China evacuates 12,000 from Libya, sends frigate to help

SHANGHAI/BEIJING: China has so far evacuated 12,000, or about a third, of its citizens from turmoil in Libya, many of them workers for Chinese-run projects and businesses in the oil-rich nation, official media said on Friday.

Afghan, NATO forces kill 30 insurgents in assault

KABUL: Afghan and NATO-led forces killed at least 30 insurgents in an air and ground assault in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, NATO forces said in a statement.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said more than 250 Afghan security forces and coalition troops battled insurgents in Laghman province, southeast of the capital Kabul, after coming under small-arms fire.

There were no immediate reports of coalition or civilian casualties in the assault, which ISAF said was continuing.

Rising violence and casualties are of deep concern in Washington, where U.S. President Barack Obama is due to conduct a strategy review of the increasingly unpopular war in December.

Afghanistan is under renewed scrutiny after last weekend’s parliamentary election was hit by violence and widespread claims of fraud, the second flawed poll in 13 months

17 officers injured in Hamburg clashes

BERLIN: Police said 17 officers were injured following clashes with demonstrators who threw paving stones and set garbage cans ablaze in the northern port city of Hamburg.

At least nine demonstrators were detained after the confrontations with police on the eve of Saturday”s May Day holiday, the German news agency reported Saturday.

Berlin police said night celebrations in the capital remained peaceful. Several hundred officers are patrolling the streets Saturday, ahead of a planned neo-Nazi march and other demonstrations.

Rallies and other events marking May Day in Berlin and Hamburg have turned violent in recent years leading police to cordon off hotspot areas and ban bottles.

Explosions inside a Somali mosque kill at least 30

MOGADISHU: Two bombs exploded inside a mosque in Mogadishu”s main market on Saturday in the first Iraq-style bombing inside a house of worship in Somalia.

At least 30 people were killed and 70 wounded, officials said.

The blasts in the Bakara market went off while people were sitting inside the Abdala Shideye mosque waiting for noon prayers.

The bombings highlight the increasingly violent path Somali militants are taking following an influx of insurgents into the country from the Afghanistan conflict, fighters who are now training Somali militants.

Most of the victims were worshippers, said businessman Ahmed Abdulle, a witness.

“The first one occurred at the back of the mosque and the other one at the front. I saw the dead bodies of at least 11 people and 18injured,”” said a businessman, Isma”il Dahir.

“The blood stained the walls and human flesh was scattered everywhere.””

Ali Muse, the head of Mogadishu”s ambulance service, said at least 30 people were killed and 70 wounded. Abdullahi Haji Ilmi, a witness, said he counted 32 bodies.

China to hold day of mourning for quake victims

BEIJING: China announced a national day of mourning to be held Wednesday for victims of a devastating quake in a remote Tibetan region, as the death toll rose above 2,000.

National flags will fly at half-staff across the country and at its embassies and consulates overseas, marking one week since the magnitude 6.9 temblor hit, China”s Cabinet announced Tuesday. All public entertainment will be suspended as well.

Chinese officials said the death toll in remote Yushu county in western Qinghai province, high on the Tibetan plateau, rose to 2,039, while more than 12,000 people were hurt. Another 200 people remain missing.

Relief efforts could be hindered by rain that was expected Tuesday on the high-altitude region. Sleet, wind, and light snow are forecast for the next three days, said Guo Yinxiang, spokeswoman for the Qinghai Metereological Bureau.

Three people were rescued Monday, including a 4-year-old girl and an elderly woman who survived under the rubble for almost a week in China because relatives used bamboo poles to push water and rice to them until rescuers pulled them out.

The rescue of Wujian Cuomao, 68, and Cairen Baji, 4, from a crumbled home in a village about 13 miles (20 kilometers) from the hardest-hit town of Jiegu was hailed by state media as a miracle and repeatedly played on television news broadcasts.

Relief workers also freed a Tibetan woman named Ritu from the rubble of a hillside house, state broadcaster China Central Television reported. Half her body had been trapped by the debris, the report said, but her vital signs were stable.

In Jiegu, thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monks picked at rubble with shovels, performed funeral rites and threw food to survivors from the backs of trucks.

Relief and reconstruction work accelerated, with power and telecommunications services largely restored and aid convoys arriving in droves.

Convoys of military supply trucks were at a standstill, backed up for miles (kilometers) on the main road heading into town. At a supply depot set up on the town”s edge, huge stacks of bottled water were piled up outside a warehouse. More relief goods rumbled past mountainside hamlets where residents pitched government-provided tents along a two-lane highway that is the only connection between Jiegu and the provincial capital of Xining, the nearest big city.

The Chinese government has poured in aid to the remote Tibetan region, where residents have frequently chafed under Chinese rule. Tibetan anger over political and religious restrictions and perceived economic exploitation by the majority Han Chinese have sometimes erupted in violence.

Deputy mayor of Afghan city shot dead: ministry

KABUL: The deputy mayor of the restive southern Afghan city of Kandahar has been shot dead, the interior ministry said Tuesday.

Azizullah Ziarmal “was killed by a terrorist with a revolver as he was going to the mosque” late Monday, the ministry said in a brief statement but gave no further details.

Kandahar, capital of the eponymous province, is one of the most violent regions of Afghanistan, and regarded by Taliban insurgents as their base.

During the brutal 1996-2001 Taliban regime, Kandahar was the country”s designated capital and has been the focus of the increasingly violent insurgency since they were overthrown in a US-led invasion in 2001.

Drive-by shootings, as well as suicide bomb attacks and crude mines and bombs are the main methods of warfare for the insurgents, who are known to control vast swathes of Kandahar city and province.

Three children were killed on Monday when explosives carried on a donkey cart detonated in a residential area of the city, a tribal leader said.

Fazluddin Agha, a pro-government official who ran President Hamid Karzai”s campaign during last year”s presidential elections, said he believed he was the target.

The dead children were his nephews and had been playing on the donkey cart when it exploded, he said.

Kandahar is seen as the key battleground to reverse the escalating conflict, which is taking an increasing toll on foreign forces and Afghan civilians.

Military planners say operations against the Taliban in the restive province have already begun and will escalate in the coming months as thousands more troops deploy to Afghanistan under escalated counter-insurgency tactics.

The number of troops under US and NATO control is set to rise from 126,000 to 150,000 by August, by which time military planners intend to have Kandahar under Afghan government control.

Four civilians, one soldier killed in separate Afghan blasts

KANDAHAR: A NATO soldier and four civilians were killed in separate home-made bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, officials and the military alliance said.

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said only that one of its troops was killed by an improvised explosive device in the volatile region, which has seen the fiercest fighting in the eight-year war with the Taliban.

Earlier, officials in Helmand province said a home-made bomb tore through a bus carrying a mine clearance team as they travelled along a dirt road near Daman district, killing four and injuring more than a dozen others.

“The deminers were travelling in a minibus. There was a remote-controlled bomb on the road. They struck the bomb,” Daman district governor Sarajuddin Khan said.

He could not give a toll for the casualties but local public health official Mohammad Ibrahim said four people were killed and 14 others were wounded.

Taliban militants, ousted from power in a US-led invasion in late 2001, have been waging an increasingly deadly insurgency against the Western-backed government in Kabul, particularly using roadside bombs.

The US military has said the increasingly sophisticated devices killed 322 coalition soldiers and wounded 1,813 in 2009 — double the number in the previous 12 months.

Eighty-one US and NATO troops were killed by IEDs between January and March this year, according to Pentagon figures.

The latest death takes to 154 the total number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year, according to a French news agdne count based on the independent icasualties.org website, which tracks coalition deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The United Nations has said that most civilian deaths — 2,412 last year — were caused by Taliban bombs and suicide attacks.

Three people were killed and five wounded on Friday when their van hit an IED intended for US and Afghan forces in western Herat province, police said.

British party leaders go head-to-head in election battle

LONDON: British premier Gordon Brown and opposition leader David Cameron clashed over the economy Wednesday, scoring points on a key campaign issue in their final parliamentary face-off before the election.

In a boisterous session in the House of Commons, each man accused the other of threatening Britain”s recovery from recession, an issue which has taken centre stage in the increasingly tight race for votes on May 6.

Brown”s centre-left Labour party is fighting for a historic fourth term against Cameron”s centre-right Conservatives, who have seen their double-digit opinion poll lead shrink in recent weeks to just a few points.

Cameron is still tipped to win, however, and took the opportunity of what could be Brown”s last prime minister”s questions to try to turn the tables on Labour claims that the Conservatives cannot be trusted on the economy.

The Conservatives want to scrap Labour”s planned rise in payroll taxes, warning it will damage economic growth and any chance of cutting Britain”s 167-billion-pound (254-billion-dollar, 188-billion-euro) budget deficit.

“This prime minister would wreck the recovery by putting a tax on every job,” Cameron declared, ahead of a visit to businesses in northwest England and Wales where he will highlight the damage the tax could do to small firms.

He also attacked Brown”s record on defence spending, a highly emotive issue given Britain”s current involvement in Afghanistan, where 280 troops have died.

Hitting back, Brown said that scrapping the planned rise in the payroll tax, known as National Insurance (NI), would take billions of pounds out of the economy at a time when it was most fragile.

“To withdraw six billion pounds from the economy now would put jobs at risk, put business at risk and put recovery at risk,” he said.

Amid the backdrop of jeering lawmakers from both sides, Brown spun around a phrase Cameron once used against Tony Blair when he was prime minister, telling the Conservative leader: “To think you were the future once.”

Brown was to face a different kind of prime minister”s questions (PMQs) later Wednesday when he fields queries from members of the public submitted via email or Twitter, in a session his party has dubbed “people”s PMQs”.

All the party leaders are seeking to rebuild trust among voters angered by a scandal over parliamentary expenses last year.

Plans to overhaul the political system are likely to feature alongside the economy as a major election issue, and both Brown and Nick Clegg, leader of the third Liberal Democrat party, unveiled plans for reform Wednesday.

In a speech in central London, Brown said it was “time to see an end to the old politics and to change our politics for good”.

He promised to give voters new powers to recall lawmakers found guilty of financial misconduct and to hold two referenda on introducing elected members into the House of Lords and on changing the voting system.

Nick Clegg, leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, earlier outlined his proposed reforms, including a cap on political donations, and insisted only his party could offer a real break from the “stench of corruption” in parliament.

“A vote for the Labour or the Conservative parties is a vote for corrupt politics,” Clegg said.

In the House of Commons debate, he attacked Labour in particular, saying: “We all remember, back in 1997, the hope and the promise of this new government. Look at them now. You”ve failed, it”s over, it”s time to go.”

The Lib Dems have struggled to make their mark as the third party in a two-party system, although they could be key players if there is a hung parliament with neither Labour nor the Conservatives winning a majority.

United States:Human Rights Battle Increasingly Fought On Internet

TrendPK.com

United States:Human Rights Battle Increasingly Fought On Internet:WASHINGTON: The United States said Thursday that the battle for human rights is increasingly being fought on the Internet as China, Iran and other states try to block access by political activists and others.
In its 2009 report on human rights abuses worldwide, [...]

Internet-show-crime-Telecom-technology

Smartphones are under a growing menace from cyber-criminals seeking to hack into web-connected handsets, but the mobile industry has contained the threat so far, security experts said.

Software security firms warned at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, that the increasingly popular smartphones could face an explosion of virus attacks in the coming years.

“Tomorrow we could see a worm on phones which would go around the world in five minutes,” said Mikko Hyppoenen, chief research officer at F-Secure, which makes anti-virus software for mobile phones.

“It could have happened already. It hasn’t, but it could happen. And I do think that sooner or later it will happen, but when? Well that I cannot tell you,” he told AFP.

But security companies, mobile operators and makers of operating systems have found solutions to limit the attacks so far and delay an onslaught of spam and viruses, he said.

“It won’t work forever, eventually we will see the first global outbreak. But we have been able to delay it by more than five years, at least,” he said.

The first mobile virus appeared six years ago, and so far F-Secure has detected only 430 mobile worms. This compares to millions of computer viruses.

Much like the first computer hackers of two decades ago, the people attacking mobile phones have been doing it as a hobby, Hyppoenen said.

“It seems that on any new platform, the first years, the first viruses are done by hobbyists just to show off and then later more professional money-making criminals move in,” he said.

One of the first viruses was called Skulls. Spreading through wireless bluetooth systems, a skull would appear on a phone’s screen and delete all its data, Hyppoenen said.

The few money-making “trojan” viruses that have been seen infiltrate a person’s phone and send text messages to premium numbers controlled by the hacker, he said.

Security companies have developped anti-spam and anti-virus software for mobile phones as well as anti-theft features that allow a phone’s owner to remotely block the device and even map its location.

But smartphones, with their email and Internet capabilities, will invite more break-ins, especially with the growth of mobile banking — financial transactions that can be done through applications, experts said.

“It is all about money,” said Eugene Kaspersky, founder and chief executive of software protection firm Kaspersky Lab.

“Malware is developed to make more money. It doesn’t matter if it’s computers or smartphones,” he said.

His company has detected an average of 30 mobile viruses per month over the past year, and believes that a wave of financial assaults are just around the corner.

It took more than 20 years for computer viruses to become a money-making industry, Kaspersky said.

“We expect that in mobiles it will take much less time,” he said. “This year and next year we expect to see the industrialisation of smartphone malware.”

Adam Leach, a mobile device expert at Ovum research firm, played down the threat, saying that the industry is staying on top of the problem.

“The threat hasn’t been as high as expected,” he said, adding that companies have learned from past experiences and have found ways to “minimise the threat.”

But he warned that the mobile industry should not let its guard down.

“I think it is something companies need to take seriously,” Leach said. “If it is not taken seriously, it has the potential to have a big impact on (mobile phone) users.”

---

Internet-show-crime-Telecom-technology was first posted on February 17, 2010 at 2:46 pm.

Next Page »