James Pearson

NEW: Fresh details on Mossad's deadly pager-bombs, based on Lebanese sources, teardown photos of an unexploded pager, and evidence of an attempt to give the pager's bulky battery a credible backstory online. With @GebeilyM and @gauthiervillars reuters.com/graphics/ISRAE…

Fact Check: London man misidentified as street artist Banksy reuters.com/fact-check/lon…

NEW: French sailor reveals position of aircraft carrier with his fitness app. Run tracking app @Strava shows Charles de Gaulle as it steams across the Med. #stravaleaks strike..again! Story by @lemonde. 1/

This article is interesting for several reasons. The article suggests that the CIA reviewed multiple videos showing a missile impacting the school at Minab. Currently there is only one public video of a missile impacting, and it hits a different building near the school.

Oh boy: theguardian.com/world/2026/mar…

Extraordinary 👇🏽

The current reporting on his identity stems from a Reuters story. The reporting is excellent, but it notably does not include any photographs. reuters.com/investigates/s…

The picture floating around today that everyone claims is Banksy is not, in fact, Banksy. This is an old photo of a man named George Georgiou who people speculated to be Banksy back in 2024. See: thesun.co.uk/news/26954196/… and thesun.co.uk/news/26907107/…

Banksy’s ‘real name revealed in 26-year-old police report’ #Echobox=1773699650" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">thetimes.com/culture/art/ar…

@IntoMyPolitics Not at all. Given the fact this gentleman is known to you, you may also wish to contact the New York Post author @anthonyblair94 directly via ablair@nypost.com and urge him to issue a photo correction.

@pearswick Ah, thanks for the clarification. Seems through my attempt to prevent further misinformation I got swept up in it myself!

Ex-BND (German Foreign Intelligence Service) deputy chief Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven received a message from fake Signal “support” asking for his PIN. He typed it in. His contacts then got a malicious link through his hijacked account. He’s a former NATO intelligence chief, and the author of a book called Putin’s Attack on Germany, where he apparently covers Russian cyberattacks. He fell for a fake customer service message.

Chinese cyber threat actor, almost certainly Mustang Panda, launched an espionage campaign against Persian Gulf countries exactly 24 hours after the US-Israeli strikes on Iran began. The cyber operators were ready. The decryption key is literally the war's start date. The attack uses a lure disguised as a PDF showing missile strikes on a US base in Bahrain - the kind of thing genuinely circulating at the time. Upon opening the file, a chain of components installs a backdoor PlugX. Multiple decoy layers, encrypted payloads, obfuscation designed to make reverse-engineering difficult. It reliably phones home via encrypted HTTPS, using Google's DNS to hide even that traffic. The decryption key baked into the malware is 20260301@@@.

My friend Kurt Schork of Reuters, killed in W Africa in 2000. I spent a day in Sarajevo in 1992 with him and John Burns of the NYT (who’s just died) debating the situation. We had strongly divergent views, but stayed friendly & positive. Now I’m the only one left.

@abbasnasir59 Hi Abbas, this piece was co-written by CIA, DGSE, R&AW and the Belgian secret service. Everyone forgets the Belgians.

Banksy has created street art around the world. But it was an unfinished work on a billboard atop a New York apartment building that helped Reuters to prove beyond all doubt the artist's identity reut.rs/4sI1akm

Who is Banksy? What a fabulous read. reuters.com/investigates/s…

Banksy's identity has been debated, and closely guarded, for decades. A quest to solve the riddle took Reuters from a bombed-out Ukrainian village to London and downtown Manhattan — and uncovered much more than a name. 🔗 Read the full investigation: reut.rs/4cGMYnb ✍️ Simon Gardner, James Pearson and Blake Morrison

Banksy is one of the world's most popular, profitable and enigmatic artists. His identity has been debated, and closely guarded, for decades. Until now: reuters.com/investigates/s… 7/7

Among the many things we found: In September 2000, New York police nabbed Banksy for defacing a billboard in Manhattan. We located and dated that billboard. We also unearthed the artist's handwritten—and signed—confession, published here for the first time. 6/7

In 2022, my colleague @SGardnerReuters was on assignment in Ukraine for @Reuters when he unearthed a tantalising clue which pointed to the identity of world famous street artist Banksy. 1/7 🧵