Day: May 11, 2021

Russia-linked Cyberattack on US Fuel Pipeline is ‘Criminal Act,’ Biden Says  

A Russia-linked cyberattack targeting the largest U.S. fuel pipeline system is a “criminal act, obviously,” President Joe Biden said Monday.“The agencies across the government have acted quickly to mitigate any impact on our fuel supply,” the president said at the White House at the start of remarks about his economic agenda.Biden, responding to a reporter’s question after he concluded his prepared statement about whether there is any evidence of involvement of Russia’s government, replied: “I’m going to be meeting with President (Vladimir) Putin. And so far, there is no evidence based on — from our intelligence people that Russia is involved.”Biden added, however, with evidence that the ransomware actors are based in Russia, the government in Moscow has “some responsibility to deal with this.”Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., asks a question during a House Natural Resources Committee hearing, July 28, 2020 on Capitol Hill in Washington.A member of the House Armed Services Committee, Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego, said, “The Russian government cannot give refuge to these cyber terrorists without repercussions.”Colonial Pipeline, headquartered in the state of Georgia, proactively shut down its operations on Friday after ransomware hackers broke into some of its networks, according to U.S. officials.“Colonial is currently working with its private cybersecurity consultants to assess potential damage and to determine when it is safe to bring the pipeline back online,” homeland security adviser and deputy national security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall told reporters during a briefing prior to the president’s remarks.“While this situation remains fluid and continues to evolve, the Colonial operations team is executing a plan that involves an incremental process that will facilitate a return to service in a phased approach,” the company said in a FILE – The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building is pictured in Washington, Nov. 30, 2017.“The FBI confirms that the Darkside ransomware is responsible for the compromise of the Colonial Pipeline network,” said the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a statement midday Monday. “We continue to work with the company and our government partners on the investigation.”The FBI has previously advised against paying ransomware. White House officials on Monday said it was up to companies to make that decision and declined to say whether Colonial Pipeline had made a payment to the hackers.”Typically, that is a private sector decision, and the administration has not offered further advice at this time,” deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies Anne Neuberger told White House reporters. “Given the rise in ransomware, that is one area we are definitely looking at now to say what should be the government’s approach.”Some lawmakers have been calling for stronger protections of critical U.S. energy infrastructure and that has been mentioned as a priority by the Biden administration, which last month launched a new public-private initiative to enhance cybersecurity in the electricity sector.“And we’ll follow that with similar initiatives and natural gas pipelines, water and other sectors,” said Biden on Monday.The emergency declaration, issued by the Transportation Department, effective through at least June 8, calls for increasing alternative transportation routes in the United States for oil and gas and eased driver regulations for overtime hours and minimum sleep for carrying fuel in 17 states across southern and eastern states, as well as the District of Columbia.“We are closely monitoring the ongoing situation involving Colonial Pipeline,” Suzanne Lemieux, operations security and emergency response policy manager for the American Petroleum Institute, told VOA.“Cybersecurity is a top priority for our industry, and our members are engaged on a continuous basis with government agencies, including the Transportation Security Administration, Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Department of Energy in order to mitigate risk and fully understand the evolving threat landscape,” she added. Concerning speculation that there are links between the hackers and the Russian government, “we can assume anything we want to, which is part of the gamesmanship in cyberwar,” said Justin Pelletier, director of Rochester Institute of Technology’s Global Cybersecurity Institute Cyber Range and Training Center.“I think a better question to ask is who we can cross off the list. There are many beneficiaries of cyber sell-sword (mercenary) activity and probably everyone can think of several organizations that would like to see an America in decline,” Pelletier told VOA.According to Bryson Bort, senior fellow for cybersecurity and emerging threats at the nonprofit R Street public policy research organization, the malicious code used by Darkside “actively checks that the Russian language package isn’t loaded on a host before it ransoms the computer. Clearly, there is a reason the gang is doing that. Is it just to avoid local enforcement?”Bort, an adviser to the Army Cyber Institute, told VOA it is an open question whether Russian intelligence is using the cybercriminals as a proxy.“Considering this was the fourth U.S. company hit in the energy sector in the last six months by this group, it sure looks like a targeted attack to me,” he said.

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Bodies Found in Indian River Raise Questions About COVID Links

Authorities in India said Tuesday they have yet to determine the cause of death of dozens of people found dead in the Ganges River.
 
Officials in Bihar state said 71 bodies were recovered Monday, while officials in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh said around 100 bodies were found, some on Tuesday.
 
Images of the bodies floating in the river sparked anger and speculation they died from COVID-19, which is surging throughout the South Asian country at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world.  
 
Some medical experts voiced concern that the coronavirus can be spread through contaminated water.
 
“Although there is no global research on how the virus may spread through dead bodies in water bodies, I strongly believe that the water is now polluted,” said Dr. Mohsin Wali. “It is not worth drinking anymore and when these bodies rot, it will be even more dangerous.”
 
Authorities performed autopsies but could not confirm the cause of death because the bodies had decomposed.
 
India had nearly 330,000 new coronavirus cases and 3,867 related deaths on Tuesday, according to Johns Hopkins University. India has the second highest number of confirmed cases worldwide with nearly 23 million and the third highest death toll with nearly 250,000, although experts say the actual figures are almost certainly much higher.
 
The surge has prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi not to travel to Britain for the Group of Seven summit next month, the Indian Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
 
Modi has been criticized for allowing massive gatherings at a religious festival and holding huge election rallies over the past two months even as infections sharply increased.Family members wearing protective gear stand next to ambulances carrying bodies of COVID victims, at an open air cremation site set up on the outskirts of Bangalore, India, May 8, 2021.On Monday, the World Health Organization said a variant of the coronavirus circulating in India is of global concern.   
 
“We classify it as a variant of concern at a global level,” Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead on COVID-19, told a briefing on the B.1.617 variant. “There is some available information to suggest increased transmissibility.”
 
The Philippines announced Tuesday that it had detected its first two cases of the Indian B.1.617 variant.  The variant was discovered in two travelers who returned to the Philippines in April from Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
 
In other developments, U.S. regulators have authorized the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer-BioNTech to be used by children as young as 12 years of age, widening the pool of those eligible to get inoculated.
 
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Monday the shot is safe and effective for children ages 12 to 15. The vaccine is already available under an emergency use authorization to those 16 and older.  
 
The Pfizer vaccine is the first in the United States to be approved for younger people. The approval comes as U.S. officials are seeking to inoculate a larger percentage of the population and will likely prompt millions of U.S. middle and high school students to try to be vaccinated before they head back to class in the fall.
 
While most children with COVID-19 only develop mild symptoms or have no symptoms at all, they are still able to pass along the virus to others.  
 
In a related development on the vaccine front, introduction of another potential COVID-19 vaccine will be delayed until later this year.  U.S.-based pharmaceutical company Novavax announced Monday it will not seek regulatory approval of its experimental vaccine until this July, citing problems in securing the raw materials and equipment needed to manufacture the vaccine.   
 
But Novavax Chief Executive Stanley Erck told reporters on a conference call that the company expects to meet its goal of producing 150 million doses per month by the fourth quarter of this year.
 
Company officials said it expects to release the results of a late-stage clinical trial in North America sometime this month.  A clinical trial conducted in Britain showed the vaccine is about 95-percent effective against the coronavirus. 
 
Novavax has promised to supply more than 1 billion doses of the vaccine to the COVAX global vaccine sharing initiative for poor and middle-income nations, as well as 200 million shots to several European countries.    

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Robotic Kitchen May Revolutionize Home, Restaurant Cooking 

A fully robotic kitchen with a robot chef that can cook thousands of dishes could be a gamechanger in homes and restaurants around the world. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.Producers: Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum   

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Nepal Struggles With 2nd COVID Wave as India’s Outbreak Spills Across Border

Thousands of Nepalese migrants working in India rushed home in recent weeks seeking safe haven from a brutal second wave of the coronavirus pandemic as it battered the country with sickness and death.Now, the small Himalayan country is confronting a crisis like India’s as its health care system buckles under an exponential rise in infections. Nepalese officials are calling for international assistance as it grapples with shortages of oxygen that have plagued India. Political turmoil after Nepali Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli lost a vote of confidence on Monday could make it harder to cope with the pandemic, analysts said.“A number of people are dying as they search for hospitals or during their treatment,” Samir Kumar Adhikari, a spokesperson for Nepal’s Ministry of Health and Population, told VOA. “Almost all hospitals are packed, and although some have space, we are unable to operationalize them because of shortage of oxygen and other logistics.”India and Nepal have an open border policy allowing free movement between the two countries — thousands of Nepalis travel for work in Indian cities, while Indians often travel to Nepal for business.Officials say COVID-19 infections first started to rise in towns like Nepalganj along the Indian border. But Kathmandu Valley where the large cities are situated is now the epicenter of the second wave. Thousands of people have left the capital Kathmandu to return to their villages, raising fears that they will carry the infection and spread it into remote rural areas.Nepal reported over 9,000 daily infections on Monday — 60 times what the country reported at the start of April when Nepal was counting around 150 daily infections.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
Nepalese paramedics treat a COVID-19 patient outside an emergency ward of a government-run hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, May 10, 2021.“We should have learned from [the United Kingdom] and Brazil how difficult it would be to contain the rapidly spreading variants and the measures needed to overcome the situation,” said Suresh Panthee of the Sustainable Study and Research Institute in Kathmandu. “Most importantly, once India started to see a rapid increase in cases, Nepal should have been vigilant to test, quarantine, and isolate. We should have seen the coming danger, but we did not.” He says the large political gatherings held in the country in recent months were “inexcusable.”
The virus appears to have traveled to the country’s most famous mountain — a Norwegian climber, Erlend Ness, said last month he had tested positive for COVID-19 at Everest Base camp. Nepalese culture and tourism ministry has however said that there are no health safety risks at the base camp.The country’s former king, Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah, and his queen, have been hospitalized after testing positive for COVID-19 following a trip to India in April where he attended the Kumbh mela, a Hindu religious festival that epidemiologists have flagged as a super spreader event.  Residents said they fear the spread of the virus in cities like Kathmandu after following the coverage of how people struggled in India’s hospitals.  “We see ambulances parked outside hospitals, people are not getting a bed,” says Vivek Sherchan, a Kathmandu resident who has tested positive for COVID-19. “We worry that the situation is about to get dire.”Officials say that most of the infected people are at home without effective surveillance and warn that the country will not be able to cater to them if they need hospital care. The army is expanding health care facilities in border areas with India.China is sending oxygen cylinders. But Nepal is yet to receive the large-scale international medical aid similar to India. India received assistance from over 40 countries.“We immediately need international support. Right now, we need oxygen support,” said Adhikari, the country’s health ministry spokesperson. “The ministry of health is unable to address the real situation, real problem in hospitals, real problem in home isolation.”Officials fear that conditions will only worsen in the coming days if the current trend continues. “We are struggling. The situation is getting out of control,” Adhikari said.
 

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