Smoke was seen rising close to Roman ruins in the Lebanese city of Tyre after an Israeli strike hit a building nearby on Tuesday. Israel has been accused of damaging historical sites in Lebanon and Iran.
Published On 24 Mar 2026
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Kim Jong Un says government will keep strengthening nation’s nuclear status
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North Korean’s Kim Jong Un pledged to solidify his nation’s nuclear status while keeping a hard-line position regarding South Korea, which he referred to as the “most hostile” state, state media indicated Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.
In a speech Monday to Pyongyang’s rubber-stamp parliament, Kim accused the United States of global “state terrorism and aggression,” in an apparent reference to the war in the Middle East, and said North Korea will play a more forceful role in a united front against Washington amid rising anti-American sentiment.
The AP reported that the North Korean official indicated that the matter of whether opponents “choose confrontation or peaceful coexistence is up to them, and we are prepared to respond to any choice.”
KIM JONG UN APPEARS WITH TEENAGE DAUGHTER AT LIVE-FIRE ROCKET TEST IN NORTH KOREA
This picture taken on Feb. 15, 2026 and released by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Feb. 16, 2026 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un delivering a speech at the inauguration ceremony of Saeppyol Street in Pyongyang. (KCNA VIA KNS / AFP via Getty Images)
“The dignity of the nation, its national interest and its ultimate victory can only be guaranteed by the strongest of power,” Kim stated, according to the AP. “The government of our republic will continue to consolidate our absolutely irreversible status as a nuclear power and will aggressively wage a struggle against hostile forces to crush their (anti-North Korean) provocations and schemes.”
KIM JONG UN CALLS SOUTH KOREA ‘MOST HOSTILE ENEMY,’ SAYS NORTH COULD ‘COMPLETELY DESTROY’ IT
This picture taken on Feb. 21, 2026 and released by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) via KNS on Feb. 22, 2026 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reporting on the review of the work of the eighth-term Party Central Committee during the Ninth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea in Pyongyang. (KCNA VIA KNS / AFP via Getty Images)
The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community states, “North Korea remains committed to expanding its strategic weapons programs, including missiles and nuclear warheads, and to solidifying its deterrent capability.”
TRUMP’S IRAN STRATEGY SHOWCASES ‘DOCTRINE OF UNPREDICTABILITY’ AMID STRIKE THREATS AND SUDDEN PAUSE
This picture taken on Feb. 2, 2026 and released by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) via KNS on Feb. 3, 2026 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un delivering a speech at the inauguration of the Samgwang Stockbreeding Farm in North Pyongan Province, North Korea. (KCNA VIA KNS / AFP via Getty Images)
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The U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran more than three weeks ago in a bid to prevent the Islamic Republic from potentially joining the ranks of other nations that possess nuclear weapons.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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Afghanistan frees detained US citizen Dennis Coyle as gesture of ‘goodwill’ | Prison News
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio welcomes Coyle’s release as ‘positive step’ while thanking Qatar and UAE for support.
Published On 24 Mar 2026
Authorities in Afghanistan have released United States citizen Dennis Coyle, who was detained in the country for more than a year, after a plea from his family.
The country’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that the family of linguist and researcher Coyle had written to the country’s leadership, asking that he be released and pardoned for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
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list of 3 itemsend of list“The Supreme Court of the Islamic Emirate deemed his period of detention sufficient and decided on his release,” the ministry said in a statement.
The announcement comes after a meeting of Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, former US Special Envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, the United Arab Emirates Ambassador to Kabul Saif Mohammed al-Ketbi, and a member of Coyle’s family.
The UAE facilitated the release, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, adding that the decision was made on humanitarian grounds and as a gesture of “goodwill”.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also thanked the UAE and Qatar on Tuesday “for their support” in securing Coyle’s release.
“The release is a positive step towards ending the practice of hostage diplomacy,” Rubio wrote in a social media post.
Earlier this month, Rubio designated Afghanistan’s Taliban government as a “state sponsor of wrongful detention”, warning that the country was not safe for US citizens to visit.
“The Taliban needs to release Dennis Coyle, Mahmoud Habibi, and all Americans unjustly detained in Afghanistan now and commit to cease the practice of hostage diplomacy forever,” Rubio said in a statement on March 9.
Coley was detained by the Afghan authorities in January 2025 “while legally working to support Afghan language communities as an academic researcher”, according to the Foley Foundation, a group that advocates for the release of US citizens detained abroad.
He had been held “in near-solitary conditions, requiring permission even to use the bathroom, and without access to adequate medical care”, the group said.
Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry said Coley was held “due to violations of Afghanistan’s applicable laws”, without elaborating.
“Afghanistan does not detain citizens of any country for political purposes but over violations of its laws,” Tuesday’s statement quoted Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi as saying.
Last year, five other US citizens were released in what the Taliban authorities also said was a “goodwill gesture”.
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FBI rescues missing autistic teen found in NJ woods after 2-day search
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FIRST ON FOX: FBI agents in Newark, New Jersey, rescued a missing 17-year-old autistic boy after a tense, nearly two-day search in near-freezing temperatures, finding him in rugged terrain after efforts by local authorities and the Coast Guard came up empty.
Joel Medina, who functions at the level of a six-year-old, vanished near his home Friday and spent multiple nights exposed to the cold, prompting an urgent, multi-agency response.
FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News Digital the rescue highlighted “the best of the FBI.”
“This story is the best of the FBI — jumping into action quickly, mobilizing our outstanding teams and resources with great partners, and refusing to give up in order to protect and serve our fellow American,” Patel said.
K-9 HAILED A HERO FOR TRACKING MISSING BOY DURING SNOWSTORM IN NORTH CAROLINA
The Egg Harbor Township Police Department released an image of Joel Medina, right, who was rescued by the FBI after two days missing in the wilderness. (Getty; Egg Harbor Township Police Department)
“Thanks to our brave agents out of FBI Newark, world class CIRG pilot teams, and coordination with great local and federal partners — Joel is home safe from what could’ve been dire circumstances,” he continued. “I’m so proud of our teams and thankful for the resolution.”
The initial report was that Medina wandered into a heavily wooded area of preserved land nearby that contains a trail system.
KIDNAPPED CHILD FOUND ALIVE AFTER YEARS HIDDEN UNDER FAKE NAME: POLICE
Surveillance video outside his home did not show him leaving, prompting concern he was possibly abducted.
The Egg Harbor Township Police Department responded along with search and rescue teams from Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland and Gloucester counties.
The FBI found a point of interest using an aviation team. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP )
Drone teams, New Jersey State Police and U.S. Coast Guard choppers conducted air searches and K-9 teams were deployed to conduct a ground search.
Underwater search and rescue teams with divers were also sent to search nearby bodies of water.
On Saturday morning, detectives asked the FBI for assistance and agents conducted an exhaustive neighborhood canvass for any possible surveillance video, searched the area surrounding the Medina household, and participated in a grid search of the woods near the home. Agents also interviewed everyone with a turkey hunting license to locate trail camera footage.
An FBI plane was sent up into the air at about 9:30 p.m. local time to conduct a grid search of the area, and after three hours, discovered a potential point of interest deep within the preserved land.
FBI Director Kash Patel listens during the Senate Committee on Intelligence hearings on Capitol Hill Wednesday, March 18, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Agents trekked through muddy terrain in the dark and eventually found Medina curled up in a ball next to a tree.
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Medina, who was only wearing shorts and a T-shirt, was guided by the FBI out of the woods, as the aviation team stayed overhead, ensuring they made it out safely.
When agents reemerged, many of them were scratched and bleeding from navigating the heavy brush.
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Tax Search Ads Deliver ScreenConnect Malware Using Huawei Driver to Disable EDR
A large-scale malvertising campaign active since January 2026 has been observed targeting U.S.-based individuals searching for tax-related documents to serve rogue installers for ConnectWise ScreenConnect that drop a tool named HwAudKiller to blind security programs using the bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) technique.
“The campaign abuses Google Ads to serve rogue ScreenConnect (ConnectWise Control) installers, ultimately delivering a BYOVD EDR killer that drops a kernel driver to blind security tools before further compromise,” Huntress researcher Anna Pham said in a report published last week.
The cybersecurity vendor said it identified over 60 instances of malicious ScreenConnect sessions tied to the campaign. The attack chain stands out for a couple of reasons. Unlike recent campaigns highlighted by Microsoft that leverage tax-themed lures, the newly flagged activity employs commercial cloaking services to avoid detection by security scanners and abuses a previously undocumented Huawei audio driver to disarm security solutions.
The exact objectives of the campaign are currently not clear; however, in at one instance, the threat actor is said to have leveraged the access to deploy the endpoint detection and response (EDR) killer and then dump credentials from the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process memory, as well as use tools like NetExec for network reconnaissance and lateral movement.
These tactics, per Huntress, align with pre-ransomware or initial access broker behavior, suggesting that the threat actor is looking to either deploy ransomware or monetize the access by selling it to other criminal actors.
The attack begins when users search for terms like “W2 tax form” or “W-9 Tax Forms 2026” on search engines like Google, tricking them into clicking on sponsored search results that direct users to bogus sites like “bringetax[.]com/humu/” to trigger the delivery of the ScreenConnect installer.
What’s more, the landing page is protected by a PHP-based Traffic Distribution System (TDS) powered by Adspect, a commercial cloaking service, to ensure that a benign page is served to security scanners and ad review systems, while only real victims see the actual payload.
This is achieved by generating a fingerprint of the site visitor and sending it to the Adspect backend, which then determines the appropriate response. In addition to Adspect, the landing page’s “index.php” features a second cloaking layer powered by JustCloakIt (JCI) on the server side.
“The two cloaking services are stacked in the same index.php—JCI’s server-side filtering runs first, while Adspect provides client-side JavaScript fingerprinting as a second layer,” Pham explained.
The web pages lead to the distribution of ScreenConnect installers, which are then used to deploy multiple trial instances on the compromised host. The threat actor has also been found to drop additional Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools like FleetDeck Agent for redundancy and ensuring persistent remote access.
The ScreenConnect session is leveraged to drop a multi-stage crypter that acts as a conduit for an EDR killer codenamed HwAudKiller that uses the BYOVD technique to terminate processes associated with Microsoft Defender, Kaspersky, and SentinelOne. The vulnerable driver used in the attack is “HWAuidoOs2Ec.sys,” a legitimate, signed Huawei kernel driver designed for laptop audio hardware.
“The driver terminates the target process from kernel mode, bypassing any usermode protections that security products rely on. Because the driver is legitimately signed by Huawei, Windows loads it without complaint despite Driver Signature Enforcement (DSE),” Huntress noted.
The crypter, for its part, attempts to evade detection by allocating 2GB of memory and filling it with zeros, and then freeing it, effectively causing antivirus engines and emulators to fail due to high resource allocation.
It’s currently not known who is behind the campaign, but an exposed open directory in the threat actor-controlled infrastructure has revealed a fake Chrome update page containing JavaScript code with Russian-language comments. This alludes to a Russian-speaking developer in possession of a social engineering toolkit for malware distribution.
“This campaign illustrates how commodity tooling has lowered the barrier for sophisticated attacks,” Pham said. “The threat actor didn’t need custom exploits or nation-state capabilities, they combined commercially available cloaking services (Adspect and JustCloakIt), free-tier ScreenConnect instances, an off-the-shelf crypter, and a signed Huawei driver with an exploitable weakness to build an end-to-end kill chain that goes from a Google search to kernel-mode EDR termination.”
“A consistent pattern across compromised hosts was the rapid stacking of multiple remote access tools. After the initial rogue ScreenConnect relay was established, the threat actor deployed additional trial ScreenConnect instances on the same endpoint, sometimes two or three within hours, and backup RMM tools like FleetDeck.”
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Iran names successor to security chief killed in US-Israeli attack | US-Israel war on Iran News
Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, ex-IRGC commander, to replace late Ali Larijani as chief of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.
Published On 24 Mar 2026
Iran has named Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as the successor to Ali Larijani, head of the country’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), who was killed in a US-Israeli air strike earlier this month.
President Masoud Pezeshkian’s deputy of communications announced the appointment on X on Tuesday.
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list of 3 itemsend of listThe SNSC, formally chaired by Pezeshkian, coordinates security and foreign policy and includes top military, intelligence and government officials, in addition to representatives of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
Zolghadr, who served in the 1980s war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, went on to become head of the IRGC’s joint staff for eight years and then deputy commander-in-chief of the elite force for another eight years.
In 2005, he was named deputy interior minister for security and police in the government of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a move that was seen at the time as bolstering the IRGC’s influence in politics.
Since 2023, he has been the secretary of the Expediency Council, a powerful body that plays both an advisory and mediating role between Iran’s various power structures and the supreme leader.
Zolghadr’s new position consolidates the IRGC’s growing clout in Iran amid growing uncertainty regarding decision-making at the top of the system. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public since he succeeded his assassinated father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in early March.
Larijani, one of the most prominent non-clerical figures in Iranian politics, was killed last Tuesday in a week that saw the war spiralling throughout the region, upending global energy markets and roiling the world economy.
On Tuesday, the war showed no sign of de-escalation after US President Donald Trump’s claim that he was speaking to an unidentified “top person”, as he extended by five days a deadline to hit Iran’s power plants.
Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said “no negotiations” were under way, accusing Trump of seeking “to manipulate the financial and oil markets”.
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Mattis warns US will ‘cede control’ of Strait of Hormuz if Trump ends Iran war now
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Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Monday said the United States would effectively cede control of the Strait of Hormuz if it ended the war with Iran at this point.
The waterway is vital to global shipping, particularly the energy market, and has been a focal point of Iran and U.S. forces as Tehran has blocked the strait since the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iranian targets last month.
“Iran right now, if we declared victory, they would now say they own the strait,” Mattis said on Monday during CERAWeek in Houston. You’d see a tax for every ship that goes through.”
“We’re in a tough spot, ladies and gentlemen. I can’t identify a lot of options,” he added.
TRUMP VOWS TO HIT IRAN ‘VERY HARD’ AFTER OBLITERATING NEARLY ’90 PERCENT’ OF REGIME MISSILES
Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said ending the war in the Middle East would effectively cede control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran. (Chance Yeh/Getty Images for The Headstrong Project)
The remarks came as President Donald Trump declared a five-day pause on military strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure.
In response to attacks, Iran has effectively closed the strait, a narrow passage where 20% of the world’s oil moves through.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House.
Despite the pause, it remains doubtful that neither side will find a compromise, said Mattis.
“Neither side has the ability right now to move the other side off of where they’re at,” Mattis said. “Never in history has air power alone changed a regime.”
BEFORE-AND-AFTER SATELLITE IMAGERY OFFERS A RARE LOOK AT DAMAGE INSIDE IRAN
President Donald Trump warned on Saturday that the U.S. could strike Iranian power plants if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened. (Aaron Schwartz/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025 via Getty Images)
The Iranian regime is charging some tankers $2 million to pass through the strait.
“Collecting $2 million as transit fees from some vessels crossing the strait reflects Iran’s strength,” Iranian lawmaker Alaeddin Boroujerdi told state broadcaster Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) on Sunday.
On Saturday, Trump warned that the U.S. could target Iran’s power infrastructure if the strait is not reopened within 48 hours.
“If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 hours from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Trump said in a post shared on Truth Social.
A satellite image shows the Strait of Hormuz, a key maritime passage connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, vital for global energy supply. (Amanda Macias/Fox News Digital)
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Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian made his position clear on X, saying the waterway was open to everyone, except Iran’s adversaries.
“The Strait of Hormuz is open to all except those who violate our soil,” he wrote. “We firmly confront delirious threats on the battlefield.”
Fox News Digital’s Emma Bussey contributed to this report.
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Anthropic challenges US Pentagon’s ban in San Francisco court showdown | Business and Economy News
Anthropic accuses Pentagon of unlawful retaliation over its refusal to loosen AI safety restrictions for military use.
Anthropic and the administration of United States President Donald Trump are headed to court over the US Defense Department’s decision last month to cut ties with the artificial intelligence giant after it refused to allow unrestricted military use of its Claude AI model.
The legal showdown begins Tuesday in San Francisco, where Anthropic will petition the court to halt a Pentagon-led ban enacted after the company refused to strip safety guardrails that prevent its artificial intelligence (AI) from being used for fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.
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list of 4 itemsend of listUS District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former US President Joe Biden, will preside over the hearing in San Francisco.
Supply chain claims
On March 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic as a national security supply chain risk amid the company’s refusal to remove guardrails. The designation prohibits anyone within the Defense Department or its contractors from using the technology.
Anthropic’s designation was the first time a US company has been publicly designated a supply chain risk under an obscure government procurement statute aimed at protecting military systems from foreign sabotage.
By March 9, the AI company filed a lawsuit, calling the administration’s move an “unprecedented and unlawful” designation and claiming it violated freedom of speech protections and due process rights that require the administration to follow a specific protocol when making a decision.
“AI-powered surveillance poses immense dangers to our democracy. Anthropic’s public advocacy for AI guardrails is laudable and protected by the First Amendment — not something the Pentagon should be punishing,” Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a release in response to the lawsuit.
Retaliation allegations
In a filing last week, the White House pushed back on Anthropic’s claims that government action violated free speech protections under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, saying the dispute stems from contract negotiations and national security concerns rather than retaliation.
“Anthropic is not likely to succeed on the merits. Anthropic is not likely to succeed in showing that the Presidential Directive, the Secretary’s social media post, and the Secretarial Determination were retaliation for Anthropic’s expressions about the safety of its model and the responsible use of AI,” the filing said.
“The record reflects that the President and the Secretary were motivated by concerns about Anthropic’s potential future conduct if it retained access to the Government’s IT infrastructure. Those concerns are unrelated to Anthropic’s speech, and no one has purported to restrict Anthropic’s expressive activity,” the filing noted.
However, legal experts and lawmakers have accused the White House of retaliation, including Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who on Monday penned a letter to Hegseth voicing her concerns.
“I am particularly concerned that DoD [the US Department of Defense] is trying to strong-arm American companies into providing the Department with the tools to spy on American citizens and deploy fully autonomous weapons without adequate safeguards,” she said.
Legal experts believe that Anthropic is likely to prevail, pointing to a February 27 post on X in which Hegseth said he is directing the DoD to “designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security”.
The post also said that contractors, suppliers or partners for the United States military are prohibited from “commercial activity with Anthropic”.
“That [the X post] went far beyond what the law allows him to say. He also said the Pentagon hadn’t done any of the things required before declaring a supply chain risk under the statute,” Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Law & AI, told Al Jazeera.
“That was clearly illegal, and now the government, in its filings, is admitting that and instead saying everyone should have ignored it and that the real supply chain designation came several days later.”
Judge Lin’s decision on the preliminary injunction will determine whether the administration can effectively ‘blacklist’ American firms that refuse to align with its military directives.
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XL bully ‘savaged’ 84-year-old man and guarded him like ‘prey’ | UK News
An XL bully mauled an 84-year-old man “as if he were its prey”, a court has heard.
John McColl died from his injuries a month after the attack in Warrington, Cheshire, on 24 February last year.
The dog attacked him after he wandered onto the driveway of Sean Garner’s home in Bardsley Avenue at around 6pm. Armed police officers shot the dog 10 times, Liverpool Crown Court heard.
Prosecutor David Birrell said the dog, called Toretto, “attacked him and it just would not let him go”.
“The dog guarded him as if he were its prey. It savaged him,” he said.
Sean Garner, 31, of Belle Vale, Liverpool, denies being the owner of a dog causing injury while out of control. He admits possessing the banned male dog and a female of the same breed without an exemption certificate.
Police officers could not get to Mr McColl, so firearms officers attended and shot the dog nine times with a pistol and once with a shotgun, the court heard.
“That is how much ammunition was required to neutralise this large, powerful, savage dog,” Mr Birrell said.
An examination of the dog after his death found no food in his stomach, and showed he had begun to eat Mr McColl alive, the court heard.
A second dog, called Malibu, was also shot by police, Mr Birrell said.
Neighbour Christopher Burton told the court he grabbed a walking stick after he was alerted to the attack.
Giving evidence, Mr Burton said: “The dog was chewing on the bloke’s face, it was tearing the bloke’s face”.
“I struck it once with the walking stick,” he said, adding that he “just could not get the dog off the bloke”.
Geoffrey Chadwick, who was walking his dog nearby at the time, said in a statement to the court that he hit the dog with spirit level.
“I thought the man was dead at first until I heard him ask me for help,” he said.
Police Constable Chris Cunliffe, one of the first officers at the scene, said in a statement: “I can only describe the dog’s behaviour as if it were guarding its toy it had just ripped apart.”
The jury heard Garner avoided police before handing himself in on 26 February.
Mr Birrell said Garner was an “irresponsible” and “reckless” dog owner.
He said Garner was expected to tell the court the dog had been kept securely in a tool shed, but that the dog was kept on a patio, with only a metal gate on a latch securing it.
Text messages showed he contacted family members and “made light of the situation”, the prosecutor said.
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Mr Birrell told the court that Garner knew the dog, which he used for breeding, was dangerous and had said he was “missing a few nuts and bolts”.
He said the jury would hear evidence that the dog had not been fed for some time.
“The expert will also tell us that the dog appeared to be guarding Mr McColl as if he were its prey or its food,” he said.
The jury heard Garner kept the female dog separated from the male, which can make them “frustrated and aggressive”.
A jury was sworn in on Tuesday morning. The trial is expected to last between five and seven days.
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