After 30 years on the run, Matteo Messina Denaro, one of Italy’s most wanted men, was arrested on Monday at a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily, where he was undergoing treatment for cancer.

One of the bosses of the Cosa Nostra Mafia in Sicily, Denaro was one of Europol’s most wanted fugitives, known for his alleged involvement in dozens of Mafia-related murders and fatal bombings in Milan, Florence and Rome in the 1990s.

Denaro, whose location was well-protected for years, once allegedly boasted that a graveyard could be filled with the people he’s killed.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Here’s what to know.

A history of deadly crimes

Crime ran in Derano’s family. His father and godfather were both members of the mob, as were his siblings. His brother, Salvatore Messina Denaro, was arrested in 2010 but refused to testify about Matteo’s whereabouts. In 2013, his sister, Patrizia Messina Denaro, was arrested and later sentenced to 14 years in prison for being a member of the Mafia.

He has been a fugitive since 1993, allegedly spotted in Brazil, Spain, Britain, and Austria but never captured.

Journalist Andrea Purgatori told the BBC that until the 1990s, murders were being committed on an almost daily basis. “Messina Denaro committed some of the most violent and cruel crimes Italy can remember,” Purgatori said.

His crimes were expansive. He was accused of killing two anti-Mafia judges in 1992, as well as strangling the partner of a rival Mafia boss, who was pregnant at the time of her death. He also allegedly kidnapped the 12-year-old son of a man who was testifying against him, holding him hostage for two years before strangling the boy then dissolving his body in acid to prevent the family from burying him.

In 2002, Denaro was convicted of a number of crimes in absentia and sentenced to life in prison.

Italy’s most wanted man

There have been numerous failed attempts to capture Denaro over the years. In May 2011, police were surveilling him at a farmhouse near his home town of Castelvetrano, but failed to arrest him, despite the involvement of hundreds of officers. His DNA was later found at the site. And in 2021, a British man was arrested at a restaurant in the Hague after anti-mafia police wrongly identified him as Denaro.

Carabinieri General Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police force’s special operations squad, said Messina Denaro’s health, along with a mix of old-school policing and modern technology, were key to his capture.

With time, police began weakening the tightly protected circle around Denaro that helped him long evade capture. Over a decade, police cracked down on anyone suspected of aiding or protecting Denaro, arresting over a hundred people. Several of his collaborators were arrested in 2020, making him more vulnerable.

Police wiretapped the homes of his family members, who—likely knowing they were being tapped—only spoke generally of “people with cancer” and “cancer surgeries.” This was enough for police to assume that Denaro was seeking treatment of some sort.

Investigators then gathered the details of all male cancer patients born in 1962 near Trapani, in western Sicily, and slowly narrowed down the search to five suspects.

They identified a man who had booked a treatment under the name of Andrea Bonafede, the nephew of deceased Mafia boss Leonardo Bonafede. But after analyzing Bonafede’s phone records, they discovered that he was far from the clinic where he was meant to be having surgery one day, confirming that Denaro was likely using the name as an alias.

“It all led to today’s date [when] he would have come for some tests and treatment” at the clinic where he was arrested, Angelosanto told reporters.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni traveled to Sciliy to congratulate the police after the arrest. Speaking outside the prosecutor’s office, Meloni said that while Italy had not yet won the “war” against the Mafia, this was a “battle that was fundamental to win.”

“It’s a day we can celebrate and tell our children that the Mafia can be defeated,” she said.

Climate campaigner Greta Thunberg was detained alongside other activists on Tuesday during protests against the demolition of the coal village of Luetzerath but the entire group will be released later in the day, according to police.

“There is no reason to hold them for days. It might take hours or they will go immediately,” a spokesperson for regional police in Aachen said, speaking about the whole group of demonstrators.

Thunberg was held while protesting at the opencast coal mine of Garzweiler 2, some 9 km (5.6 miles) from Luetzerath, where she sat with a group of protesters near the edge of the mine.

The clearing of the village in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia was agreed between RWE and the government in a deal that allowed the energy giant to demolish Luetzerath in exchange for its faster exit from coal and saving five villages originally slated for destruction.

Activists have said Germany should not be mining any more lignite and should focus on expanding renewable energy instead.

Riot police backed by bulldozers removed activists from buildings in the village with only a few left in trees and an underground tunnel by last weekend, but protesters including Thunberg remained at the site staging a sit-in into Tuesday.

Thunberg was seen sitting alone in a large police bus after having been detained, a Reuters witness said.

“We are going to use force to bring you to the identity check, so please cooperate,” a policeman said to the group, according to Reuters footage.

“Greta Thunberg was part of a group of activists who rushed towards the ledge. However, she was then stopped and carried by us with this group out of the immediate danger area to establish their identity,” a spokesperson for Aachen police told Reuters, adding one activist had jumped into the mine.

Thunberg was carried away by three policemen and held by one arm at a spot further away from the edge of the mine where she was previously sat with the group.

She was then escorted back towards police vans.

The Swedish climate activist addressed the around 6,000 protesters who marched towards Luetzerath on Saturday, calling the expansion of the mine a “betrayal of present and future generations.”

“Germany is one of the biggest polluters in the world and needs to be held accountable,” she said.

(This story has been corrected to clarify that Thunberg was detained but not arrested in the headline and corrects spelling of the town)

Related Galleries:

Ukraine came a step closer on Tuesday in its bid to win a fleet of modern battle tanks it hopes could turn the course of the war with Russia, after the West’s big holdout Germany said this would be the first item on its new defence minister’s agenda.

In the central city of Dnipro, authorities called an end to the search for survivors in the ruins of an apartment building destroyed during Russian missile attacks on Saturday.

Forty-four people were confirmed killed and 20 remain unaccounted for in the attack, the deadliest for civilians of a three-month Russian missile bombardment campaign, according to Ukrainian officials. Seventy-nine people were wounded and 39 rescued from the rubble.

Nearly 11 months after Russia invaded, Kyiv says a fleet of Western battle tanks would give its troops the mobile firepower to drive Russian troops out in decisive battles in 2023.

German-made Leopard battle tanks, workhorse of armies across Europe, cannot be delivered without authorisation from Berlin, which has so far demurred.

With Western allies meeting at a U.S. air base in Germany on Friday to pledge military support for Ukraine, Berlin is under intense pressure to lift its objections this week.

The decision sits on the desk of Germany’s new Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, named on Tuesday to replace Christine Lambrecht, who quit after comments critics called insensitive.

“When the person, when the minister of defence, is declared, this is the first question to be decided concretely,” German Economy Minister Robert Habeck told Deutschlandfunk radio broadcaster on Tuesday, before the appointment was announced.

In his first comments on the job, Pistorius, a regional politician viewed as close to Chancellor Olaf Scholz, made no mention of weapons for Ukraine: “I know the importance of the task,” he said in a statement. “It is important to me to involve the soldiers closely and to take them with me.”

Pistorius will host U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Thursday ahead of Friday’s meeting of allies at Ramstein air base.

Germany has been cautious about approving weapons that could be seen as escalating conflict.

Scholz, speaking on Tuesday in an interview for Bloomberg TV, confirmed that discussions with Germany’s allies on tanks were ongoing but should not be conducted in public.

The Kremlin said last week that new deliveries of weapons, including French-made armoured vehicles, to Kyiv would “deepen the suffering of the Ukrainian people” and would not change the course of the conflict.

Vladimir Solovyev, a pro-Kremlin presenter on Rossiya 1 state television, said any Western countries which supplied more advanced weapons to Ukraine should be considered legitimate targets for Russia.

Since President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, the United States and its allies have given tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry including rocket systems, drones, armoured vehicles and communications systems.

Ukraine’s top general, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, said he had outlined his forces’ “urgent needs” in a first personal meeting on Tuesday in Poland with the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley.

Poland and Finland have already said they would send Leopards if Berlin gives re-export approval.

Separately, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday the Netherlands would join the United States and Germany in sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine.

British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said NATO allies were conveying a clear message to Putin by boosting their arms supplies to Ukraine.

“The message we’re sending to Putin… is that we made a commitment to support Ukrainians until they are victorious,” Cleverly told a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

A senior Ukrainian official blamed Russia for carrying out the bulk of more than 2,000 cyberattacks on Ukraine in 2022, speaking at a news conference he said was itself delayed because of a cyberattack. There was no immediate comment on his allegations from Moscow.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions driven from their homes since Russia launched last February what it calls a “special military operation” to eliminate security threats in Ukraine. Kyiv and its Western backers call Russia’s actions a land grab.

Ukrainian forces drove Russian troops back during the second half of 2022, but over the past two months the front lines have largely been frozen in place despite both sides enduring heavy losses in relentless fighting.

Moscow has turned since October to a tactic of raining missiles down on Ukrainian cities far from the front lines in the east and south, mainly targeting electricity infrastructure.

Russia says it aims to reduce Ukraine’s ability to fight; Kyiv says the attacks serve no military purpose and are intended to harm civilians, a war crime.

In Dnipro, residents left flowers and cuddly toys at a makeshift memorial near the apartment block devastated during a wave of missile attacks on Saturday.

Hundreds of mourners bade farewell to boxing coach Mykhailo Korenovskyi, killed in a strike, while footage showed the kitchen of his apartment, decorated in bright yellow colours, now exposed to the air after the external wall was torn off.

A recent family video, filmed in the same kitchen, showed Korenovskyi’s daughter smiling and blowing out four candles on her birthday cake while he stood behind her, holding another child in his arms.

Moscow denies intentionally targeting civilians, and blamed Ukraine’s air defences for the missile that hit the apartment block. Kyiv says it was hit by a notoriously inaccurate Russian anti-ship missile for which Ukraine has no defences.

Related Galleries:

A ransomware attack against the maritime software supplier DNV impacted approximately 1,000 vessels.

About 1,000 vessels have been impacted by a ransomware attack against DNV, one of the major maritime software suppliers. 

DNV GL provides solutions and services throughout the life cycle of any vessel, from design and engineering to risk assessment and ship management. The Norwegian company provides services for 13,175 vessels and mobile offshore units (MOUs) amounting to 265.4 million gross tonnes, which represents a global market share of 21%.

The ransomware attack took place on the evening of January 7 and in response to the incident the company shut down the IT servers connected to the ShipManager system operated by the company.

DNV reported that there are no indications that any other of its software or data is affected by the security incident.

“DNV confirms its ShipManager software was victim of a ransomware cyber-attack on the evening of Saturday 7 January. DNV experts have shut down ShipManager’s IT servers in response to the incident. All users can still use the onboard, offline functionalities of the ShipManager software.” reads the notice published by the company.

The maritime software supplier launched an investigation into the incident with the help of global IT security partners, it is working to recover operations as soon as possible. The company also reported the incident to the Norwegian authorities. 

According to the notice, 70 customers were impacted. 

“DNV is communicating daily with all 70 affected customers to update them on findings of the ongoing forensic investigations. In total around 1000 vessels are affected,” continues the statement. 

At this time the company has yet to disclose the family of ransomware that infected its systems.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, maritime)

The post 1,000 ships impacted by a ransomware attack on maritime software supplier DNV appeared first on Security Affairs.

(NewsNation) — Brian Walshe, the husband of missing Boston mom Anna Walshe, has been charged with murder, the Norfolk County District Attorney announced Tuesday. He is expected to be arraigned in court on Wednesday.

Ana Walshe was last seen on New Year’s Day, leaving her Massachusetts home to fly to Washington D.C. where she worked and owned a condominium. She was reported missing three days later by her husband. However, the Daily Beast reports that Ana Walshe may have been reported missing by her employer before Brian Walshe.

Just four days after she was reported missing, Brian Walshe was arrested and charged with misleading police in the investigation. He was arraigned on that charge on Jan. 9 and pleaded not guilty while being held on $500,000 bond.

Court documents showed his ankle monitor, which he was mandated to wear in relation to a previous fraud conviction, showed he went to Home Depot where investigators found he purchased hundreds of dollars of cleaning supplies.

Mugshot of Brian Walshe (From Cohasset Police Department)

A broken and bloody knife was found in the basement of the Walshe home and investigators say additional evidence was found at a trash transfer station near Brian Walshe’s mother’s home.

Authorities are continuing to search for Ana Walshe’s remains.

Ana Walshe’s social media portrayed a curated image of an ambitious and optimistic woman living a glamorous life. But the Boston Globe reports friends noticed she seemed tense prior to her disappearance and recent Instagram photos showed her not wearing her wedding ring.

A deed obtained by NewsNation showed she had sold her D.C. condo shortly before she disappeared and a police report from 2014 shows Ana Walshe told police her husband threatened to kill her. The case was eventually dropped when she refused to cooperate with investigators.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Hinge

• Hinge is rolling out a new pricier subscription tier that will cost up to $720 annually. 
• The new level will offer premium capabilities to boost premium subscribers’ exposure on the app. 
• Another Match-owned dating app, Tinder, is testing a $500-per-month membership, though it is unclear what it will offer. 

Hinge is set to release a new service for serious daters only. 

The dating app, which Match Group owns, is rolling out a new membership level that will likely cost between $50-$60 per month or up to $720 per year. 

The new, pricier subscription is targeted at “highly motivated daters,” the company said, and will offer enhanced capabilities to boost premium subscribers’ exposure on the app. For example, the premium subscription includes access to more tailored profile recommendations and having your “likes” appear faster than non-premium users.

The new membership level is a step up in price from Hinge’s current most expensive membership, which is $35 per month and allows unlimited profile “likes” and the option to add filters like height and whether someone has children to recommendations. The company also offers a free version of its dating app that allows up to 8 profile likes per day. 

Hinge isn’t the only Match-owned dating app looking to expand its subscription offerings: Tinder is internally testing user interest in a $500 per month – or $6,000 per year – membership tier. It is currently unclear what additional services would be offered with such a pricy membership. 

This story was first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed to Insider. 

Match declined to provide a comment for this story. 

Match’s mobile-based dating apps like Hinge and Tinder grew in popularity during the pandemic, and according to the company, they are still a “bright spot.” 

On Match’s most recent earnings call, Bernard Kim, the company’s CEO, said Hinge hit record downloads in the US and globally in October 2022.  

Getty Images

• A judge signed off on a settlement last year giving 200,000 defrauded borrowers $6 billion in student-debt relief.
• A group of companies last week filed an appeals notice to stop the relief from going through.
• They argued their reputations will be harmed, and they were not given “due process” after being included in the settlement.

Two months after a federal judge approved $6 billion in student-debt cancellation in a sweeping settlement, a group of companies want to stop that relief from reaching the impacted borrowers.

In November, federal Judge William Alsup granted final approval of a lawsuit — Sweet v. Cardona — that would give over $6 billion in student-debt relief to 200,000 borrowers who were defrauded by a school they attended. The lawsuit was first filed in 2019, and the plaintiffs accused the Education Department at the time of failing to process borrower defense to repayment applications, which are claims borrowers can file if they believe they were defrauded by their school.

Since the lawsuit was not resolved under former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden took it on, and Alsup ultimately signed off on the relief. Last week, though, two for-profit companies — Lincoln Educational Services Corp. and American National University — and Everglades College, Inc., a nonprofit, filed notices that they plan to appeal Alsup’s decision.

“Intervenors do not wish to delay a legitimate settlement of this case or the granting of meritorious BD (borrower defense) claims, but they cannot accept an illegal settlement that unfairly harms their reputations and prejudices their rights, as this settlement does,” the group wrote in the filing.

They added that if the relief goes through, all impacted schools “will immediately suffer the stigma of having all BD claims against them summarily granted—without any administrative process, judicial factfinding, or reasoned decision on the merits.”

Per the terms of the settlement, the Education Department identified 153 schools it found to have engaged in misconduct, and any student who attended one of those schools would receive full relief automatically. An additional 64,000 borrowers who attended a school not included on the list would get decisions on their borrower defense claims on a rolling deadline.  

Prior to his final ruling, Alsup gave schools the chance to intervene, but he ultimately rejected their arguments.

“This order finds all class members, including our named plaintiffs, have properly asserted a real and concrete injury arising from the Secretary’s alleged unlawful handling of their borrower-defense claims,” Alsup wrote in his opinion, referring to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. “The injury is two-fold. The Secretary’s improper delay and suspension of processing claims for debt relief has directly led to a specific economic injury to each class member. Unlawful delay of debt relief results in clear monetary harm.”

The group filing the appeal argued schools were not given “due process” after being included in the settlement, and they are asking the court to implement a stay on the relief pending the appeals process. They wrote that “the Department would benefit from a stay because it would not be required to expend resources carrying out an elaborate and expensive process that could be later reversed.”

It’s unclear how the appeals process will unfold, but it comes as Biden’s broad plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for federal borrowers is also facing legal challenges. Two conservative-backed lawsuits blocked the implementation of the relief late last year, and the Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments on whether the policy is legal on February 28.

Eóin Noonan/Sportsfile for Web Summit/Getty Images

• Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said that ChatGPT is a mind-blowing “game changer,” per Insider.
• Maggioncalda said that he uses ChatGPT daily and plans on adding it to the firm’s course catalog.
• Still, he acknowledges ChatGPT “isn’t perfect” and “is definitely risky” amid ethical concerns.

DAVOS, Switzerland — When Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda first “started banging” on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, he couldn’t believe what he saw.

“It looked like magic,” he told Insider’s Cadie Thompson at the 2023 World Economic Forum.

The former English major turned ed-tech executive said that he was impressed by how the buzzy chatbot was able to “recombine word patterns” to “create new ideas.”

“The first time I sat down in front of ChatGPT, I said ‘this is not possible,'” Maggioncalda said. He called ChatGPT a “game changer” that is “blowing my mind” — so much so that he now talks to ChatGPT daily and uses it as a “writing assistant” and a “blog partner.”

His interest in the AI extends beyond personal use. Maggioncalda plans on integrating ChatGPT into Coursera’s course catalog that will likely roll out this year, according to a spokesperson at Coursera. ChatGPT, he said, can be trained on Coursera’s data to talk like “the smartest professors in the world.”

Maggioncalda’s endorsement comes as companies experiment with AI tools, including ChatGPT, to find ways to integrate AI capabilities into their products and services. So far, Microsoft reportedly plans to invest $10 billion into OpenAI and has said it will add ChatGPT to its platforms. 

Some people have used ChatGPT to generate Mozart-inspired piano music, write and illustrate a children’s book in 72 hours, and even come up with responses to dating app matches.

But despite how impressed Maggioncalda is by ChatGPT, he admits that the AI “isn’t perfect” and that “it’s definitely risky” since it can generate false answers.

After all, many companies and AI experts have expressed ethical concerns over the real-life applications of ChatGPT.

Koko — a digital mental health company — was criticized by public health and tech professionals accusing it of violating informed consent law after the company used ChatGPT to generate responses to 4,000 users as part of an experiment. In response to these allegations, co-founder of Koko Robert Morris told Insider that the experiment was “exempt” from that law and tweeted that users opted-in to chatting with peer supporters who used the bot to “help craft their responses.” 

Similarly, legal experts expressed similar concerns over ChatGPT’s potential use in the courtroom after Joshua Browder, the founder of the app DoNotPay that uses ChatGPT tech, said that he plans to test his app’s “robot lawyer” in an upcoming traffic court case. Researchers also warn that ChatGPT could be trained with biased data that could hurt marginalized communities. 

ChatGPT has even been banned by New York City’s public schools over fears that it would create an uptick in student cheating. 

Despite ChatGPT’s imperfections, Maggioncalda feels that “people are thinking about it in such discrete binary, black and white ways” and that ChatGPT could be “a great opportunity” for companies like Coursera to create more interactive learning experiences. 

“You have to put a critical thought on it,” he said. “But it’s stunning.” 

January 16 was the day we (at least those of us who care) commemorate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King gave his own life to free millions of others. His contributions should not be ignored, ridiculed, or vilified, which is exactly what Republicans are trying to do with their ridiculous attacks on “wokeness.” Anything that doesn’t go along with their status quo is “woke.” Even as they decry their attempts to save “freedom of speech,” they want others silenced.

The whole “woke” conversation is nothing but a new way of displaying hatred. Faux News reported that Jim Banks (R-IN) is creating an “Anti-Woke Caucus.” This is simply another way to waste time and taxpayer money. Banks calls “wokeness” the “greatest domestic threat to America today.” I beg to argue with him; Republicans are the greatest domestic threat to America. They claim they want to stop all the “hate,” but they are merely fanning the flames. To the extent they really do have constituents who care about this nonsense, they are pandering to a very small group of haters. It makes you wonder how these people even get elected. We can only assume that even Republicans who exhibit some sense of normalcy are voting for them because they’re the only Republicans in the race. If that’s true, then they are just as bad as the rest.

What exactly is “wokeness?” Some opine that it began around the time of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO by police officers when people began to become vigilant about injustices facing Blacks (The Elm). From there, it has been morphed by people who don’t want to face the truth of life for minorities in the U.S. into something evil. To bring home their point, they want to cover up the truth, including the history of how Blacks even came to be in this country. There is nothing “woke” about acknowledging history and trying to learn from it. Indeed, most intelligent people want to learn from history. We hear this same rhetoric from white supremacists, who say their racism is their “culture.” Racism is not now, nor will it ever be “culture.” Judging people based on the way they look is not “culture.” It a culture of ignorance. Ignorance must be banished, and that includes the ignorance of our so-called representatives.

One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King is: “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” Another is: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Even as he was beaten, jailed, and denied his rights, Dr. King never hated and kept to his vow to wipe out hate with love. Republican officials can and need to learn to live Dr. King’s legacy. There is nothing wrong with teaching children about the history of our country, both good and bad. It is not “indoctrination;” it is “truth.” Truth will always set us free. Unfortunately, some people choose to ignore the value of truth.

The post The Republican war on “wokeness” is becoming completely unhinged appeared first on Palmer Report.