Latest News
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Police raid Portugal's TAP Airlines in a corruption probe
The prosecutor general’s office reported that Portuguese police conducted a search of the headquarters of TAP, Portugal's flag carrier, and other companies in the country on Tuesday. This was part of a continuing investigation into suspected fraud in a complicated aircraft leasing deal from 2015. The searches are a result of an investigation conducted in 2023 into TAP's lease deal for 53 Airbus planes, which was struck shortly after the company had been privatised. It then came under control of a joint-venture between American-Brazilian aviation businessman David Neeleman, and Portuguese Barraqueiro Group owned by Humberto Porsa. Both Neeleman & Pedrosa deny any wrongdoing. TAP is now fully owned by the state and has entered a new process of privatisation. In a press release, the Infrastructure Ministry stated that legal proceedings are to be considered "normal". The Infrastructure Ministry said in a statement that the legal proceedings should be viewed "as normal". The prosecutor's said that it suspects the leasing contract to be part of a scheme illegal in which Airbus assisted in financing the acquisition of TAP by Airbus in 2015, leading to losses for the airline. In a press release, it stated that "the facts in question likely constitute crimes of harmful administration in the private sector and passive corruption, as well as aggravated tax fraud and Social Security fraud." Airbus' spokesperson said that the company "doesn't comment on any situations involving their client companies". Airbus's historic business dealings were the subject of multiple investigations. This led to a $4 billion settlement for corruption with French, British, and U.S. Authorities in 2020 and a $14 million French settlement 2022. Airbus has made sweeping changes, including a new compliance system. TAP's spokesperson stated that the airline does not comment on court proceedings, and cooperates fully with all authorities. Prosecutors said that 25 locations were being searched, including law firms, auditing firms, and companies. Barraqueiro Group confirmed that it had also been searched but was confident of its innocence in relation to the privatisation of TAP. It stated that it was cooperating with the investigation and did not have any cause for concern. (Reporting and additional reporting by Inti landauro, editing by Andrei Khalip; Conor Humphries, Jan Harvey and Andrei Khalip)
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NTSB: Loose wiring led to power failure before the March 2024 Baltimore Ship Crash, NTSB states
The National Transportation Safety Board announced on Tuesday that loose wires caused a power outage on the cargo vessel Dali, which crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 20, 2024. Six people were killed and the bridge was destroyed. The NTSB will hold an hearing in Washington, DC to determine the probable causes of the accident that resulted in the death of six construction workers. The staff of the board said that they recommend operators perform periodic inspections on high voltage switchboards, and propose changes to allow ships more quickly recover after a loss of power. The NTSB said that the Dali had lost power on several occasions before it crashed into the Key Bridge. This included a blackout while in port maintenance and just before the crash. The NTSB is considering new recommendations for preventing catastrophic collisions when power outages occur at sea. ASSESSING BRIDGED SAFETY In March, the board requested urgent safety assessments for 68 bridges across 19 states, including the Golden Gate Bridge (also known as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge), Brooklyn Bridge, and George Washington Bridge. The review is focused on bridges that were built before 1991, and are frequented primarily by ocean-going vessels. These bridges have not been subjected to vulnerability assessments. The May crash of a Mexican Navy Training Ship into the Brooklyn Bridge raised concerns over bridges being damaged by vessels. The NTSB reported last year that about four minutes prior to the crash, the Dali's power was cut off when the electrical breakers tripped. This caused a power outage for all shipboard equipment and lighting when the Dali was only 0.6 miles (1 km) away from the bridge. Initially, it was estimated that a replacement bridge would cost $1.7 to $1.9 billion. It should be completed by the end of 2028. State officials announced on Monday that they expect the bridge to cost between $4.3 billion and $5.2 billion, with traffic opening only in late 2030. The increased cost was attributed to a new pier-protection system and a longer, more complex design. The FBI has launched a criminal investigation into the collapse. (Reporting and editing by Lincoln Feast, Frances Kerry and David Shepardson)
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Police raid Portugal's TAP Airlines in a corruption probe
The prosecutor general’s office reported that Portuguese police conducted a search of the headquarters of TAP, Portugal's flag carrier, and other companies in the country on Tuesday. This was part of a continuing investigation into suspected fraud in a complicated aircraft leasing deal from 2015. The searches are a result of an investigation conducted in 2023 into TAP's lease deal for 53 Airbus planes, which was struck shortly after the company had been privatised. It then came under control of a joint-venture between American-Brazilian aviation businessman David Neeleman, and Portuguese Barraqueiro Group owned by Humberto Porsa. Both Neeleman & Pedrosa deny any wrongdoing. TAP is now fully owned by the state and has entered a new process of privatisation. The prosecutor's said that it suspects the leasing contract to be part of a scheme illegal in which Airbus assisted in financing the acquisition of TAP by Airbus in 2015, leading to losses for the airline. In a press release, it stated that "the facts in question likely constitute crimes of harmful administration in the private sector and passive corruption, as well as aggravated tax fraud and Social Security fraud." Airbus' spokesperson said that the company "doesn't comment on any situations involving their client companies." Airbus's historic business dealings were the subject of multiple investigations. This led to a $4 billion settlement for corruption with French, British, and U.S. Authorities in 2020 and a $14 million French settlement in 2030. Airbus has made sweeping changes, including a new compliance system. TAP's spokesperson stated that the airline "doesn't comment on legal proceedings, and fully cooperates" with all authorities. Prosecutors said that 25 locations were being searched, including law firms, auditing firms and companies. Barraqueiro Group confirmed that it had also been searched but was confident of its innocence in relation to the privatisation of TAP. It stated that it was "cooperating" and did not have any reason to be concerned about the ongoing investigations. (Reporting and additional reporting by Inti landauro, editing by Andrei Khalip & Conor Humphrey; Reporting by Sergio Goncalves)
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Recent major tech failures
Cloudfare, a web-infrastructure company, was affected by a global outage Tuesday. This left major internet platforms unreachable globally. The second major Internet disruption in the last year has been the failure of Amazon's cloud service unit AWS. In chronological order, here are the most recent tech outages. BRITISH AERIALWAYS British Airways, owned by IAG, was hit in May 2017 by a major failure of its computer system that left 75,000 passengers stranded over a long weekend. This led to a disastrous public relations situation and promises from the airline that they would improve in the future. Media reports claim that a maintenance worker accidentally turned off the power. A Google outage that occurred on December 14, 2020, affected some of Google's most popular products including YouTube Gmail and Google Drive for one hour. According to the outage monitoring site DownDetector more than 12,000 YouTube customers were affected around the world including in the United States of America, Britain, and India. FASTLY On June 20, 2021, thousands government, news, and social media sites across the world were affected by an hour-long widespread outage that was linked to U.S. cloud company Fastly. This issue affected many high-traffic sites, including Reddit.com, Amazon.com, CNN, PayPal.com, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network, and The New York Times. Outages ranged from a few moments to an hour. AKAMAI Websites for dozens of Australian financial institutions and US airlines were temporarily down on 17 June 2021 due to server-related glitches. The firm said that the bug was the cause of the problem. META Meta's social media platforms Facebook WhatsApp and Instagram were down for six hours in October 2021. 10.6 Million users reported problems around the world. The company claimed that the outage was due to a configuration error. X Corp's social media platform Twitter was affected by a major outage in December 2022. For several hours, users were unable to use the platform or access its features. At the height of the disruption, Downdetector recorded more than 10,000 users affected from the United States. About 2,500 users were from Japan and approximately 2,500 people from the UK. CROWDSTRIKE On July 19, 2024, a software update from global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused global computer system outages lasting several hours for Microsoft customers. Globally, services from healthcare to shipping and finance to airlines were affected. After the outage, businesses were left with a backlog of cancelled and delayed flights, medical appointments, and missed orders. Amazon's Cloud Services unit, which hosts computer applications and processes for businesses around the globe, experienced an outage in October 2025. This caused disruptions across industries and took down popular apps such as Reddit and Snapchat. The disruption forced workers in London and Tokyo to go offline, stopping them from performing normal daily tasks such as paying their hairdressers or changing airline tickets. AWS's Northern Virginia cluster (also known as US-EAST-1) was responsible for a major Internet meltdown at least three times in the last five years. CLOUDFARE On November 18, 2025, the web-infrastructure company, whose network handled about a fifth web traffic, suffered an outage that prevented thousands of users from accessing popular internet platforms including X, ChatGPT, and others. Cloudfare stated in an update at 1148 GMT that it was "experiencing a degradation of internal service". Cloudfare said in a update at 1442 GMT that it had fixed the issue.
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Georgia's U turn from Western path
Four of the eight main opposition coalitions won seats in Georgia's Parliament just over a month ago. All but one of the eight leaders are either in prison, exiled or facing criminal charges. The ruling party wants to outright ban the main opposition groups. Many in the tiny South Caucasus nation of 3.7 millions have been shocked by the slide towards one-party rule. Georgia was a democratic country that appeared to be on the rise in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. It seemed poised to join the EU, and escape Russia's influence. Brussels' assessment, however, says that it is now further away from the West today than ever before in its post-Soviet past. It describes its democratic institutions and courts as being under the thumb of state. In a report published this month, the EU stated that Georgia is now a candidate to join "in name only". The EU ambassador to Tbilisi stated that Georgia is no longer on track to join the EU. Senior Georgian politicians and diplomats who were interviewed about recent events said that it appeared as though Georgia was close to a point beyond which it would be difficult for democracy to recover. "We are five minutes from a one-party dictatorship," Sergi Kapanadze said, a former vice foreign minister and deputy speaker of the parliamentary until 2020. "DEMOCRATISATION MEANS YOU WILL LOSE THE POWER AT SOME POINT" Natalie Sabanadze said that despite decades of sometimes caustic internal political disputes, there was always a political consensus in Georgia that it belongs to the West. This has now been lost. She said that the Georgian Dream Party, the ruling party, knows that democratisation - which the EU requires - means accepting the fact that you will eventually lose power. "They don’t want that. They are building an authoritarian system. Georgian Dream claims it protects the country against opposition figures that are trying to seize control and incite a war with Russia. The fear became tangible after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This evoked memories of Russian tanks rolling through the suburbs in Tbilisi, in an embarrassing defeat by Moscow during a short war in 2008. Nino Tsilosani is a lawmaker from the ruling party who serves as deputy speaker of parliament. He said, "Georgia has a unique peace within a geopolitical area that's very challenging." "What businesses and investors need is stability." She accused opposition politicians in jail of plotting a coup. The opposition parties deny these accusations as fabrications to justify a crackdown. Bidzina ivanishvili, the billionaire founder of Georgian Dream, is portrayed by opponents as the cause of the shift to authoritarianism. Some accuse him to be in league with Russia where he made his fortune in 1990s. Gia Khukhashvili who was Ivanishvili’s top advisor and helped launch the party before parting ways with him in 2013 said that it is wrong to see his former boss as being subordinate to Moscow. Ivanishvili, however, sees only a "coincidence" of interests between the two countries. "He knows that he will need an older brother in this ocean full of sharks. Who is the elder brother? "It can only be Russia," Khukhashvili replied. ECONOMY TAKES A TURN TOWARDS RUSSIA AND CHINA Georgia, strategically located on the Black Sea, is crisscrossed with oil and gas pipelines. In theory, this could play a significant role in the West’s plan to divert energy and trade away from Russia. Georgia's rapid growth was fueled by its investor-friendly policies and political shift towards the West. This openness is now rapidly reversing, with foreign direct investments falling in the last two years to levels not seen since the early 2000s. The economy has remained stable, thanks to a flood of Russian IT workers and businesses into Georgia following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. The World Bank predicts that Georgia's GDP will grow by 7% in this year after growing 9.4% in last year. Construction of a deep water port on the Black Sea, a key transit hub between Asia and Europe, has been stalled since the Western-led consortium left the project. Since then, a Chinese company won the contract. However, progress in building the port is minimal. Georgia imports 45% of the oil it uses from Russia. This is up from 8% in 2012. Tbilisi has no diplomatic relations with Moscow. Former U.S. Ambassador to Georgia Ian Kelly said that the West could have done much more to strengthen ties with Tbilisi. He said, "We're blowing this." "Georgia opened the door to Russia and China." SPEED CHESS Georgian Dream, in recent weeks has taken a number of measures to eliminate any remaining political dissension. The Constitutional Court is preparing to ban three of the main opposition parties. Meanwhile, new criminal charges brought against nine opposition figures, including the jailed former president Mikheil Saakashvili, will keep potential opponents behind bars for many years. Recently, criminal charges have been filed against former Georgian Dream founder Ivanishvili and senior government ministers. The government is moving so fast that Kapanadze (the former deputy speaker) compared the situation to "speed-chess", where the opposition is trying to avoid checkmate and hoping the government will make tactical mistakes in their haste. The arrests of political activists at the nightly protests against the government outside parliament keeps them in a state of fear, despair, and resignation. Dozens of people are in prison or have been fined after blocking the road. "Georgia is gone, not only from the European table but also from the world stage," said Grigol Gegelia, a member of the Lelo Party, which faces a ban. "We are losing the country." Reporting by Lucy Papachristou, Editing by Peter Graff
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After Heathrow Power Outage, UK sets up an energy resilience taskforce
The government announced on Tuesday that Britain would set up a taskforce in order to improve the resilience of the energy grid following a fire at a substation which cut off power to Heathrow Airport for nearly a day. In March, the fire at Heathrow Airport forced Heathrow, Europe's most busy airport, to cancel flights and cause delays, revealing weaknesses in Britain's power grid. The Government said that the Energy Security and Resilience Taskforce, headed by Ed Miliband as energy minister, will coordinate upgrades of infrastructure and emergency response protocol across the country. The team will also be responsible for auditing asset management, fire safety and restoration procedures and ensuring critical national infrastructure operators are armed with robust business continuity plans. The energy department responded to an independent report commissioned to determine lessons learned from the incident with the following statement: "The energy resilient strategy will embed resilience in the design of future energy systems by taking a comprehensive approach to identifying key opportunities for the sector and setting clear ambitions for system resilience." As part of the clean energy transition, the government said it will publish a long-term strategy for energy resilience in 2026. This is to reduce cascading failures that could affect sectors like transport and telecoms. A report from July stated that the UK power grid failed to maintain a substation. The report also said that the problem that caused the fire was found in 2018, but not corrected.
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Polish PM: two of those responsible for the railway blast were Russian intelligence agents
The Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced on Tuesday that Poland had identified two individuals responsible for the explosion that occurred on a rail route leading to Ukraine. He added that these were Ukrainians that collaborated with Russian intelligence, and that they fled to Belarus. The explosion on the Warsaw-Lublin Line, which connects Poland's capital with the Ukrainian border, came after a wave arson, cyberattacks and sabotage in Poland and other European nations since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine. Warsaw said that Poland is now one of Moscow's main targets because it acts as a hub to aid Kyiv. Russia has denied responsibility for sabotage acts. Tusk said to lawmakers, "The most important thing is that...we have identified the individuals responsible for acts of sabotage." He said: "We are certain that in both cases, the attempts to blow up rails and the violation of the railway infrastructure were deliberate and intended to cause a railroad traffic disaster." A spokesperson for Poland's Special Services Minister said earlier on Tuesday that everything pointed towards Russian intelligence services ordering sabotage against Polish railways. (Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Alan Charlish, Pawel Florkiewicz; Editing by Conor Humphries)
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President says that Tanzania's damaged image may make it difficult to attract funding.
Tanzania may have difficulty securing funding from international institutions due to its damaged global reputation, said President Samia Suluhu Hassan on Tuesday as he swore in new ministers following last month's disputed elections. Hassan, 65 years old, was declared the winner by a landslide of the October elections that were marred with clashes between security forces and her main rivals over their exclusion. She did not say what tarnished Tanzania's reputation. The United Nations, rights groups and opposition parties have all said that hundreds of people are likely to have been killed during the clashes. However, the government has disputed these figures, calling them exaggerated. "Most of time, we depend on outside sources." Hassan: "We have received loans from international institutions and banks. But what happened to our country has damaged our image." The bad reputation we created might make us return. African Union observers stated that the vote was not credible, and they documented evidence of ballot box stuffing. The government has rejected criticism and claimed that the elections were fair. Hassan promised to investigate election violence, and offered condolences last week to bereaved family members. This was her most public acknowledgment of the turmoil that has led to the biggest political crisis the country has experienced in decades. She urged officials, during the swearing in of ministers on Tuesday in Dodoma's administrative capital, to focus instead on raising money from domestic sources. The finance ministry announced in June that it had planned to borrow 8.7 trillion Tanzanian Shillings ($3.6billion) for the fiscal year 2025/26. (July - June). The 2024/25 budget set the amount of external grants and loans to be made at 5.13 trillion Tanzanian shillings.
Ryanair's late flight results in some landing rights being lost at Dutch airport
Airport Coordination Netherlands (the body that assigns slots to airports) announced on Tuesday that Irish low-cost carrier Ryanair had lost two landing slots at Eindhoven Airport because its flights were repeatedly late. Ryanair announced in a press release that it had appealed ACNL’s decision before the European Commission and Dutch courts. It called it "unprecedented and disproportionate". ACNL determined that Ryanair consistently delayed flights on Monday evenings from Sofia, Bulgaria and Thursday evenings from Pisa in Italy. The ACNL said that the flights were, on average, more than an hour behind schedule.
ACNL then removed the airline's two slots from the schedule for the summer of next year, a punishment it only rarely imposes. Ryanair stated that ACNL penalizes airlines for delays in air traffic control, even if they are only 15 minutes late. The decision was first reported by the Dutch newspaper Eindhovens Dagblad. (Reporting and editing by Jamie Freed; Joe Bavier, Jan Harvey, and Jamie Freed)
(source: Reuters)