Month: July 2017

With an eye on anti-globalization protests brewing in Hamburg before this week’s G20 summit, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday leaders will have to focus on sustainable and inclusive economic growth rather than their own prosperity.

In her weekly podcast, the German chancellor said this year’s G-20 summit will delve into issues championed by protesters such as distribution of wealth and consumption of resources — alongside related issues like climate change, free markets, consumer protection and upholding social standards.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched against the meeting in the rain in Hamburg on Sunday in a prelude to the July 7-8 gathering, where 21,000 police from across Germany will protect the meetings of the world’s 20 largest economies.

“It’s not only going to be about [economic] growth but rather sustainable growth,” Merkel said. “We’ve got to have a ‘win-win’ situation for everyone. The issues obviously revolve around: how do we achieve inclusive or sustainable growth?”

Merkel, seeking a fourth term in a Sept. 24 election, outlined the issues as: “What are we doing with our resources? What are the rules for distribution of wealth? How many people are taking part? And how many countries are able to profit from that?”

Without mentioning the protests that have German security officials worried about possible acts of sabotage this week in the country’s second-largest city, Merkel noted that these non-traditional issues were forced onto the G-20 agenda.

“If we simply try to carry on as we have in the past, the worldwide developments will definitely not be sustainable and inclusive,” she said. “We need the climate protection agreement, open markets and improved trade agreements in which consumer protection, social and environmental standards are upheld.”

In a speech to parliament last week, Merkel promised to fight for free trade and press on with multilateral efforts to combat climate change at the summit, challenging the “America First” policies of U.S. President Donald Trump.

The G-20 meeting follows a G-7 summit in Sicily a month ago that exposed deep divisions between other Western countries and Trump on climate change, trade and migration. Trump later announced he was pulling the United States out of a landmark agreement to combat climate change reached in 2015 in Paris.

German authorities are bracing for trouble in Hamburg, worried that the protests could turn violent as they did outside a G8 summit in Genoa, Italy in 2001 when one person was shot dead and hundreds injured.

The German Federal Crime Office warned that violent G-20 opponents could carry out arson and sabotage at infrastructure targets such as the Hamburg harbor and airport, newspaper Welt am Sonntag said on Sunday.

“New and creative forms of attack have to be watched out for,” the report said. It added Hamburg police are bracing for attempts by activists to disrupt electrical power in Hamburg.

Sunday’s demonstration was organized by a group called “Protest Wave G20”, with 50,000 to 100,000 protesters expected on an afternoon march through the city center. Other

demonstrations this week are called “Welcome to Hell” and “G-20 Not Welcome”.

 
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The chief executive of Russia’s Kaspersky Lab says he’s ready to have his company’s source code examined by U.S. government officials to help dispel long-lingering suspicions about his company’s ties to the Kremlin.

In an interview with The Associated Press at his Moscow headquarters, Eugene Kaspersky said Saturday there’s never been any truth to rumors of his work with Russian intelligence. But he acknowledges it’s unusual for a successful company to operate independently of the government in Russia, saying, “I do understand why we look strange.”

But he says the firm never cooperates with cyberespionage, saying he shuts down the conversation when he occasionally sensed that unidentified governments were pushing him to.

He says “we stay on the bright side and never, never go to the dark side.”
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Pope Francis is calling for an end to the violent anti-government protests in Venezuela and expressing solidarity with families of those killed.

Francis led thousands of people in prayer for Venezuela on Sunday as he noted the country is to mark its independence on Wednesday.

He said, “I assure this dear nation of my prayers and express my closeness to the families who have lost their children in the protests. I appeal for an end to the violence and for a peaceful and democratic solution to the crisis.”

At least 80 people have been killed since anti-government protests erupted three months ago.

The Vatican sponsored a dialogue last year that failed. Recently, Venezuelan bishops have travelled to the Vatican and briefed Francis on their criticism of President Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian bent.
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The interior ministers of France, Germany and Italy will meet in Paris Sunday to help Italy deal with masses of migrants arriving on its shores.

Italy is struggling to respond to the influx of tens of thousands of migrants and threatened earlier this week to close its ports to migrant rescue boats in order to force the vessels to go to other Mediterranean countries.

Officials say French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb, German counterpart Thomas de Maiziere and Italy’s Marco Minniti will meet European Union Commissioner for Refugees Dimitris Avramopoulos in Paris Sunday to discuss the situation.

Watch: EU Pledges Support as Italy Threatens to Close Ports Following Migrant Surge

Upsurge in migrants

So far this year, Italy has taken in 82,000 migrants as the country has become the main point of arrival to Europe for the mostly African migrants. In that same period, more than 2,000 migrants have died attempting to make the trip from North Africa.

A stretch of good weather and calm seas has led to more than 10,000 migrants being rescued off Italy’s coast since Sunday. At the current rate, and with months of good sailing weather ahead, the number of migrants heading toward Europe is on track to exceed the 200,000 who landed in Italy in 2016.

​‘Unsustainable’ situation

In a letter to the European Commission, Italy’s ambassador to the EU, Maurizio Massari, said the situation has become “unsustainable.”

The EU Commission has backed Italy’s pleas for greater European solidarity and has urged other EU states to allow rescue boats to dock in their ports.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Friday the group will discuss further measures with Italy and Greece in the next week to help them tackle the influx.

Avramopoulos, the EU migration commissioner, also offered Italy his support this week. 

“Italy is under huge pressure and we are not going to leave this country alone,” he said.

Other options

Legal experts say Italy is likely obligated to take the migrants under international refugee laws. However, they say Italy may be trying to force the European Union to implement a 2015 agreement for countries to share refugees across the bloc, a deal that has so far made little progress in being implemented.

Other EU nations have closed their borders to migrants, hoping to block them from moving north. Poland and Hungary have refused to host some asylum-seekers to help ease the burden on Italy and Greece, another front-line country.

Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni has accused fellow EU nations of “looking the other way” and not doing enough to assist Italy with the surge in migrants.

Political ramifications

The influx in migrants this week prompted Minniti, the Italian interior minister, to cancel a trip to Washington in order to address the growing crisis, which is turning into a political issue for the country’s left-leaning coalition government. In municipal elections earlier this month, the coalition lost ground to center-right parties such as Matteo Salvini’s Northern League, which has called for a “stop to the invasion.”

An intense debate is also centered around the role of international NGOs who fund boats to pick up the refugees. Some argue the groups are effectively aiding the human smugglers and allowing the trade to continue.

Migrant origins

The migrants are coming from the shores of Libya, which has become the main gateway to Europe for people from across sub-Saharan Africa, and also from the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Syria and Bangladesh.

Around 15 percent of the migrants arriving this year in Europe are Nigerian. Twelve percent are Bangladeshi; Guineans account for 10 percent, and 9 percent are Ivorians.
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“I was 12 years old when I was raped. I did not understand what was happening.”

Nelle is now 36 years old. But in 1993 when war broke out in Burundi, armed men came to her village near the capital, Bujumbura. They killed her mother and father and six siblings. She was raped, but she survived.

“I saw people were killing each other. They were running away and killing each other. I hid myself under dead bodies for five days,” she said.

Difficult story

Nelle’s story of survival was long and difficult to tell. After living through years of instability, she told VOA that she left for South Africa in 2004 when a new government came to power in Burundi.

“I was scared,” she said. “I was afraid war was coming and I did not want to go through the same thing as in 1993. I did not want to be raped again. So, I quit the country and became a refugee in South Africa.”

Nelle is one of 25 rape survivors from South Sudan, Mali, Colombia and 12 other conflict-affected countries around the world who attended a four-day retreat this week in Geneva.

They came to share their experiences and to devise strategies for the creation of a global movement to end rape as a weapon on war.

“These 25 women have suffered unthinkable things and developed remarkable powers,” said Esther Dingemans, director of the Mukwege Foundation.

“They have experienced the cruelest violence. But the perpetrators did not succeed in breaking them,” she said.

The foundation is headed by Denis Mukwege, a renowned surgeon from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who has treated thousands of survivors of sexual violence in Congo.  

“We hope that this week will be the beginning of a large long-term movement that leads to a global platform of survivors,” said Dingemans, “and that their voices will finally be heard.”

Wartime atrocities

In 1992, after the atrocities committed in the Bosnian war, especially against Muslim women, rape, for the first time was recognized as a weapon of war by the United Nations Security Council.

In 2000, the Security Council adopted resolution 1325, which was the first formal and legal document that required parties to a conflict to “protect women and girls from sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflict.”

It also was the first U.N. resolution to specifically mention women.

Ulrike Lunasek, vice president of the European Parliament, who spoke at the ceremony honoring the 25 women survivors, said it is “important to break the vicious circle of shame and silence” that women usually feel when they are raped.

She said women raped in war must be supported, helped to heal and then “be encouraged to speak up, but also to tell the truth about what military conflict and war means for women.”

Women did speak up at this conference. Several survivors presented searing testimony about their ordeals.

Solange Bigiramana, who survived the horrors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, now lives as a stateless person in South Africa.

“My situation of being a survivor, that comes from a situation of war. It happened for me to face rape. I know what rape means,” she said.

“And I am here with a story of hope,” she said. “I once was under a shadow. I want every survivor to be out of the shadow and to be into the light.”

Yazidi girl

Another survivor, Farida Abbas-Khalaf, a Yazidi girl from the Iraqi village of Kocho, described the torment to which she and other members of her community were subjected by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, in her book The Girl Who Beat ISIS.

She spoke movingly and in agonizing detail about being raped, beaten, insulted, and forced to pray and read the Koran.

“Young boys were brainwashed and sent to ISIS training camps to become ISIS fighters while women and young girls were taken as sex slaves and sold at slave markets,” said Abbas-Khalaf.

She said that she was able to heal because of support from her family, her community and her spiritual leader who she said made a statement “that the surviving girls are an important part of the Yazidi community and that what happened to them was against their will.”

She added, “It is time that survivors break the silence. But mostly it is time for the world to hear their voices.”
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Ukraine has blamed Russian security services for a massive cyberattack that started in the last week in Ukraine and eventually spread to computers across the world.

Ukraine’s security agency, the SBU, said in a statement Saturday the attack bore resemblances to past hacks of Ukrainian infrastructure by the Russian security services.

“The available data, including those obtained in cooperation with international antivirus companies, give us reason to believe that the same hacking groups are involved in the attacks, which in December 2016 attacked the financial system, transport and energy facilities of Ukraine, using TeleBots and BlackEnergy,” the statement said.

Russia has denied involvement in the recent attack that halted operations at large companies and government agencies in more than 60 countries around the world. The hackers encrypted data on infected machines and demanded a ransom to give it back to its owner.

Europol Director Rob Wainwright called Tuesday’s hack “another serious ransomware attack.” He said it bore resemblances to the previous “WannaCry” hack, but it also showed indications of a “more sophisticated attack capability intended to exploit a range of vulnerabilities.”

The WannaCry hack sent a wave of crippling ransomware to hospitals across Britain in May, causing the hospitals to divert ambulances and cancel surgeries. The program demanded a ransom to unlock access to files stored on infected machines.

Researchers eventually found a way to thwart the hack, but only after about 300 people had already paid the ransom.

The most recent hack has been largely contained, but now some researchers are questioning the motivation behind the attack. They say it may not have been designed to collect a ransom, but instead to simply destroy data.

“There may be a more nefarious motive behind the attack,” Gavin O’Gorman, an investigator with U.S. antivirus firm Symantec, said in a blog post. “Perhaps this attack was never intended to make money [but] rather to simply disrupt a large number of Ukrainian organizations.”

Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab similarly noted that the code used in the hacking software wouldn’t have allowed its authors to decrypt the stolen data after a ransom had been paid.

“It appears it was designed as a wiper pretending to be ransomware,” Kapersky researchers Anton Ivanov and Orkhan Mamedov wrote in a blog post. “This is the worst case news for the victims – even if they pay the ransom they will not get their data back.”

The computer virus used in the attack includes code known as Eternal Blue, a tool developed by the NSA that exploited Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and which was published on the internet in April by a group called Shadowbrokers. Microsoft released a patch in March to protect systems from that vulnerability.

Tim Rawlins, director of the Britain-based cybersecurity consultancy NCC Group, says the attacks continue to happen because people have not been keeping up with effectively patching their computers.

“This is a repeat WannaCry type of outbreak and it really comes down to the fact that people are not focusing on what they should be focusing on, the very simple premise of patching your systems,” Rawlins told VOA.
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