Middle East Experience

Winner of the Student Oscar: a little girl in a bombed-out flat in Syria. The television is her only window to the world – but even this is taken away from her. Nikolas Fischer watched the impressive film..
Source: Albawaba
Full Article: The world through Tala’s eyes: “Tala’vision” – sadly poetic

The US said Wednesday that it had blacklisted Israel’s NSO and Candiru for selling spyware to foreign governments that “maliciously” targeted government officials and journalists.Over the summer, a global investigation showed that the Israeli-NSO licensed Pegasus spyware was used to hack the smartphones of prominent foreign officials, journalists, and human rights activists.For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.NSO rejected the reports and claimed “uncorroborated theories.”On Wednesday, following the US decision, NSO again said it was innocent.“NSO Group is dismayed by the decision, given that our technologies support US national security interests and policies by preventing terrorism and crime, and thus we will advocate for this decision to be reversed,” an NSO spokesperson was quoted as telling AFP.But the US was quick to note that it was not taking action against countries or governments where the companies were located.“NSO Group and Candiru were added to the Entity List based on a determination that they developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used this tool to maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics, and embassy workers,” the US said.Wednesday’s decision by the US means that the companies undermined US national security and foreign policy interests. It also makes exports to these companies by US counterparts are restricted.Two other companies, Computer Security Initiative Consultancy PTE (COSEINC) and Positive Technologies, were also added to the Entity List.These two companies are in Singapore and Russia, respectively.Read more: France's Macron changes phone in light of Pegasus case, Israel eyes changes
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: US blacklists Israel's NSO, Candiru for spyware undermining national security

China is expanding its nuclear force much faster than US officials predicted just a year ago, highlighting a broad and accelerating buildup of military muscle designed to enable Beijing to match or surpass US global power by mid-century, according to a Pentagon report released Wednesday.The number of Chinese nuclear warheads could increase to 700 within six years, the report said, and may top 1,000 by 2030. The report did not say how many weapons China has today, but a year ago the Pentagon said the number was in the “low 200s” and was likely to double by the end of this decade.For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.The United States, by comparison, has 3,750 nuclear weapons and has no plans to increase. As recently as 2003 the US total was about 10,000.The Biden administration is undertaking a comprehensive review of its nuclear policy and has not said how that might be influenced by its China concerns.The report does not suggest open conflict with China but it fits an emerging US narrative of a People’s Liberation Army, as China calls its military, intent on challenging the United States in all domains of warfare — air, land, sea, space and cyberspace. Against that backdrop, US defense officials have said they are increasingly wary of China’s intentions with regard to the status of Taiwan.“The PLA’s evolving capabilities and concepts continue to strengthen (China’s) ability to ‘fight and win wars’ against a ‘strong enemy’ — a likely euphemism for the United States,” the report said, adding that it makes China more capable of coercing Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China claims as its territory.Wednesday’s report is the latest reminder to Congress, already leery of Beijing’s military ambitions, that the Pentagon’s frequent promises to focus more intently on countering China have moved only incrementally beyond the talking stage. The Biden administration is expected to take a new step by following through on its announcement in September of plans to increase the US military presence in Australia, in addition to a controversial decision to help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines.China’s military modernization is proceeding on a wide front, but its nuclear advances are especially notable.The Chinese may already have established what is known as a nuclear triad — the combination of land-, sea-, and air-based missiles that the United States and Russia have had for decades, the report said. To its existing land- and sea-based nuclear forces China is adding an air-launched ballistic missile.The Pentagon report was based on information collected through December 2020 and so does not reflect or even mention Gen. Mark Milley’s expression of concern last month about Chinese hypersonic weapon tests last summer that he said came as a troublesome surprise. Wednesday’s report only referred to the widely known fact that China had fielded the DF-17 medium-range ballistic missile, equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle designed to evade American missile defenses.In remarks shortly before the report’s release Wednesday, Milley told the Aspen Security Forum that the hypersonic missile test and other Chinese advances are evidence of what is at stake for the world.“We are witnessing one of the largest shifts in global and geostrategic power that the world has witnessed,” he said.The Pentagon report said China is pursuing a network of overseas bases that “could interfere with” US military operations and could support Chinese military operations against the United States. President Xi Jinping has said China plans to become a global military power by 2049.The Pentagon’s wide-ranging assessment of China’s military strategy and force development is the latest in an annual series of reports to Congress and in some respects was more detailed than previous versions. For example, it questioned China’s compliance with international biological and chemical weapons agreements, citing studies conducted at military medical institutions that discussed identifying, testing and characterizing groups of “potent toxins” that have civilian as well as military uses.The basis of the Pentagon’s prediction that China will vastly increase its nuclear arsenal is not spelled out in Wednesday’s report. A senior defense official who briefed reporters in advance of the report’s public release, and thus spoke on condition of anonymity, said the forecast reflects several known developments, such as China’s addition of a nuclear bomber capability, as well as public statements in Chinese official media that have made reference to China needing 1,000 nuclear weapons.The report also asserted that China has begun construction of at least three new missile fields that “cumulatively contain hundreds” of underground silos from which ICBMs could be launched.The report provided no details on the new missile fields, but private nuclear analysts have reported that satellite imagery shows what appear to be vast new missile silo fields under construction in north-central China. In an update published Tuesday, analysts Matt Korda and Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists said they have seen continued construction progress and have discovered “unique facilities that appear intended to support missile operations once the silo fields become operational.”One of those facilities, they said, is a complex in the mountains surrounded by what appear to be four tunnels into underground facilities. The tunnels are under construction and there are large amounts of excavated soil dumped nearby. This facility’s function is unknown but “could potentially involve missile and/or warhead storage and management,” the analysts said.Other structures under construction may be technical service facilities and launch control centers, they said.Read more: China’s hypersonic test like a ‘Sputnik moment’: US top general
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: Pentagon: China’s nuke force growing faster than predicted

Last weekend, Black Shadow announced its hack of Cyberserve, which hosted Atraf, and the hackers have been exposing personal information of LGBTQ clients of the website.
Source: Jerusalem Post
Full Article: State probing LGBTQ Atraf website for faulty cyberdefenses

Senior Greek Jewish official expresses optimism that the current government ‘has the political willingness to address the issue.’
Source: Jerusalem Post
Full Article: Greek Jewish community seeking legislation to legalize 'shechita'

IDF troops will include forces from the Maglan commando unit and from the Lotar anti-terrorism unit as well as from the School for Infantry Corps Professions and Squad Commanders.
Source: Jerusalem Post
Full Article: IDF holding amphibious drill in Eilat with US NAVCENT forces

Hefetz may be the most critical witness in the trial because he is one of two who can point the finger directly at Netanyahu on media bribery charges.
Source: Jerusalem Post
Full Article: Bezeq-Walla Affair: Nir Hefetz to testify against Netanyahu November 16

In response to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s decision to place cyber surveillance company NSO Group on its “entity list” for malicious cyber activity, Danna Ingleton, Deputy Director of Amnesty Tech, said: “With this move, the US government has acknowledged what Amnesty and other activists have been saying for years: NSO Group’s spyware is a ..
Source: Albawaba
Full Article: US blacklisting of NSO Group recognizes spyware abuses

"We are in the last stretch of this effort and its final days and nights will be exhausting, but the budget will pass."
Source: Jerusalem Post
Full Article: Bennett: 'I am saving Israel from a mess'

The official number of global COVID-19 deaths has topped five million, but a new report has suggested the pandemic true death toll could be more than three times that figure.According to the worldometer COVID-19 tracking tool, at least 5,039,536 people worldwide have died of the coronavirus since the onset of the pandemic, while the latest figures on Thursday show 248, 938, 575 people have been diagnosed with the disease to date.For more coronavirus news, visit our dedicated page.The US leads the tally of global COVID-19 deaths with more than 750,000 casualties to date.But a report by The Economist suggests the true death toll could be in the region of 17 million.The news outlet said that when COVID-19 first hit northern Italy in February 2020, they noticed that “something strange was happening.”“There were 1,140 deaths attributed to the virus in parts of Bergamo province in March, for example, but the overall increase in fatalities compared with the same period in the previous year was 2,420. Similar phenomena were soon noticed in America, Britain, Spain and other countries,” the Economist reported.In July the Indian government rejected studies which suggested that millions of people have died in the country from COVID-19, several times the official toll of almost 420,000.It said in a statement however that several Indian states were now “reconciling” their data after dealing with a spike in cases in April and May.It followed a study by US research group the Center for Global Development suggested anywhere from 3.4 million to 4.7 million people had died in India, between eight and 11 times the official number.The Economist said official COVID-19 death tolls were—and continue to be—inaccurate.“They typically rely on testing for the virus, which can be patchy, and use definitions which exclude indirect consequences of the pandemic, such as extra deaths in overburdened hospitals,” the report noted. “Fortunately, there is a better way to calculate death tolls. To measure those of events such as wars, researchers do not check how many dead people have bullets in them, but on something much more reliable: how many more died during them than one would expect in normal years.”This is known as “excess deaths.”The gulf between official and reliable counts of covid-related deaths means that while the global toll officially passed 5 million on November 1, the actual number of people lost to the virus is, by The Economist’s count, closer to 17 million.They are not the only organization to point out the disparity.The World Health Organization, which declared COVID-19 as a pandemic in March 2020, has previously said that it considers the actual death toll to be at least 60 percent higher than figures reported officially.The Economist said that undercounts are much more significant in poorer countries.They pointed to Bulgaria. There, pandemic deaths are probably nearly twice as high as the official tally.“In Russia, the official statistics seem to underestimate the true number of COVID-19 deaths by a factor of 3.5; in India the government’s number underestimates the death toll by a factor of ten,” said The Economist report. “As well as leading to a poor understanding of the virus’ true spread, this phenomenon means that the pandemic’s impact is underestimated most in the countries with the least resources to fight it.”Latest figures released by our World in Data showed that almost half (49.9 percent) of the world’s population have received at least one COVD-19 vaccine, with 7.15 billion doses administered globally and an average of 27.19 million administered daily.Yet most vaccinations have taken place in developed countries.Only 3.9 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. ”There are still some reasons to use the official death counts,” The Economist report said. “They can show trends over time within countries, for example.”“But too often they are used to compare rich and poor countries or to assess the global death toll—metrics for which they are useless. They are still used, however, because they are more up to date than excess-death counts, and, unlike them, are available for all countries.”The Economist said it has found a way to remedy this situation, and says it is the only source of daily updated estimates of excess deaths around the world.To find the true death toll of the pandemic, The Economist first collected mortality data for all countries where it was available (with help from researchers and volunteers), and then built a machine learning model to predict it where it is unknown.The organization has made these estimates, as well as their data, code and models, freely available, and presented its work to the World Health Organization, among others.For all the latest headlines follow our Google News channel online or via the app.Their estimates find the most likely global death toll to be 16.8 million, with a “confidence interval of between 10.3 million and 19.5 million.”The likeliest date for when deaths due to the pandemic passed five million fell in the first week of December 2020, it said.Read more:Global COVID-19 death toll tops five million in under two yearsIndia denies recent studies suggesting millions have died from COVID-19Surgeon general Murthy in advisory urges US fight against COVID misinformation
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: Five million? COVID-19 death toll could actually be close to 17 million: Report