NEW YORK, Nov 19 (IPS) – A week has gone by since COP 26 with 197 Parties ended in the Scottish city of Glasgow on extended time last Saturday. Climate change which covers wide array of issues affecting all living beings engaged the people around the world for COP 26 in a way never experienced since COP1 was held in Berlin in 1995.
China has accused the Philippines of breaching its territory, saying two supply ships were blocked by Beijing’s coast guard as they approached a disputed shoal. Manila protested over the run-in, citing its own claim to the area.
The two Philippines vessels “trespassed” into waters near the Nansha island chain – also known as the Spratly Islands – on November 16, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijan told reporters on Friday, noting that they entered the area “without China’s consent.”
“Chinese coast guard vessels performed official duties in accordance with law and upheld China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime order,” Zhao said, adding that the area is now “generally tranquil” and that the two countries are in communication about the encounter.
The comments from Beijing come just one day after Manila first publicized the incident, with the Philippines Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin claiming Chinese vessels fired water cannon on the two supply boats and forced them to abandon their mission near a disputed shoal in the Spratlys. He called on China to “back off” and “take heed” of Philippines claims to the region.
While both countries regard the Ayungin shoal – alternatively referred to as the Second Thomas or Renai Jiao shoal – as their own territory, The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration settled the dispute in the Philippines’ favor in 2016. However, despite that ruling, as well as the fact that Manila has maintained a presence on the shoal since 1999, Beijing has not abandoned its claims to the area.
The stars of the Harry Potter films will reunite for a 20-year anniversary special on HBO, minus author JK Rowling. Fans and commenters wondered if Rowling’s absence had anything to do with her views on transgender issues.
‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ premiered 20 years ago this week, catapulting actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson to superstardom. Warner Bros announced on Tuesday that the three stars – as well as a whole range of supporting actors from the franchise – will travel back to Hogwarts for an “enchanting making-of story” airing on New Year’s Day, entitled ‘Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts’.
Conspicuously absent from the production is author JK Rowling. A Warner Bros’ press release made no mention of Rowling, and a lengthy Instagram post by actress Emma Watson thanked fans and fellow cast members, but also made no mention of Rowling, whom other Harry Potter actors said they “owe everything” to.
Rowling’s PR team did not comment on the author’s absence, and the Hollywood Reporter claimed that the author will only appear in the show in archival footage.
Commentators online reckoned that Rowling had been canceled from the retrospective special due to her high-profile clashes with transgender activists. A self-described feminist, Rowling has spoken out against gender-neutral language, arguing that it “erases” the concept of sex and therefore the concept of womanhood. She has also stated that sex is a binary concept, and argued against gender-neutral bathrooms, claiming that by allowing men into women’s bathrooms, women are made less safe.
If I owed my entire career to 1 person, if I’d known her since I was 8, if I was worth $90m because of her, then not only would I defend her when maligned but I would refuse to take part in any reunion that excluded her. But that’s just me. #JKRowlinghttps://t.co/0ay5mhQ1FE
I can’t believe they’re actually shunning JK Rowling
“No you can’t participate in something celebrating the world you made because we are the new Amish but with more Puritan soul and no redeeming features”.
Rowling’s comments on gender issues generated intense backlash from LGBT organizations, and death and rape threats from the most zealous transgender ideologues online. Actors Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson also both spoke out against Rowling’s defense of biological sex last year, with Radcliffe declaring that “transgender women are women,” and apologizing to upset fans “for the pain [Rowling’s] comments have caused you.”
“Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t who they say they are,” Watson chimed in.
Rowling has repeatedly stated that she is against anti-trans discrimination, but would not change her position on sex. “I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it,” she wrote last year.
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EXPERT OPINION —More than 200 U.S. officers have been hunted around the globe and targeted by an adversary using a mysterious weapon that causes permanent brain injury. It’s time to get serious about fighting back.
The Authors:
Paul Kolbe served for 25 years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. He is currently Director of the Intelligence Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Marc Polymeropoulos worked for the CIA for 26 years. He is author of “Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA.
John Sipher worked for the CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years. He is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment.
Prior to 9/11, al Qaida declared war on the United States, bombed the USS Cole, and blew up U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salam. Despite heavy casualties, America viewed successive al Qaida terrorist attacks as somehow unique, not representative of a larger threat or state of war. We went about our business and failed to take hard action against al Qaida despite clear warning. Our failure to respond forcefully led to 9/11 and the two decades of war that followed.
Fast forward to today. Since 2016, more than 200 U.S. officials have reportedly suffered from a mysterious series of symptoms which have caused long-lasting, debilitating injuries. Suffering from searing headaches, vertigo, vision impairment, and nausea, many victims have been formally diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and other leading hospitals. Family members and young children have suffered as well. Some medical tests can now confirm the markers of brain injury, similar to those suffered by victims of concussive injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These injuries began with a cluster of reports from Cuba in 2016 and have become commonly referred to as Havana Syndrome. Moscow, Vienna, Belgrade, and Hanoi are among more than a dozen cities where U.S. officials reportedly have been attacked and injured. In residences, on the street, in vehicles, and even at secure U.S. facilities, U.S. officers are being hunted. Stunningly, even a close aide to CIA Director Bill Burns was reportedly attacked on a trip to India just this past August.
The CIA, after a period of confusion, delay, and even denial at times, now appears to take these threats very seriously. CIA Director Burns and Deputy Director David Cohen have publicly stated that U.S. officials are being “attacked.” They have improved health care for CIA officers who are hurt. And an agency task force is hard at work trying to obtain additional intelligence on those responsible. We credit Director Burns for his solid leadership.
The cause of these injuries? The National Academy of Sciences has pointed to Directed Energy Weapons – devices which emit microwave pulses which can inflict pain and damage tissue. The United States, Russia, China, and others have all developed Directed Energy Weapons to destroy equipment, counter drones, and control crowds. This is not science fiction.
Directed energy weapons would account for the highly directional and locational nature of these incidents. When victims can “move off the x,” the signature sounds, sensations, and pain that goes with the attacks often stop, though damage has already occurred. The amount of exposure seems to affect the degree of injury. Other technologies could be at play and are being investigated, but microwaves appear to be the most likely vector. Russia has used them before, flooding the U.S. Embassy in Moscow with microwave radiation for decades.
Regardless of form, the weapons being used in these attacks are nothing less than weapons of terror, designed to cause injury to non-combatants. Who would use such a weapon to attack U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and military personnel, and to what conceivable end?
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CIA Deputy Director Cohen stated at a recent intelligence summit, that the U.S. was closer to identifying the culprit, and Politico has reported that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are increasingly convinced that Russia or another hostile adversary is behind the attack, although reportedly, no smoking gun has been found.
As former CIA operations officers with extensive experience dealing with both counterterrorism and counterintelligence issues, we have few doubts about who will be named as the culprit. For at least a decade, Russia has conducted itself as in a state of conflict with the West in general and the United States in particular. Russia has launched cyberattacks impacting critical infrastructure and supply chains, assassinated opponents with nuclear poisons and chemical weapons, gunned down people in the streets using criminal proxies, sabotaged a Czech ammunition depot, and mounted a violent coup attempt in Montenegro. It has also bombarded the U.S. embassy in Moscow with microwave radiation and used carcinogenic “spy dust” without regard to health effects. The attacks on U.S. officials would fit this pattern of behavior.
We recognize that it is important to let the intelligence community do its job and its findings must inform policy action. Congress and the administration must work together to formulate a range of possible responses and it is not too early to begin. As Senator Collins and others have stated, these attacks are “an act of war,” and as such, preparation for a future attribution call by the national security establishment is in order. So how could the U.S. respond?
Let’s start with what doesn’t work – sanctions. Sanctions feel good and satisfy an action imperative but they are feckless. Sanctions have not stopped Russia from killing dissidents, halted the Nordstream II pipeline, compelled a pull back from occupied territories, reduced support for tyrants, or hindered oil and gas production. Sanctions have simply forced Russia to develop more creative money laundering and sanction circumvention mechanisms.
So, what would work? For starters, we must understand that the Putin regime considers itself in a state of conflict with the U.S., short of war, but nonetheless deadly real. We are dealing with a state sponsor of terror which conducts operations across the globe to weaken the U.S. abroad, divide it from its allies, and sow discord at home. Our policy must be calibrated to win this conflict, without sparking a shooting war, but at risk of one.
Russia understands reciprocity and strength. When four Russian diplomats were kidnapped by extremists in Beirut in 1985, and one of them was killed, Russia reportedly responded by kidnapping and gruesomely killing a relative of the group’s leader. The surviving diplomats were released immediately. The story may be apocryphal, but it does illustrate the Russian approach. Tempting as it may be for America to retaliate tit for tat, we need not mirror Russia’s actions. Instead, we should play to our greater economic, diplomatic, and military advantages.
We offer five elements to frame a response: enlist U.S. allies, expand forward deterrence, limit the adversary’s reach, choke off money, and bring those accountable to justice.
NATO: With proof of the attacks on U.S. officials, we should activate NATO’s Article Five collective defense clause. The only other time this was enacted was after 9/11. As justification, in addition to the Havana Syndrome attacks, (which also caused Canadian casualties), we would include GRU and FSB assassination operations across Europe, deadly sabotage in the Czech Republic, a coup attempt in Montenegro, persistent cyberattacks, and a litany of other actions that can only be described as irregular warfare directed against NATO members.
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Forward Presence: A crystal clear signal that we understand the nature of Russian hybrid warfare and are responding would be to enhance our deployed military presence in Poland, the Baltic States, and in the Black Sea region. These units would pose no offensive threat to Russia but would be a clear signal that the U.S. is prepared to counter any Russian shenanigans. We should also significantly ramp up our lethal aid and training to the Ukraine, where the nature of Russian aggression is well known. Weakness in Eastern Europe is an invitation to conflict.
Travel and Presence: We should drastically limit Russian business and tourist travel which is being used as cover for FSB and GRU operations. We would reduce Russian diplomatic presence in each capital to the bare minimum – handfuls not hundreds. American and European counterintelligence experts believe there are more Russian intelligence officers operating from embassies than during the Cold War. Limiting the size of Russia’s espionage infrastructure will complicate the planning and execution of all of its intelligence operations.
Finance: A key tool in counterterrorism operations is the ability to target sources of finance which constitute material support to terrorism. In this case, we would apply that principle to the Russian government, state enterprises, and individuals who provide cover, tools, and sources of funding to Russia’s campaign to undermine the West with violence, terror, and media manipulation. Russia’s dirty money has been used to undermine the west and poison our politics. We should limit the easy access of shady money to western banks.
Criminal Cases: We need bring war crime cases to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague. Following a decade of conflict in the Balkans, the ICJ brought to justice 161 indicted Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian war criminals. This was an astounding success – a manhunt which included American and European law enforcement and intelligence services. Just as in Nuremberg after World War II, these actions to hold war criminals accountable drew a line in the sand.
This is a start. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations have pursued Russia policies which represent the triumph of hope over experience. We have treated the symptoms of malign Russian actions rather than the underlying pathology. It is now time to finally acknowledge that we are in a long-term hybrid conflict and forget the fantasy of changing Putin’s behavior. Only a new regime in the Kremlin would hold the hope of bringing about a change in actions. Eventually, the Putin regime will wither or collapse, but until it does, we and our allies must do a better job of defending ourselves.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
An American nonprofit behind the US-funded bat virus research in China has denied ever sending virus samples from Laos – a place where SARS-CoV-2 closest natural relative was found – to Wuhan in response to fresh allegations.
“No work was ever conducted in Laos as a part of this collaborative research project,” EcoHealth Alliance – a group that conducted experiments on coronaviruses while receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – said in a series of tweets on Sunday, responding to media reports alleging that the group might have transported a potentially dangerous virus from Laos to the laboratory in Wuhan.
However, we considered it a higher priority to continue our focus on China, and no work was ever conducted in Laos as a part of this collaborative research project.
The group’s name surfaced in October when the NIH principal deputy director, Lawrence Tabak, revealed EcoHealth Alliance did experiment on the viruses with the agency’s financial help. At that time, White House Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that the viruses studied as part of the project “were distant enough molecularly that no matter what you did to them, they could never, ever become SARS-CoV-2.”
EcoHealth has come under renewed scrutiny after its emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information request, appeared to suggest that the group was discussing the prospect of collecting viral samples from bats in Laos and sending them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The emails were initially obtained by the White Coat Waste Project and sparked a flurry of reports over the weekend, including in the Spectator by British science writer Matt Ridley.
The emails shared between EcoHealth Alliance and its US government funders reportedly reveal that the scientists discussed collecting viral samples from bats in eight countries, including in Laos, between 2016 and 2019, and toyed with the idea of transporting them to Wuhan, ostensibly, to avoid red tape. One email from 2016 cited by the Spectator reportedly reads: “All samples collected would be tested at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Laos is the birthplace of at least one virus that seems to be very close to SARS-Cov-2. A bat viral strain called Banal-52 discovered in Laos in September shares 96.8 percent of its genome with the virus behind the Covid-19 pandemic
On Sunday, EcoHealth Alliance claimed that the emails cited by Ridley “do not show…that we were sampling bats in Laos and sending the results to Wuhan.”
The group acknowledged, however, that it requested NIH permission to work in Southeast Asian countries, including in Laos, and that this permission was granted.
However, the nonprofit claimed it ended focusing on China instead.
The response failed to satisfy Ridley, who is also a co-author of a book on Covid’s origin, who demanded “evidence” proving that his report was not “fully accurate.”
Hospitals in the Netherlands have begun delaying certain operations to free-up ICU beds during a record wave of Covid-19 infections, while an infectious diseases researcher has warned of an impending ‘Code Black’ in the sector.
The country set a daily national record for new Covid infections on Thursday, registering around 23,600 cases. It was the third day in a row of the figure topping 20,000.
To make more staff available for Covid wards, a number of operations, including those for cancer and heart patients, are being canceled from this week on, Dutch healthcare officials have said. Fewer than 200 beds remained available in Dutch ICUs as of Thursday, while Friday figures show almost half (47.8%) of occupied ICU beds were being used by Covid patients.
“These are cancer patients that should actually be operated-on within six weeks of diagnosis, and that won’t be met in all cases. It’s also heart patients,” said a spokesperson for the National Coordination Center for Patient Distribution (LCPS).
Meanwhile, new calculations by an infectious disease modeller at Wageningen University & Research suggest that a so-called ‘Code Black’ in hospitals is looming. The emergency designation means that patient safety is at risk and, if declared, would mean many people with life-threatening illnesses cannot go to the ICU, while doctors have to prioritize who to treat.
According to recent estimates from the Dutch Healthcare Authority (NZa), up to 200,000 operations were not performed as a result of urgently needed Covid care since the start of the pandemic. On Thursday, the NZa revealed that almost a quarter of operating rooms across the country are not currently in use due to a combination of Covid patient pressures and rising staff absences due to illness.
It is not yet clear what impact the delayed care will have on public health. In December 2020, the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) calculated that an estimated 34,000 to 50,000 ‘healthy life years’ had been lost due to the first Covid-19 wave alone.
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Despite COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, some 650,000 women and girls were provided with gender-based violence services through a joint UN and European Union (EU) programme working to stamp out what is arguably one of the most prevalent human rights violations.
Those making and knowingly using fake vaccination certificates in Germany could soon face up to five years behind bars, as the country’s likely future coalition government is looking to tighten the screws.
Coming under the same category are also fake test results and Covid recovery certificates, with similar penalties for the counterfeiters and the holders. Everything envisaged in the new guidelines was drafted by the Social Democrats, along with the Free Democratic and Green Parties. The three are currently in coalition talks and expected to form a new government as early as next week.
The German Parliament will decide on the regulations this Thursday, though a draft has already been seen by the media outlet DPA.
According to German media, the manufacturing and sale of fake certificates has become a booming black-market industry in the country. In just one such case reported by Der Spiegel in late October, a counterfeiter working at a pharmacy in Munich and her accomplice had churned out more than 500 fake digital certificates in the span of one month, raking in €350 for each one sold.
Meanwhile, Berlin authorities are planning to further ramp up restrictions in the city, where, starting Monday, having either a vaccination or recovery certificate is a must to enter restaurants, cinemas, theaters, museums, galleries, swimming pools, gyms, as well as hairdressers and beauty salons. On Tuesday, Berlin Mayor Michael Müller confirmed that authorities want to “have an additional instrument” to contain the spread of the virus. However, he declined to elaborate on what the new measures will be. Local media speculate that starting next week, in addition to the requirement to have a vaccination or recovery certificate to enter public places, people inside the venues will also need to practice social distancing and wear a mask, or have a recent negative test result.
This comes after Covid-19 numbers in Berlin hit an all-time high last Thursday, with 2,874 new cases reported that day.
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Hospitals in the Netherlands have begun delaying certain operations to free-up ICU beds during a record wave of Covid-19 infections, while an infectious diseases researcher has warned of an impending ‘Code Black’ in the sector.
The country set a daily national record for new Covid infections on Thursday, registering around 23,600 cases. It was the third day in a row of the figure topping 20,000.
To make more staff available for Covid wards, a number of operations, including those for cancer and heart patients, are being canceled from this week on, Dutch healthcare officials have said. Fewer than 200 beds remained available in Dutch ICUs as of Thursday, while Friday figures show almost half (47.8%) of occupied ICU beds were being used by Covid patients.
“These are cancer patients that should actually be operated-on within six weeks of diagnosis, and that won’t be met in all cases. It’s also heart patients,” said a spokesperson for the National Coordination Center for Patient Distribution (LCPS).
Meanwhile, new calculations by an infectious disease modeller at Wageningen University & Research suggest that a so-called ‘Code Black’ in hospitals is looming. The emergency designation means that patient safety is at risk and, if declared, would mean many people with life-threatening illnesses cannot go to the ICU, while doctors have to prioritize who to treat.
According to recent estimates from the Dutch Healthcare Authority (NZa), up to 200,000 operations were not performed as a result of urgently needed Covid care since the start of the pandemic. On Thursday, the NZa revealed that almost a quarter of operating rooms across the country are not currently in use due to a combination of Covid patient pressures and rising staff absences due to illness.
It is not yet clear what impact the delayed care will have on public health. In December 2020, the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) calculated that an estimated 34,000 to 50,000 ‘healthy life years’ had been lost due to the first Covid-19 wave alone.
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