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UK health chief defends virus record after Cummings attack

By
The Associated Press
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LONDON — Britain’s health minister on Thursday defended his handling of the coronavirus pandemic after a former top government aide alleged the government’s botched response had led to tens of thousands of needless deaths.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock hit back after Dominic Cummings singled him out for criticism in an excoriating attack on the government.

In testimony to lawmakers on Wednesday, Cummings accused Hancock of lying to the public and said he “should have been fired” for mistakes including testing failures that saw patients with the virus discharged from hospitals to nursing homes. Thousands of people died with COVID-19 in British care homes in the first months of the outbreak.

Hancock said “the unsubstantiated allegations around honesty are not true.”

“I have been straight with people in public and in private throughout,” he told legislators in the House of Commons. “Every day since I began working on the response to this pandemic last January, I’ve got up each morning and asked: ‘What must I do to protect life?”

Cummings, who left his job as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s top adviser in November, claimed the government’s slow and chaotic initial response, and Johnson’s failure to learn from mistakes, meant that tens of thousands of people had died unnecessarily.

He said Johnson was “unfit for the job” of prime minister.

Opposition Labour Party health spokesman Jonathan Ashworth said whether or not Cummings’ allegations were true, the government had questions to answer.

“These allegations from Cummings are either true, and if so the secretary of state (Hancock) potentially stands in breach of the ministerial code … or they are false and the prime minister brought a fantasist and a liar into the heart of Downing Street,” he said. “Which is it?”

The U.K. has recorded almost 128,000 coronavirus deaths, the highest toll in Europe, and experienced one of the world’s deepest recessions in 2020 as three successive lockdowns hobbled the economy.

A mass vaccination campaign that started in December has brought infections and fatalities down sharply, though Britain is now reckoning with a more transmissible new strain of the virus first identified in India. It is spreading across the country and scientists expect it to become the dominant variant in Britain, but they say existing vaccines appear to work against it.

The government says it will begin an independent public inquiry into its handling of the pandemic within the next year. Opposition politicians, and families who have lost loved ones to COVID-19, want it to start sooner.

EU calls on Iran to review sentencing of female activist

By
The Associated Press
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The European Union on Thursday called on Iran to review a case of a prominent female human rights activist who was sentenced to 30 months in prison and 80 lashes on charges of protesting against the killing of protesters during the country’s 2019 unrest.

A spokesperson for the bloc urged Iran to look into the case of Narges Mohammadi under “applicable international human rights law and taking into account her deteriorating health condition.”

Earlier this week, Mohammadi confirmed her sentence in an Instagram post and said she does not “accept any of these sentences.”

“The recent sentencing of the Iranian human rights defender Mrs Narges Mohammadi to prison term and flogging is a worrying development,” the EU said.

In the post, Mohammadi said one of the charges against her is having a party and dancing in jail.

She was released from jail in October 2020, after serving eight and a half years in prison, after her initial, 10-year sentence was commuted. In that case, she was sentenced in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court on charges including planning crimes to harm the security of Iran, spreading propaganda against the government and forming and managing an illegal group.

Before imprisonment she also was vice-president of the banned Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran.

Mohammadi has been close to Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, who founded tyhe center. Ebadi left Iran after the disputed re-election of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, which touched off unprecedented protests and harsh crackdowns by authorities.

In 2018, Mohammadi, an engineer and physic, was awarded the 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prize.

EU leaders express support for holding Tokyo Olympics

By
The Associated Press
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BRUSSELS — The European Union’s two top officials expressed support Thursday for holding the Tokyo Olympics despite growing opposition to the event in Japan because of the coronavirus pandemic.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel discussed the games with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga during a virtual EU-Japan summit.

“He told us that he is engaged with his country’s authorities to take all necessary precautionary measures,” Michel said after the talks.

Initially planned last year, the Tokyo Olympics have been delayed by a year because of the pandemic. The are scheduled to open on July 23.

In the meeting’s joint statement, leaders said they support the holding of the rescheduled Olympics “in a safe and secure manner this summer as a symbol of global unity in defeating COVID-19.”

With only a tiny percentage of Japanese people now vaccinated, public opinion polls in the country show between 60-80% want the Olympics canceled, and an online petition asking for the games be canceled has gained 400,000 signatures in a few weeks. Tokyo, Osaka and other regions of the country are under a state of emergency that is likely to be extended past its May 31 expiration.

Organizers and the IOC, often citing the authority of the World Health Organization, say the games can be held safely with 15,000 Olympic and Paralympic athletes entering Japan, joined by tens of thousands of judges, officials, sponsors, broadcasters and media. Fans from abroad have already been banned, and organizers are to announce next month if any fans at all will be allowed into Olympic venues.

“We have of course said we are looking forward to the Olympic Games,” von der Leyen said. “The signal that, from the European Union, more than 100 million doses of vaccines have been authorized to be exported to Japan also is a strong sign that we support any preparation for the Olympic Games, and the safety of these games.”

More AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/olympic-games and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

European privacy groups challenge facial scan firm Clearview

By
The Associated Press
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LONDON — Privacy campaign groups filed legal complaints Thursday with European regulators against Clearview AI, alleging the facial recognition technology it provides to law enforcement agencies and businesses breaches stringent European Union privacy rules.

Four privacy campaign groups complained to data protection authorities in France, Austria, Greece, Italy and the U.K. about Clearview’s practices. They say the company stockpiled biometric data on more than 3 billion people without their knowledge or permission by “scraping” their images from websites.

The complaints say Clearview didn’t have any legal basis to collect and process this data under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which covers facial image data. Britain adopted its own version of the EU privacy rules after it left the bloc.

New York-based Clearview didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.

News of Clearview’s stockpile, first reported by The New York Times, raised concerns that the type of surveillance seen in China could happen in Western democracies.

Privacy International said European data protection laws clearly outline the purposes for which companies can use personal data.

“Extracting our unique facial features or even sharing them with the police and other companies goes far beyond what we could ever expect as online users,” said Ioannis Kouvakas, London-based Privacy International’s legal officer.

Italy’s Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, Greece’s Homo Digitalis and Austria’s noyb were also part of the challenge.

Clearview is already facing global scrutiny.

American civil liberties activists filed a similar legal challenge in March that sought to bar Clearview from collecting biometric information in California and force it to delete data on Californians collected from sites including Facebook, Twitter, Google and Venmo.

Meanwhile, privacy watchdogs in Britain, Australia and Canada have opened investigations into the company.

Clearview’s CEO Hoan Ton-That has said the company’s database is compiled with publicly available photos from the open web and can’t be used for surveillance.

Real Madrid says Zidane stepping down as team’s coach

By
The Associated Press
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MADRID — Zinedine Zidane is stepping down as Real Madrid coach, again.

The club said Thursday the Frenchman is leaving his job, four days after a season in which Madrid failed to win a title for the first time in more than a decade.

“Zidane is one of the great myths of Real Madrid and his legend goes beyond what he has been as a coach and player of our club,” Madrid said in a statement.

Zidane had a contract through June 2022.

Zidane left the club for the first time after leading Madrid to one of its most successful runs from 2016-2018, with three consecutive Champions League titles. In his two years and five months in charge, Madrid won a total of nine trophies, including two Club World Cups, two UEFA Super Cups, one Spanish league and one Spanish Super Cup.

He only won the league title once and a Spanish Super Cup in his second stint.

He quit the first time less than a week after leading the team to its third straight Champions League title, saying it was time for a change and that he didn’t see it clearly that the club would keep winning with him in charge.

Zidane had been dismissing talks about his future recently, saying that he would discuss it with the club. He said he believed that Madrid could do well without him as coach.

More AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Twitter urges Indian gov’t to respect freedom of expression

By
The Associated Press
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NEW DELHI — Twitter on Thursday said it is worried about the safety of its staff in India and called for the government to respect freedom of expression, days after Indian police visited its office in New Delhi over its labeling of a tweet by a governing party spokesman as “manipulated media.”

Twitter has been involved in a tense battle with the Indian government, which has often asked it to restrict content alleging Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration is trying to silence criticism, including of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Twitter said it has “concerns with regards to the use of intimidation tactics by the police” and “the potential threat to freedom of expression for the people we serve.”

On Monday, Indian police visited the Twitter office in New Delhi to serve a notice directing it to answer questions about its tagging of the tweet as manipulated.

“It appears that Twitter has some information which is not known to us on the basis of which they have classified it as such,” police said in a statement.

On Wednesday, the messaging app WhatsApp filed a lawsuit in Delhi High Court arguing that new government rules that require it to make messages “traceable” to external parties are unconstitutional and undermine the fundamental right to privacy.

WhatsApp currently uses end-to-end encryption for its messaging service, which encrypts messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and receiver are able to read the messages sent between them.

Sweeping new regulations for technology companies were announced in February that hold them more accountable for content shared on their platforms. A 90-day grace period for complying with the rules ended Wednesday.

Leaders from Modi’s party last week tweeted portions of a document they said was created by the main opposition Congress party to make the government look bad over its handling of the pandemic. Some Congress leaders complained to Twitter, saying the document was forged. In response, Twitter marked some posts as “manipulated media.”

Under Twitter rules, it applies “manipulated media” tags to posts that have been “deceptively altered or fabricated.”

Twitter said in its statement Thursday that “to keep our service available, we will strive to comply with applicable law in India.”

“But, just as we do around the world, we will continue to be strictly guided by principles of transparency, a commitment to empowering every voice on the service, and protecting freedom of expression and privacy under the rule of law,” it said.

Critics accuse Modi’s government of silencing criticism on social media, particularly Twitter, a charge senior leaders of the governing party have denied.

The new social media regulations give the government more power to police online content. They require internet platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to erase content that authorities deem to be unlawful and to help with police investigations, including identifying the originators of “mischievous information.”

Social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, were given three months to comply.

UN rights chief: Israeli strikes in Gaza may be war crimes

By
The Associated Press
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GENEVA — The U.N. rights chief said on Thursday that Israeli forces may have committed war crimes in the latest, 11-day war with the militant group Hamas that rules the Gaza Strip

The remarks by Michelle Bachelet came as the U.N.’s top human rights body opened a one-day special session to discuss the plight faced by Palestinians in the fighting this month. She said that Hamas’ indiscriminate rocketing during the conflict was also a clear violation of the rules of war.

The U.N. high commissioner for human rights spoke to the Human Rights Council, chronicling the “most significant escalation of hostilities since 2014” that left devastation and death in the Gaza Strip before a cease-fire last week.

“Air strikes in such densely populated areas resulted in a high level of civilian fatalities and injuries, as well as the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure,” she said. “Such strikes raise serious concerns of Israel’s compliance with distinction and proportionality under international humanitarian law.”

“Such attacks may constitute war crimes,” she added, if deemed to be indiscriminate and disproportionate in their impact on civilians.

In an apparent allusion to tactics of Hamas, she said it was a violation of international humanitarian law to locate military assess in densely populated civilian areas, or to launch attacks from them.

Hamas “rockets are indiscriminate and fail to distinguish between military and civilian objects, and their use, thereby, constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law,” she added. “However, the actions of one party do not absolve the other from its obligations under international law.”

“Unless the root causes of the violence are addressed, it will certainly be a matter of time until the next round of violence commences with further pain and suffering for civilians on all sides, “ she also said.

The day-long debate involved personal accounts from Palestinians — such as that of a young woman journalist from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in east Jerusalem, an early flashpoint that led to the violence — as well as statements from the council’s 47 member states and also observer states.

The Organization of Islamic Conference has presented a resolution that, if passed by the council, would mark an unprecedented level of scrutiny authorized by the council by setting up a permanent commission to report on human rights violations in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

A vote on the draft resolution was likely at the end of the session, which is largely virtual.

Israel — backed at times by the United States — accuses the council of anti-Israel bias and has generally refused to cooperate with its investigators. Israel’s ambassador, Meirav Eilon Shahar, has called on member states to oppose Thursday’s meeting.

US pipelines ordered to increase cyber defenses after hack

By
The Associated Press
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WASHINGTON — U.S. pipeline operators will be required for the first time to conduct a cybersecurity assessment under a Biden administration directive in response to the ransomware hack that disrupted gas supplies in several states this month.

The Transportation Security Administration directive being issued Thursday will also mandate that the owners and operators of the nation’s pipelines report any cyber incidents to the federal government and have a cybersecurity coordinator available at all times to work with authorities in the event of an attack like the one that shut down Colonial Pipeline.

Pipeline companies, which until now operated under voluntary guidelines, could face financial penalties that start at $7,000 per day if they fail to comply with a security directive that reflects an administration focus on cybersecurity that predates the May attack on Colonial, senior Department of Homeland Security officials said.

“The evolution of ransomware attacks in the last 12-18 months has gotten to a point that it poses a national security risk and that we are concerned about the impact on national critical functions,” one of the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the regulation ahead of the formal release.

Criminal syndicates, often based in Russia or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, have unleashed a wave of ransomware attacks in which they scramble a target’s data with encryption and demand a ransom. Victims have included state and local governments, hospitals and medical researchers and businesses large and small, leaving some victims unable to perform even routine operations.

The hack that targeted Colonial Pipeline prompted the company to shut down a system that delivers about 45% of the gasoline consumed on the East Coast for about a week. It led to panic-buying and shortages at gas stations from Washington, D.C., to Florida.

It came up in Congress on Wednesday as DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas outlined the agency’s budget next year to the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee for homeland security.

“The Colonial Pipeline breach, in particular, was a wake-up call to many Americans about how malicious cyber actors, often backed by foreign states, can disrupt the U.S. economy and all of our lives,” said Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., the panel’s chair.

Colonial Pipeline, based in Alpharetta, Georgia, later disclosed it paid a ransom of $4.4 million to retrieve access to its data from the gang of hackers, linked by the FBI to a Russian-speaking criminal syndicate known as DarkSide.

The episode exposed the threat to the more than 2.7 million miles (4.4 million kilometers) of pipeline used to transport oil, other liquids and natural gas around the U.S.

The TSA is responsible for the physical security and cybersecurity of this network and has worked with the owners and operators, about 100 companies in all, to develop the voluntary guidelines and conducts on-site assessments. Lawmakers and experts have been critical of industry security standards.

DHS, under Mayorkas, launched a “60-day sprint” to focus the agency on the ransomware threat weeks before the Colonial Pipeline hack became publicly known on May 7. The directive is intended to address issues that emerged in the response and may have enabled the hack to occur in the first place.

Pipeline owners will be required to do the assessment within 30 days. They will have to show how their processes line up with the voluntary guidelines, identify any gaps and provide a plan for addressing them, the officials said.

Operators will be required for the first time to report any cybersecurity incidents to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, another DHS component. Companies have been reluctant to report breaches in the past for a variety of reasons, including embarrassment and concern that they could expose themselves to legal liability.

Pipeline companies will also have to designate a cybersecurity coordinator who would be on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week to work with TSA and CISA in case of a breach like the one at Colonial Pipeline.

Bayern signs defender Omar Richards from 2nd-tier Reading

By
The Associated Press
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MUNICH — Bayern Munich has signed defender Omar Richards on a free transfer from second-division English club Reading.

The 23-year-old Englishman signed a four-year deal with the German champions, the team said Thursday.

“Omar is a technically gifted player on the left side of defense,” Bayern sporting director Hasan Salihamidžić said. “He finds good solutions going forward, he’s very alert, and we trust him to play a good role in our team.”

Richards, who provides support for left back Alphonso Davies, called it “a dream has come true.” He will wear the No. 3 shirt.

Richards is Bayern’s second signing for the new season after French defender Dayot Upamecano from league rival Leipzig.

It also has a new coach in Julian Nagelsmann. He switched from Leipzig to take over from Hansi Flick, who will become the Germany coach after the European Championship.

More AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

China says politics behind US call for virus origin probe

By
The Associated Press
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BEIJING — China on Thursday accused the Biden administration of playing politics and shirking its responsibility in calling for a renewed investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that was first detected in China in late 2019.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a daily briefing that President Joe Biden’s order showed the U.S. “does not care about facts and truth, nor is it interested in serious scientific origin tracing.”

Biden told U.S. intelligence officials to redouble their efforts to investigate the origins of the pandemic, including any possibility the trail might lead to a Chinese laboratory.

After months of minimizing that possibility as a fringe theory, the Biden administration is joining worldwide pressure on China to be more open about the outbreak, aiming to head off Republican complaints the president has not been tough enough to press China on alleged obstruction.

Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have promoted the theory that the virus emerged from a laboratory rather than naturally through human contact with an infected animal in Wuhan, China.

Zhao also said the U.S. must open itself up to investigations into its biological laboratories, including at the military’s Fort Detrick base.

“The U.S. side claims that it wants China to participate in a comprehensive, transparent, evidence-based international investigation,” Zhao said. “We would like to ask the U.S. side to do the same as China and immediately cooperate with the World Health Organization on origin tracing research in a scientific manner.”

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