8
DHAKA TRIBUNE
International
Germany for own Internet as spying scandal rankles n Reuters, Paris/Frankfurt As a diplomatic row rages between the United States and Europe over spying accusations, state-backed Deutsche Telekom wants German communications companies to cooperate to shield local internet traffic from foreign intelligence services. Yet the nascent effort, which took on new urgency after Germany said on Wednesday that it had evidence that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone had been monitored, faces an uphill battle if it is to be more than a marketing gimmick. It would not work when Germans surf on websites hosted on servers abroad, such as social network Facebook or search engine Google, according to interviews with six telecom and internet experts. Deutsche Telekom could also have trouble getting rival broadband groups on board because they are wary of sharing network information. More fundamentally, the initiative runs counter to how the Internet works today - global traffic is passed from network to network under free or paid-for agreements with no thought for national borders. If more countries wall themselves off, it could lead to a troubling “Balkanisation” of the Internet, crippling the openness and efficiency that have made the web a source of economic growth, said Dan Kaminsky, a U.S. security researcher.
Rebel areas of Syria’s Homs need food aid: sources n AFP, Beirut Some 3,000 civilians trapped in a suffocating Syrian army siege of rebel areas in the city of Homs need urgent food aid, a monitoring group and activists said Friday. “Three thousands civilians, among them 500 aged over 70, are living exclusively off the little food that had been stored in the besieged districts of Homs,” said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman. “People there are barely eating enough to survive,” he added. For more than 500 days, hundreds of families have been living under a tight government siege of rebel-held areas of the Old City neighbourhood of Homs. The army in July recaptured the Khaldiyeh neighbourhood, and hundreds of people who had been living there for months fled for other neighbourhoods under rebel control. A few weeks ago, “the last remaining tunnels the rebels were using to bring in supplies were discovered by the army and destroyed. Now, all the people have to eat is what they had in storage,” said Abdel Rahman. l
France feared US hacked president, was Israel involved? n AFP, Paris
The alleged US spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone may have been run out of its Berlin embassy (R), less than a kilometre from the chancellery (L) AFP Controls over internet traffic are more commonly seen in countries such as China and Iran where governments seek to limit the content their people can access by erecting firewalls and blocking Facebook and Twitter. “It is internationally without precedent that the internet traffic of a developed country bypasses the servers of another country,” said Torsten Gerpott, a professor of business and telecoms at the University of Duisburg-Essen. “The push of Deutsche Telekom is laudable, but it’s also a public relations move.” Deutsche Telekom, which is 32 per-
cent owned by the government, has received backing for its project from the telecoms regulator for potentially giving customers more options. In August, the company also launched a service dubbed “E-mail made in Germany” that encrypts email and sends traffic exclusively through its domestic servers. Government snooping is a sensitive subject in Germany, which has among the strictest privacy laws in the world, since it dredges up memories of eavesdropping by the Stasi secret police in the former East Germany, where Merkel grew up.l
Turkey, Iraq eye closer cooperation n Reuters, Ankara Turkey and Iraq, both concerned by the rise of al Qaeda in Syria, said on Friday their strained relations were improving and they would cooperate more closely to limit the spillover from Syria’s civil war. The two countries’ dealings have been tense in recent years, not least because of Turkey’s deepening ties with northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, locked in a dispute with the federal government over oil and land rights. “Over the past two years our relations have gone through a bit of a problematic time,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told a joint news conference with his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu during a visit to Ankara. “But the time has come for us to close this page and open a new one. Even though we still have certain disagreements, we don’t have any problems that are not solvable.” The war in Syria, which borders both Turkey and Iraq, has drawn Sunni Islamists from across the region and beyond into battle against President Bashar al-Assad’s government and has
nourished the revival of al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda’s Syrian and Iraqi wings merged this year to form the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which has mounted attacks in Syria and Iraq and has taken territory in northern Syria close to the border with Turkey in recent weeks. Davutoglu said Syria had dominated the discussions with Zebari and the two had agreed on a formal mechanism for more intensive talks between their governments. “We are the two countries that are the most deeply affected by developments in Syria,” Davutoglu said. He will visit Baghdad in the first half of November, his first visit to the Iraqi capital since March 2011. Asked if Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki planned to visit Turkey, Zebari said he hoped relations would continue on a more senior level but he gave no date for any visit. Iraq has been particularly angered by Turkey’s involvement in the autonomous Kurdistan region’s oil and gas industry. l
France believed the United States attempted to hack into its president’s communications network, a leaked US intelligence document published on Friday suggests. US agents denied having anything to do with the May 2012 cyber attack on the Elysee Palace, the official residence of French presidents, and appeared to hint at the possible involvement of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, a classified internal note from the US National Security Agency suggests. Extracts from the document, the latest to emerge from the NSA via former contractor Edward Snowden, were published by Le Monde newspaper alongside an article jointly authored by Glenn Greenwald, the US journalist who has been principally responsible for a still-unravelling scandal over large-scale US snooping on individuals and political leaders all over the world. The document is a briefing note prepared in April this year for NSA officials who were due to meet two senior figures from France’s external intelligence agency, the DGSE. The French agents had travelled to Washington to demand explanations over their discovery in May 2012 of attempts to compromise the Elysee’s communications systems. The note says that the branch of the NSA which handles cyber attacks, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), had confirmed
a senior Iraqi security official said. Washington agreed in August to
lance of Iraq’s desert border with Syria. But Deputy National Security Ad-
that it had not carried out the attack and says that most of its closest allies (Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand) had also denied involvement. It goes on to note: “TAO intentionally did not ask either Mossad or (Israel’s cyber intelligence unit) ISNU whether they were involved as France is not an approved target for joint discussions.” Le Monde interpreted this sentence as being an ironic reference to a strong likelihood that Mossad had been behind the attack. Hollande said Friday that French intelligence services had identified “several leads” for the attacks, speaking in Brussels after EU summit talks. He did not elaborate further, but his comments came after he and German Chancellor Angela Merkel pushed for Washington to agree on new rules on the conduct of intelligence gathering among allies. Merkel herself has also reportedly been the target of US espionage, with claims emerging this week the US tapped her mobile phone and spied on other allies. “Spying between friends, that’s just not done,” an angry Merkel said Thursday at the start of the summit of European Union leaders, which was overshadowed by the issue. The latest Le Monde report follows revelations published earlier this week that the NSA collected more than 70 million recordings of French citizens’ telephone data -- a claim contested by the top US intelligence chief. l
UK’s Cameron says Snowden and media spy leaks ‘helping enemies’ n Reuters, London Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday accused US whistleblower Edward Snowden and unnamed newspapers of assisting Britain’s enemies by helping them avoid surveillance by its intelligence services. In his strongest remarks on the subject yet, Cameron told a news conference in Brussels that the classified information which Snowden had leaked was going to make it harder for Britain and other countries to keep its citizens safe from people who wanted to “blow up” families. “What Snowden is doing and, to an extent, what the newspapers are doing in helping him do what he is doing, is frankly signaling to people who mean to do us harm how to evade and avoid intelligence and surveillance and other techniques,” Cameron told reporters. “That is not going to make our world safer, it’s going to make our world more dangerous. That is helping our enemies.” Cameron was talking after a European Council meeting in Brussels which had been overshadowed by allegations that the United States had tapped the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He declined to answer questions about Britain’s possible involvement, saying only that its intelligence services routinely shared information with other European countries and were subject to proper oversight.l
40 kiled near Damascus: Syrian media n AP, Damascus Syrian government troops on Friday ambushed rebels near the capital, Damascus, killing at least 40 opposition fighters, state media reported. The ambush was part of the military’s offensive against rebel strongholds around President Bashar Assad’s seat of power. Also Friday, Kurdish gunmen battled jihadi rebels in a northeastern Syrian town along the border with Iraq, leaving a number of casualties on both sides, activists said. Such battles have become increasingly common in Syria’s blood-
letting, adding another complex layer to the civil war, now in its third year. The ambush near Damascus came hours after Assad’s forces captured the town of Hatitat al-Turkomen south of the city, securing a key highway that links the capital with the Damascus International Airport. State-run SANA news agency said 40 rebels were killed in the ambush, which took place near the Otaiba area, and that a large arms cache was seized, including anti-tank rockets. The area is part of a region known as Eastern Ghouta, which was the scene of a horrific chemical
weapons attack in August, when several hundred people, including many women and children, were killed. An unidentified Syrian army officer in the area told state-run Al-Ikhbariya TV station that there were foreign fighters among the dead and that the ambush followed an intelligence tip. The TV broadcast footage showing more than a dozen bodies of men lying on the ground in an open area near a small river, along with scattered automatic rifles and hand grenades. A scroll on the TV read: “Eastern Ghouta is a graveyard of terrorists.” l
130,000 flee north Syria district: NGO n AFP, Paris Tens of thousands of people have escaped from the Al Safira district in northern Syria, fleeing non-stop heavy bombing in a “massive exodus,” Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Friday. The non-governmental organisation, which has staff on the ground in the conflict-ridden country, said some 130,000 people had fled the district in the northern province of Aleppo, in-
Ukranian jailed for Iraq to press US on drones, F-16s to fight al Qaeda 40 years for British supply a $2.6bn integrated air defense viser Safa al-Sheikh Hussein said Iraq n Reuters, Baghdad system and F-16 fighter jets, with deliv- needs them now. “The first thing the mosque bombs, Prime Minister will ask for is to accelThe Baghdad government wants the ery due in autumn 2014. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who erate the processes for the shipment of immediate delivery of US drones and murder F-16 fighter jets in order to combat al will meets US President Barack Obama drones and F-16s,” said Safa al-Sheikh Qaeda insurgents, who are making in Washington next week, has also re- Hussein in an interview with Reuters. n AFP, London “The initial response from the US was swift advances in the west of the Iraq, quested drones to carry out surveilA Ukranian student was jailed for a minimum of 40 years by a British court Friday for murdering a Muslim grandfather and planting bombs near three mosques as part of what police called a racist terror campaign. Pavlo Lapshyn, 25, had pleaded guilty on Monday to stabbing 82-yearold Mohammed Saleem to death as he walked home from a mosque in the central English city of Birmingham in April. Lapshyn, a postgraduate student from the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, also admitted plotting to cause explosions at mosques in three towns in central England. No one was injured in the blasts in the towns of Walsall, Wolverhampton and Tipton in June and July. Judge Nigel Sweeney, sitting at the Old Bailey in London, the central criminal court for England and Wales, sentenced Lapshyn to life in jail with a minimum term of 40 years on Friday. “You clearly hold extremist rightwing, white supremacist views and you were motivated to commit the offences by religious and racial hatred in the hope that you would ignite racial conflict and cause Muslims to leave the area where you were living,” the judge said. “Such views, hatred and motivations have no place whatsoever in our multifaith and multi-cultural society.” l
Saturday, October 26, 2013
positive, but it depends on the delivery time. We want them immediately.” l
FROM BRITAIN WITH LOVE
cluding almost all those who lived in the town of Al Safira. These add to the millions who have been driven from their homes since a brutal crackdown on Arab Spring-inspired protests in March 2011 escalated into a civil war that has now left some 115,000 people dead. “Faced with the magnitude of the needs of these displaced people, humanitarian aid is insufficient,” MSF said in a statement. Marie-Noelle Rodrigue, head of operations at MSF, said the “extremely vi-
WORLD WATCH Russian parliament passes new anti-terror bill
The lower house of Russian parliament has approved a new legislation that toughens punishment for terrorism and requires terrorists’ relatives to pay for the damages caused in attacks. The bill, unanimously passed Friday by the State Duma, is expected to see a similarly swift approval in the upper house and be signed by President Vladimir Putin to become law. The document says that training for terrorist activities is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. It also introduces a punishment of up to six years for those participating in a militant group abroad. The measure appears to be a response to Russian nationals fighting alongside rebels in Syria. Russian officials have voiced concern that they may launch attacks at home when they return.
Petrochemical plant shutdown averted in Britain A Scottish petrochemical plant threatened with closure will stay open after unions agreed to a survival plan. The Grangemouth plant’s owners threatened to shut the facility after unions initially balked at the terms. The plant and adjoining oil refinery have been shut for a week because of the dispute. With 800 jobs at stake, union leaders changed course Friday, agreeing to a pay freeze and pension changes. Workers cheered as the announcement was made. Reliability manager John Convery says the last couple of days have been “hellish” for workers and the surrounding community. He said workers and their families “have been staring into the abyss.” Plant owner Ineos said it was losing 10 million pounds ($16 million) a month. It says it will invest 300 million pounds in the facility. A dancer poses with a new painting by British graffiti artist Banksy on the front door of the Hustler Club in New York October 24
REUTERS
olent attacks” in Al Safira since October 8 had forced those who had already fled violence in other places to escape again. “These people arrive in areas that already host a large number of displaced people, where the rare humanitarian players that are present are faced with huge needs,” she said in the statement. According to MSF, new arrivals in the town of Manbij -- to the northeast of Al Safira -- were crammed into nearby farms, a makeshift camp on a parking lot that only has one latrine. l
Morocco teen jailed for 3 months for Obama tweet threat
A Moroccan court on Friday jailed a teenager for three months for threatening to kill US President Barack Obama on Twitter, judicial sources said. The 17-year-old identified as Soufiane I. pleaded guilty at a Casablanca court to “electronic crimes” and “calling for violence via electronic media,” after posting the death threat last year. “I will kill your president and everyone in his company. It’s what I’m going to do when I arrive in the United States next month,” the youth wrote on his Twitter feed. The teenager was arrested around two months ago in Casablanca. He is due to serve his sentence at the city’s Oukacha juvenile detention centre. The court hearing was closed to the media, and it was not immediately known whether the young Moroccan’s lawyers planned to appeal. Time spent in pre-trial detention is normally deducted from jail sentences in Morocco.
Muslim Brotherhood supporters rally in Egypt
Thousands of supporters of Egypt’s ousted president and his Muslim Brotherhood group have been marching in Cairo to keeping up the pressure on the country’s military-backed leadership. Scattered protests also are occurring across Egypt. Supporters of Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first elected president, marched Friday in Cairo’s southern district of Maadi. Some held pictures of their fallen members. Others called for Morsi to be reinstated, urging military leader Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi to step aside. Morsi was overthrown along with his Muslim Brotherhood-led government in July 3 coup after millions protested against his leadership.