previous year, suggesting that smugglers are increasingly cramming more people onto each vessel.

While the government continues to grapple with the complexities of managing migration, the number of people awaiting an initial decision on their asylum claims remains a key issue.

By the end of June 2024, 118,882 people were still awaiting an initial decision, a slight increase from 118,329 at the end of March 2024.

Nevertheless, this is a significant drop of 32 per cent from the record high of 175,457 recorded in June 2023. Of those waiting, 76,268 have been on the waiting list for more than six months, although this number is down 46 per cent from last year’s record high of 139,961.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper reiterated her commitment to tackling illegal migration, announcing plans to reopen two immigration centres as part of a wider strategy to increase the number of people being removed who have no legal right to remain in the UK.

Cooper, who has been criticised by migrant rights campaigners, said the Border Security Command would step up its activities.

She emphasised that 100 officers from the National Crime Agency had been brought in to reinforce the border. According to Cooper, they are to thwart “criminal gangs operating transport operations” and prevent migrants from travelling dangerously across the sea in boats. The minister also announced sanctions against negligent employers who hire migrants illegally.

For more than 10 years, each of Britain’s governments has promised to reduce the number of migrants. Britons who supported leaving the EU believed that the country’s immigration problems were due to EU pressure on it. But Brexit didn’t help: while net immigration in the year before the referendum in 2015 was 329,000, according to Reuters, it will be 745,000 in 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics.

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