Why are US warships going to Venezuela?
Transunion hack exposes consumer data for millions of Americans
The credit reporting company TransUnion has confirmed that more than 4 million people’s data was exposed in a recent hack involving an unidentified third party.
In a letter posted to the website of Maine’s attorney general on Wednesday, the company said it had “recently experienced a cyber incident involving a third-party application serving our US consumer support operations”.
“We continue to enhance our security controls as appropriate to minimise the risk of any similar incident in the future”.
In a statement, TransUnion said it had “quickly contained the issue, which did not involve our core credit database or include credit reports”.
The Illinois-based credit bureau also issued a letter to consumers, saying it would offer its credit monitoring services to those affected free of charge.
Maine legally requires disclosures for certain kinds of breaches affecting its residents. Among the more than 4.4 million people who were victims of the hack, roughly 17, 000 were from Maine.
The state attorney general’s office indicated that the breach occurred on July 28 and was discovered two days later, on July 30.
The name of the third-party application was not disclosed, but US corporations have recently seen waves of compromises as hackers trick employees into opening up their respective employers ‘ Salesforce databases, where consumer data is often stored.
A Salesforce representative did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Credit reporting companies amass data about consumers ‘ borrowing and spending practices, and they therefore contain sensitive information, including Social Security numbers.
One of the biggest hacks in recent decades targeted the credit bureau Equifax in 2017. More than 147 million Americans saw private information released as part of the breach, including birthdates, credit card numbers and Social Security information.
That incident was considered one of the largest of its kind. The company was forced to agree to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission that included $425m set aside to help affected consumers.
UN Security Council votes to wind down UNIFIL mission in Lebanon after 2026
The UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon will remain there until 2026, but the UN Security Council will end it in an “orderly and safe drawdown and withdrawal” process the following year.
The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)’s mandate was set to expire on Sunday, just as the United States and its close ally Israel have been pressing for its termination.
After Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1978, UNIFIL was established to control the Israeli troops’ withdrawal from that country. Since then, its mandate has been renewed annually.
After the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in 2006, the mission was expanded, with supporters still arguing that maintaining a demilitarized buffer between the two sides.
UNIFIL would begin removing its 10, 800 military and civilian personnel and equipment as soon as its operations were approved and continue until December 2026. The Lebanese government is in discussions with us about doing that.
The resolution also calls on Israel to withdraw its forces and declares the Lebanese government “the only provider of security” in southern Lebanon north of the UN-drawn border known as the Blue Line.
Since taking office in January, US President Donald Trump has pushed for the organization to end and has already overseen US funding cuts.
Since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel and the start of Israel’s conflict in Gaza, Israel has long accused UNIFIL of failing to stop the organization’s mission and has increasingly pushed for its termination.
Israel has been accused of attacking UNIFIL positions and injuring peacekeepers repeatedly throughout its most recent ground invasion of Lebanon, which started in October of last year.
Israel has repeatedly struck targets in Lebanon despite a ceasefire in November, and it has maintained its ground presence in some important positions.
Israel steps up bombardment of Gaza City, killing at least 50 people
At least 50 people have been killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza since dawn on Thursday, including 12 aid seekers, medical sources told Al Jazeera, as residents report intensified military bombardment of the eastern and southern neighbourhoods of Gaza City.
The Israeli military has been preparing to take Gaza City, the enclave’s largest urban centre, despite international calls to reconsider the move over fears that the operation would cause significant casualties and displace the roughly one million Palestinians sheltering there.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was among those criticising the campaign, saying on Thursday that it “signals a new and dangerous phase” in the war.
“Expanded military operations in Gaza City will have devastating consequences. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, already exhausted and traumatised, would be forced to flee yet again, pushing families into even deeper peril,” he said.
“This must stop,” he said.
In Gaza City, residents said families were fleeing their homes and most were heading towards the coast as Israeli forces bombarded the Shujayea, Zeitoun and Sabra neighbourhoods.
No buildings remain standing in the southern part of Zeitoun as the Israeli ground operation has demolished more than 1,500 homes, according to Gaza’s Civil Defence agency.
Israeli officials have described Gaza City as the last stronghold of Hamas.
‘Enforced disappearances’
The Israeli military said in a statement that it was continuing to operate throughout Gaza to target fighters and their infrastructure.
The military said on Thursday that it had killed three fighters in the past day without saying how it had identified the individuals.
The Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that those killed across Gaza on Thursday included a woman and her child sheltering in a tent camp for displaced people in Khan Younis.
Meanwhile, UN rights experts voiced alarm at reports of “enforced disappearances” of starving Palestinians seeking food at distribution sites run by the US- and Israeli-backed GHF, urging Israel to end the “heinous crime”.
The seven independent experts said in a joint statement they had received reports that a number of individuals, including one child, had been “forcibly disappeared” after going to aid distribution sites in Rafah in southern Gaza.
“Reports of enforced disappearances targeting starving civilians seeking their basic right to food is not only shocking, but amounts to torture,” said the experts, who are mandated by the UN Human Rights Council but who do not speak on behalf of the UN itself.
“Using food as a tool to conduct targeted and mass disappearances needs to end now.”
In response, the GHF said it had found no evidence of “enforced disappearances” at its aid sites.
According to the AFP news agency, the GHF said in response to the experts’ statement: “We operate in a war zone where serious allegations exist against all parties operating outside our sites. But inside GHF facilities, there is no evidence of enforced disappearances.”
New famine deaths
With the enclave in the grips of a humanitarian crisis, the Gaza Ministry of Health also said on Thursday that four more people, including two children, had died of malnutrition and starvation in the enclave, raising hunger-related deaths to 317 people, including 121 children, since the war started.
“The scene on the ground is quite heartbreaking,” Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.
“Families are still lining up in front of soup kitchens for hours under the scorching heat, often to return to their temporary shelters empty-handed,” he said.
“Others are risking their lives to travel to distribution points to seek food aid.”
Israel’s military campaign has devastated the territory and displaced most of the roughly two million Palestinians there.
It started after Hamas’s October 2023 attacks on Israel, which killed 1,139 people with another 251 taken captive. Most of the captives have since been released through diplomatic negotiations although 50 remain in Gaza, of whom 20 are said to be alive.
Israel, meanwhile, has not responded publicly to Hamas’s acceptance of a proposal for a ceasefire that would allow the return of some of the captives.
Israeli officials have, however, insisted that they would only accept a deal that sees all of the captives released and Hamas’s surrender.
UN chief slams Israel for ‘deliberate’ Gaza ‘catastrophe’
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed that Israel was making “liberal decisions that defy basic humanity,” claiming that this had led to disastrous outcomes in Gaza. He reaffirmed that famine was no longer a looming possibility but rather a foreseeable catastrophe.
United States moves to restrict visa length for foreign students, reporters
The administration of US President Donald Trump intends to shorten the amount of time that foreign students, participants in cultural exchanges, and journalists are permitted to stay in the country.
The changes are necessary to combat “visa abuse,” according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Wednesday, and give the government more flexibility to “vet and supervise” foreign visa holders.
A spokesperson for the unnamed DHS said in a news release that “for too long, previous administrations have allowed foreign students and other visa holders to remain in the United States virtually indefinitely, posing safety risks, costing untold amounts of taxpayer dollars, and disadvantaging U.S. citizens.”
The Trump administration is attempting to impose stricter restrictions on all forms of immigration with the proposed time caps.
F visas for students, which are limited to four years, J visas for cultural exchange, which are also four years, and I visas for reporters, which are only allowed to stay for 240 days and have a four-year extension, are the three different types of visas that are affected.
China’s journalists would only have 90 days to travel there.
Student visas have typically been issued for the duration of an academic program up until this point. However, the proposal on Wednesday sparked concerns that the time restrictions could cause harm to foreign students.
A typical undergraduate university program in the US lasts four years, but some PhD programs can last longer. The length of time it takes to earn an academic diploma can also be affected by research opportunities, changes in degree paths, and other factors.
Foreign students are frequently charged more than their American counterparts, which adds up to a significant portion of the funding of US higher education.
In the US in 2024, there were 1.6 million foreign students studying with an F visa.
However, the Trump administration claimed that foreign students were using their visas to stay indefinitely.
In its news release, the DHS claimed that “foreign students have taken advantage of US generosity and have become “forever” students who are enrolled in higher education while residing in the US.
The Trump administration has aimed to increase government scrutiny of foreign students. Additionally, it announced earlier this year that all student visa applications would be temporarily suspended. The administration stated it would increase monitoring of social media activity while the application process was being reviewed when appointments first started in June.
Since Trump’s second term in office ended in January, thousands of student visas have also been suspended.
Some of the student activism, such as pro-Palestine protests, has resulted in their resignations.
In one instance, the administration detained and threatened to deport a PhD student from Turkey named Rumeysa Ozturk after she co-authored an editorial in which she wrote that called for her campus to cut ties with Israel in the wake of the country’s devastating conflict in Gaza.
Ozturk was released from an immigration detention facility in May after a legal dispute, but her case is still pending and she is still at risk of being deported.