“One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system. The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. … Per the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding to cook the results, each trustee holds a third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results. ‘Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share,’ the IACR said.” (11/21/25)
“Ten large Indian trade unions have condemned the government’s rollout on Friday of new labour codes, the biggest such overhaul in decades, as a ‘deceptive fraud’ against workers. The unions, aligned with parties opposing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, demanded in a statement late on Friday that the laws be withdrawn before nationwide protests they plan to hold on Wednesday. … Modi’s government implemented the four labour codes, approved by parliament five years ago, as it seeks to simplify work rules, some dating to British colonial rule, and liberalise conditions for investment. It says the changes improve worker protections. While the new rules offer social security and minimum-wage benefits, they also allow companies to hire and fire workers more easily.” (11/22/25)
“A man was shot and killed Saturday evening after deputies say he and three others tried to force their way into a southwest Miami-Dade home. … A preliminary investigation found that four unidentified individuals arrived at the home and attempted to enter by force. The homeowner, who was inside at the time, fired at the group, striking one of the subjects in the upper body, deputies said. … The remaining three individuals fled the scene in an unknown direction.” (11/22/25)
“The date was May 7, 2017. Addressing cheering supporters, the newly elected leader of France, Emmanuel Macron, made a promise that now, in his waning 18 months as president, lies in tatters. The rival that Macron defeated that day, Marine Le Pen, had secured 10,638,475 votes. They were nowhere near enough for the far-right leader to win. But they were too numerous for Macron to ignore, a best-ever watershed at the ballot box for Le Pen’s once-ostracized National Front party that she inherited from her Holocaust-denying father. Gazing out over a sea of French flags, Macron acknowledged ‘anger’ and ‘distress’ that he said motivated Le Pen voters. He pledged to do everything to win them over, ‘so they no longer have any reason to vote for the extremes.’ But since then, Le Pen’s us-against-them nativist politics targeting immigrants, Muslims and the European Union have made millions more converts.” (11/23/25)
“A former TV anchor-turned entrepreneur convicted of stealing millions of dollars in a COVID-era fraud scheme will spend the next decade behind bars at the same Texas prison camp as infamous sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. Earlier this year, a federal grand jury found Stephanie Hockridge, 42, guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. On Friday, Hockridge was sentenced to 10 years in lockup at a Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, the New York Post reported. She was also ordered to pay over $63 million in restitution. Hockridge was convicted ‘in a scheme to fraudulently obtain over $63 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans guaranteed by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act’, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Hockridge co-founded lender service provider Blueacorn in April 2020, ostensibly to help small businesses and individuals secure PPP loans during the COVID-19 pandemic, the DOJ said.” (11/23/25)
“Abortion is again illegal in North Dakota after the state’s Supreme Court on Friday couldn’t muster the required majority to uphold a judge’s ruling that struck down the state’s ban last year. The law makes it a felony crime for anyone to perform an abortion, though it specifically protects patients from prosecution. Doctors could be prosecuted and penalized by as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Three justices agreed that the ban is unconstitutionally vague under the state constitution. The other two justices said the law is not unconstitutional. The state constitution requires at least four of the five justices to agree for a law to be found unconstitutional, a high bar.” (11/21/25)
“A Houthi-controlled court in Yemen’s capital convicted 17 people of spying for foreign governments and sentenced them to death in the latest development in a yearslong Houthi crackdown on local staff from foreign agencies. The Specialized Criminal Court in Sanaa handed down the verdict on Saturday, according to the Houthi-run SABA news agency. The people convicted were part of ‘espionage cells within a spy network affiliated with the American, Israeli and Saudi intelligence,’ said the court, which handed down a death sentence by firing squad in public. The court also sentenced a man and a woman to 10 years in prison, while another defendant was acquitted. Saturday’s verdict can be appealed, said Abdulbasit Ghazi, a lawyer representing some of the defendants who were convicted.” (11/23/25)
“Brazil’s federal police on Saturday arrested former president Jair Bolsonaro over suspicion he was plotting to escape and avoid starting a 27-year prison sentence for leading a coup attempt. … federal agents entered Bolsonaro’s house early Saturday under the order of a Supreme Court Justice to take the former president to the headquarters of the country’s federal police in the capital, Brasilia. Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw the case on Bolsonaro’s attempt to keep the presidency after his defeat to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022, ordered the preemptive arrest after saying the far-right leader’s ankle monitor was violated at 12:08 a.m. on Saturday. His lawyers claimed in a statement that did not take place.” (11/22/25)
“Fifty of the more than 300 students kidnapped from a Nigerian Catholic school last week have escaped and have been reunited with their parents, the Catholic Church and Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) said on Sunday. But around 253 of the kidnapped children, along with 12 staff members and teachers, are still with the kidnappers, said CAN Chairman Bulus Yohanna, a Catholic Bishop who is also the proprietor of the school. In a statement, Yohanna said the pupils escaped on Friday and Saturday. Parents rushed to the school in Niger state, to the west of the capital Abuja, after hearing that some children were free.” (11/23/25)
“A Washington, D.C., federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the IRS from sharing taxpayer information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, finding the practice ‘unlawful.’ The court ‘concludes that the Plaintiffs have shown a substantial likelihood that the IRS’s adoption of the Address-Sharing Policy and the IRS’s subsequent sharing of taxpayer information with ICE were unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act,’ U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a 94-page ruling. ‘Furthermore, Plaintiffs have shown that the IRS’s disclosure of confidential taxpayer address information to ICE was contrary to law because it violated several provisions of Internal Revenue Code,’ the judge wrote. The order indicated that in early August, the IRS disclosed information about nearly 47,000 taxpayers.” (11/21/25)
