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      Commuters See ‘Islamophobic’ Message in Cyber Attack on Public Wi-Fi, Authorities Say

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      The British authorities are investigating after commuters at 19 train stations saw an Islamophobic message when they tried to log on to a public Wi-Fi system.The British authorities are investigating a cyberattack on Wednesday that they said displayed an anti-Muslim message on a public Wi-Fi system serving more than a dozen train stations around the country.Commuters who connected to a Wi-Fi service at stations for Network Rail, Britain’s national rail operator, were met with “Islamophobic messaging,” according to the British Transport Police, who oversee law enforcement on British rail networks. The police said they had received reports of the cyberattack just after 5 p.m. local time, and that they were leading an investigation into the incident. The service was quickly taken down, Network Rail said, and would remain down until security checks were completed.The issue emerged at 19 stations across Britain, including major transportation hubs in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol and other cities, a spokesman for Network Rail said in a statement.Commuters attempting to log onto Wi-Fi at the stations were met with a webpage that said “We love you, Europe,” along with information related to terror attacks in Europe, The Manchester Evening News reported.The Wi-Fi was a “click-and-connect” service that did not collect any personal data and was operated by a third-party company, Telent, Network Rail’s statement said.Telent, a technology and communications company, on Thursday pointed to Global Reach, a provider that ran the Wi-Fi service’s landing page. Telent said in a statement that it had found that an “unauthorized change was made to the Network Rail landing page from a legitimate Global Reach administrator account.”British Transport Police were investigating the matter as a criminal case, Telent said, and no personal data was affected by the incident. But, as a precaution, it said, it had temporarily suspended all use of Global Reach services to confirm that none of its other customers had been impacted.Global Reach did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.Britain’s crime and cybersecurity agencies were also helping with the investigation, the Transport Police said on Thursday.The disruption follows another “cybersecurity incident” on Sept. 1 that targeted Transport for London, the agency that runs the city’s public transit network, in which hackers accessed the contact details of the agency’s customers, and potentially could view bank account details for some commuters. The cyberattack also affected the broadcasting of live train schedules online and payment systems.A 17-year-old was arrested in Walsall, a town in the West Midlands county of England, as part of the investigation into that attack, cybercrime authorities said this month. More

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      Harrods Will Be Sued by Mohamed al-Fayed’s Alleged Victims, Lawyers Say

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      Attorneys for 37 women said they would sue Harrods, the luxury department store, over the rape and sexual assault they say its former owner committed.Lawyers representing dozens of women who have detailed harrowing allegations of sexual assault by Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, said on Friday that they would launch a civil case against the luxury British department store for allegedly enabling his abuse.At a news conference on Friday, a day after a bombshell BBC documentary and podcast laid out a pattern of sexual violence and rape of female employees during the time that Mr. al-Fayed owned the store, lawyers for at least 37 women said Harrods had “acquiesced to” an unsafe environment that had failed the alleged victims. About 20 of those women looked on from the audience.Mr. al-Fayed, who died last year at 94, was a billionaire tycoon who owned the iconic store from 1985 to 2010.“We will say it plainly, Mohamed al-Fayed was a monster,” said Dean Armstrong, one of the lawyers, adding, “But he was a monster enabled by a system, a system that pervaded Harrods.”Mr. al-Fayed was “enabled by unsafe systems of work which Harrods established, maintained, certainly acquiesced to, and, we say, facilitated during his chairmanship,” Mr. Armstrong said.Harrods, which is now owned by the state of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, issued a statement shortly after the documentary was released on Thursday, saying it was “utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed al-Fayed.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nigel Farage’s Anti-Immigration Party Has Big Plans. Can It See Them Through?

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      Nigel Farage, a Trump ally and Brexit champion, thinks his Reform U.K. party can become a major political force. At a conference on Friday, he will explain how.A week ago, he was the keynote speaker at a glitzy Chicago dinner for the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank with a history of denying climate science, where the top tables went for $50,000.On Friday, it was back to the day job for Nigel Farage, the veteran political disrupter, ally of Donald J. Trump and hard right, anti-immigrant activist whose ascent has alarmed both of Britain’s main political parties.In a cavernous exhibition center in Birmingham, in England’s West Midlands, Mr. Farage is set to address supporters of his upstart party, Reform U.K., at its first annual conference since its success in Britain’s July general election. He is expected to lay out a plan to professionalize the party and build support ahead of local elections next year.His ambitions are clear. But the jet-setting lifestyle of Mr. Farage, 60, whose visit to Chicago was his third recent trip to the United States, underscores the question hanging over Reform U.K.: Does its leader have the ability and appetite to build the fledgling party into a credible political force?Mr. Farage, a polarizing, pugnacious figure, is one of Britain’s most effective communicators and had an outsized impact on its politics for two decades before finally being elected to Britain’s Parliament in July. A ferocious critic of the European Union, he championed Brexit and helped pressure Prime Minister David Cameron to hold the 2016 referendum.“A fairly strong case can be made that Nigel Farage has been the most important political figure in all the elections of the last decade,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mike Lynch, Tech Mogul Acquitted of Fraud, Dies at 59

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      The British entrepreneur, who was found not guilty of fraud charges in the sale of his company to Hewlett-Packard, was celebrating his acquittal when his yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily in a storm.Mike Lynch, a British software mogul who was once celebrated as a top technology leader — only to spend more than a decade defending himself against accusations that he orchestrated one of the biggest frauds in Silicon Valley history — died on Monday after his yacht sank off the coast of Sicily. He was 59.An official in the Italian city of Palermo confirmed on Thursday that Mr. Lynch’s body had been recovered by divers.Twelve guests and 10 crew members were onboard the yacht, the Bayesian, when it went down during a violent storm. Mr. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was rescued, along with nine crew members and six passengers. Six bodies have been recovered and one person is still missing, Mr. Lynch’s daughter Hannah Lynch.Mr. Lynch’s death came two months after he was acquitted in federal court in San Francisco of criminal fraud charges, tied to the $11 billion sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. The takeover, widely regarded among investors as one of the worst deals in history, led HP to accuse Mr. Lynch of deception.U.S. prosecutors charged Mr. Lynch with more than a dozen counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the deal, with a potential sentence running to about two decades in prison.Emergency services search for survivors after a yacht sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday.Alberto Lo Bianco/, via LaPresse, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Stonehenge’s Altar Stone, an Improbably Long Ancient Journey

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      A six-ton megalith at the heart of the archaeological site traveled more than 450 miles to get there, a new study concludes.Near the center of the roughly 5,000-year-old circular monument known as Stonehenge is a six-ton, rectangular chunk of red sandstone. In Arthurian legend, the so-called Altar Stone was part of the ring of giant rocks that the wizard Merlin magically transported from Mount Killaurus, in Ireland, to Salisbury Plain, a chalk plateau in southern England — a journey chronicled around 1136 by a Welsh cleric, Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his “Historia Regum Britanniae.”Since then, the accepted provenance of the Altar Stone has shifted, spanning a range of possible sites from east Wales and the Marches to northern England. On Wednesday, a study in the journal Nature reroutes the megalith’s odyssey more definitively, proposing a path much longer than scientists had thought possible.The researchers analyzed the chemical composition and the ages of mineral grains in two microscopic fragments of the Altar Stone. This pinpointed the stone’s source to the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland, an area that spans Inverness, the Orkney Islands and Shetland. To reach the archaeological site in Wiltshire, the megalith would have traveled at least 465 miles by land or more than 620 miles along the present-day coastline if it came by sea.“This is a genuinely shocking result,” said Rob Ixer, a retired mineralogist and research fellow at University College London who collaborated on the project. “The work prompts two important questions: How and why did the stone travel the length of Britain?”Stonehenge features two kinds of rocks: larger sarsens and smaller bluestones. The sarsens are sandstone slabs found naturally in southern England. They weigh 20 tons on average and were erected in two concentric arrangements. The inner ring is a horseshoe of five trilithons (two uprights capped by a horizontal lintel), of which three complete ones still stand.Richard Bevins examining Bluestone Stone 46, a rhyolite most probably from north Pembrokeshire, on Wales’s southwest coast.Nick Pearce/Aberystwyth University.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      UK Police Brace for Unrest After Southport Stabbing

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      Protests escalated into violent riots in Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and Belfast over the weekend, with dozens arrested and more demonstrations planned.The police in cities across Britain were bracing on Sunday for the spread of far-right and anti-immigration protests, a day after dozens of people were arrested in another day of unrest after a stabbing in a northern town last week.Protests in cities including Liverpool and Manchester descended into riots on Saturday, prompting a heavy police response across the country. The National Police Chiefs’ Council, which represents law enforcement across Britain, has said that nearly 4,000 additional officers have been deployed to deter the violence.“The police have our full backing,” Yvette Cooper, the British home secretary, said on Saturday. “I want everyone to be clear. Anyone who gets involved in criminal disorder, violent thuggery on our streets will have to pay the price.”Tension has gripped some communities across the country after a stabbing rampage at a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class on Monday in the town of Southport, near Liverpool, killed three young girls and injured many others. A 17-year-old suspect was later named.Disinformation about the attacker’s identity spread quickly online, falsely identifying him as a migrant and fueling a violent, far-right riot in which a mosque was attacked and dozens of police officers were injured in Southport on Tuesday.Unrest has since spread to other parts of Britain, with violent protests in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham and other cities over the weekend. A protest was also held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and also turned violent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Who Are the Far-Right Groups Behind the U.K. Riots?

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      After a deadly stabbing at a children’s event in northwestern England, an array of online influencers, anti-Muslim extremists and fascist groups have stoked the unrest, experts say.Violent unrest has erupted in several towns and cities in Britain in recent days, and the authorities are bracing for further disorder this weekend as far-right agitators plan more rallies around the country.The violence has been driven by online disinformation and extremist right-wing groups intent on creating disorder after a deadly knife attack on a children’s event in northwestern England, experts said.A disparate range of far-right factions and individuals, including neo-Nazis, violence-prone soccer fans and anti-Muslim campaigners, have promoted and taken part in the unrest, which has also been stoked by online influencers.Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to deploy additional police officers to crack down on the disorder. “This is not a protest that has got out of hand,” he said on Thursday. “It is a group of individuals who are absolutely bent on violence.”Here is what we know about the unrest and some of those involved.Where have riots taken place?The first riot took place on Tuesday evening in Southport, a town in northwestern England, after a deadly stabbing attack the previous day at a children’s dance and yoga class. Three girls died of their injuries, and eight other children and two adults were wounded.The suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Britain, but in the hours after the attack, disinformation about his identity — including the false claim that he was an undocumented migrant — spread rapidly online. Far-right activists used messaging apps including Telegram and X to urge people to take to the streets.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kate, Princess of Wales, Plans to Attend Wimbledon Final

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      The princess has stepped back from the public eye since her cancer diagnosis earlier this year.Catherine, Princess of Wales, appeared on Sunday afternoon at the Wimbledon tennis championship in London, a further step in her cautious return to public appearances after her cancer diagnosis.She took her seat in the front row of the royal box, to prolonged applause, about five minutes before the men’s singles final between Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic was scheduled to start at 2 p.m. She wore a bright purple dress and gold earrings, and was joined by her daughter, Princess Charlotte.A wonderful Centre Court welcome for our Patron HRH The Princess of Wales 💜#Wimbledon pic.twitter.com/HGcphka27P— Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 14, 2024

      The Princess of Wales has long been one of the most visible and most popular members of the royal family. But she stepped back from royal duties after having abdominal surgery in January, and her announcement in March that she had begun chemotherapy prompted a flood of concern about her health.She largely stayed out of public view — save for a statement to the public last month saying that she was “not out of the woods yet” and thanking supporters for their well wishes — until June, when she joined her family at Buckingham Palace for a military parade, called Trooping the Color, to mark the king’s birthday.Wimbledon is a familiar setting, with the promise of a friendly and enthusiastic crowd.Catherine — a high school athlete who has repeatedly played sports as a working royal — has been a fixture at the tournament. She is the patron of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (commonly known as Wimbledon), a role she has held since 2016. She did not attend the women’s final on Saturday, although she has previously awarded trophies to both winners.Catherine’s husband, Prince William, will also attend a major sporting event on Sunday, Kensington Palace said: The final of Euro 2024 in Berlin, where the English men’s soccer team will face Spain. The match begins at 9 p.m. in Germany.That match is the subject of more intense excitement in England, which has been treating the occasion as something of a national holiday — the men’s team has not won a major international tournament since the 1966 World Cup.A formal national holiday may yet follow. When asked about the idea at the NATO summit in Washington this past week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told reporters that England “should certainly mark the occasion” if the team won, adding, “I don’t want to jinx anything.”But William’s and Catherine’s public appearances come at a tough time for the family, whose public-facing ranks have been thinned by scandal and sickness.King Charles III announced in February that he had cancer, and took a step back before returning to public duties in April. Princess Anne, his younger sister, was hospitalized for five days in June after suffering a concussion. More