US intelligence has received information that Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden's son Hamza has died, NBC News reported Wednesday.
NBC said three US officials had confirmed they had information of Hamza bin Laden's death, but gave no details of the date or place, and did not indicate if they had confirmed the information.
Questioned by reporters in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump did not confirm or deny the report.
"I don't want to comment on it," he said.
In February the US government put a $1 million bounty on Bin Laden's head, saying the man sometimes dubbed the "crown prince of jihad" was "emerging as a leader in the Al-Qaeda franchise."
He had put out audio and video messages calling for attacks on the United States and other countries, especially to avenge his father's killing by US forces in Pakistan in May 2011.
Documents seized in the raid on his father's house in Abbottabad suggested Hamza was being groomed as heir to the Al-Qaeda leadership, according to the US State Department.
US forces also found a video of the wedding of Hamza, who was thought to have been 30, to the daughter of another senior Al-Qaeda official that is believed to have taken place in Iran.
Hamza bin Laden's whereabouts have never been pinpointed. He was believed to have been under house arrest in Iran but reports suggest he also may have resided in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria.
The group behind the deadly September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Al-Qaeda's prominence as a radical Islamist group has faded over the past decade in the shadow of the Islamic State group.
But branches and associated jihadist groups in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere have underscored its continuing potency.
(This is a breaking story. Please come back here for details.)
HONG KONG - Months of increasingly violent protests in Hong Kong are taking a growing toll on the city’s economy, weighing on confidence and scaring away tourists from one of the world’s most vibrant shopping destinations.
FILE PHOTO: A shopkeeper looks out from a closes door as protesters attend a march at an anti-parallel trading at Sheung Shui, a border town in Hong Kong, China July 13, 2019. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
Economists say the impact of anti-government protests over the past eight weeks is already worse than in 2014, when a so-called “Umbrella revolution” paralyzed the city’s financial district for 79 days.
Demonstrations are more spread out across the city this time and violence has been more intense, prompting local and foreign shoppers to avoid certain areas. Stores and even bank branches have been forced to close for prolonged periods.
Many businesses in the port city on the southern Chinese coast are already facing strains from China’s economic slowdown and fallout from the year-long Sino-U.S. trade war.
Various strikes are planned in coming weeks, while disruptive civil disobedience actions are taking place almost daily and look set to continue for months. On Tuesday, hundreds of protesters blocked train services, causing commuter chaos.
The main retail association has warned members expect a double-digit drop in sales in July and August. The government will release June sales data on Thursday.
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“Hong Kong’s retail industry will be affected both internally and externally,” said Angela Cheng, economist at CMB International Capital Corporation Limited, adding she had revised her 2019 retail sales forecast to as much as a 10% drop, twice as deep as her previous estimate.
Brokerage CLSA downgraded local jeweler Chow Tai Fook, one of the city’s most popular brands with mainland tourists, to ‘sell’ from ‘outperform’ on July 23, saying the protests could cause permanent long-term damage.
Luxury group Richemont warned in July that protests hurt its sales, while Swiss watchmaker Swatch said political turbulence contributed to a double-digit decline in sales in Hong Kong, one of its most important markets globally.
Around the Admiralty district, where much of the protests have centered, staff at several restaurants and shops told us at Reuters on Monday that patrons have dropped by a third from a month earlier.
BUSINESS AND MORALS
Bobby Tang, a 21-year-old sales representative at a Gucci store in the Causeway Bay shopping district, where protest barricades were raised for the first time on Sunday, supports the civil movement.
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He says the government has failed to respond to any of its demands, which at first were focused on withdrawing a controversial China extradition bill, but have morphed into a much wider pro-democracy struggle.
But he also worries about his job at the French luxury group. Prior to the protests, the store had one client per minute, he said, but now it was 3-4 per hour and daily sales have fallen to HK$20,000 ($2,560) from HK$100,000.
“If the protests last until October, I worry if I can earn enough salary,” Tang said.
Shopping malls are often being used for rest breaks by protesters wearing helmets and goggles and sometimes carrying makeshift weapons.
The protesters have been largely respectful of the premises, but on one occasion one mall turned into a battle ground. As police tried to disperse crowds in the Sha Tin working class district on July 14, it ended up chasing them into a shopping center managed by Sun Hung Kai Properties.
Fighting erupted and scenes of regular shoppers with bulky bags running away while trying to maintain balance on bloody, slippery floors were broadcast worldwide.
Tourism, especially from mainland China, has dropped markedly. Britain, Japan, Singapore and others have issued travel alerts.
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Hong Kong’s Federation of Trade Unions said hotel occupancy rates fell 20% in June year-on-year, and probably 40% in July.
A local tour manager who gave only his surname Yu said around two-thirds of his mainland clients have canceled bookings.
LONG-TERM RISKS
Fitch Ratings said in a note on Tuesday the unrest could damage business confidence and the quality of governance. It also raised longer-term concerns about policy paralysis and erosion of the rule of law.
A 1992 U.S.-Hong Kong Policy Act allowing Washington to have a different customs regime with Hong Kong than with mainland China was also crucial for the stability of the Chinese-ruled city.
For it to stand, U.S. authorities need to see Hong Kong as sufficiently independent from Beijing, therefore they will scrutinize the latter’s every step during the protests.
Fitch affirmed Hong Kong’s AA+ rating on June 11.
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“Evidence of a permanent loss of confidence in public institutions or tangible reduction of the territory’s semi-autonomy as granted under the Basic Law, would ... be grounds to review the ratings,” Fitch said.
The American Chamber of Commerce warned that international businesses were feeling pessimistic on short-term prospects and that the government should take immediate actions to address the root causes of the demonstrations.
“The protests have a chance to last until the end of the year. We may even lose on Christmas, which should be the best sales season,” said Fung, a sales assistant for a skin care company who only gave her last name.
The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets, overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access.[1][2] The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the Web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.[3][4][5][6][7]
The darknets which constitute the dark web include small, friend-to-friendpeer-to-peer networks, as well as large, popular networks like Tor, Freenet, I2P, and Riffle operated by public organizations and individuals. Users of the dark web refer to the regular web as Clearnet due to its unencrypted nature.[8] The Tor dark web may be referred to as onionland,[9] a reference to the network's top-level domain suffix .onion and the traffic anonymization technique of onion routing.
Darknet websites are accessible only through networks such as Tor ("The Onion Routing" project) and I2P ("Invisible Internet Project").[17] Tor browser and Tor-accessible sites are widely used among the darknet users and can be identified by the domain ".onion".[18] While Tor focuses on providing anonymous access to the Internet, I2P specializes in allowing anonymous hosting of websites.[19] Identities and locations of darknet users stay anonymous and cannot be tracked due to the layered encryption system. The darknet encryption technology routes users' data through a large number of intermediate servers, which protects the users' identity and guarantees anonymity. The transmitted information can be decrypted only by a subsequent node in the scheme, which leads to the exit node. The complicated system makes it almost impossible to reproduce the node path and decrypt the information layer by layer.[20] Due to the high level of encryption, websites are not able to track geolocation and IP of their users, and users are not able to get this information about the host. Thus, communication between darknet users is highly encrypted allowing users to talk, blog, and share files confidentially.[21]
The darknet is also used for illegal activity such as illegal trade, forums, and media exchange for pedophiles and terrorists.[22] At the same time traditional websites have created alternative accessibility for the Tor browser in efforts to connect with their users. ProPublica, for example, launched a new version of its website available exclusively to Tor users.
Many hackers sell their services either individually or as a part of groups.[47] Such groups include xDedic, hackforum, Trojanforge, Mazafaka, dark0de and the TheRealDeal darknet market.[48] Some have been known to track and extort apparent pedophiles.[49] Cyber crimes and hacking services for financial institutions and banks have also been offered over the Dark web.[50] Attempts to monitor this activity have been made through various government and private organizations, and an examination of the tools used can be found in the Procedia Computer Science journal.[51] Use of Internet-scale DNS Distributed Reflection Denial of Service (DRDoS) attacks have also been made through leveraging the Dark Web.[52] There are many scam .onion sites also present which end up giving tools for download that are infected with trojan horses or backdoors.
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