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EU ‘did not properly consider conflicts of interest’ over BlackRock contract

by admin 28.11.2020

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The EU did not properly consider conflicts of interest when it hired the US investment manager BlackRock to advise on environmental regulation for banks, an influential watchdog has said.

The European ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, said the European commission, the EU’s executive arm, should strengthen its conflict of interest rules in light of the findings, in a judgment published on Wednesday.

BlackRock, the world’s largest investor, had $7.8tn (£5.8tn) in assets under management at the end of September. In March, it won a tender from the EU to advise on how to integrate ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues into banking regulation. BlackRock has already carried out much of the work required under the contract.

28.11.2020 0 comment

Military conflicts world

Huge portrait of Copernicus to be seen in UK for first time

by admin 27.11.2020

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A spectacular three-metre-wide painting of the astronomer Copernicus is to be shown in the UK for the first time, to showcase a superstar 19th-century artist little known outside his native country.

The National Gallery said Jan Matejko is widely regarded as the national painter of Poland, revered for his huge, minutely detailed depictions of key moments in the nation’s history.

His masterpiece, Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God, is his portrait of Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer who transformed our understanding of the solar system.

It hangs in the senate chamber of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, from where it rarely leaves. The National Gallery announced on Monday that it would display the painting in the spring in a free exhibition introducing British audiences to Matejko.

27.11.2020 0 comment

Military conflicts world

Hackers ‘try to steal Covid vaccine secrets in intellectual property war’

by admin 26.11.2020

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State-sponsored hackers from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are engaged in concerted attempts to steal coronavirus vaccine secrets in what security experts describe as “an intellectual property war”.

They accuse hostile-state hackers of trying to obtain trial results early and seize sensitive information about mass production of drugs, at a time when a range of vaccines are close to being approved for the public.

Previously the hackers’ primary intention was to steal the secrets behind the design of a vaccine, with hundreds of drug companies, research labs and health organisations from around the world targeted at any one time.

The cyber struggle involves western intelligence agencies, including Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, who say they are committed to protecting “our most critical assets”. But they discuss only a fraction of their work in public.

26.11.2020 0 comment

Military conflicts world

Daniel Cordier, one of last heroes of French resistance, dies aged 100

by admin 25.11.2020

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One of France’s last remaining French resistance heroes Daniel Cordier, has died aged 100.

One of only two remaining Compagnons de la Libération, an honour awarded by France’s exiled wartime leader, Charles de Gaulle, to those who risked their lives to liberate France from Nazi occupation, Emmanuel Macron said there would be a national ceremony to honour his memory.

“When France was in danger, he and his compagnons took every risk so that France remained France. We owe them our freedom and our honour,” Macron wrote in a tweet.

Cordier was secretary to the French resistance leader, Jean Moulin, who was killed by the Gestapo in 1943.

Born into a wealthy family in Bordeaux, Cordier admitted he was a monarchist and in his own words “fiercely antisemitic” before the war when he was a member of the ultra-nationalist Action Française.

Daniel Cordier pictured in Paris in 1945

After the German invasion in 1940, Cordier was appalled as he listened to the radio address by Marshal Philippe Pétain, leader of the collaborationist Vichy government, calling on the French army to surrender, a decision he considered a disgraceful betrayal.

“I raced upstairs and flung myself on my bed and I sobbed. But then it must have been half an hour later, I suddenly drew myself up, and I said to myself: ‘But no, this is ridiculous. He (Pétain) is just a stupid old fool! We have to do something,” he later recalled.

He and 16 friends immediately set off aboard a ship from Bayonne to join De Gaulle in London, landing in Falmouth seven days later. Cordier underwent military training in the UK and then transferred to the secret intelligence service of the Free French, learning sabotage, radio transmission and parachuting.

He was parachuted into France in 1942, aged 22, with the codename Bip W, and ordered to make contact in Lyon with a man known only as “Rex”. The man he made contact with was, in fact, Moulin, who had organised and unified the Conseil National de la Résistance (National Resistance Council).

For a year he was Moulin’s right-hand man, drafting his correspondence and liaising with other resistance leaders. Moulin died after he was arrested by the Gestapo in July 1943, having been betrayed to the Nazis and tortured. He died onboard a train to Germany.

Cordier continued to rally and organise resistance fighters while dodging the Germans himself, finally fleeing over the Pyrenees where he was arrested and interned before being transferred to London in May 1944.

Emmanuel Macron meeting Daniel Cordier in 2018.

After the war, Cordier opened a gallery in Paris – described by newspapers at the time as the “most original” in the French capital for its promotion of previously little-known contemporary artists.

He also wrote a bestselling and award-winning memoir, Alias Caracalla, based on his wartime experiences with Moulin. His death leaves only one surviving member of the 1,038 Companions of the Liberation, Hubert Germain, who is also 100 years old.

In 2018, Cordier was awarded the Grand Croix of the Légion d’honneur, the highest decoration of the French state. As he decorated him, Macron told Cordier: “To be face to face with you is to find oneself immediately and compellingly face to face with history.”

Cordier, who was living in Cannes on the French Riviera at the time of his death, told Le Monde in 2018: “I’m an old but very, very happy old man,” and described his experience as not one life but “successive lives that were so different from one another”.

25.11.2020 0 comment

Military conflicts world

Barnier self-isolates and Brexit talks halt after EU official tests positive

by admin 24.11.2020

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The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, was forced to go into self-isolation and face-to-face Brexit talks in Brussels have been suspended after a member of the bloc’s negotiating team tested positive for coronavirus.

In a development that will put further pressure on the tight timeline for a successful outcome in the trade and security talks, Barnier shut down the talks in the Belgian capital with the agreement of his British counterpart, David Frost.

The two sides had been aiming to strike an agreement by next week to allow time for the European parliament to ratify any potential deal, with a possible emergency sitting on 28 December pencilled in.

In an attempt to keep to that tight deadline, the two sides said video conference negotiations would continue but British officials are expected to leave Brussels on Friday. The talks were also suspended in March when Barnier and Frost contracted the virus.

It is understood that none of the 50 UK officials in Brussels will need to quarantine as they were not in close contact with the EU official.

Barnier’s team has been more affected by the development. Under Belgian law, anyone testing positive should quarantine for seven days while those who have had contact with an infected person must stay in isolation for 10 days.

The EU’s chief negotiator tweeted: “One of the negotiators in my team has tested positive for Covid-19. With David Frost we have decided to suspend the negotiations at our level for a short period. The teams will continue their work in full respect of guidelines.”

It is understood Barnier will ask a commission official outside his senior team to brief EU ambassadors in person on Friday morning about the latest twists and turns in the negotiations.

Shortly after Barnier’s announcement, Frost also issued a short statement. He tweeted: “I am in close contact with Michel Barnier about the situation. The health of our teams comes first. I would like to thank the European commission for their immediate help and support.”

The negotiation is on a knife-edge, prompting the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to call on the European commission to ramp up no-deal preparations to prepare businesses for the worst.

The UK and EU teams have been locked in talks in Brussels since Monday.

In six weeks the UK’s transition period will end and it will leave the EU’s single market and customs union.

A UK government spokesman said: “With respect to the relevant public health guidance, the UK and EU teams have agreed to continue to negotiate remotely for the time being. The talks will resume in person when it is judged safe to do so. The health and welfare of our staff are our priority.

“The negotiations have been conducted throughout in a way that is consistent with applicable social distancing laws and guidance.”

24.11.2020 0 comment

Military conflicts world

Refugees on Lesbos face winter in makeshift facility after camp razed

by admin 24.11.2020

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Thousands of people who were relocated to a tent camp after fires gutted Europe’s biggest refugee facility on the Greek island of Lesbos will have to endure winter in the rudimentary settlement.

As Greece faced criticism from one of the continent’s top human rights watchdogs, the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, over the appalling conditions of several of its refugee holding centres, officials conceded asylum seekers would have to languish in the settlement until well into the new year.

“Its problematic,” said Giorgos Koumoutsakos, Athens’ alternate minister for migration and asylum policy. “A new camp has to be built from scratch and agreement has yet to be reached over its location. It’s impossible to get a new state-of-the art facility ready before next summer.”

Almost 8,000 men, women and children are living in the camp, established as part of an emergency response to blazes that razed the island’s infamously overcrowded Moria reception centre in September. The new settlement, on a former shooting range only metres from the sea, was meant to be temporary. Lack of infrastructure has meant the sprawling facility is wholly dependent on water tanks.

In what would be an overhaul of containment policies that have trapped thousands of people in the outposts, the centre right administration also promised that no asylum seeker would remain on any island for more than six months.

About 19,000 people are living in overcrowded camps in Greece, having attempted to reach Europe from the shores of Turkey. “Our asylum system is now working very quickly,” Koumoutsakos told the Guardian. “Around 80,000 applications have been processed over the course of the last nine months.”

But a report released by the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture on Thursday called out the Greek authorities for their management of migrants reaching the country. It found that, five years after almost a million Syrians fleeing civil war traversed Lesbos alone, Greece’s response was still far from acceptable, citing allegations of ill-treatment by the police, coastguard and military. In some cases, squalid conditions of detention amounted to “an affront to human dignity”.

Refugees dig trenches to keep water out of their tents at the temporary Lesbos camp. Photograph: Panagiotis Balaskas/AP

“Of course, the CTP recognises the immense difficulties confronting Greece in managing mass migration flows at the EU’s external borders,” said Mark Kelly, the committee’s first vice-president, who headed the delegation that visited Greece in March. “However, dealing with those pressures must under no circumstances be allowed to degenerate into holding men, women and children in conditions that could be considered inhuman and degrading.”

The report, which called for a stop to illegal pushbacks after “consistent and credible allegations” of migrants being forcibly expelled to Turkey, said delegates had seen 93 migrants crammed into two police cells in the port of Samos. Among the detainees were 20 babies, while three of 15 women there were pregnant. Neither of the cells was equipped with heating, beds or mattresses. One, measuring 42 sq metres, held 43 people, while a second of little more than 32 sq metres held 50 people.

“The unpartitioned in-cell toilets were blocked and emitted a foul stench into the rest of the cell … the migrants [we] met had not had access to a shower for more than two weeks and no soap was given to them to wash their hands.” Arrivals had not been given information about their rights, as was also the case in Evros, the land-border region the committee visited.

Kelly said the authorities were pursuing a “punitive approach”. “A belief apparently remains that harsh conditions will deter migrants from arriving in Greece, without taking into consideration the push factors driving people to risk their lives to enter the country,” he said.

The anti-torture committee questioned the role and engagement of the EU border agency, Frontex, in pushback operations that in some cases had the effect of separating children from parents forcibly expelled across the land frontier with Turkey.

Since Ankara’s threat to open the doors to hundreds of thousands of refugees earlier this year, Athens has taken unprecedented steps to reinforce its borders, with backing from the EU.

The Greek government has issued a 25-page response contesting the report’s findings, and its claims of abuse. “Whenever there are allegations [of misconduct] they are always examined,” said Koumoutsakos. “It is a constant challenge to protect our borders. Turkey has a pool of 4 million refugees that it might choose to use for geopolitical goals again.”

24.11.2020 0 comment

Military conflicts world

Putin warns Armenia backing out of Nagorno-Karabakh deal would be ‘suicidal’

by admin 23.11.2020

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Vladimir Putin has said it would be “suicidal” for the Armenian government to back out of a Russian-brokered ceasefire in the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, as opposition forces in Yerevan protest against the week-old truce and call for the resignation of the prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan.

In a Russian state television interview about the deal aired on Tuesday evening, Putin was asked about a new government potentially coming to power reneging on the deal. “That would be a huge mistake,” he said.

The deal, which gave Azerbaijan significant territorial concessions after launching a bloody six-week war, was seen as a capitulation in Armenia and sparked protests against Pashinyan’s government. The country’s president has demanded snap elections and his foreign minister resigned this week in a high-level departure tied to the controversial deal.

Armenian security services last week also said they had prevented an assassination plot against Pashinyan involving an opposition politician and a war veteran.

“A country that is at war or in danger of resuming hostilities, as it has always been in past years, still cannot afford to behave in such a way, including in the sphere of organising power, as to split society from within. I think this is absolutely unacceptable, counterproductive and extremely dangerous,” Putin said.

23.11.2020 0 comment

Military conflicts world

Russia discovers ‘road of bones’ on frozen highway in Siberia

by admin 21.11.2020

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A “road of bones” has been discovered in Siberia, where officials have opened an inquiry into how a human skull and other remains appeared on a frozen highway near Irkutsk.

The remains, which may be a century old, were buried in sand that was spread over a local road to improve traction on black ice. So far, the bones of at least three people have been discovered, a Kirensk city official told Russian state television, adding that they may date back to Russia’s 1917-22 civil war.

Photographs of the frozen remains first emerged on social media, where locals argued over whether the bones had come from a nearby cemetery or from a ravine rumoured to have been used as a mass grave.

“According to preliminary information, utility workers took sand from territory near a cemetery. I can’t even describe how monstrous it is.” He said he hoped those responsible would be punished.

Human remains are occasionally unearthed during construction and roadworks in Russia, mainly near second world war battle sites in the west of the country. The remains of at least 10 people suspected to have been Red Army soldiers were discovered in 2014 during construction of a local highway in Kursk region. In 2018, construction workers in neighbouring Latvia unearthed human remains that led to the discovery of nearly 150 bodies.

The discovery in Siberia drew closer comparisons to the famous Kolyma highway, a 1,250-mile road from near Yakutsk to Magadan that was built under Stalin using gulag labour. The highway is nicknamed the “road of bones” for the estimated 250,000 lives lost in the building of the remote roadway.

21.11.2020 0 comment

Military conflicts world

Kremlin meant to kill Navalny, western security agencies believe

by admin 20.11.2020

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Western security agencies believe the Kremlin intended to kill the opposition leader Alexei Navalny and only failed to achieve the deadly goal because of quick thinking by first responders when he suddenly fell ill in August.

The conclusion from lab tests is that Navalny was poisoned using a potentially milder strain of novichok than the one used in the Salisbury attack, pointing to an active chemical weapons programme in Russia capable of producing different variants of the poison.

Diplomats from Britain, France and Germany are now working together to try to get the OPCW chemical weapons agency to formally declare that Russia was responsible at a plenary meeting, which starts at the end of the month.

It is unclear if that effort will succeed, but European security agencies say in private there is “growing evidence” of Russian state involvement in the attack.

Navalny collapsed on 20 August while on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. He fell into a coma and is probably only alive because the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was given atropine, the only drug known to be effective, by the doctors first treating him.

Tests have been carried out in labs in Germany, where Navalny was airlifted for treatment, France and Sweden and by the OPCW. All concluded traces of the novichok nerve agent were found in the opposition leader’s body.

They also concluded the strain of novichok used was different from that used in the Salisbury attack in the UK in 2018, which targeted Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia and ultimately led to the death of a British woman, Dawn Sturgess.

In October, the OPCW said in a statement that the traces of novichok found in Navalny’s blood and urine samples had “similar structural characteristics” to the nerve agent banned after Salisbury.

Hamish de Bretton Gordon, a chemical weapons specialist, said: “Reading between the lines between the way Navalny and the Skripals were treated, this novichock also appears to be less toxic and slow to have an effect.”

Navalny has accused Vladimir Putin of being behind the crime. Such an attack on Russia’s most prominent opposition politician, using a chemical weapon so closely associated with the Kremlin, will almost certainly have been sanctioned by the president, western intelligence agencies add.

Moscow has denied involvement. It has suggested foreign states may have been responsible as part of a plot to stir up internal tensions. Last week Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, claimed Navalny could have been poisoned in Germany or on board a medical plane taking him from Siberia to Berlin.

Officially, the Kremlin destroyed its stockpile of chemical weapons in October 2017. But last month, Bellingcat, an investigative website, reported that the Russian programme had dispersed to a number of secret labs and was still in operation.

According to Washington and London, over the past decade Russia has produced and stockpiled small quantities of novichok. One of the two Salisbury assassins – Alexander Mishkin – liaised with the head of a St Petersburg military laboratory ahead of the Skripal mission, Bellingcat reported.

Meanwhile, last month, it emerged that western agencies had concluded that Russia’s domestic spy agency, the FSB, had carried out the Navalny poisoning. The UK and EU targeted the FSB chief, Alexander Bortnikov, as well as five other senior Russian officials and a Moscow research institute.

But security officials and diplomats hope to go further and are focused on individuals such as Gen Alexei Sedov, who runs the FSB’s second service, responsible for tackling terrorism, extremism and internal political threats. Diplomatic sources have accused the division of carrying out the poisoning.

The latest developments come as the first trip by a UK government minister to Russia since 2017 gets under way, a three-day visit from the junior Foreign Officer ministe Wendy Morton, where she is expected to discuss the attack on Navalny.

Morton’s trip is likely to be challenging. The Labour MP Chris Bryant revealed he fell violently ill with food poisoning during an official trip to Russia in 2009. Bryant said there were repeated calls made to his hotel room every hour. “I gather these were standard practice irritants meted out by the FSB to ‘difficult’ visitors,” he wrote.

Western agencies still do not know exactly how Navalny was poisoned, although they believe – as the opposition leader has himself suggested – that he was targeted in his hotel room on a trip to Siberia, possibly by adding novichok to a water bottle.

A few drops of novichok – a colourless, odourless poison first developed by Russia in the 1970s – added to a drink or applied direct to the skin is normally enough to kill, prompting some to question why Navalny did not die quickly, even allowing for the timely treatment.

20.11.2020 0 comment

Military conflicts world

EU must assert autonomy in face of US-China dominance, says Macron

by admin 19.11.2020

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European leaders must not let up on efforts to construct an autonomous bloc that is capable of resisting the duopoly of China and the US, Emmanuel Macron has said in his first extended response to the US presidential election.

The French president said the US would only respect Europe if it was sovereign with respect to its own defence, technology and currency. Warning that US values and interests were not quite the same as Europe’s, he said: “It is not tenable that our international policies should be dependent on it or to be trailing behind it.” The same need for independence applied even more to China, he added.

His analysis came in a marathon interview in the journal Le Grand Continent, conducted last Thursday, in which he called for a redoubling of the protection of the values of the European enlightenment against “barbarity and obscurantism”. Le Grand Continent is the review attached to the leading French thinktank Groupe d’Études Géopolitiques.

Macron suggested 2020 may prove to be a landmark year similar to 1945, 1968 and 2007. Much of the interview considered the extent to which the forces that led to Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and the UK’s Brexit vote, could be contained, and reversed.

“The changeover of the administration in America is an opportunity to to pursue in a truly peaceful and calm manner what allies need to understand among themselves – which is that we need to continue to build our independence for ourselves, as the US does for itself and as China does for itself.”

“It is vital that our Europe finds the ways and the means to decide for itself to rely on itself, not to depend on others in every area, technological, health, geopolitics, and to be able to cooperate with whomever it chooses,” he said.

Macron added that although the US was Europe’s historical ally, cherishing similar principles, “our values are not quite the same. We have an attachment to social democracy, to more equality. Our reactions are not quite the same”.

Macron, who previously criticised Nato as being “brain-dead”, said: “Europe has a lot of thoughts unthought. On a geostrategic level we had forgotten to think because we thought our geopolitical relations through Nato.”

Calling for a reinvention of international cooperation, he said the current multilateral frameworks were blocked. “The UN security council no longer produces useful solutions today. We all have some responsibility to bear when some [institutions] such as the World Health Organization find themselves hostages to the crises of multilateralism.”

He said the deep crisis of cooperation was a crisis born of conflicting values, including the rise of neoconservatism and a breakdown in the universal principle of inviolable human rights. This rupture, he said, “is the fruit of ideological choices fully endorsed by powers that see in it the means to rise, and a form of fatigue, of breakdown”.

Without mentioning Turkey directly, he said: “Authoritarian regional powers are re-emerging, theocracies are re-emerging. It is an extraordinary acceleration of a return of religion on the political scene in a number of these countries.”

19.11.2020 0 comment

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