U.S. prosecutors on Monday said they had charged a Ukrainian man with launching a July ransomware attack on an American firm that had infected 1,500 businesses throughout the world.

Authorities also announced they had seized $6 million in ransom payments made to a Russian national accused of launching more than 3,000 other attacks targeting American companies.

An indictment filed in the southwestern state of Texas by the Justice Department accused Yaroslav Vasinskyi, a Ukrainian national arrested in Poland last month, of unleashing the ransomware attack known as REvil on Florida-based firm Kaseya, a global information technology software infrastructure supplier, which in turn affected its customers across the globe.

Vasinskyi and another alleged REvil operative, Russian national Yevgeniy Polyanin, who was accused in the other attacks, were charged with conspiracy to commit fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, among other charges.

The U.S. Treasury Department also said the two men face sanctions for their roles in carrying out other ransomware attacks in the U.S., as well as creating a virtual currency exchange called Chatex “for facilitating financial transactions for ransomware actors.”

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Vasinskyi was in fact charged just six weeks after the July attack.

“His arrest demonstrates how quickly we will act, alongside our international partners, to identify, locate and apprehend alleged cybercriminals, no matter where they are,” Garland said.

U.S. President Joe Biden has urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop providing a haven for cybercriminals in Russia, where many of the attacks are believed to originate. Hackers have locked up companies’ computer operations from afar and demanded millions of dollars in ransom payments to let the companies resume their operations.

Authorities said the July attack corrupted a widely used software tool made by Kaseya, and its customers were immediately infected with REvil encryption. Some of the companies paid ransoms totaling millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies to resume business operations, though a master decryption key was eventually recovered by authorities and distributed weeks later.

Many of the 1,500 companies affected by the attack on Kaseya use its software to handle back-office functions because they are too small to have their own technology departments.

Vasinskyi, 22, is being held in Poland pending U.S. extradition proceedings, while Polyanin, 28, remains at large.

The indictment of Vasinskyi alleged that he and other conspirators launched the hacking software around April 2019 and “regularly” updated and refined it.

Europol said Monday that Romanian authorities last week arrested two individuals suspected of cyberattacks using the REvil ransomware, with three others arrested earlier in the year.

Europol said Friday that 12 people suspected of mounting ransomware attacks against companies or infrastructure in 71 countries were “targeted” in raids in Ukraine and Switzerland.
…

The eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma entered its eighth week Monday, powerful as ever and showing no signs of stopping. 

From its official Twitter account, INVOLCAN, the Canary Islands Volcanology Center, reported lava and huge plumes of smoke and ash have been spouting from the crater all day.

Citing a report from Italy’s volcano department, INVOLCAN said the minimum height of the volcano’s plume Monday was 1,600 meters. 

The eruption has alternately surged and ebbed since September 19 and scientists say the eruption could last for up to three months. 

But experts have said that predicting the end of the eruption is difficult because the lava, ash and gases coming to the surface reflect complex geological activity happening deep inside the Earth, far from the reach of currently available technology. 

An area of more than 8,200 hectares between the Cumbre Vieja volcano and the Atlantic Ocean has been declared off limits. 

Lava from the volcano has destroyed several hundred homes and industrial buildings, and scorched hectares of farmland in the largely agricultural area. Officials evacuated more than 7,000 residents and tourists to prevent loss of life.

The previous eruption on La Palma happened 50 years ago and lasted about three weeks. The island of roughly 85,000 residents is part of Spain’s Canary Islands off the northwestern coast of Africa. 

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse. 
…

A European human rights group alleged Monday that Israeli-made Pegasus spyware was used to hack the phones of staff members of six Palestinian civil society groups that Israel’s defense ministry has designated as terrorist organizations.

Dublin-based Front Line Defenders said its allegation was confirmed independently by researchers for Amnesty International and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

Front Line Defenders stopped short of blaming the Israeli government for installation of the spyware on the phones of the Palestinian human rights workers. But it condemned Israel’s designation of their organizations as linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, a Marxist group labeled as a terrorist organization by many Western nations, including the United States.

Last month, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz designated six Palestinian civil society territory groups in the occupied West Bank territories as “terrorist organizations.” The groups are Addameer, Al-Haq, Defense for Children – Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, Bisan Center for Research and Development, and the Union of Palestinian Women Committees.

Israel declined Monday to comment on the allegation that Pegasus was used against the groups’ staff members but pushed back against international criticism of the terrorism designation against the organizations, saying it had an “excellent file” of evidence linking the groups to the PFLP.  

Front Line Defenders said use of the Pegasus spyware made by NSO Group turns cell phones into pocket-spying devices, giving attackers “complete access to a phone’s messages, emails, media, microphone, camera, passwords, voice calls on messaging apps, location data, calls and contacts.”

The U.S. Commerce Department sanctioned the NSO Group last week, putting in on a blacklist that prohibits the company from receiving American technologies. It acted after U.S. officials determined that the NSO Group’s phone-hacking tools had been used by foreign governments to “maliciously target” government officials, journalists and activists around the world.

Asked about the new allegations, NSO Group said, “As we stated in the past, NSO Group does not operate the products itself … and we are not privy to the details of individuals monitored.” The company said it only sells to law enforcement and intelligence agencies and that it takes steps to curb abuse.

Front Line Defenders said it examined 75 iPhones and found six of them contaminated with the spyware, including phones used by Ghassan Halaika, a field researcher and human rights defender working for Al-Haq; Ubai Al-Aboudi, an American who is executive director of the Bisan Center for Research and Development; and French national Salah Hammouri, a lawyer and field researcher at the Jerusalem-based Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.

Three other Palestinians whose phones were hacked declined to be identified.

Front Line Defenders said that use of the Pegasus spyware “means that, in addition to the targeting of Palestinians, including dual nationals, non-Palestinians (including foreign nationals and diplomats) with whom these victims were in contact, including Israeli citizens, could have also been subject to this surveillance, which, in the case of its citizens, would amount to a breach of Israeli law.”

In a statement, Front Line Defenders said it “strongly condemns the decision and allegations of terrorism brought against these Palestinian human rights organizations in response to their peaceful human rights work. Human rights defenders are not terrorists.”

Some material in this report was supplied by Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
…

Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed regional conflicts and a crisis in ties with the head of the US Central Intelligence Agency who paid a rare trip to Moscow last week, the Kremlin said Monday.

CIA chief William Burns was in Russia for two days of meetings with top officials at the request of President Joe Biden, the US embassy has said.

CNN reported last week that Burns had been sent to Moscow to warn the Kremlin about the alleged build-up of troops near Ukraine’s border. It said that after his meetings in Russia, Burns spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by phone.

The Kremlin’s spokesman said on Monday that Putin and Burns discussed bilateral ties, “regional conflicts” and a crisis in diplomatic relations. He did not provide further details. 

Burns, who was the US ambassador to Russia in 2005-2008, visited Moscow during a severe crisis in ties between Moscow and Washington. 

Biden has increased pressure on Putin since becoming US president in January. In May, Russia formally designated the United States an “unfriendly state”.

The Pentagon said last week it was monitoring the situation in Ukraine closely amid reports of a new build-up of Russian troops on the country’s border.

Publicly, Ukraine has denied reports of a new Russian troop build-up.

The Ukrainian army is locked in a simmering conflict with pro-Russian separatists that erupted after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014.

After a rise in violence early this year, Russia in the spring amassed around 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, sparking fears of a major escalation. Under pressure from Kiev’s Western allies, Moscow later announced a pullback.
…

Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, convicted by Russia of spying, will continue to fight for his transfer to the United States despite losing a court appeal on Monday, Interfax news agency quoted his lawyer as saying.

Whelan, who holds U.S., British, Canadian and Irish passports, was sentenced last year to 16 years in jail. He denies espionage and has said he was set up in a sting operation. Washington has demanded his release. 

Whelan had challenged the refusal of a regional court to hear his case for being sent home, but an appeals court in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, around 400 km east of Moscow, deemed the original ruling lawful. 

Ahead of the hearing, one of Whelan’s lawyers, Vladimir Zherebenkov, said that negotiations between Washington and Moscow to try to agree to his release were no longer taking place, but that his team would continue to seek deportation through other channels.

“According to my information, all negotiations, including about a possible exchange, extradition or pardon of Whelan are not being held now, everything is suspended,” Zherebenkov was quoted as saying. 

“That is why we are trying to do it this way. I hope our justice system will expel him.” 

However, Zherebenkov said that extradition was unlikely without the recognition of the Russian sentence by the U.S. side. 

Whelan has said he hoped to be freed as part of a prisoner swap, a topic President Vladimir Putin discussed with his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden at a summit in June. 

Moscow said that Whelan had been caught red-handed with classified information in a Moscow hotel room where agents from the Federal Security Service detained him on Dec. 28, 2018. 

Whelan said he was in Russia for a wedding and on holiday and set up by a Russian man he thought was a friend. 
…

A German humanitarian ship with more than 800 rescued migrants, including 15 very young children, steamed into a Sicilian port on Sunday after being granted permission by Italian authorities following days of waiting in the Mediterranean Sea.

The charity group Sea-Eye said the vessel Sea-Eye 4 was assigned to the port of Trapani, in western Sicily, on Saturday evening. Most of the adults were to be transferred to other ships for preventative quarantine against COVID-19, while some 160 minors, including babies and other children younger than 4, were to be taken to shelters on land.

Many of the passengers came from countries in West Africa, Egypt or Morocco, said Giovanna di Benedetto, an official from Save the Children in Italy.

Shouts of joy from those aboard Sea-Eye 4 could be heard on Trapani’s dock as the vessel drew near, SkyTG24 TV reported.

About half of the migrants were rescued from a sinking wooden boat on November 4, while the other passengers had been plucked from the sea in separate operations.

Sea-Eye officials had lamented that Malta, a European Union island nation in the central Mediterranean, hadn’t responded to the wooden boat’s distress signal in the Maltese search-and-rescue area.

Meanwhile, another charity ship, Ocean Viking, with 308 migrants aboard, was still awaiting a port assignment near Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island south of Sicily.

The humanitarian organization SOS Mediterranee, which operates Ocean Viking, tweeted that its team on Friday night was involved in a search for a boat in distress south of Lampedusa. The charity tweeted that the Italian Coast Guard “eventually coordinated and completed the rescue requesting the assistance” of Ocean Viking.

Separately, the coast guard, working in rough seas, evacuated two people, along with four family members, from the Ocean Viking for medical treatment, including for burns, SOS Mediterranee said.

On Saturday, Sea-Eye 4 received a delivery of food and blankets while it waited to learn where the migrants could set food on land. Doctors aboard Sea-Eye 4 had treated 25 people for hypothermia, sea sickness and high blood pressure, along with injuries consistent with torture.

U.N. refugee agencies have long denounced the practice of torture in detention camps in Libya, where the migrants live, often for weeks or months, until human traffickers arrange their passage aboard flimsy boats. 

The number of migrants daring the dangerous central Mediterranean crossing has surged this year to more than 54,000. Still, the numbers are dramatically below those of 2014-2017, when 120,000-180,000 people reached Italy each year, often in rickety smugglers’ boats. 
…

Poland’s Health Ministry issued instructions Sunday to doctors confirming that it is legal to terminate a pregnancy when the woman’s health or life is in danger, a directive that comes amid apparent confusion over a new restriction to the country’s abortion law. 

The document addressed to obstetricians comes in reaction to the hospital death of a 30-year-old mother whose pregnancy was in its 22nd week. The woman died in September but her death became widely known this month. Doctors at the hospital in Pszczyna, in southern Poland, held off terminating her pregnancy despite the fact that her fetus lacked enough amniotic fluid to survive, her family and a lawyer say.

The doctors have been suspended and prosecutors are investigating. 

Angered Poles held massive nationwide protests over the weekend, blaming the woman’s death on Poland’s restrictive abortion law. Women’s rights activists say it has a chilling effect on doctors in this predominantly Roman Catholic nation.

The ministry stressed it is in line with the law to terminate a pregnancy when the woman’s health is in danger, even more so in case of threat to her life. It included guidance in case of premature loss of the amniotic fluid.

“It should be clearly stressed that doctors must not be afraid to take evident decisions. stemming from their experience and the available medical knowledge,” the ministry said.

Until a year ago, women in Poland could have abortions in three cases: if the pregnancy resulted from a crime like rape, if the woman’s health or life was at risk, or in the case of irreparable defects of the fetus. That last possibility was eliminated a year ago, when the Constitutional Tribunal ruled it went against Poland’s law. 
…

John Kerry is everywhere and on the move at a fateful U.N. climate summit.

President Joe Biden’s envoy at the talks in Glasgow, Kerry steams from side talks with U.S. rivals China and Russia that painstakingly probe for common ground on climate to news conferences extolling progress. Kerry pops into project launches, rewarding CEOs and bankers for emissions-cutting efforts with high-level face time and praise. The lanky envoy smiles for a photo with Indigenous women from Brazil, their feather headdresses barely reaching his chin.

Toward the end of the U.N. climate summit’s first of two weeks, Kerry’s voice grew hoarse from his mission of rallying global climate efforts that are threatening to hit a wall at home.

“The alternative is you don’t do anything, you don’t say anything” on climate, Kerry told reporters at the summit. “You don’t have any promises, you don’t have any commitments. And you’re sitting there, waiting for the deluge.”

He was speaking of a climate fight growing more urgent, as global warming from the burning of fossil fuel intensifies, and more fraught, as the United States’ own wildly swinging seesaw politics imperil Biden’s climate efforts and again threaten global momentum on the matter.

With the summit underway, the U.S. House on Friday finally passed a stalled infrastructure bill that contains some important measures to cut U.S. emissions.

But Biden’s lagging political support, and Republican upsets in off-year elections last week, are heightening uncertainty that the U.S. administration can deliver on some of Biden’s biggest climate promises.

Kerry, President Barack Obama’s secretary of state and a former senator, came back post-President Donald Trump to serve as Biden’s climate envoy. 

The job has entailed apologizing for the global disruption that Trump, who mocks the science behind climate change, wreaked when he pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate accord, which Kerry helped to negotiate. Scientists say the ground lost during the Trump administration leaves this decade a last chance to keep the Earth from warming to more catastrophic levels.

Kerry’s job now is part diplomat, part cheerleader. At the Glasgow climate conference, as in the months before, Kerry negotiates to nail down every possible bit of new climate effort from countries and businesses — then pushes for more. While the U.S. return to global climate negotiations has helped push allies to some deeper cuts on emissions, the world’s other big polluters besides the United States — China, Russia, India and others — are short on emission promises, at best.

At 77, Kerry is waging only the latest of his campaigns in a decades-long personal battle to curb the fossil fuel emissions heating Earth.

Kerry “brings a deep knowledge of what’s at stake,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, and a veteran of climate talks. “He brings long-term relationships to these talks, and the spirit of collaboration.” Yet, she adds, he “gets limited by what is happening at home.”

If there’s not “a credible U.S. plan to meet the targets and phase out fossil fuels, there’s only so much, only so far, he can get here,” Morgan said.

Conservative groups single out Kerry online, making social media memes out of his wealth — at Glasgow he introduced a speaker as his neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard — and supposed love for jetting around the world.

Kerry’s intentness on diplomacy to try to push and pull coal-loving China into faster emission cuts also brings him into public contrast with Biden and some of Biden’s top officials, who have become vocally critical of China. China is currently the world’s top climate polluter. The U.S. is No. 2 at the moment, and the world’s worst carbon polluter over time.

Biden’s parting words as he left the Glasgow summit this past week after joining more than 100 other world leaders here were that Chinese President Xi Jinping had made a “big mistake” in not attending.

“They’ve lost an ability to influence people around the world,” Biden said. 

Veteran observers of global climate talks speak favorably of Kerry’s quieter work as climate envoy.

Thom Woodroofe, a researcher on U.S.-China climate diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said Biden’s appointment of the former secretary of state made countries such as China “really sit up and take notice with just how significant … how much importance the Biden administration was going to place on diplomacy and their climate action at home.”

While Chinese leaders publicly scold and snub members of the Biden administration, China’s own veteran climate diplomat, Xie Zhenha, told reporters at Glasgow he calculated he had talked to Kerry 23 times in Kerry’s current position.

When a news site ran a caricature showing an exaggeratedly chinned Kerry with one hand on the shoulder of the equally exaggerated round-faced Xie, and the other hand cupping the Earth and its future, Kerry had the cartoon framed and presented it to Xie.

At the climate summit, Kerry’s height makes him an easy spot among the thousands of climate advocates, government officials and reporters at the summit site, which sprawls for more than a half-mile (close to a kilometer). It’s a mix of permanent and temporary structures along Glasgow’s River Clyde that feels like an airport terminal flanked by a military forward-operating base.

Kerry appears patient and polite with the random advocates and reporters from around the world who approach him at the summit.

Before the summit, climate activists carrying out a hunger strike at the White House gates filmed another Biden administration official impatiently thumbing his phone when they approached him on the need for climate action. 

Kerry, by contrast, went out and talked to the young climate strikers, telling them about his own environmental activism when he was young.

Kerry’s first cause after returning from fighting in the Vietnam War was activism for the first Earth Day, in 1970, he says. His wife, Teresa Heinz, says they met at a later Earth Day, in 1990.

In 2015, his work in climate negotiations, and the trust Xie seemed to place in Obama negotiators including Kerry, helped seal a global climate deal in which more than 190 nations committed to taking action to cut climate emissions.

The irreversible damage being wrought by global warming was even more obvious to all by November 2016, when Kerry made one of his last trips as Obama’s secretary of state, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Antarctica.

The U.S. presidential election had just handed victory to Trump, who already had pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord and would soon be rolling back U.S. climate efforts in office.

Kerry crunched in boots over a frozen sea, faced off with a curious penguin and talked with U.S. scientists there.

The South Pole had the purest air in the world, but it, too, was heavily polluted with coal and petroleum waste, scientists told him. The West Antarctic ice sheet was melting from below in the warming waters, breaking off and floating out to sea.

It was “some of the most stunning wilderness,” Kerry recalled last month to The Associated Press, and it was “mixed with the negative impacts of human beings.”
…

Three people were wounded in a knife attack on a high-speed train in southern Germany on Saturday, local police said, adding a suspect had been arrested.

Officers said the danger was over and a 27-year-old man was in custody, with unconfirmed media reports saying the suspect was of Syrian origin and suffered from psychiatric issues.

The motive for the attack on the passenger train, making its way from Bavaria to the northern city of Hamburg with roughly 300 people on board, was not yet clear.

Local prosecutors are handling the case rather than the federal officials who would deal with suspected terrorism.

The three victims were being treated in hospital, said police in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, adding that none had suffered life-threatening injuries.

The ICE high-speed train was halted in the station of Seubersdorf, southeast of Nuremberg, and travel on the line was suspended.

“This knife attack is horrible,” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said on Twitter.

“I would like to thank everyone, especially the police and the train staff, for their brave action, which prevented something even worse from happening.

“The motive for the crime is still unclear and will now be determined.”

The attack took place at a tense time in Germany, which faces terror threats from jihadis and right-wing extremist groups.

Islamist suspects have committed several violent attacks in recent years, the deadliest being a truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 that killed 12 people.

The Tunisian attacker, a failed asylum seeker, was a supporter of the Islamic State jihadist group.

Seehofer said earlier this year that German authorities had foiled 23 attempted attacks since 2000.

“Germany and Western Europe are still in the sights of radical Islamists,” he warned at the time.

Since 2013, the number of Islamists considered dangerous in Germany has increased fivefold to 615, according to the interior ministry.

Several attacks or attempted attacks were carried out by asylum seekers who arrived in Germany during the 2015 migration crisis.

Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the country’s doors to some 900,000 asylum seekers.

German officials believe the attackers planned their acts alone, unlike some of the attacks in France in 2015 that were ordered by the Islamic State jihadist group. 
…

Tens of thousands of climate activists marched Saturday through the Scottish city hosting the U.N. climate summit, physically close to the global negotiators inside but separated by a vast gulf in expectations, with frustrated marchers increasingly dismissive of the talks and demanding immediate action instead to slow global warming. 

The mood at the protest in Glasgow was upbeat despite the anger and bursts of rain. Similar protests were also held in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin, Copenhagen, Zurich and Istanbul. 

Many of the marchers condemned government leaders for failing to produce the fast action they say is needed, with some echoing activist Greta Thunberg’s view Friday that the talks were just more “blah, blah, blah.”

“We’re having these conversations, but there’s no policies to actually back them,” said Daze Aghaji, a marcher from London at the Glasgow demonstration, shouting over the steady beat of the drums.

“And on top of that, the real people should be in the room,” Aghaji said, referring to complaints that the Glasgow summit has too sharply limited participation by the public. “How are we expecting to make decent policy when the people who are the stakeholders of this aren’t even present in the room?”

Marchers held signs with messages including “Code Red for Humanity,” “Stop big polluters,” “COP26, we are watching you” or simply “I’m angry.” One sign asked “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?” 

Megan McClellan, 24, of Glasgow said she doubted that climate negotiators were listening.

“This is a very easy thing for them to ignore. They’re nice and comfortable” inside the summit conference center, she said, which is ringed by steel fences. 

But her friend Lucette Wood, 30, of Edinburgh disagreed. 

“They might not actually do anything about it but they pretend that they do … and they will just put it off for 20-30 years,” Wood said. 

Thunberg’s dismissive talk of the two-week climate summit — which has another week to go — has touched a nerve inside and outside the summit site. Government leaders and negotiators insist they are as equally aware as the marchers of the urgency of their task, with time slipping away to rein in pollution from fossil fuels before the Earth faces much higher levels of warming. 

Jamila Khatoon from Pakistan carried a sign in Glasgow about three glaciers in her region that may disappear because of climate change. 

“The glaciers are melting,” Khatoon said. “Villages are drowning. Nobody is doing anything.” 

Elaine Knox, 69 and William Oliphant, 60, both from Glasgow, said they were attending the rally for the next generations. 

“I’m dying before the worst happens,” Knox said. “It’s the youngsters we’re leaving a horrible, horrible world.” 

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose country is hosting the talks, has defended the progress made by governments in raising promises of emissions cuts and climate financing, while acknowledging the public’s demands that more needs to be done. 

At the huge U.N. conference venue, negotiators spent a seventh straight day haggling over draft agreements that can be passed to government ministers for political approval next week. Among the issues under discussion were a fresh commitment to capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), pushing countries to review their efforts more frequently to increase the pressure for deeper cuts, and providing more financial support for poor nations to adapt to climate change. 

The summit’s president, Alok Sharma, told reporters he understood the protesters’ frustration. 

“I think we have overall made progress,” Sharma said Saturday. “I think people have been constructive in the negotiating rooms.” 

“We are getting to the point where the rubber hits the road, where we’re going to have to make, you know, tough decisions” by government officials, he said. “I don’t, certainly do not, underestimate the difficulty of the task which is ahead of us.” 

Saturday’s marches drew a range of participants and ages, a day after tens of thousands of young people in the Fridays for Future movement protested outside the Glasgow conference’s fences. Thunberg’s mix of school strikes, blunt and impatient talk about government excuses, and mass demonstrations have galvanized climate protests since 2018, especially in Europe. 

The climate protest movement — and the worsening droughts, storms, floods, wildfires and other disasters around the world this year — have brought home to many the accelerating damage of global warming and have kept the pressure on governments for stronger and faster action to reduce fossil fuel emissions. 

Elizabeth May, a Canadian member of parliament and 16-time participant in the U.N. climate talks, said the protests are making a difference. 

“Most of the people on the inside are here in their hearts and sometimes physically,” May said, who joined the Glasgow demonstrators Saturday.

In central London, thousands of climate protesters marched from the Bank of England to Trafalgar Square. Protester Sue Hampton, 64, said everyone is at risk and all generations need to press for action. 

“We can’t let the young people do all the work here. We’ve all got to do it together,” she said. 

In Istanbul, climate protesters brought their children to the demonstration Saturday, emphasizing the impact of global warming on future generations. 

“I want my children to live on a beautiful planet,” said Kadriye Basut, 52, in Istanbul.
…

As this year’s U.N. climate talks go into their second week, negotiations on key topics are inching forward. Boosted by a few high-profile announcements at the start of the meeting, delegates are upbeat about the prospects for tangible progress in the fight against global warming. 

Laurent Fabius, the former French foreign minister who helped forge the Paris climate accord, said the general atmosphere had improved since the talks began October 31 and “most negotiators want an agreement.”

But negotiators were still struggling late Saturday to put together a series of draft decisions for government ministers to finalize during the second week of the talks. 

“People are having to take tough decisions, as they should,” Archie Young, the U.K.’s lead negotiator, said Saturday. 

Here’s the state of play in four main areas halfway through the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow: 

Top Result from the Conference 

Each Conference of the Parties, or COP, ends with a general statement. It’s as much a political declaration as a statement of intent about where countries agree the effort to combat climate change is heading. 

A flurry of announcements at the start of the COP26 talks in Glasgow on issues including ending deforestation, cutting methane emissions, providing more money for green investments and phasing out the use of coal could be reflected in this final declaration. Even though only some countries signed on to each of those deals, others would be encouraged to add their signatures at a later date. 

Affirming the goal of keeping global warming at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, compared to pre-industrial times, is also seen as important. With greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise, host Britain has said it wants the Glasgow talks to “keep 1.5 C alive.” One way to achieve that would be to encourage rich polluters in particular to update their emissions-cutting targets every one or two years, rather than every five years as now required by the Paris accord. 

Money Matters to Combat Climate Change 

Rich countries pledged to mobilize $100 billion each year by 2020 to help poor nations cope with climate change. That target was likely missed, much to the frustration of developing nations. 

Restoring goodwill and trust between rich and poor countries on this issue requires a clear commitment on raising financial support starting from 2025. Addressing the thorny question of who is to pay for the losses and damages that nations face as a result of global warming they aren’t responsible for is likewise important, but agreement there could be elusive, observers say. 

“It’s about finance, finance, finance, finance,” said Fabius. 

Carbon Trading: A Tricky Nut to Crack 

Many negotiators and observers at climate conferences roll their eyes when they hear the words “Article 6.” 

The section dealing with rules for carbon markets has become one of the trickiest parts of the Paris climate accord to finalize. Six years after that deal was sealed, countries appear to be making headway and there’s even talk of a breakthrough on the issue that so frustrated negotiators in Madrid two years ago.

Observers say Brazil and India may be willing to drop demands to count their old — but others say worthless — carbon credits amassed under previous agreements. The price for this might be that rich nations grant poor countries a share of proceeds from carbon market transactions to adapt to climate change. This has been a red line for the United States and the European Union until now.

A deal on Article 6 is seen as crucial because many countries and companies aim to cut their emissions to “net zero” by 2050. This requires balancing out any remaining pollution with an equal amount of carbon they can reliably say is captured elsewhere, such as through forests or by technological means. 

Transparency, Rigor in National Emissions-Cutting Targets 

The Paris Agreement lets governments set their own emissions-cutting targets, and many of them are in the distant future. 

Verifying that countries are doing what they committed to, and that their goals are backed up by realistic measures, is tricky. China in particular has bristled at the idea of having to provide data in formats set by other nations. Brazil and Russia, meanwhile, have resisted demands to lay out in greater detail the short-term measures they’re taking to meet their long-term goals.
…

The death of a pregnant Polish woman has reignited debate over abortion in one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic countries, with activists saying she could still be alive if it were not for a near total ban on terminating pregnancies.

Tens of thousands of Poles took to the streets to protest in January this year when a Constitutional Tribunal ruling from October 2020 that terminating pregnancies with fetal defects was unconstitutional came into effect, eliminating the most frequently used case for legal abortion.

Activists say Izabela, a 30-year-old woman in the 22nd week of pregnancy who died of septic shock, her family said, after doctors waited for her unborn baby’s heart to stop beating, is the first woman to die as a result of the ruling.

The government says the ruling was not to blame for her death, rather an error by doctors.

Izabela went to a hospital in September after her water broke, her family said. Scans had previously shown numerous defects in the fetus.

“The baby weighs 485 grams. For now, thanks to the abortion law, I have to lie down. And there is nothing they can do. They’ll wait until it dies or something begins, and if not, I can expect sepsis,” Izabela said in a text message to her mother, private broadcaster TVN24 reported.

When a scan showed the fetus was dead, doctors at the hospital in Pszczyna, southern Poland, decided to perform a Caesarean. The family’s lawyer, Jolanta Budzowska, said Izabela’s heart stopped on the way to the operating room and she died despite efforts to resuscitate her.

“I couldn’t believe it, I thought it wasn’t true,” Izabela’s mother Barbara told TVN24. “How could such a thing happen to her in the hospital? After all, she went there for help.”

Budzowska has started legal action over the treatment Izabela received, accusing doctors of malpractice, but she also called the death “a consequence of the verdict.”

In a statement on its website, the Pszczyna County Hospital said it shared the pain of all those affected by Izabela’s death, especially her family.

“It should … be emphasized that all medical decisions were made taking into account the legal provisions and standards of conduct in force in Poland,” the hospital said.

On Friday, the hospital said it had suspended two doctors who were on duty at the time of the death.

The Supreme Medical Chamber, which represents Polish doctors, said it was not immediately able to comment.

Not one more

When the case came to public attention as a result of a tweet from Budzowska, the hashtag #anijednejwiecej or ‘not one more’ spread across social media and was taken up by protesters demanding a change to the law.

However, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party rejects claims that the Constitutional Tribunal ruling was to blame for Izabela’s death, attributing it to a mistake by doctors.

“When it comes to the life and health of the mother … if it is in danger, then terminating the pregnancy is possible and the ruling does not change anything,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Friday.

PiS lawmaker Bartlomiej Wroblewski told Reuters that the case should not be “used to limit the right to life, to kill all sick or disabled children.”

But activists say the ruling has made doctors afraid to terminate pregnancies even when the mother’s life is at risk.

“Izabela’s case clearly shows that the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal has had a chilling effect on doctors,” Urszula Grycuk of the Federation for Women and Family Planning told Reuters.

“Even a condition that should not be questioned — the life and health of the mother — is not always recognized by doctors because they are afraid.”

In Ireland, the death of 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar in 2012 after she was refused a termination provoked a national outpouring of grief credited by many as a catalyst for the liberalization of abortion laws.

Budzowska told Reuters that a debate similar to the one that took place in Ireland was underway in Poland.

“Both Izabela’s family and I personally hope that this case … will lead to a change in the law in Poland,” she said.

Poland’s president proposed changing the law last year to make abortions possible in cases where the fetus was not viable. The Law and Justice dominated parliament has yet to debate the bill. 
…

The coup in Sudan puts into doubt the process that would have seen France cancel some $5 billion debt it was owed by the African country, France’s foreign ministry said on Friday, the latest power to pressure military leaders who seized power.

France, Sudan’s second-largest creditor, has been a main actor in backing the interim authorities after former President Omar al-Bashir was ousted in 2019, but the civilian transition was derailed in October when the military took control.

Speaking to reporters in a daily briefing on Friday, Foreign ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre said Paris had been an “unwavering” partner for Sudan and that the general debt cancellation program as part of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative was agreed at a conference in Paris in May.

“A Paris Club agreement was reached on July 15, each creditor now having to sign a bilateral agreement with Sudan,” Legendre told reporters, responding to a question on whether Paris was reviewing its debt cancellation promise.

“It is clear that the military coup of October 25 calls into question this process.”

Sudan owes nearly $60 billion, 40% of which — or $23.5 billion — is held by the Paris Club. 

Under the July agreement, the Paris Club decided to cancel $14.1 billion of that debt and reschedule the rest.

At that conference President Emmanuel Macron had vowed to cancel about $5 billion France is owed by Khartoum, provided a loan to clear Sudan’s arrears to the International Monetary Fund and organized a side event promoting investment into the country.

In a sign the junta is tightening its control, the military dissolved the boards of all state companies and national agricultural projects, state TV said on Friday.
…

Cybersecurity experts say Microsoft’s recent disclosure that alleged Russian hackers successfully attacked several IT service providers this year is a sign that many U.S. IT companies have underinvested in security measures needed to protect themselves and their customers from intrusions.

But a U.S.-based association of IT professionals says the industry’s efforts to combat foreign hacking attacks are hampered by their customers not practicing good cyber habits and by the federal government not doing enough to punish and deter the hackers.

In an October 24 blog post, Microsoft said a Russian nation-state hacking group that it calls Nobelium spent three months attacking companies that resell, customize and manage Microsoft cloud services and other digital technologies for public and private customers. Microsoft said it informed 609 of those companies, known as managed service providers, or MSPs, that they had been attacked 22,868 times by Nobelium from July 1 to October 19 this year.

‘Well-known techniques’

As of its October 24 blog post, Microsoft said it determined that “as many as 14” of the resellers and service providers had been compromised in the Nobelium attacks, which it said involved the use of “well-known techniques, like password spray and phishing, to steal legitimate credentials and gain privileged access.”

Nobelium is the same group that Microsoft said was responsible for last year’s cyberattack on U.S. software company SolarWinds. That attack involved inserting malicious code into SolarWinds’ IT performance monitoring system, Orion, and gave the hackers access to the networks of thousands of U.S. public and private organizations that use Orion to manage their IT resources.

The White House said in April that it believed the perpetrators of the SolarWinds hack were part of the Russian foreign intelligence service, or SVR.

In an October 29 statement published by Russian network RBC TV, Russia’s foreign ministry dismissed as “groundless” Microsoft’s accusation that SVR was behind the recent cyberattacks on IT companies. It also said Microsoft should have shared data on the attacks with the Russian government’s National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents to aid a “professional and effective dialogue to … identify those involved.”

VOA asked Microsoft whether the company had communicated with Moscow regarding the latest hacking incidents, but Microsoft declined to comment.

It also has not disclosed the names or locations of any of the targeted or compromised IT companies.

Charles Weaver, chief executive of the U.S.-based International Association of Cloud and Managed Service Providers, also known as MSPAlliance, told VOA that he had not heard of any of his organization’s members being affected by the latest Nobelium attacks.

MSPAlliance describes itself as the world’s largest industry group for people who manage hardware, software and cloud computing services for customers. It says it has more than 30,000 members worldwide, about two-thirds of them based in North America.

Insufficient attention

The apparently successful cyberattacks on Microsoft-linked IT companies are a sign that U.S. MSPs are not putting enough priority on cybersecurity, said Jake Williams, a chief technology officer at U.S. cybersecurity company BreachQuest and a former U.S. National Security Agency elite hacking team member.

“The profit margins for MSPs are often razor-thin, and in the majority of cases, they compete purely on cost,” Williams told VOA in an interview. “Any work they do that doesn’t directly translate to additional revenue is generally not happening.”

One cybersecurity practice that more MSPs should adopt is the sharing of information with U.S. authorities about hacking incidents, said James Curtis, a cybersecurity program director at Webster University in Missouri, in a conversation with VOA’s Russian Service.

Curtis, a retired U.S. Air Force cyber officer and a former IT industry executive, said MSPs do not like to admit they have been hacked.

“They don’t want to share that their users’ information has been stolen, because it may hurt their bottom line and may hurt their stock prices, and so they try to handle that internally,” he said.

“The MSP community is not perfect,” Weaver said. “Our members face a lot of cyberattacks and their job is to protect their customers against these things. For 21 years, MSPAlliance has strived to promote best practices for our global community, and we will continue to incrementally improve as fast and as often as we can.”

But Weaver said criticism of MSPs for not devoting enough attention to cybersecurity is misplaced.

Customer practices

“MSPs have been urging their customers to make easy and inexpensive fixes such as adopting multifactor authentication to back up their data to the cloud,” Weaver said. “But I personally have witnessed a lot of nonconformity amongst the customers. They have to be the ones that ultimately pay for and allow MSPs to deploy those fixes.”

The Biden administration also has used a variety of tools this year to try to protect U.S. targets from Russian and other foreign hackers. In May, President Joe Biden issued an executive order for U.S. authorities to tighten cybersecurity contractual requirements for IT companies that work with the federal government. The order said the companies should be required to share more information with federal agencies about cyber incidents impacting the IT services provided to those agencies.

In an earlier action in April, the Biden administration sanctioned six Russian technology companies for providing support to what it called malicious cyber  activities of Russia’s intelligence services.

Senior U.S. officials also have used diplomacy to try to expand international participation in a Counter-Ransomware Initiative (CRI). A U.S. National Security Council statement issued Wednesday said deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger briefed representatives of 35 countries Tuesday on the outcome of last month’s first CRI meeting of experts from law enforcement, cybersecurity, financial regulators and foreign affairs ministries.

Chris Morgan, an intelligence analyst at Britain-based cybersecurity company Digital Shadows, told VOA the stronger cybersecurity practices mandated by the U.S. government for federal contractors will not necessarily be voluntarily adopted by IT companies working in the private sector. One such mandated practice is for federal contractors to adopt a “zero-trust” security model, in which users who log in to a network are not automatically trusted to do whatever they like within that network but must instead undergo continual authentication.

Larger government role

“Implementing zero-trust is a real change in the way that your network is managed and comes with significant costs. I think that’s the reason why a lot of companies are quite hesitant to do so,” Morgan said. “I think a lot of people would like the U.S. government to take a more active role in combating cybercrime [through promoting measures like zero-trust].”

Weaver, of MSPAlliance, said applying federal cybersecurity regulations to the entire private sector is not a good idea because different industries, such as banking, health care and energy, have different IT needs.

He also said the U.S. government could effectively curb ransomware attacks by doing more to hold the perpetrators accountable.

“Cyberattacks are a big business, yet the hackers are in countries beyond the reach of our law enforcement,” Weaver said. “So you have a business model that has no disincentive to stop. And all we have are the IT guardians against those attacks. I just don’t think that putting regulations on the guardians is going to solve this.”
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The United States is keeping a close watch on Russian troop movements near the country’s border with Ukraine, describing the activity as “unusual.”

“We continue to monitor this closely,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters Friday, while calling on Moscow to publicly explain its intentions.

“Without getting into greater detail right now, I think it’s really a matter of scale. It’s a matter of the size of the units that we’re seeing,” he said, adding, “Any escalatory or aggressive actions by Russia would be of great concern.”

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said earlier this week that an estimated 90,000 Russian troops were positioned along the border and in rebel-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine.

For its part, Moscow has denied any saber-rattling.

“Russia maintains troops presence on its territory wherever it deems necessary,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a call Wednesday, the same day the United States’ highest-ranking military officer called Moscow’s military movement “significant.”

“We’ve seen this before,” General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a security forum in Washington, saying that at that point there was “nothing overtly aggressive” about Russia’s actions.

“So, what does this mean? We don’t know yet,” Milley added. “But we’re continuing to monitor with all of our capabilities.”

U.S. military and intelligence officials voiced repeated concerns in April after Russia massed as many as 150,000 troops along its border with Ukraine, calling that buildup the biggest since Moscow’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.

Tensions between Russia and the West appear to be rising.

Russia earlier this week complained about U.S. and NATO activity in the Black Sea as its naval forces practiced destroying enemy targets there.

And last month, Russia suspended its diplomatic mission to NATO in retaliation for the expulsion of eight Russian officials.

In June, the U.S. gave Ukraine a $150 million security package that includes training and equipment, aimed at bolstering the country’s defensive capabilities.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
…

In a tit-for-tat round of recriminations, Belarus summoned Poland’s top diplomat in Minsk on Thursday to protest claims made earlier this week by Warsaw that Belarusian border guards had threatened to open fire on a Polish patrol.

The Belarusian Foreign Ministry said Polish allegations were unfounded and it accused Poland of engaging in “megaphone diplomacy” and issuing “dogmatic statements for the media.”

Amid rising tensions between the two countries over Belarus being used, with Minsk’s encouragement, as a transit point by migrants, mainly from Iraq, Poland’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday summoned Belarus’ top diplomat based in Warsaw to complain about Belarusian guards crossing into Poland. The incursion was said to have occurred Monday.

Stanislaw Zaryn, spokesman for Poland’s security services, said the Belarusians encroached 300 meters into Poland and were confronted by a Polish patrol. The Belarusians “reloaded their weapons and then departed,” Zaryn said.

Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have been militarizing their borders with Belarus to try to stop record numbers of migrants crossing their borders. They accuse Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of orchestrating migrant crossings as a form of “hybrid warfare” against the European Union in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Belarus over last year’s disputed elections. Those elections were widely seen as rigged and led to a harsh crackdown on protesters who challenged the legitimacy of Lukashenko’s rule.

The EU, United States and Britain also imposed sanctions in June targeting 86 officials and Belarusian state-owned entities in response to the forced landing in Belarus’ airspace of a Ryanair plane, which was carrying a Lukashenko critic.

‘We are forced to react’

Lukashenko has halfheartedly denied he’s seeking to needle or blackmail Europe by trying to fuel a migrant crisis, but said he was reacting to foreign pressure. “We are not blackmailing anyone with illegal immigration,” he told journalists in Minsk’s Independence Palace in August. “We’re not threatening anyone. But you have put us in such circumstances that we are forced to react. And we’re reacting.”

In October alone, Poland recorded 15,000 attempted illegal border crossings. Last week Poland deployed 2,500 more troops to the border, bringing to 10,000 the number of soldiers reinforcing the country’s border guards.

Piotr Wawrzyk, a deputy foreign minister, said: “The actions taken by the Belarusian authorities in recent weeks have the increasingly evident hallmarks of a deliberate escalation.” He told The Associated Press this week that there had been a “series of incidents and provocations organized by Belarusians,” but described the border crossing by Belarusian guards as “the most dangerous incident so far.”

Lithuanian officials also accuse Lukashenko of “weaponizing” migrants and of being behind a surge in Iraqi and Syrian asylum-seekers trying to cross their borders illegally.

Earlier this year, they said Belarus’s state-owned tourism agency had been organizing flights to Minsk from Baghdad and Istanbul for migrants, charging them from $1,800 to $12,000, and then handing them over to Belarusian border guards to transport them to the mainly forested 680-kilometer border Lithuania shares with Belarus.

Lithuania finished this week the first stretches of a razor-wire-topped steel wall it plans to extend along much of its border with Belarus. It has allocated $175 million for the project and plans to complete it in a year’s time.

Poland and Latvia have also laid stretches of coiled razor wire on their borders to stop the migrants. Polish officials, who accuse Belarusian border guards of slashing the wire, are bracing for even larger asylum-seeker surges.

Belarusian journalist Tadeusz Giczan reported last week that Minsk International Airport published a new schedule for the coming winter “according to which at least 55 planes will be flying from the Middle East to Minsk every week.”

Formal protests

The rising tensions along the Poland-Belarus border have seen the Poles summon the Belarusian charge d’affaires in Warsaw three times so far to the Foreign Ministry to be handed formal diplomatic protests.

The burgeoning crisis is also souring relations between EU member states and Poland about how to handle the asylum-seekers. According to analyst Elizabeth Braw of the Washington-based think tank American Enterprise Institute, that likely fits into what she dubs Lukashenko’s “sinister game.”

“The Belarusian ruler knows that immigration is a hugely divisive issue within the European Union, and within individual EU member states. Poland’s strategy of pushing migrants back into Belarus has already caused a rift with Brussels — and thus worsened Poland’s already tense relations with EU headquarters,” she wrote in a commentary for the news site Defense One.

EU officials say Poland is in breach of international norms by trying to force migrants back into Belarus and that it is obliged to offer them protection.

Poland has declared a state of emergency along part of its border with Belarus, hindering journalists and NGO workers from monitoring what’s happening in an exclusion zone in the Podlasie forests. NGOs say there is an urgent need for them to gain access to the militarized zone on the Polish side of the border and they have accused Poland of using the migrants as political weapons.

Eight migrants have died trying to cross the border so far, the latest a 19-year-old Syrian man whose body was retrieved from the River Bug by divers on October 21.“Disgraceful things are happening on the Polish-Belarusian border,” said the Polish refugee charity Fundacja Ocalenie, or the Salvation Foundation.

‘Illegal and inhumane practices’

In a letter in September to the EU commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, the charity said it had documented “numerous illegal and inhumane practices of the Polish authorities” along the border.

They included denying migrants the right to apply for international protection, rounding up migrants on Polish territory and “illegally transporting them back to the border and forcing them to cross the border back to Belarus.” The charity said sometimes the migrants were deposited in dangerous areas, such as swamps, “exposing these people, including young children, to life-threatening conditions.”

Fundacja Ocalenie said it and other humanitarian organizations had been denied the opportunity to provide assistance to migrants trapped in a no-man’s land between the borders, including dozens of Afghans camped in the Usnarz Górny area.

Rights organization Amnesty International has also complained about 17 Afghans at the border being violently pushed back into Belarus by Polish guards.

Two former Polish officials, Adam Bodnar, a former ombudsman of Poland, and Agnieszka Grzelak, who served as a deputy director of the Constitutional, European and International Law department in the office of the ombudsman, urged Brussels on Thursday to intervene with Warsaw, saying, “The EU can’t sit by while migrants die at the Belarusian border.”

Writing in Politico.eu, a news site, they said: “A few days ago, a former colleague from the Ombudsman’s office carried a three-year-old child out of the forest in his arms. If he had not found and taken care of him, or forced the border guards to register him, the child and his family would have been pushed back from Polish territory without any guarantee of safety by Belarusian authorities.”
…

Editor’s note: Here is a fast take on what the international community has been up to this past week, as seen from the United Nations perch.

Leaders talk global warming in Glasgow 

— World leaders met in Glasgow, Scotland, this week to try to halt global warming. But with some of the world’s biggest emitters like China and Russia skipping the conference, known as COP26, hopes dimmed that leaders will find a way to keep the world from warming more than the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius this century.

Hope Eroding as COP26 Climate Pledges Fall Short

— Burning coal is the single biggest contributor to climate change. Phasing out its use between 2030 and 2040 is one of the United Nation’s most ambitious appeals. More than 40 countries made coal-related pledges on Thursday at COP26.

COP26: Britain Hails Global Deals to End Coal but Plans New Mine

— The world’s youth have the most at stake as the planet warms, and they have been vocal advocates for change. On Friday, they took center stage during Youth and Public Empowerment Day at COP26.

‘It’s Our Lives on the Line’, Young Marchers Tell UN Climate Talks 

War crimes committed in northern Ethiopia

— The conflict between the Ethiopian federal army and Tigrayan fighters in northern Ethiopia reached the one-year milestone this week. A report written by a joint investigative team from the United Nations and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission was published Wednesday, saying all belligerents have committed atrocities during the year-long conflict.

UN Report Says Ethiopia’s War Marked by ‘Extreme Brutality’

— The U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffery Feltman, traveled to Ethiopia on Thursday, as the internal armed conflict intensified. On Tuesday, the Ethiopian federal government declared a state of emergency, saying Tigrayan fighters were advancing toward the capital, Addis Ababa.

US Envoy to Visit Ethiopia After Government Declares State of Emergency

News in brief

World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley has for months been trying to attract the attention of some of the world’s richest men on Twitter, seeking $6 billion to assist 42 million people who are “marching toward starvation” due to conflict, climate change and COVID-19. On Monday, he finally caught the attention of the world’s richest man, Tesla founder Elon Musk.

Quote of note

“We are not drowning, we are fighting. This is our warrior cry to the world.”

— Samoan climate activist Brianna Fruean, 23, of her Pacific Island peers to world leaders at the opening of COP26 on Monday. 

What we are watching next week

An international conference on Libya will be held in Paris on November 12. Libya is set to hold elections on December 24, but concerns are growing that it may not be on track to carry out a free and fair election on time.

Did you know?

The 15 members of the U.N. Security Council take turns being council president for a month at a time. Rotation is in alphabetical order. Kenya was president in October, Mexico took over Monday for November, and Niger will finish out the year in December.

To mark their presidency, Mexico donated a new sculpture now on display at U.N. headquarters in New York City.

 
…

Activists will take over the UN climate summit in Scotland on Friday, capping off a week of dizzying government speeches and pledges with a student march, youth-led presentations, and a giant iceberg shipped from Greenland to Glasgow’s River Clyde to dramatize the plight of the Arctic.

UK organizers decided to hand the day over to civic groups in an acknowledgement of how young campaigners like Vanessa Nakate of Uganda and Greta Thunberg of Sweden have raised public understanding of climate change, and a nod to their stance that today’s youth must live with consequences of state decisions.

“We’re expecting lots of people to come and join us in the streets and not only youth but also adults supporting youth, and adults that want climate action,” said Isabelle Axelsson, 20, an activist with Thunberg’s climate movement Fridays For Future, which is organizing the march.

The COP26 talks in Glasgow aimed to secure enough national promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions – mainly from fossil fuels – to keep the rise in the average global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Crossing that threshold could trigger a cascading climate crisis, scientists say.

The COP26 summit has so far yielded deals to phase out coal, reduce deforestation and curb methane, but a clear picture has yet to emerge on what these voluntary initiatives would add up to in terms of moderating temperature rises.

The head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, said on Thursday that emissions cut pledges made so far – if all implemented – could potentially hold warming to 1.8 C. But some U.N. negotiators said that assessment was too rosy.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and UK COP26 President Alok Sharma will sit down Friday with civil society leaders to discuss the progress made so far and what remains to be done over the next week of negotiations.

Professor Gail Whiteman, founder of the climate activist group Arctic Basecamp, said she hoped to bring a sense of urgency to discussions on Friday by using an iceberg as a giant prop.

She said her group had the iceberg shipped from Greenland via Iceland to the east coast of England, and then onward on a truck to the River Clyde.

“Studies are showing that if we lose the snow and ice in the Arctic we will amplify global warming by 25 to 40%,” she said. “We felt that negotiators here had to actually come face to face with the Arctic, so we brought the iceberg.”
…

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has reported its Food Price Index, which tracks the international prices of a basket of food, found that in October, the cost of a basket of food was up 3% from September.

The FAO Cereal Price Index increased 3.2% in October from the previous month, while the price of wheat rose by 5% amid reduced harvests from major exporters of wheat that include Canada, Russia and the United States. The FAO also recorded the international prices of other major cereals have increased.

Meanwhile, the U.N. agency said the price of vegetable oil hit an “all-time high” increase of 9.6% in October, marking a fourth consecutive month of price hikes. The FAO said the rising vegetable oil price was “largely underpinned by persisting concerns over subdued output in Malaysia due to ongoing migrant labor shortages.”

Dairy prices rose by 2.5%, while the price of meat fell by 0.7%, “marking the third monthly decline.”

Some information from The Associated Press and Reuters was used in this report.
…

The “end of coal” is in sight, according to Britain — the host of the COP26 climate summit — after dozens of countries pledged to stop using coal and end the financing of fossil fuels. But as Henry Ridgwell reports from the Glasgow summit, weaning economies off coal won’t be easy — even for Britain itself.

Camera: Henry Ridgwell
…

The “end of coal” is in sight, according to Britain, host of the COP26 climate summit, after dozens of countries pledged to stop using coal and end the financing of fossil fuels.

Burning coal is the single biggest contributor to climate change, accounting for about 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions, Britain said. At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, Thursday, more than 40 countries pledged to phase out coal entirely. 

The signatories included big coal consumers such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Poland and Ukraine. They, alongside several global banks and financial institutions, also committed to ending all investment in new coal power generation.

End of coal 

COP26 President Alok Sharma hailed the agreement as a major step toward combating global warming.

“Today, we are publishing the Global Coal to Clean Power transition statement, a commitment to end coal investment, to scale up clean power, to make a just transition and phase out coal in the 2030s in major economies, and in the 2040s, elsewhere,” Sharma told delegates Thursday. 

“I think we can say that the end of coal is in sight,” he added. “The progress we’ve seen over the past two years would have seemed like a lofty ambition when we took on the COP presidency back in 2019. Who would have thought back then that today we’re able to say that we are choking off international coal financing, or that we would see a shift away from domestic coal power?” 

But the world’s biggest coal consumers, including China, the United States, Australia and India, did not sign the deal. Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, wrote on Twitter that without those countries, “there’s still a very real danger that the end won’t come soon enough.”

Separately, 25 countries, including the United States, also pledged to stop public financing for all overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of next year and to prioritize clean energy finance. Key Asian coal investors China, Japan and South Korea did not sign up. Katharina Rall, an environmental researcher at Human Rights Watch, criticized their absence. 

“Countries that choose not to sign on, including Japan and South Korea, are signaling a lack of regard for their human rights obligations and for the rights of communities around the world already facing a mounting toll from climate impacts,” she said. 

Accusations of hypocrisy 

Britain has also been accused of hypocrisy as it considers opening a new mine to produce coking coal for steelmaking. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently voiced opposition to the plan but said it was a planning matter for local government.

Mike Starkie, mayor of Copeland Borough Council in Cumbria, where the mine is planned, explained his support for the project. 

“The coal that will be extracted from this mine is exclusively for the use of making steel, and if we are going to have the green industrial revolution that we need in developing solar, wind, wave — and certainly here we’d love to develop more nuclear — it’s all going to take significant amounts of steel,” Starkie told The Associated Press. 

“And if the coal that produces the steel is not mined here, we’re going to be shipping it in from around the world, leaving a huge transport carbon footprint from mines that aren’t net-zero extraction, like the most modern mine that will ever be built, here in Whitehaven,” he said.

Britain is also considering the development of a new oil field off Scotland’s Shetland Islands, north of Glasgow, the host city of the climate summit. 

Emissions rebound 

A new report warns that emissions of carbon dioxide have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

“The rebound is caused by emissions from coal and gas, which grew more in 2021 than they had fallen in 2020. And behind this, we see a rapid rise in emissions in China, particularly pushed by probably economic stimulus packages, whereas other countries have tended to follow the trajectory pre-pandemic of decreasing emissions in the U.S. and Europe and increasing emissions in India,” Corinne Le Quéré a professor at the University of East Anglia and co-author of the report, told the AP. 

The International Energy Agency said Thursday that if all the commitments made at COP26 so far were fully implemented, global warming would be limited to below 2 degrees Celsius — a significant improvement on the 2.7 degrees Celsius rise the U.N. forecasted before the summit. 

 
…

An Earth-flight giant contributes to NASA’s upcoming moon missions. Plus, words from the next crew to visit the International Space Station and grim news from NASA about the future of food on Earth. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us the Week in Space.
…

In the fight to curb climate change, several major coal-using nations announced steps Thursday to wean themselves — at times slowly — off of the heavily polluting fossil fuel.

The pledges to phase out coal come on top of other promises made at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, that the head of an international energy organization said trimmed several tenths of a degree from projections of future warming. But outside experts called that optimistic.

Optimism also abounded in relation to the promises on coal, which has the dirtiest carbon footprint of the major fuels and is a significant source of planet-warming emissions.

“Today, I think we can say that the end of coal is in sight,” said Alok Sharma, who is chairing the conference of nearly 200 nations, known as COP26.

Critics say that vision is obscured by a lot of smoke because several major economies have yet to set a date for ending their dependence on the fuel, including the United States, China, India and Japan — which was targeted outside the summit venue Thursday by protesters clad as animated characters.

What nations have promised varies. Some have pledged to quit coal completely at a future date, while others say they’ll stop building new plants, and even more, including China, are talking about just stopping the financing of new coal plants abroad.

The British government said pledges of new or earlier deadlines for ending coal use came from more than 20 countries including Ukraine, Vietnam, South Korea, Indonesia and Chile.

Some came with notable caveats, such as Indonesia’s request for additional aid before committing to bring its deadline forward to the 2040s.

Meanwhile, Poland, the second-biggest user of coal in Europe after Germany, appeared to backtrack on any ambitious new commitments within hours of the announcement.

“Energy security and the assurances of jobs is a priority for us,” Anna Moskwa, Poland’s minister for climate and environment, said in a tweet, citing the government’s existing plan which “provides for a departure from hard coal by 2049.” Earlier in the day, it had seemed that Poland might bring that deadline forward by at least a decade.

Campaigners reacted angrily to the apparent U-turn.

“Moskwa has underscored that her government cannot be trusted to sign a postcard, let alone a responsible climate pledge,” said Kathrin Gutmann, campaign director of the group Europe Beyond Coal.

Separately, more than two dozen countries, cities and companies joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance, whose members commit to ending coal use by 2030, for developed countries, and no later than 2050 for developing ones. Banks that are members pledge not to provide loans for the worst types of coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, the United States, Canada, Denmark and several other nations signed a different pledge to prioritize funding clean energy over fossil fuel projects abroad.

While not completely ruling out financial support for coal-fired power plants, the countries said they would refrain from any “new direct public support” for coal except in limited circumstances.

That move was seen as a significant step by environmental campaigners, who said that it could push international lenders to stop providing loans for new fossil fuel projects.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss officials’ thinking, said that while the U.S. hadn’t opted to join the coal phase-out pledges, its commitment to a clean energy future was clear. The Biden administration wants to reach 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035.

Underlining the urgent need for action on coal, a new analysis by scientists at Global Carbon Project found emissions from the fuel increased dramatically in 2021, not just from pandemic-struck 2020 levels, but even when compared to pre-pandemic 2019 levels. The world spewed 14.7 billion metric tons (16.2 billion tons) of carbon dioxide from coal burning, 5.7% more than last year, said the group, which tracks annual carbon pollution.

That was mostly spurred by a dramatic increase in China, which hit a new peak of coal emissions this year of 7.6 billion metric tons (8.4 billion tons) of carbon dioxide, more than half the globe’s coal emissions, the report said.  

Still, experts said the announcement and others made so far at the summit showed the growing momentum to ditch coal.

“Today’s commitments will help to shift whole continents on their journey to phase out coal,” said Dave Jones of the energy think tank Ember.

Ukraine, the third-biggest coal consumer in Europe, is bringing forward its coal deadline, from 2050 to 2035.

Coal production in Ukraine has dropped significantly over the past few years: From 40.9 million metric tons in 2016 to 28.8 million in 2020 (45 million tons to 32 million), according to the Energy Ministry.

The figures do not include production in the coal fields of separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine, which accounted for about half of Ukraine’s mines before the 2014 uprising.  

“The progress on coal being shown at COP26 demonstrates that the conditions are ripe for a global coal exit,” said Leo Roberts, a senior researcher at the environmental think tank E3G.

“We now need to see the incoming massive scale-up in clean energy finance made available quickly to ensure all countries can confidently move from coal to clean,” he added.

But some environmental activists said the commitments didn’t go far enough.

“Emissions from oil and gas already far outstrip coal and are booming, while coal is already entering a terminal decline,” said Murray Worthy of the campaign group Global Witness. “This is a small step forwards when what was needed was a giant leap.”  

The agreements on coal are not part of the formal negotiations at the U.N. talks in Glasgow. But British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose country is hosting the conference, had said he wanted to see deals on coal, cars, trees and cash.

Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, said Thursday that a new analysis by the Paris-based body shows that fully achieving all the emissions-reduction pledges made on previous days — including for the potent greenhouse gas methane — could allow the world to limit warning to 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

The goal that countries set at a previous conference in Paris is to limit temperature increases to 1.5C (2.7F). A United Nations analysis showed that before Glasgow the world was heading to a 2.7C (4.9F) increase while other analyses showed warming in the mid- to upper-2-degree range also.

Niklas Hohne, of the New Climate Institute and Climate Action Tracker, called Birol’s figure optimistic and noted it was based on countries achieving pledges to only emit what can be absorbed — so called net-zero plans — when they haven’t yet implemented any actions that would get them there.
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The World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe said Thursday the continent is now the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, accounting for 59 percent of all cases globally.

At a virtual news briefing from Copenhagen, Hans Kluge said the current pace of transmission across the region’s 53 countries is of grave concern. He said new cases are approaching record levels, with the delta variant of the coronavirus driving the surge.

Kluge said his agency’s latest data shows hospitalizations in the region more than doubled in one week.

He noted officials are seeing increasing trends across all age groups, but that the rapid increase in the older population is of the most concern. He said this is translating into more people having severe cases and dying, with 75 percent of the deaths among persons aged 65 or older.

Kluge said one reliable projection indicates that at the current pace, Europe could see another half a million COVID-19 deaths by the first of February. COVID-19 is caused by the coronavirus.

He also cited uneven vaccination rates and the relaxation of public health and social measures throughout the region as the cause of the surge.

While a billion doses of vaccine have been distributed, in Europe, only 47 percent of the total population are fully vaccinated. He says in eight nations, at least 70 percent of the people have been inoculated fully. Kluge notes the rate remains below 10 percent in two other countries.

Kluge encouraged nations with low vaccination rates to increase coverage, particularly among priority groups such as the elderly. He urged nations with high vaccination rates and ample supply to share with less fortunate nations.

He also said that vaccines are most effective when used with other preventive measures, such as social distancing and mask-wearing. Kluge said if the region achieved universal mask use, 188,000 lives could be saved between now and February.

The WHO region chief said, “We must change our tactics, from reacting to surges” of COVID-19 to “preventing them from happening in the first place.” 

 
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