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Cryptocurrency theft is estimated to generate half of the country’s foreign currency incomeNorth Korea plays by its own rules. The isolated, secretive and autocratic country is largely cut off from the world’s economic system – but when it comes to generating foreign earnings it relies on some of the world’s most sophisticated hacking.Experts, such as TRM Labs, quickly attributed the extraordinary $6.3bn (£4.7bn) Binance cryptocurrency theft to TraderTraitor, an elite North Korean hacking unit that has also been known as the Lazarus Group. Though the link may not be proven yet, the pattern of behaviour is familiar. Continue reading...

Scottish detectives are investigating time that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell spent at Balmoral, King Charles’ private estate in Scotland.Police Scotland said it had received “information” and that inquiries into the disgraced royal’s time there with the late child sex offender were at a “very early stage," reported The Guardian.The Daily Express has reported that the inquiries relate to claims that women were trafficked to the estate.“We have received information and active inquiries are ongoing, but these are at a very early stage,” a Police Scotland spokesperson said. “All inquiries are evidence-led, with the needs of victim survivors at the heart of those inquiries.”Photos previously released by the U.S. Department of Justice appear to show Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein on a shooting trip at Balmoral.The estate also appears in a string of cryptic emails released last year as part of the Epstein files. In August 2001, someone using the name “the Invisible Man” sent four emails to Maxwell, who has since been convicted of sex trafficking. In one, the sender said their “valet” had recently died and that they had “left the RN,” shorthand for the Royal Navy. Mountbatten-Windsor left the Royal Navy the month before.Another email from the same sender, dated Aug. 16, 2001, said they were at “Balmoral summer camp for the royal family” before asking Maxwell: “Have you found me some inappropriate friends?”In March 2002, Maxwell wrote to the Invisible Man that she had passed along a message to an unnamed person, beginning: “I just gave Andrew your telephone no.” She added that “Andrew” would be “very happy” if the person did some “two legged sight seeing.”The sender of the emails has not been confirmed.Several other British police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, Thames Valley Police and Surrey Police, have live investigations linked to the Epstein files. The National Police Chiefs’ Council said there is no national investigation at present.Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office over allegations that he shared sensitive information with Epstein while serving as a U.K. trade envoy. He denies wrongdoing, and that investigation continues.

Forums for discussion of feminist and LGBTQ+ views face growing intolerance from Chinese state, say expertsBeijing’s annual independent queer film festival has been cancelled after what is understood to have been a campaign of sustained harassment from authorities.Beijing Queer film festival, which was due to begin on Friday in China’s capital, is one of the country’s oldest independent film festivals. Continue reading...

Critics cite Lana Nusseibeh’s denial of accusations the UAE is fuelling Sudan war by supporting paramilitary RSFMembers of the Sudanese diaspora and international human rights monitors have denounced the candidature of an Emirati diplomat for the top job at the UN, citing her denial of accusations that the United Arab Emirates is fuelling the war in Sudan by supporting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.The UAE nominated Lana Nusseibeh last week to replace the UN secretary general, António Guterres, as he finishes his second five-year term ⁠this year, upending a race that had become gridlocked. Continue reading...

A former Defense Intelligence Agency staffer’s warning that Americans need to start preparing for a crisis has caused a stir with observers, and they can’t agree on whether to start stockpiling or roll their eyes.Farijah “Doc” St. Clair is head of technology and intelligence at the risk firm Crisis24. He wrote on X that “something is brewing” and that Americans’ “window to prepare, even with the basics, is closing.” He warned that “you will be on your own” in a national-scale crisis, urged people to prepare quietly and even “feign poverty,” and closed with: “It’s going to get rough.”Some readers took the warning seriously.“I have no idea what’s coming, if anything,” wrote novelist Danielle Langlois. “But when a former Defense Intelligence Agency employee shares advice like this (on top of the announcements I’ve seen from other nations), I take note. Go buy more food, maybe. Because this is weird.”Don Shift, a post-apocalyptic fiction author and Ventura County Sheriff’s veteran, called it “probably a very sober take on what’s really ‘up.’”Others wanted to know what, exactly, they’re supposed to be getting ready for.“What. Are. We. Preparing. For??” wrote Martin Skold, a geostrategist, policy adviser and author. “I’ll grant the premise: Having useful things on hand is useful, but anything more than that requires specifics.”“Preparing for an internet outage is not the same as preparing for a gasoline shortage is not the same as preparing for a nuclear strike is not the same as preparing for riots is not the same as preparing for a bank hack is not the same as preparing for a market crash,” Skold wrote. “I’m old enough to remember when telling people to stockpile necessities was considered pointless panicmongering.”Rebecca V., opinion editor at the publication Wrongspeak, dismissed it outright.“This is all a psyop to get people scared,” she wrote. “Power hungry elites just want more power. This is the way it’s been forever and will be until the end of time.”AI researcher David Bellamy, who works on training infrastructure for open-source AI and holds a PhD from Harvard, responded with a joke about AI-powered cyberattacks: “Yeah…so anyways, thrilled to release Claude Fable 5.5, which is a step change in cyberattack capabilities. Good luck everybody else!”St. Clair didn’t say what kind of event he believes is coming, telling readers “to not focus on the ‘what.’”

Vice President JD Vance has been pulled into a Brazilian police investigation of whether a donor network he co-founded illegally aided Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro’s losing presidential bid.Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino ordered the investigation Tuesday in a 38-page decision, two days after Bolsonaro lost a runoff election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.The order focuses on the Rockbridge Network, a donor group Vance co-founded in 2019, The Washington Post reported. Vance spoke at the network’s donor gatherings as recently as a year ago, and his office declined to comment Tuesday.Dino’s order lists five questions for federal police, and two of them name Rockbridge directly.The order says police must examine talks between Rockbridge representatives and Brazilian businessmen Tallis Gomes and Pedro Sang. A petition filed in the case named the two men, described as allegedly tied to Rockbridge, as possible go-betweens for financial support to Bolsonaro’s campaign, Dino wrote.“[It is] necessary to verify if there was the effective furnishment of resources — including human resources — services, or other measurable economic advantages, identifying its origin, its destination and its eventual use in the campaign,” Dino added, according to the Post’s translation.Brazil law makes it a crime for a candidate to accept money or other campaign help from a foreign source, the Post reported.Dino also ordered police to determine whether those funding talks were tied to foreign interest in Brazil’s rare earths and critical minerals, according to the order.Police must find out who made any proposal, who received it and what was offered in return, Dino wrote. He added that those minerals belong to the federal government and can be mined only with its permission.Dino placed the investigation under the Supreme Court’s direct supervision because members of Congress may have taken part, the order says. Bolsonaro is a sitting senator.Bolsonaro's opponents filed complaints that reached Brazil’s courts before the Oct. 25 runoff, including Lula’s Workers’ Party, the Post reported.Renan Santos, a presidential candidate eliminated in the first round, alleged that Brazilians claiming to represent Rockbridge discussed U.S. support with Bolsonaro campaign officials, the Post reported. A person with direct knowledge told the Post that the same representatives also helped the Santos campaign.“The Brazilians made false representations about their relationship with Rockbridge and created documents representing or referencing Rockbridge without Rockbridge’s knowledge or consent,” the network said in a statement Tuesday.Still, Dino’s order directs police to identify who took part in contacts between Rockbridge representatives and Brazilian businessmen, and what those contacts were for.The order also covers paid posts by foreign accounts that promoted Bolsonaro using odds from Polymarket, a prediction market banned in Brazil, and any deliberate manipulation of algorithms by internet companies to favor or hurt candidates.Bolsonaro fled Brazil for the United States on Tuesday, the day of Dino’s ruling, in defiance of a separate Supreme Court order, three people with knowledge of the matter told the Post. A senior State Department official told the newspaper that he and his family will be issued visas to stay.Dino also sent his decision to 10 federal agencies, including Brazil’s intelligence agency and its central bank, and told the federal police director to report the new case number back to the court, according to the order.

Warnings of escalating clampdown on press freedom come after Cairo court convicts Attalah of managing an unlicensed websiteLina Attalah, a prominent Egyptian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the news outlet Mada Masr, has been released from detention by Egypt’s authorities and had her website ordered to be shut down by a court amid an intensifying crackdown on independent media in the country.Attalah was taken briefly into custody after a Cairo court convicted her of managing an unlicensed website, prompting fresh international concerns over press freedom in Egypt. Continue reading...

A former Defense Intelligence Agency staffer is warning Americans that time is running out to prepare for a crisis. His post has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.“Your window to prepare, even with the basics, is closing,” wrote Farijah “Doc” St. Clair on X. “For those tracking the indicators that an event is increasingly likely, you know that it is now undeniable that something is brewing.”St. Clair is head of technology and intelligence at Crisis24, a GardaWorld-owned risk firm. There he leads AiiA, an AI-driven intelligence product built with Palantir that gives corporate executives a daily briefing modeled on the President’s Daily Brief. A combat-wounded Army veteran, he says he spent more than a decade in the Army and the “Defense Intelligence Enterprise,” including a stint at DIA around 2015 and 2016. His company bio says he supported efforts to counter Russian influence and deployed to multiple combat theaters.In his post, St. Clair wrote that during his intelligence career he worked on “counterintelligence threats to Continuity of Government (COG) and Continuity of Operations (COOP).”“Something I can say for absolute certain is that once governments signal that their citizens need to prepare, those preparations have already been conducted for national leadership,” he wrote.He pointed to European governments urging citizens to keep supplies on hand. He also cited reports that the Pentagon wants U.S. military bases to be able to sustain themselves for 90 days, which he called “the loudest signal concerning how significant the situation is.”“The gravity of this can’t be understated,” he wrote. “The calls for preparedness will escalate in their time frames. 3 days will turn into a week. A week will turn in to a few weeks. A few weeks into a couple months.”His message to Americans was blunt.“What Americans should know is that you will be on your own,” St. Clair wrote. “FEMA does not have the resources to help people in a time of need during an event at national scale. Your local authorities don’t either.”He described a grim scenario that he said comes from an Army study of how big cities collapse when “just in time” supply chains fail.“In 3 days, a major city is out of food in the major stores. Looting starts,” he wrote. “Suburbia is then the next harvest location. People organize and target food distribution warehouses. Then people head out into the country where people are prepared and things get ugly.”St. Clair’s advice is to prepare, and to do it quietly.“You, at some point, will hear, ‘well if something happens, I’ll just come to your house,’ stated as a joke. But this is not a joke. You have now become someone’s backup plan. Don’t allow this,” he wrote.He urged readers to “randomize when you go to the store,” cut back on visible Amazon deliveries, and “start to think about how to feign poverty.”He recommended stocking “water, rice, protein, canned foods,” along with basic medicines, and told people to watch the 1980s nuclear war films “The Day After” and “Threads.”“We are now at the part of both movies where governments are telling people to prepare and some degree of panic is setting in,” he wrote. “This will get worse.”He signed off with: “For everyone, hang in there. It’s going to get rough.”St. Clair didn’t say what kind of event he believes is coming. He told readers “to not focus on the ‘what.’”Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reportedly ordered U.S. military installations to become more self-sufficient, an effort covered by outlets including Fox News and the Daily Wire.