World News

Ukraine could potentially join NATO even if parts of its territory remained occupied by Russia, the alliance's former Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview on Oct. 4.

One of the main arguments against granting Ukraine membership at the current time is that NATO's Article 5 mutual defense clause would immediately draw the alliance into a direct war with Russia.

But speaking to the Financial Times, Stoltenberg suggested there could be ways to get around this if the Ukrainian territory considered part of NATO was "not necessarily the internationally recognized border."

National police chief Viorel Cernautanu revealed that over 130,000 Moldovans were bribed by a Russian network to promote pro-Kremlin candidates, raising concerns about malign influence.

Moldova has accused Moscow of interfering in the upcoming referendum on the country's European Union membership bid, alleging it has poured significant funds to turn people against it and influence the vote. 

Speaking to the press on Thursday, National police chief Viorel Cernautanu said more than 130,000 Moldovans had been bribed by a Russian network pushing pro-Kremlin candidates in a bid to derail attempts to grow closer to the EU.

With presidential elections set to be held on 20 October, alongside a referendum on whether the country should pursue its bid for EU membership, the news has raised concerns about corruption.

MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippines accused Chinese maritime officials on Friday of carrying out an "unjustified assault" on Vietnamese fishermen in the contested waters of the South China Sea, adding its voice to a fraught dispute over the confrontation.

Vietnam said this week that Chinese law enforcement officers had beaten 10 fishermen and seized their gear while they were working last Sunday near the Chinese-controlled Paracel Islands, which Hanoi also claims and calls Hoang Sa.

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Several people, including a small child, died when overcrowded boats were trying to cross the Channel to the UK, French authorities said. The interior minister said the child was trampled to death on board.

France's interior minister said that several people, including a small child, died on Saturday trying to cross the English Channel in overcrowded boats.

"Today several people died trying to cross the English Channel," Bruno Retailleau said. "A child was trampled to death in a small boat." 

Retailleau said the "tragedy" again highlighted the need to crack down on people smuggling groups organizing the dangerous crossings. 

"The people smugglers have the blood of these people on their hands and our government will intensify the fight against these mafias who are getting rich by organizing these crossings of death," he wrote.

Over the past 10 years, rates of colorectal cancer among 25 to 49 year olds have increased in 24 different countries, including the UK, US, France, Australia, Canada, Norway and Argentina.

The investigation's early findings, presented by an international team at the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) congress in Geneva in September 2024, were as eye-catching as they are concerning.

The researchers, from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the World Health Organization's (WHO's) International Agency for Research on Cancer, surveyed data from 50 countries to understand the trend. In 14 of these countries, the rising trend was only seen in younger adults, with older adult rates remaining stable.

Based on epidemiological investigations, it seems that this trend first began in the 1990s. One study found that the global incidence of early-onset cancer had increased by 79% between 1990 and 2019, with the number of cancer-related deaths in younger people rising by 29%. Another report in The Lancet Public Health described how cancer incidence rates in the US have steadily risen between the generations across 17 different cancers, particularly in Generation Xers and Millennials.

These federally-mandated backdoors were first required on phone systems in 1994 by the CALEA law, then controversially extended to broadband by the FCC in '04.

Archive link

See also https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/05/china-linked-security-breach-targeted-us-wiretap-systems-wsj-reports.html

A year ago, Franky Dean, a 24-year-old documentary film-making master’s student, decided to make a phone call she’d been avoiding nearly half her life. She was sitting in a dark computer room in New York University’s journalism institute in Manhattan when she FaceTimed her parents. They were in the living room at her home in the UK, where she grew up. Franky told them she’d just filed a police report about something that had happened more than a decade earlier. When Franky was 12, she had been sexually abused by a close friend’s dad.

And then her mum said two words that would change her life, again, for ever: “We know.”

It was meant to be a climactic moment – a revelation that Franky had been building up to for years. Instead, it was the beginning of another story – the unravelling of a shadow narrative that spanned half of Franky’s life. It’s a story about what happens when police assume survivors of sexual abuse to be “unknowing victims” – a series of misinterpretations and missteps that amounted to Franky spending 12 years hiding her abuse from her parents while they spent 12 years hiding it from her.

Conversations in Tyre in southern Lebanon happen in a hurry now. It’s not wise to linger on the streets, and there are fewer and fewer people to talk to.

War has created a vacuum here – sucking the life out of this ancient city proud of its Roman ruins, and golden sandy beach.

Israeli strikes are getting louder and closer to our hotel – in recent days several strikes on the hills opposite us appear to involve some of Israel’s most destructive bombs, weighing in at 1000lb.

In hospitals, doctors look weary and overwhelmed. Many no longer go home because it is too dangerous to travel.

(Dr Salman Aidibi, the Hiram Hospital CEO) says the hospital receives about 30-35 injured women and children a day, and it is taking its toll on staff.

Lobbyists for Britain’s biggest food brands successfully pushed for a £1.7bn packaging tax to be deferred, new documents reveal.

The fees for a new scheme to improve recycling rates and tackle plastic pollution were due to be imposed this month, but were delayed for a year by the last Tory government after the industry complained about the costs in a series of private meetings.

The extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme aims to shift the costs of collecting and recycling waste on to the companies that make packaging for soft drinks, confectionery and other consumer goods. They would pay fees based on the amount of packaging they use, with lower fees for more sustainable options.

Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have begun vaccination against mpox, nearly two months after the disease outbreak that spread to several countries was declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization.

Some of the 265,000 doses donated to the DRC by the EU and the US were administered in the eastern city of Goma in North Kivu province, where hospitals and health workers have been overstretched, struggling to contain the new and possibly more infectious strain of mpox.

The DRC, with about 30,000 suspected mpox cases and 859 deaths, accounts for more than 80% of all the cases and 99% of all the deaths reported in Africa this year. All of the central African country’s 26 provinces have recorded mpox cases.

Although most mpox infections and deaths recorded in the DRC are in children under 15, the doses being administered are only meant for adults and will be given to at-risk populations and frontline workers, the health minister, Roger Kamba, said this week.

In several cases, they accused senior newsroom figures of failing to hold Israeli officials to account and of interfering in reporting to downplay Israeli atrocities. In one instance at CNN, false Israeli propaganda was put on air despite advance warnings from staff members.

Elon Musk merging Twitter into X didn't absolve X from child safety fine.

Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) remains on the hook for an approximately $400,000 fine after failing to respond to an Australia eSafety Commission 2023 inquiry, which largely sought to probe measures X is currently taking to combat an alleged proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on its platform.

To void the fine, X tried to persuade Australian Judge Michael Wheelahan that X had no obligation to comply with an Online Safety Act notice issued to Twitter because Twitter "ceased to exist" a few weeks after receiving the notice—when Musk merged the app into his company X Corp.