Chinese cyberspies have hacked most Washington institutions, experts say
By ,
Start asking security experts which powerful Washington institutions have been penetrated by Chinese cyberspies, and this is the usual answer: almost all of them.
The list of those hacked in recent years includes law firms, think tanks, news organizations, human rights groups, contractors, congressional offices, embassies and federal agencies.
The information compromised by such intrusions, security experts say, would be enough to map how power is exercised in Washington to a remarkably nuanced degree. The only question, they say, is whether the Chinese have the analytical resources to sort through the massive troves of data they steal every day.
“The dark secret is there is no such thing as a secure unclassified network,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has been hacked in the past. “Law firms, think tanks, newspapers — if there’s something of interest, you should assume you’ve been penetrated.”
Young children detained and tortured after protests in Egypt
Activists speak out over 'unprecedented level of institutional abuse of children'
Hundreds of children – some as young as nine – have been illegally detained and in many cases tortured by the Egyptian police following the protests which erupted after the second anniversary of the 2011 uprising.
In what lawyers and activists say is a retrenchment of state brutality akin to the worst abuses of power during Hosni Mubarak’s regime, large numbers of children have been unlawfully imprisoned in camps used by Egypt’s central security forces.
Rights groups say that many of those detained have been subjected to cruel mistreatment, including beatings, electrocution and “hanging” torture. Others were forced by their tormentors to strip naked before being drenched with cold water.
SOCIETY
Little progress on tackling German child abuse
Promises of support for victims of childhood sexual abuse have been largely left unfulfilled by German politicians. Even financial help and a victims' rights law prove more difficult to enact than had been expected.
More than three years ago Germany was rocked by a wave of sexual abuse cases - past and present - uncovered in schools and church institutions across the country. At the time, the government acted quickly and decisively in its efforts to tackle the issue. Social Democratic Party politician Christine Bergmann was put in charge of looking into the scandal independent of any of the sides involved.
Bergmann focused on grasping the massive scope of the abuse. A call that went out to abuse victims to report their cases proved a sad success story: many of the incidents took place decades ago and thousands of victims broke their silence.
'Fundamentally, it is the same as Hitler's Auschwitz': survivors reveal horror of North Korea prison camps
February 21, 2013 - 4:57PM
North Korea's prison camps are a closed-off world of death, torture and forced labour where babies are born slaves, according to two survivors who liken the horrors of the camps to a Holocaust in progress.
"People think the Holocaust is in the past, but it is still very much a reality. It is still going on in North Korea," Shin Dong-Hyuk said through an interpreter on the sidelines of a human rights summit in Geneva.
The birth of a baby is a blessed thing in the outside world, but inside the camp, babies are born to be slaves like their parents. It's an absolute scandal
Shin himself spent his first 23 years in a prison camp in the secretive country, where he says he was tortured and subjected to forced labour before making a spectacular escape seven years ago - and giving the outside world a rare first-hand account of life inside the camps.
Guatemala gets a bump in its police force
Guatemala has one of the world's highest murder rates, and one way President Molina has tried to address this is by adding 2,000 more police since January 2012.
Guatemala's National Civil Police graduated 1,617 new agents last Friday. That brings the PNC's total to 25,383, almost 2,000 more than the country counted when Otto Perez Molina took office in January 2012. Perez wants to end 2013 with at least 30,000 officers and, from what I remember, wanted to increase the police by 10,000 during his four year term (33,500).
That's going to be tough especially if you actually want qualified people to fill the positions and the force continues to remove corrupt elements from its ranks. President Alvaro Colom added 6k or so officers during his four-year term but several thousand were also removed for corruption and other crimes during that time so it wasn't a net of 6k. We've had several arrestsof police officers during Perez Molina's first year but no large-scale dismissals.
21 February 2013 Last updated at 00:11 GMT
Russia and Arab League propose direct Syria talks
Russia and the Arab League say they want to broker direct talks between the Syrian government and opposition in a bid to end the country's civil war.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said violence was "a road to nowhere".
The move comes as the opposition Syrian National Coalition is due to begin a two-day meeting in Egypt to discuss a framework for a possible solution.
Some 70,000 people have died since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011, the UN says.
The BBC's Jim Muir in Cairo says although the Syrian government and the opposition are talking about dialogue, that still seems a distant prospect.
No comments:
Post a Comment