Category World News

Cambodian authorities have arrested more than 1,000 people in raids on cyber-scam compounds.

The suspects were arrested in raids in at least five provinces between Monday and Wednesday, according to statements from Information Minister Neth Pheaktra and police.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet issued a directive made public on Tuesday, telling law enforcement and the military “to prevent and crack down on online scams”, warning they risk losing their jobs if they fail to take action.

Since the pandemic, Cambodia has been plagued by the rapid spread of cyber-scam operations – many of them run by Chinese organised crime groups. Inside compounds ranging from individual flats to sprawling, multibuilding affairs, an international army of scammers is forced to run global romance and business cons that have bilked unwitting victims out of billions of dollars.

Most of those employed are lured in with promises of good jobs, only to face torture or even death if they try and escape. The UN estimates that more than 100,000 people are enslaved in Cambodia alone, part of a wider landscape in Southeast Asia responsible for an estimated $40bn stolen annually.

Those detained included more than 200 Vietnamese, 27 Chinese, and 75 suspects from Taiwan and 85 Cambodians in the capital Phnom Penh and the southern city of Sihanoukville. Police also seized equipment, including computers and hundreds of mobile phones.

At least 270 Indonesians, including 45 women, were arrested Wednesday in Poipet, a town on the border with Thailand notorious for cyber-scam and gambling operations, the minister said. Elsewhere, police in the northeastern province of Kratie arrested 312 people, including nationals of Thailand, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam, while 27 people from Vietnam, China and Myanmar were arrested in the western province of Pursat.

While the crackdown is the latest in a series of mass arrests, many critics have accused the government of doing too little to prevent their spread, alleging corruption and insider dealing. The US government in September imposed sanctions on tycoon Ly Yong Phat, a close associate of the prime minister and his family, over allegations of forced labour and cyber-scams.

Last month, Amnesty International released a report accusing the Cambodian government of “deliberately ignoring a litany of human rights abuses including slavery, human trafficking, child labour and torture being carried out by criminal gangs on a vast scale in more than 50 scamming compounds located across the country”.

The government has routinely denied such claims, saying they are doing what they can.

Cambodia’s latest crackdown comes in the middle of a bitter feud with neighboring Thailand, which began with a brief armed skirmish in late May over border territory claimed by both nations and has now led to border closures and nearly daily exchanges of nationalistic insults. Friendly former leaders of both countries have become estranged and there have been heated debates about which nation’s cultural heritage has influenced the other.

Bahrain’s crown prince is set to invest more than $17bn in the United States.

The White House outlined the new deal before a meeting between Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and US President Donald Trump.

Sitting with the crown prince of Bahrain, he described the Gulf nation as a “fantastic ally.” He said they would discuss trade and other topics.

The prince said they would announce investments in the United States, which “builds upon a legacy that we’re very proud of”.

As part of the investment, Bahrain will sign a deal between Gulf Air and Boeing/GE valued at about $7bn for 12 aircraft with an option for six more.

The deal also includes the sale of 40 GE engines, according to the White House.

The announcement from the crown prince comes on the heels of foreign investment deals Trump made during a trip to the Middle East in May. During a visit to Riyadh, Trump secured a $600bn commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the United States and agreed to sell the Saudis an arms package worth nearly $142bn.

The White House said the Bahrain deal will support 30,000 American jobs and was secured with help from Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

The crown prince will also commit to deploying additional capital amounting to billions of dollars.

Bahrain is expected to be signing deals with Oracle and Cisco, with plans to replace Chinese servers with Cisco products, the White House said.

Bahrain also seeks to increase its investments in US energy, tech and manufacturing sectors.

The White House says the crown prince intends to deploy capital to increase US domestic aluminium production, invest in US LNG production to secure BAH energy supplies and buy cutting-edge AI chips, partnering with US hyper-scalers.

During the visit, the crown prince will also announce the kingdom’s intention to make these investments and sign various deals and memorandums of understanding (MOUs).

One of these MOUs creates a framework for Bahrain to begin discussions towards developing commercial nuclear capabilities.

Later this year, the king of Bahrain will visit Washington to finalise these agreements and solidify the progress made in building our two nations’s economic prosperity, the White House said.

US markets remained relatively flat on the announcement. As of 12:00pm ET (16:00 GMT) the S&P 500 was down 0.1 percent, the tech-heavy Nasdaq was down 0.09 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 0.04 percent. Boeing stock is down 0.3 percent from the market open, after an earlier upward surge this morning. GE trending upwards on the news, up 0.1.

The new investment agreement comes as the White House’s tariff strategy remains in the spotlight. In April, when the White House paused country-specific tariffs, the Trump administration said it would have 90 deals in 90 days. With that deadline having passed, the US has only solidified three, including Vietnam, UK and as of Tuesday, Indonesia.

United States President Donald Trump continues to feud with supporters disappointed by his handling of information about deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, calling them “weaklings” and labelling the controversy a “hoax” concocted by his political enemies.

In a social media post on Wednesday, Trump accused Democrats of attempting to capitalise on growing anger over his administration’s efforts to distance itself from conspiracies that many on the US right, including Trump and his allies, have fuelled for years.

“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘b*******,’ hook, line, and sinker,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

“Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!” he added.

The post underscores growing schisms within the US right over the Trump administration’s insistence that there was nothing untoward about Epstein’s death by suicide in prison, and that the disgraced financier never had a “client list” of powerful figures tied to child sex abuse.

“I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” Trump said.

Speculation about Epstein’s connections to political and economic elites, and the possibility of an “Epstein List” of clients subject to blackmail, is not exclusive to the US right, and has become a symbol of wider popular belief that powerful people who commit abuses are unlikely to face consequences.

After Epstein died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex abuse charges, the circumstances around his death immediately drew scepticism and became a source of widespread conspiracies.

But those conspiracies have become a matter of particular obsession for the US right, who have used them to advance a dark vision of corrupt and venal elites who need to be rooted out and brought to justice, and were often fused with wider calls for extrajudicial actions against their perceived political enemies, especially prominent Democrats.

Trump administration officials such as FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, former proponents of such theories, teased action and new revelations when they first entered the administration.

Asked about the Epstein files during a TV interview in February, Bondi said they were “sitting on my desk right now to review”.

The administration made an about-face when the Department of Justice released a memo last week concluding that Epstein’s death was a suicide and he never had a “client list”. In the time since, Trump has expressed increasing annoyance towards those on the US right who have continued to question those details, including some who have said that Trump’s own relationship with Epstein may explain the reversal.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump snapped at a reporter last week. “This guy’s been talked about for years.”

But Trump’s insistence that his supporters stop talking about Epstein may in fact be pushing many to double down.

A key partner in Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition says it is quitting, leaving the Israeli prime minister with a razor thin majority in parliament.

The Ultra-Orthodox Shas party said on Wednesday that it was leaving the cabinet in protest against lawmakers’ failure to guarantee future exemption from military conscription for religious students.

“Shas representatives … find with a heavy heart that they cannot stay in the government and be a part of it,” said the group in a statement.

Shas, which has long served as a kingmaker in Israeli politics, said it wouldn’t work to undermine the government once outside it and could vote with it on some laws. It also wouldn’t support its collapse.

The departure of Shas comes one day after another ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism (UTJ),  resigned from the government over the same issue, which has sparked an explosive debate in the country after more than 21 months of war with Hamas in Gaza.

However, unlike the UTJ, a Shas spokesman said the party was not leaving the parliamentary coalition, leaving Netanyahu with a slim majority.

While ultra-Orthodox seminary students have long been exempt from mandatory military service, many Israelis are angered by what they see as an unfair burden carried by the mainstream who serve.

The joint move by Shas and UTJ comes just before Parliament starts a three-month summer recess on July 27, giving the Prime Minister several months of little to no legislative activity to bring the parties back into the fold.

‘Cruel and criminal persecution’

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders say full-time devotion to holy scriptures study is sacrosanct and fear their young men will steer away from religious life if they are drafted into the military.

Last year the Supreme Court ordered an end to the exemption. Parliament has been trying to work out a new conscription bill, which has so far failed to meet the demands of both Shas and UTJ.

Religious Services Minister Michael Malkieli, a member of Shas, said on Wednesday that rabbis were angered after Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein reneged on promises regarding the bill, according to a report in the Times of Israel.

Malkieli, reading from a statement by the Council of Torah Sages, also hit out at action taken by the IDF and attorney general to pursue draft dodgers, describing the move as “nothing less than cruel and criminal persecution against yeshiva students”.

The rupture is not expected to usher in immediate elections or undermine efforts to secure a possible Gaza ceasefire.