The hackers who upended the US presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, US defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hitlist obtained by the Associated Press. The news comes as US prosecutors are reportedly considering charges against six members of the Russian government accused of hacking into the Democratic national committee’s computers.

The list obtained by the AP provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that stretched back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users across the globe – from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow.

“It’s a wishlist of who you’d want to target to further Russian interests,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP’s findings. He said the data was “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence”.

The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets.(theguardian)…[+]

The heads of eight of the world’s largest news organisations have called for the European commission to investigate the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia and the independence of the media in Malta. The editors and directors have written a letter to Frans Timmermans, the first vice-president of the commission, which describes the murder of Caruana Galizia as “shocking” and an “appalling reminder” of the dangers that journalists and citizens practising journalism face as they try to uncover corruption and criminal behaviour.

The signatories include Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, Jérôme Fenoglio, director of Le Monde, and James Harding, the director of news and current affairs at the BBC.

Caruana Galizia was killed last month by a car bomb near her home. She had led an investigation into corruption in Malta using the Panama Papers – with the government and the opposition implicated – and the readership for her blogposts often exceeded the circulation of the country’s newspapers.(theguardian)…[+]

Archaeologists have uncovered a mysterious enclosure hidden deep inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The massive cavity stretches for at least 30 metres and lies above the grand gallery, an impressive ascending corridor that connects the Queen’s chamber to the King’s in the heart of the historic monument. It is the first major structure found in the pyramid since the 19th century. It is unclear whether the void is a chamber or a corridor, or whether it played any more than a structural role in the pyramid’s construction – such as relieving weight on the grand gallery below. But measurements show that it has similar dimensions to the grand gallery, which is nearly 50 metres long, eight metres high and more than a metre wide.(theguardian)…[+]