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Former CNOOC executive expelled from Chinese Communist Party, watchdog says

Former CNOOC executive expelled from Chinese Communist Party, watchdog says

Reuters3 days ago
July 31 (Reuters) - A senior former executive at state-owned oil and gas major CNOOC Ltd has been expelled from the Communist Party and placed under investigation for serious violations of party discipline and the law, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection on Wednesday.
Guangyu Yuan, 66, retired as chief executive of CNOOC in September 2019 after reaching the mandatory retirement age, and was also a former deputy general manager of CNOOC parent, China National Offshore Oil Company.
He was placed under disciplinary review and supervisory investigation by the country's top anti-corruption watchdog in March, the CCDI said in a statement.
The CCDI said Yuan had "lost his faith and convictions" and abused his position for illicit gains, including trading power for money and sex. Yuan had accepted golf outings that may have compromised his duties, and engaged in profit-making activities related to his former role after retirement, "making a living off the oil sector after serving in it."
CNOOC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Yuan was not immediately available for comment.
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Idaho murders crime scene photos seen after Kohberger sentencing
Idaho murders crime scene photos seen after Kohberger sentencing

Daily Mail​

time18 minutes ago

  • Daily Mail​

Idaho murders crime scene photos seen after Kohberger sentencing

Chilling photos taken inside the Idaho home where Bryan Kohberger slaughtered four students have been released for the first time, revealing a bloody and violent crime scene. Creepy handprints are seen pressed against the windows in one of the rooms while blood spatters are visible on the white painted doors. Other distressing images show the student bedrooms and beds where some of the victims were murdered in their sleep. Best friends Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, both 21, were stabbed to death in Mogen's bed in her room on the third floor of the home. The sliding door to the kitchen on the second floor of the home is seen ajar in another photo - the way Kohberger left it after he both entered and exited the house through the back entrance. More than 200 distressing images, obtained by KTVB7 from Moscow Police, were released weeks after the 30-year-old mass killer was sentenced to a lifetime behind bars. The criminology PhD student broke into 1122 King Road in Moscow, Idaho, in the early hours of November 13, 2022, and stabbed the four students to death. Kernodle, who was still awake having just received a DoorDash order - suffered more than 50 stab wounds, including two to the heart and multiple defensive wounds. Chapin died from a stab wound to the jugular and his legs had also been slashed. Goncalves was stabbed more than 20 times and her face was 'unrecognizable' after Kohberger beat her with a second unidentified weapon. Mogen had stab wounds to her forearm, hands, liver and lung as well as a huge gash from her right eye to her nose. Two other roommates - Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke - were also inside the home at the time but survived. The net closed in on Kohberger after he left a brown leather Ka-Bar knife sheath behind at the scene. DNA on the sheath came back a match to the criminology student, who was living just over the state border in Pullman, Washington, at the time. Kohberger fought the charges for more than two years before he finally confessed to the murders and changed his plea to guilty last month, as part of a plea deal to spare him from the death penalty. On July 2, he pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. On July 23, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole and also waived his right to appeal. Since the sentencing, a sweeping gag order in the case has been lifted and police have begun releasing records and documents from the investigation. As well as the crime scene photos, surveillance footage has also been released showing Kohberger's white Hyundai Elantra circling the victims' home multiple times on the night of the murders. The video, first reported by the Idaho Statesman, shows Kohberger staking out the scene and making three loops around the student neighborhood from around 3.30am onwards. At around 4am, Kohberger then parked his car and broke into 1122 King Road. Police said Kohberger took just 13 minutes to carry out his murderous rampage. At around 4.17am, the video - captured by a neighboring home's security camera close to Kernodle's bedroom wall - picks up what sounds like a cry and a loud thud. A dog - believed to be Goncalves' pet Murphy - is then heard barking. At 4.20am, Kohberger's car is seen a final time in the footage speeding away from the area. The footage also captured a DoorDash delivery driver dropping off a food order for Kernodle minutes before the killer struck. Despite Kohberger's change of plea and a growing body of evidence coming to light, many questions still remain in the case. When given the opportunity to speak at his sentencing in Ada County Courthouse in Boise, Idaho, Kohberger refused to reveal any details about the murders - leaving the victims' families in the dark. His motive remains a mystery and no connection has ever been found between him and the victims. Police have said Kohberger targeted 1122 King Road that night but it is unclear which of the victims was his specific target. Cell phone data found Kohberger was surveilling the student area in the lead-up to the murders. From July 2022 through to November 13, 2022, his phone placed him in the vicinity of the King Road home at least 23 times, mostly at night. The victims had also noticed a string of bizarre incidents at the home in the weeks before the murders . Around one month earlier, Goncalves had told multiple people she had seen a man watching her in the trees around the home when she took Murphy outside. Friends also recalled multiple occasions when, during parties at the home, Goncalves's dog would run barking into the tree line and wouldn't return when he was called. This was out of character for the dog, they said. On November 4, 2022 - just nine days before the murders - the roommates then came home to find the door to their three-story house open. It is unclear if Kohberger had broken into the home prior to November 13, but Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson said he believes it is possible.

Why taboo on nuclear weapons is fading, 80 years after Hiroshima
Why taboo on nuclear weapons is fading, 80 years after Hiroshima

Times

time18 minutes ago

  • Times

Why taboo on nuclear weapons is fading, 80 years after Hiroshima

It wasn't finding skeletons that the British government delegation found most harrowing, although, months after the Hiroshima attack, they still stumbled across them. No, worse was where there were none. Roaming the streets, they noted that 'asphalt retained 'shadows' of those who had walked there at the instant of the explosion'. The purpose of the 1945 British mission to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not to document a holocaust; it was to prevent a repeat. What would happen when such bombs hit other cities, including London? The assumption was they must. Exactly 80 years on, incredibly, they haven't. Why? The easy answer is mad — mutually assured destruction. And that explains why the USSR and Nato never went to war. It doesn't explain why, say, the US didn't recently hit Iran's nuclear bunker with a small thermonuclear device, despite it being in the middle of nowhere. Or why a tactical weapon wasn't used in Korea or Vietnam — when there were no qualms about dropping vast quantities of conventional explosives — or Ukraine today. • Japan offers silent prayers 80 years after devastation of Hiroshima No, as Nina Tannenwald, a US political scientist, argued, there is another, more human, factor. Nuclear weapons became taboo. Taboos are things you just don't do. Cannibalism, for instance. We don't debate whether someone might be more acceptable to eat if, say, they were just run over by a bus. Neither do we look at nuclear attacks on a case by case basis. There may be situations when tactical nuclear weapons could be militarily useful, even proportionate. We don't countenance it. To see the taboo, consider a poll this week by YouGov: 56 per cent of UK respondents thought conventional bombings of cities in the Second World War were justified, yet only 26 per cent thought the nuclear attacks were. Why? Was it more moral to become a human torch during Operation Gomorrah, when at least 34,000 Hamburg civilians died in a literal tornado of fire, than become a shadow on a Nagasaki pavement? • How Times readers debated the morality of the Hiroshima bomb The taboo, though, may be weakening. Oxford researchers found that if you change the questions, you get different answers. Imagine terrorists are planning an atrocity from an isolated bunker. Do you attack conventionally, or with nuclear? With both equally likely to succeed, 12 per cent chose nuclear. If nuclear was twice as likely to succeed, 56 per cent said nuke 'em. Why did the US not do just that in Iran? And yet, there is an oddity about nuclear weapons. In isolation, they can be just another tool. In multiple? They are worse than we ever thought. In 2022 the journal Nature Food analysed the effects of a small nuclear war between India and Pakistan. It would, unsurprisingly, be bad for them: 50 million killed. But here's the more troubling statistic: it would be worse for us. As the soot blocked the sun, around the world one billion would starve. • The Times View: The nuclear attack on Hiroshima reminds us of human folly That there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945 is perhaps the greatest achievement of global diplomacy. But 80 years from now? Those who remember Hiroshima are dying out. The countries seeking nuclear weapons are increasing. Speak to nuclear theorists and the worry is not merely that nuclear weapons are used somewhere and it's horrific. It's that they are used somewhere and, as is perfectly possible, it's not horrific enough. Because then the taboo is gone. And it won't come back.

North Korea exploits job market in latest cyberattacks: report
North Korea exploits job market in latest cyberattacks: report

Coin Geek

time22 minutes ago

  • Coin Geek

North Korea exploits job market in latest cyberattacks: report

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... In its ongoing campaign to evade sanctions and raise funds, North Korea's innovative hacking army has turned to the international job market, using artificial intelligence (AI) to pose as remote IT workers and offering fake IT jobs to gain access to western companies' cloud systems. North Korea, or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), has been continuously under some form of sanction since the end of the Korean War in 1953, primarily trade and financial restrictions from the United States. However, the sanctions were dramatically expanded in 2006 after North Korea's first test of its nuclear weapon program, with a number of countries and international bodies imposing additional investment, financial assistance, and travel sanctions. Up until Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, North Korea was the most sanctioned country in the world. Naturally, these sanctions have taken a toll. Accurate data for North Korea can be hard to come by, but in 2023, the Bank of Korea (BOK) estimated North Korea's gross domestic product (GDP) at around $29.6 billion, which would place it around 109th in the world. For comparison, South Korea is 15th, at around $1.7 trillion. In recent years, North Korea has increasingly turned to hacking and cyberattacks as a way to make and launder money, with the digital asset and blockchain space proving particularly fruitful. The social media gateway Last week, Google Cloud published its H2 2025 Cloud Threat Horizons Report, which revealed that the 'Google Threat Intelligence Group' is 'actively tracking' UNC4899, a North Korean hacking operation that successfully hacked two companies after contacting employees via social media. In both cases, 'under the guise of freelance opportunities for software development work,' UNC4899 attackers successfully convinced the targeted employees of the companies to download and run malware, which established connections between the hacker-controlled command-and-control infrastructures and the target companies' cloud-based systems. After gaining access, UNC4899 conducted 'several internal reconnaissance activities on the victims' hosts and connected environments, before obtaining credential materials they used to pivot to the victims' cloud environments.' Eventually, the hacking group had the necessary credentials and information to transfer 'millions worth of cryptocurrency' out of company accounts. According to cloud security firm Wiz, which also reported on the UNC4899 hacks, this type of cyberattack falls within a cluster of such activity referred to by the U.S. government as 'TraderTraitor.' 'TraderTraitor has conducted several major campaigns since 2020, all sharing common tactics (social engineering, trojanized malware or code) but targeting different parts of the cryptocurrency ecosystem,' explained Wiz. The U.S. Treasury confirmed that the North Korea-backed entities behind TraderTraitor are tracked as Lazarus Group, APT38, BlueNoroff, and Stardust Chollima. The former of these, Lazarus Group, is the notorious North Korean hacking organization behind—among other attacks—the record-breaking February 2025 hack of digital asset exchange Bybit, in which the group stole $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum's ETH token—the largest exploit of its kind. Financial gain is the primary strategic objective of TraderTraitor, but Wiz also warned that it 'may also pursue strategic espionage objectives in the crypto/blockchain sector,' with reports indicating the attackers appear to seek to acquire sensitive cryptocurrency intellectual property and technology. While infiltrating companies by offering freelance work to existing employees has seen some notable successes for North Korean hackers, it's not the only employment-related avenue proving profitable for the country. Wolves in sheep's clothing On August 4, U.S.-based cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike released its '2025 Threat Hunting Report,' in which it highlighted the rise of the 'enterprising adversary.' In the context of North Korea, the company identified more than 320 incidents over the past 12 months in which state operatives gained fraudulent employment as remote software developers for Western companies. According to CrowdStrike, this marks a 220% increase from the previous year. Essentially, the scheme involves North Korean actors using false identities, resumes, and work histories, usually generated by artificial intelligence, to gain employment and earn money for the regime. The fake employees, many of whom don't speak English fluently, then use sophisticated AI to do the majority of the work required of them. CrowdStrike identified the North Korean hacking group dubbed 'Famous Chollima' as one of the principal offenders, conducting insider threat operations at 'an exceptionally high operational tempo.' 'Famous Chollima has been able to sustain this pace by interweaving GenAI-powered tools that automate and optimize workflows at every stage of the hiring and employment process,' said the report. This includes using generative AI and other AI-powered tools to draft resumes, modify or 'deepfake' their appearance during remote interviews, and translate for them. 'Once hired, Famous Chollima IT workers use GenAI code assistants (such as Microsoft Copilot or VSCodium) and GenAI translation tools to assist with daily tasks and correspondence related to their legitimate job functions,' explained the report. 'These operatives are not fluent in English, likely work three or four jobs simultaneously, and require GenAI to complete their work and manage and respond to multiple streams of communication.' Once employed, these operatives can also use their position and credentials to gain access to sensitive company data, which they can later use to extort the company. In this part of the operation, AI tools again come in useful to hackers, as CrowdStrike noted: 'They are using publicly available models to aid their reconnaissance, vulnerability research, and phishing campaign content and payload development.' CrowdStrike recommended several measures to reduce these attacks, including enhanced identity verification processes during the hiring phase, real-time deepfake challenges during interview or employment assessment sessions, and training programs designed to teach hiring managers and IT personnel to recognize potential insider threats using AI tools. In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek's coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI. Watch: Blockchain could revolutionize cybersecurity title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="">

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