The catalonian government, which is an autonomous community of Spain, held a referendum to secede. The Spanish shut down polling stations, but they declared independence anyways, so the central government implemented direct rule and arrested the separatist politicians responsible for it.
This is fake, nothing has changed. Google has never formally labeled Palestine on the map. A quick search for "Google maps Palestine" reveals that articles like this pop up once every year.
The ability to purely make transactions is trivial - you can just use a debit card. The value of credit cards comes from other factors like fraud protection, SCI compliance, actual credit, etc.
From the site you linked, the one with "unknown" motive has exclusively attacked Chinese academic victims. It would be extremely bizarre to suggest that the Chinese government is behind this.
These are crypto mining schemes, though. This looks a lot more like run of the mill money making cybercrime than espionage - I don't think any nation state would be interested in outing themselves for a pittance in bitcoin.