India will aim to become a developed nation within 25 years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a national day address on Monday, with policies to support domestic production in power, defence and digital technology.
Speaking from the 17th century Red Fort in Delhi as India celebrates its 75th year of independence from British colonial rule, Modi exhorted Indian youth to give their best years for the cause of the country.
The World Bank currently categorizes India as a lower-middle income economy – meant for countries with a gross national income per capita of between $1,086 and $4,255. High-income countries, like the United States, have a per capita income of $13,205 or more.
India is the world’s sixth-largest economy and is expected to grow at over 7% in the current fiscal year ending in March 2023 – the fastest among major economies. Many experts say India’s economy could expand to become the world’s third-largest by 2050 after the United States and China.
With about 1.4 billion people, India is expected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country next year.
Japan’s economy rebounded at a slower-than-expected pace in the second quarter from a Covid-induced slump, data showed on Monday, highlighting uncertainty on whether consumption will grow enough to bolster a much-delayed, fragile recovery.
While rising consumption propped up April-June growth, the outlook has been clouded by a resurgence in infections, slowing global growth, supply constraints and rising raw material prices that are boosting households’ living costs.
The world’s third-largest economy expanded an annualized 2.2% in April-June, government data showed, marking the third straight quarter of increase but falling short of median market forecasts for a 2.5% gain.
The growth was driven largely by a 1.1% gain in private consumption, the data showed, as businesses re-opened after the lifting of pandemic-related curbs on economic activity.
Capital expenditure, another key driver of April-June growth, increased 1.4% from the previous quarter, exceeding a median market forecast for a 0.9% expansion, the data showed.
Domestic demand added 0.5% point to GDP growth, while external demand neither added to, nor shaved off from growth.
Japan has lagged other major economies in fully recovering from the pandemic’s hit due to weak consumption, blamed in part on curbs on activity that lasted until March. That has turned the Bank of Japan (BOJ) into an outlier in the global monetary tightening phase sweeping across many economies amid surging inflation.
After 11 days of not having any news of their loved ones, relatives of Mexican miners trapped inside El Pinabete mine grew increasingly upset.
Rescue works have not been advancing as fast as families were expecting, a relative of a trapped miner Enereida Toledo told Reuters on Sunday. Toledo added that authorities have avoided giving relatives concrete answers on the status of the rescue works.
The ten miners became trapped inside the Pinabete mine in the town of Sabinas in the North-western state of Coahuila on August 3, when their excavation work caused a tunnel wall to collapse, triggering flooding in three wells.
Miner Gabriel Rodriguez Palomares who is assisting with rescue efforts said they needed more help and for authorities to allow experts to descend into the mine.
Over the last week, authorities and rescue teams have been pumping water out of the mine in order to allow rescuers to enter the chambers, but Coahuila state government said in a tweet on Sunday that water levels had risen. They added that engineers and experts were working to find out the source of the rise and to develop a new water abstraction strategy.
Poison cannot be ruled out as the cause of a mass die-off of fish in the Oder river but tests so far have not proven toxic substances were to blame, Polish Environment Minister Anna Moskwa said on Sunday.
Tonnes of dead fish have been found since late July in the river Oder, which runs through Poland and along the border with Germany.
Both countries have said they believe a toxic substance is to blame, but have yet to identify what it is.
“As of today, none of these (water) tests have confirmed the presence of toxic substances,” Moskwa said after meeting with her German counterpart Steffi Lemke and other German and Polish officials in Poland’s Szczecin.
Moskwa said samples are now being tested for the presence of pesticides and around 300 more substances will be checked for in the coming hours.
She said Polish authorities were working to identify how the unidentified substance that caused the death of the fish had entered the river.
Lemke said the extent of the damage to the ecosystem and how long it would last was still unclear, and the Polish and the German sides would work together on the clean-up, investigation of the cause and improving communication to prevent future disasters.
Green activists and opposition politicians have criticised the Polish government for not responding quickly enough to the danger and failing to alert Poles to avoid bathing and angling in the river.
Germany has also grumbled over Poland’s response. Lemke said the Polish and German sides agreed at their meeting “one of the most essential points” in a similar situation was that all relevant organisations and authorities could get quick and comprehensive information.
At least 41 people were killed and 12 injured in a massive fire that broke out in a Coptic church in Egypt’s Giza Province on Sunday, the Egyptian Health Ministry said.
The accident took place in Abu Sifin church in the Imbaba neighborhood, according to the ministry.
“Four of those injured are in unstable conditions,” the ministry said in a statement, adding it had sent 37 ambulances to the scene.
The fire started from an air conditioner on the second floor of the church building because of an electrical fault, the Egyptian Interior Ministry said in a separate statement.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi extended his condolences to the victims of the church fire in a phone call to Pope Tawadros II, head of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church.
“President Sisi reiterated that all state institutions are providing the necessary support to contain the aftermath of this tragic accident,” said the Egyptian presidency in a statement.
Fire fighters work at a fire site in Giza Province, Egypt, on Aug. 14, 2022. (Ministry of Interior Affairs of Egypt/Handout via Xinhua)
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Incident Response Report reveals trends, future implications and offers recommendations based on data gathered from a year’s worth of investigations
According to a new report from Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW), the global cybersecurity leader, the heavy use of software vulnerabilities matches the opportunistic behaviour of threat actors who scour the internet for vulnerabilities and weak points on which to focus.
The 2022 Unit 42 Incident Response Report offers a multitude of insights gleaned from Unit 42 by Palo Alto Networks’ extensive incident response (IR) work, leveraging a sampling of over 600 Unit 42 IR cases, to help CISOs and security teams understand the greatest security risks they face, and where to prioritize resources to reduce them.
In the report, Unit 42 identified that finance and real estate were among the industries that received the highest average ransom demands, with an average demand of nearly $8 million and $5.2 million, respectively.
Overall, ransomware and business email compromise (BEC) were the top incident types that the Incident Response team responded to over the past 12 months, accounting for approximately 70% of incident response cases.
“Right now, cybercrime is an easy business to get into because of its low cost and often high returns. As such, unskilled, novice threat actors can get started with access to tools like hacking-as-a-service becoming more popular and available on the dark web,” said Wendi Whitmore, SVP and head of Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks.
“Ransomware attackers are also becoming more organized with their customer service and satisfaction surveys as they engage with cybercriminals and the victimized organizations:
Key trends covered in the report include:
Ransomware A new ransomware victim is posted on leak sites every four hours. Identifying ransomware activity early is critical for organizations. Typically, ransomware actors are only discovered after files are encrypted, and the victim organization receives a ransom note. Unit 42 has identified that the median dwells time — meaning the time threat actors spend in a targeted environment before being detected — observed for ransomware attacks was 28 days.
Ransom demands have been as high as $30 million, and actual payouts have been as high as $8 million, a steady increase compared to the findings of the 2022 Unit 42 Ransomware Report. Increasingly, affected organizations can also expect threat actors to use double extortion, threatening to publicly release sensitive information if a ransom isn’t paid.
Lockbit 2.0 was responsible for the highest number of attacks in Thailand, causing 9 out of the 13 ransomware attacks in Thailand. Bangkok has the highest number of attacks compared to other states in Thailand, mostly within the commercial & professional services sector followed by software & services and automobiles & components.
BEC Cybercriminals used a variety of techniques in business email compromise wire-fraud schemes. Forms of social engineerings, such as phishing, offer an easy and cost-effective way to gain covert access while maintaining a low risk of discovery. According to the report, in many cases, cybercriminals are simply asking their unwitting targets to hand over their credentials — and getting them. Once they have access, the median dwell time for BEC attacks was 38 days, and the average amount stolen was $286,000.
Affected Industries Attackers follow the money when it comes to targeting industries; however, many attackers are opportunistic, simply scanning the internet in search of systems where they can leverage known vulnerabilities. Unit 42 identified the top affected industries in incident response cases as finance, professional and legal services, manufacturing, healthcare, high tech, and wholesale and retail. Organizations within these industries store, transmit and process high volumes of monetizable sensitive information that attracts threat actors.
The report also reveals some statistics from IR cases that cyber attackers don’t want you to know:
● The top three initial access vectors used by threat actors were phishing, exploitation of known software vulnerabilities and brute-force credential attacks focused primarily on the remote desktop protocol (RDP). Combined, these attack vectors make up 77% of the suspected root causes for intrusions.
● ProxyShell accounted for more than half of all vulnerabilities exploited for initial access at 55%, followed by Log4J (14%), SonicWall (7%), ProxyLogon (5%) and Zoho ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus (4%).
● In half of all IR cases, our investigators discovered that organizations lacked multifactor authentication on critical internet-facing systems, such as corporate webmail, virtual private network (VPN) solutions or other remote access solutions.
● In 13% of cases, organizations had no mitigations in place to ensure account lockout for brute-force credential attacks.
● In 28% of cases, having poor patch management procedures contributed to threat actor success.
● In 44% of cases, organizations did not have an endpoint detection and response (EDR) or extended detection and response (XDR) security solution, or it was not fully deployed on the initially impacted systems to detect and respond to malicious activities.
● 75% of insider threat cases involved a former employee
American actor Anne Heche was taken off life support on Sunday, nine days after suffering severe injuries in a fiery car crash, as a compatible person was found to receive her donated organs, a spokesperson said.
Heche, 53, had been legally dead since Friday (August 12), though still with a heartbeat, and was kept on life support to preserve her organs so they could be donated, her representatives said.
“Anne Heche has been peacefully taken off life support,”
spokesperson Holly Baird said in a statement.
Heche’s Mini Cooper sped out of control, plowed into a house and burst into flames on Aug. 5, leading to an agonizing hospital stay with increasingly grave messages from her family and representatives.
On Friday, one of her two sons, 19-year-old Homer Laffoon, issued a statement saying: “My brother Atlas and I lost our Mom.”
Heche, who starred in the movies “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag The Dog” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” struggled for decades with the fallout from a troubled childhood and was part of a groundbreaking same-sex couple in the 1990s.
Winner of a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991 for her roles as identical twin sisters in the NBC soap opera “Another World,” Heche starred in the 1998 adventure comedy “Six Days Seven Nights” with Harrison Ford and played alongside Demi Moore and Cher in the HBO TV movie “If These Walls Could Talk.”
She became one half of Hollywood’s most famous same-sex couple at the time when she dated comedian and actress Ellen DeGeneres. Against the wishes of her studio, Heche came out publicly at the 1997 red carpet premiere for disaster movie “Volcano,” taking DeGeneres along as her date.
The pair were together for more than three years before Heche ended the relationship.
In an interview with Page Six entertainment website in October 2021, Heche said she was “blacklisted” by Hollywood because of her relationship with DeGeneres. “I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years. I was fired from a $10 million picture deal and did not see the light of day in a studio picture.”
In 2001, she married Coleman Laffoon, a cameraman. After the couple divorced, Heche began a long-term relationship with actor James Tupper which ended in 2018.
Anne Celeste Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio on May 25, 1969, and was the youngest of five children. At age 13, she was shocked by her father’s death from AIDS and from the revelation that he had had secret gay relationships.
Her brother, Nathan, died three months after their father in a car crash.
Heche said her father raped her as a child, causing her mental health struggles for decades after, including frequent fantasies that she was from another planet.
Heche’s mother, Nancy, denied her daughter’s claim that she knew about the sexual abuse, calling it “lies and blasphemies” and her sister Abigail has said she believes the “memories regarding our father are untrue.” She said that Anne Heche had cast doubt herself on her own memories of that time.
Later in her career, Heche starred as a senior member of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the NBC TV series “The Brave” and appeared on competition show “Dancing With The Stars” in late 2020.
The World Health Organisation (WHO)’s move to rename the monkeypox virus will help prevent cultural and social discrimination, the vice chair of the Public Health Commission said on Sunday.
Chalermchai Boonyaleephan said renaming monkeypox is much like renaming Covid-19, which was initially called the “Wuhan virus”. Then US president Donald Trump also began calling it the “Chinese virus”, sparking a conflict between the two countries.
He said that WHO’s system of renaming Covid-19 variants based on the Greek alphabet has also helped people forget the country of origin.
“Once people become familiar with the Greek alphabet, they forget the origin. Like Omicron variant was originally found in South Africa,” he said.
He added that it would be interesting to see what Thailand will call monkeypox once it is renamed.
The move to rename the virus came after monkeys were attacked recently in Brazil over fears of transmission. In a press conference last week, WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris pointed out that the transmission is between humans and the virus came from rodents.
The WHO also renamed the two variants of the virus on August 8. Now the Central African or Congo Basin clade and the West African clade will be referred to as Clade I and Clade II respectively. WHO also decided that Clade II comprises two distinct subclades.
Jürgen Klopp provided his reaction to Darwin Nunez’s red card and Liverpool’s 1-1 draw with Crystal Palace post-match at Anfield on Monday night.
The Reds were held to a point for the second successive game to begin the Premier League season as Luis Diaz cancelled out Wilfried Zaha’s opener.
Diaz’s scintillating solo effort came just moments after Klopp’s side were reduced to 10 men due to Nunez’s dismissal for a clash with Joachim Andersen.
On his view on Nunez’s red card
A little provocation here and there – and definitely the wrong reaction. A clear red card, I cannot deny that. Yeah, he will learn from that. Unfortunately, he has now a few games’ time to do so. That’s not cool for us in our specific situation, even less, but that’s how it is.
On it being the first sending-off for violent conduct of his tenure at Liverpool
There must be always a first time… it doesn’t make it better.
On his assessment of the Reds’ performance on the night
Really good. I told the boys after the game I’m proud, and I am – that’s what I feel. A lot of things happened during the week and then the game started like it started, I loved it, that was the game we wanted to play. Of course we wanted to finish the situations off but I think we did extremely well and then in the box with a lot of legs and bodies they blocked, I’m not sure, seven or eight shots in the first half already. That’s a special number so we were obviously on the right path and if we carry on like this it was a matter of time.
But unfortunately then they scored the 1-0, which I think was the first counter-attack? I think so. Everything was in place for that moment, so we had good protection actually; we had Fab and Trent around Eze, we had two-v-one in the last line as well. Unfortunately, Eze can free him there and then the space is pretty big, with the speed of Zaha and a good finish. In that moment they showed actually how good they are and how difficult it is to play against them, because these moments always can happen and it didn’t happen too often.
At half-time, positive, I told the boys we should go back to the way we started the game, that would be ideal; we need offers, we need the speed, we need the direction, these were the moments where Palace struggled, we caused them problems. We need to pick up as well second balls in these moments and go from there. I thought the start was positive again and then the red card happened. But obviously the best possible reaction from Lucho then – worldie, wonderful goal. And from that moment on it was a special game. That was us at home with an incredible atmosphere. Unfortunately, without a goal, which is not easy.
But I think the way we played – and you all watched a lot of football games with 10v11 and it’s not common that you put a team as much under pressure as we did. But we did and that was good. So, now we have a point more than before the game. I can imagine what kind of articles and headlines and commentaries that leads [to] but that’s life. So, we will go from here.
On whether he will speak to Nunez in the coming days
Yeah, of course I will speak with him. I came in and I wanted to see the situation; in the game I couldn’t see anything so I didn’t know what happened. I saw Andersen on the floor and Darwin walking away, that was my picture. I asked then our guys already and I saw only, ‘OK, red card’. And then I saw it – yes, it is a red card. Wrong reaction in the situation. Andersen wanted that, I would say, and he got it. But he made a mistake, Darwin, so of course we will talk about it. But not yet.
The Thai women’s national tennis team has won promotion to Group I of the Asia/Oceania Zone after crushing Hong Kong in the final of the Billie Jean King Cup.
Thailand’s 19-year-old Anchisa Chanta, ranked world No 698, defied the odds to beat Hong Kong’s Wu Ho-ching (No 599) 6-4, 6-1 on Saturday in Kuala Lumpur. Patcharin Cheepchandet, 27, and ranked 712, then sealed the Thai team’s victory with a 6-3, 6-2 win over Eudice Chong.
Thailand dominated the tournament, reaching the final after thrashing Pacific Oceania, Malaysia, Singapore and Maldives by the same 3-0 scoreline.
Lawn Tennis Association of Thailand president Suchai Pornchaisakudom on Sunday praised the team on their promotion to the region’s elite league alongside China, Japan, India and South Korea.
“This group of players is a great combination of superstars and veteran players, making it strong enough to become champions of this tournament,” he said.
He also hailed the victory as a new era for Thai tennis on the international stage.
Fire fighters work at a fire site in Giza Province, Egypt, on Aug. 14, 2022. (Ministry of Interior Affairs of Egypt/Handout via Xinhua)
