Day: June 7, 2021

U.S. law enforcement officials say they have hit back at the Russian-based criminal network that caused gas pipelines to shut down across parts of the country last month, seizing much of the multimillion-dollar ransom payment before it could be used.The Justice Department announced Monday it recovered $2.3 million of the approximately $5 million Colonial Pipeline paid to the DarkSide Network following the ransomware attack, which resulted in fuel shortages along the U.S. East Coast.“We turned the tables on DarkSide,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, describing the seizure as a “significant development.”“Ransomware attacks are always unacceptable, but when they target critical infrastructure, we will spare no effort in our response,” she added.Tanker trucks are parked near the entrance of Colonial Pipeline Company, May 12, 2021, in Charlotte, N.C.Colonial Pipeline, the target of DarkSide’s May 7 attack, is the top fuel pipeline operator in the U.S., responsible for about half of the fuel supply for the East Coast.Following the attack, the company made the decision to meet DarkSide’s demands, paying out about $5 million in Bitcoin cryptocurrency. But U.S. government officials said Colonial also worked closely with law enforcement agencies, who were able to track the payment to a virtual wallet.Specifically, officials said they were able to obtain a virtual key that unlocked the contents of the wallet.As a result, the Justice Department said it was able to recover about 80% of the cryptocurrency, which has dropped in value in recent weeks, before DarkSide could access it.“We deprived a cybercriminal enterprise of the object of their activity,” said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. “For financially motivated cybercriminals, especially those presumably located overseas, cutting off access to revenue is one of the most impactful consequences we can impose.”Officials said this is not the first time they have been able to recover ransom payment made to groups like DarkSide, and encouraged other companies to cooperate with the government if they are targeted.“The message we are sending today is that if you come forward and work with law enforcement, we may be able to take the type of action that we took today to deprive the criminal actors of what they’re going after,” Monaco said.But she added that this type of operation is a “significant undertaking” and “we cannot guarantee, and we may not be able to do this, in every instance.”The FBI has been investigating DarkSide since last October, blaming the network for attacks against 90 victims across critical sectors such as manufacturing, health care and energy.DarkSide and its affiliates have also been connected to ransomware attacks in at least 14 other countries. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported the group made almost $60 million in seven months, including $46 million in the first three months of this year.In a statement late Monday, Colonial Pipeline President Joseph Blount said the company was grateful for the help from both the Justice Department and the FBI, calling them “instrumental in helping us to understand the threat actor and their tactics.”“Holding cyber criminals accountable and disrupting the ecosystem that allows them to operate is the best way to deter and defend against future attacks of this nature,” Blount added. “As our investigation into this event continues, Colonial will continue its transparency in sharing intelligence and learnings with the FBI and other federal agencies.”The Justice Department announcement also earned praise from some private cybersecurity firms, with one calling the seizure of the ransom payment a “welcome development.”“In addition to the immediate benefits of this approach, a stronger focus on disruption may disincentivize this behavior, which is growing in a vicious cycle,” John Hultquist, vice president of analysis at Mandiant, said in a statement. “Law enforcement agencies need to broaden their approach beyond building cases against criminals who may be beyond the grasp of the law.”U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to raise the issue of the DarkSide ransomware attack when he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, Switzerland, next week.Biden has previously said Moscow bears “some responsibility” to deal with the attack.“The president’s message will be that responsible states do not harbor ransomware criminals, and responsible countries take decisive action against these ransomware networks,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last week.National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday that Biden will also use meetings next week with G-7 leaders to discuss “increasing the robustness and resilience of our defense against ransomware attacks.”Sullivan said the U.S. also hopes to discuss ways to better share information about ransomware attacks.Information from Reuters was used in this report.
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The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations met Monday with the head of the U.N. Population Fund in the first such high-level engagement in more than four years.The U.S. Mission to the United Nations said Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield highlighted the resumption of extensive support to the organization, which provides life-saving health care to millions of women and girls around the world.“I’m delighted to announce the resumption of U.S. humanitarian funding for UNFPA, including support for the Rohingya refugee crisis, Afghanistan, Sudan and those fleeing the Tigray region,” Thomas-Greenfield tweeted after the meeting. To mark our renewed commitment to @UNFPA, I met today with Executive Director Natalia Kanem. I’m delighted to announce the resumption of U.S. humanitarian funding for UNFPA, including support for the Rohingya refugee crisis, Afghanistan, Sudan and those fleeing the Tigray region. pic.twitter.com/aMJ9cAbgpL— Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield (@USAmbUN) June 7, 2021In April 2017, the Trump administration withdrew funding to UNFPA, saying it “supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization” in China. For decades, China had a “one-child policy” for couples, which it revised in 2016 to a “two-child policy.” The country had been accused of using forced sterilization and abortions to enforce the restrictions. Last week, it relaxed the policy further, saying it would allow families to have up to three children, due to decreasing birth rates.The United Nations rejected the Trump administration’s accusation, but that did not persuade Washington to restore the nearly $76 million the U.S. contributed to the agency’s core operating budget. It was also the beginning of what many Western diplomats and activists said was the former Republican administration’s war on women’s health and reproductive rights at the United Nations.Since taking office in January, the Biden administration has offered the agency nearly $31 million toward its core operating budget. Washington has also resumed funding UNFPA’s humanitarian activities, including $2.6 million for the Rohingya refugee crisis and nearly $1.2 million for Ethiopian refugees in Sudan fleeing the conflict in the Tigray Region. The U.S. is also contributing nearly $1.5 million for international protection issues in Afghanistan and $1.3 million to assist Sudan in improving the response to gender-based violence for internally displaced persons and vulnerable communities.In 2015, UNFPA received $979 million in total contributions for its work in more than 150 countries. The United States provided nearly $76 million to the fund’s core budget and specific programs and initiatives, making it one of the top international donors. 
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In a nationwide address Monday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the federal government would take a larger role in obtaining vaccines for Indian states.“Government of India itself will buy 75% of the total vaccine production from vaccine manufacturers and give it free to the state governments.”FILE PHOTO: India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a gathering in Ahmedabad, India, March 12, 2021.According to the New York Times, less than 4% of Indians have been fully vaccinated.India’s health ministry on Monday reported 100,636 new COVID-19 infections, the lowest tally in 61 days, and 2,427 deaths in the previous 24-hour period.In other COVID-19 news, Britain’s health minister Matt Hancock said Sunday the delta variant of the coronavirus, first identified in India, may be up to 40% more transmissible than the alpha variant.The delta variant has become the dominant strain in Britain, replacing the alpha variant first identified in Kent, Hancock told reporters. It is possible the delta variant could threaten plans to lift lockdown restrictions by June 21, he said.Hancock stressed the importance of Britons getting their vaccinations. Early data show the vaccine is effective against the delta variant after people have received both doses, he said.People queue outside a vaccination center for those aged over 18 years old at the Belmont Health Center in Harrow, amid the coronavirus outbreak, in London, June 6, 2021.Currently, 40% of the United Kingdom’s population has been fully vaccinated, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. New cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, have dropped dramatically since the United Kingdom began its vaccination campaign.Uganda began a 42-day pandemic lockdown Monday, including the closing of schools and universities, and suspended public gatherings, including in churches and mosques.Public transportation will be suspended starting Thursday.The country has seen an uptick in cases in recent weeks, and officials say the current wave is impacting people 20 to 39 years of age.The global count of COVID-19 cases reached 173.4 million Monday, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
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Government health officials on Monday approved the first new drug for Alzheimer’s disease in nearly 20 years, disregarding warnings from independent advisers that the much-debated treatment hasn’t been shown to help slow the brain-destroying disease.The Food and Drug Administration said it approved the drug from Biogen based on results that seemed “reasonably likely” to benefit Alzheimer’s patients.  It’s the only therapy that U.S. regulators have said can likely treat the underlying disease, rather than manage symptoms like anxiety and insomnia.The decision, which could impact millions of Americans and their families, is certain to spark disagreements among physicians, medical researchers and patient groups. It also has far-reaching implications for the standards used to evaluate experimental therapies, including those that show only incremental benefits.The new drug, which Biogen developed with Japan’s Eisai Co., did not reverse mental decline, only slowing it in one study. The medication, aducanumab, will be marketed as Aduhelm and is to be given as an infusion every four weeks.Dr. Caleb Alexander, an FDA adviser who recommended against the drug’s approval, said he was “surprised and disappointed” by the decision.”The FDA gets the respect that it does because it has regulatory standards that are based on firm evidence. In this case, I think they gave the product a pass,” said Alexander, a medical researcher at Johns Hopkins University.The FDA’s top drug regulator acknowledged that “residual uncertainties” surround the drug, but said Aduhelm’s ability to reduce harmful clumps of plaque in the brain is expected to help slow dementia.”The data supports patients and caregivers having the choice to use this drug,” Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni told reporters. She said FDA carefully weighed the needs of people living with the “devastating, debilitating and deadly disease.”Under terms of the so-called accelerated approval, the FDA is requiring the drugmaker to conduct a follow-up study to confirm benefits for patients. If the study fails to show effectiveness, the FDA could pull the drug from the market, though the agency rarely does so.Biogen said the drug would cost about $56,000 for a typical year’s worth of treatment, and said the price would not be raised for four years. Most patients won’t pay anywhere near that amount thanks to insurance coverage and other discounts. The company said it aims to complete its follow-up trial of the drug by 2030.The nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review said that “any price is too high” if the drug’s benefit isn’t confirmed in follow-up studies. About 6 million people in the U.S. and many more worldwide have Alzheimer’s, which gradually attacks areas of the brain needed for memory, reasoning, communication and basic daily tasks. In the final stages of the disease, those afflicted lose the ability to swallow. The global burden of the disease, the most common cause of dementia, is only expected to grow as millions more baby boomers progress further into their 60s and 70s.Aducanumab helps clear a protein called beta-amyloid from the brain. Other experimental drugs have done that before but they made no difference in patients’ ability to think, care for themselves or live independently.The pharmaceutical industry’s drug pipeline has been littered for years with failed Alzheimer’s treatments. The FDA’s greenlight Monday is likely to revive investments in therapies previously shelved by drugmakers.The new medicine is manufactured from living cells and will be given via infusion at a doctor’s office or hospital.Researchers don’t fully understand what causes Alzheimer’s but there’s broad agreement the brain plaque targeted by aducanumab is just one contributor. Evidence suggests family history, education and chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease may all play a role.”This is a sign of hope but not the final answer,” said Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, which wasn’t involved in the Biogen studies but funds research into how Alzheimer’s forms. “Amyloid is important but not the only contributing factor.”Patients taking aducanumab saw their thinking skills decline 22% more slowly than patients taking a placebo.But that meant a difference of just 0.39 on an 18-point score of cognitive and functional ability. And it’s unclear how such metrics translate into practical benefits, like greater independence or ability to recall important details.The FDA’s review of the drug has become a flashpoint in longstanding debates over standards used to evaluate therapies for hard-to-treat conditions. On one side, groups representing Alzheimer’s patients and their families say any new therapy — even one of small benefit — warrants approval. But many experts warn that greenlighting the drug could set a dangerous precedent, opening the door to treatments of questionable benefit.The approval came despite a scathing assessment in November by the FDA’s outside panel of neurological experts. The group voted “no” to a series of questions on whether reanalyzed data from a single study submitted by Biogen showed the drug was effective.Biogen halted two studies in 2019 after disappointing results suggested aducanumab would not meet its goal of slowing mental and functional decline in Alzheimer’s patients.Several months later, the company reversed course, announcing that a new analysis of one of the studies showed the drug was effective at higher doses and the FDA had advised that it warranted review. Company scientists said the drug’s initial failure was the result of some patients not receiving high enough doses to slow the disease.But the changes to dosing and the company’s after-the-fact analysis made the results hard to interpret, raising skepticism among many experts, including those on the FDA panel.The FDA isn’t required to follow the advice of its outside panelists and has previously disregarded their input when making similarly high-profile drug decisions.About 600 U.S. medical specialists already prescribe the drug through Biogen’s studies and many more are expected to begin offering it. Many practical questions remain unanswered: How long do patients benefit? How do physicians determine when to discontinue the drug? Does the drug have any benefit in patients with more advanced dementia?With FDA approval, aducanumab is certain to be covered by virtually all insurers, including Medicare, the government plan for seniors that covers more than 60 million people.Even qualifying for the drug could be expensive. It’s only been tested in people with mild dementia from Alzheimer’s or a less severe condition called mild cognitive impairment. To verify a diagnosis could require brain scans that cost $5,000 or more. Insurers, including Medicare, don’t cover the scans because their benefits are unclear, but that could change if the scans become a gateway to treatment.Additional scans will be needed to monitor potential side effects. The drug carries a warning about temporary brain swelling that can sometimes cause headaches, confusion and dizziness. Other side effects included allergic reactions, diarrhea and disorientation. 
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Health professionals continue to see heart disease in some young people who have had COVID-19, those who have been vaccinated against the virus, and among student athletes, in general.Cardiomyopathy is an inflammation and weakening in the walls of the heart.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta has reviewed vaccine safety data weekly since the start of the U.S. vaccination program and cautions that cases among those who have received the COVID-19 vaccine are “mild and few.” The agency says the condition appears in males more than females, more often following the second shot in a two-dose regimen, and usually around four days after the vaccination.Coronavirus-related cardiomyopathy was first observed last year in younger people when college athletes resumed play as the pandemic spread in the United States. College sport events generate significant revenues for colleges and universities, and some big schools that draw thousands into stadiums returned players to campus with the hope of public events resuming sooner than later.In a study of college athletes conducted since last September, a higher incidence of cardiomyopathy, also called myocarditis, has been seen in athletes who contracted the coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2. Symptoms include shortness of breath, weakness, tiredness, dizziness and abnormal heart rhythm, according to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.   “Myocarditis is a leading cause of sudden death in competitive athletes,” researchers wrote in JAMA Cardiology in May, adding, “Myocardial inflammation is known to occur with SARS-CoV-2,” the medical name for the coronavirus. Another study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in March found that more than one in three “previously healthy college athletes recovering from COVID-19 infection showed … resolving pericardial inflammation.”Resolving is the key word here: Researchers concluded that “no athlete showed … features to suggest an ongoing myocarditis,” or inflammation of the heart walls. Knowing when athletes should play or rest is important, and research has not nailed down the long-term effects yet, the researchers said.“Further studies are needed to understand the clinical implications and long-term evolution of these abnormalities in uncomplicated COVID-19,” they wrote.  Pediatric cardiologist Geoffrey Rosenthal has observed myocarditis in young people, specifically during the pandemic. He has been the team cardiologist for the University of Maryland, College Park since 2020.  “Myocarditis is one of the more common causes of sudden death in athletes,” said Rosenthal.  “If someone had myocarditis, it’s one of the standard recommendations that they not exercise strenuously for three to six months after their diagnosis to allow time for their heart to heal, and lessen their risk of a sudden event,” he said.  The residual health of athletes who have had COVID is being assessed to try to understand the risks.  Ohio State University (OSU) was one of the big universities that brought players back to campus amid the pandemic and detected heart changes in athletes who tested positive for the infection.It has led the effort to monitor athletes by overseeing a registry of nearly 1,600 COVID-19 positive athletes in the Big Ten sports conference, or a division of 14 colleges and universities among other divisions nationally.  Looking at a smaller sample of 37 athletes diagnosed with myocarditis, 28 didn’t exhibit symptoms, reported OSU.Rosenthal noted that research and cooperation among universities has advanced detection of myocarditis among young people and student athletes, who are largely asymptomatic, by using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The University of Maryland adopted cardiac MRI screening for athletes before almost all other universities in the country as the pandemic was starting, he said.“The EKG is normal, and their blood tests are normal, and their echo [cardiogram] is OK,” Rosenthal explained. “And then we get the MRI and find out that there’s an abnormality that we weren’t expecting, and that we never would have found out about had we not done the MRI.“There’s still a lot of cardiac work that’s going on in the younger student population,” Rosenthal said.  And this advancement in detection will help other athletes, younger and older.  “There’s also hope that it will inform our understanding of COVID in older athletes, in older and non-elite athletes. … the weekend warriors,” he said.But this research will also help non-athletes whose jobs demand physical labor.  “Other populations that these results might help inform is the military and other professions and occupations in which physical activity is part of what people are doing,” Rosenthal said.  “First responders, firefighters, policemen, you know, other people whose jobs have physical demands. In addition to gaining insight into the health of our student athletes what other populations can we help through this work?” 
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Authorities on Greece’s most popular tourist island, Mykonos, will deploy more than a dozen drones to spot those who defy safety protocols aimed at preventing the spread and resurgence of COVID-19. 
 
The decision, known as “Operation Mykonos,” comes after a string of local so-called  “Corona-parties” organized by entrepreneurs at private villas and estates in recent weeks to bypass safety rules banning the operation of nightclubs. 
 
It also comes as the beleaguered government of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis scrambles to revive its battered tourism sector, luring foreign travelers — mainly from the United States, Europe, Israel, and Russia —  with the promise of a safe summer holiday stay under the Greek sun. 
 
Foreign travelers are required to abide by local lockdowns, curfews, and safety protocols during their stays. 
 FILE – People gather as the sun sets at the windmills on the Aegean Sea island of Mykonos, Greece, Aug. 16, 2020.Under “Operation Mykonos,” authorities will deploy 15 drones to fly over private villas or establishments in Mykonos that in recent weeks were host to parties packed with hundreds of locals and foreigners. Ten-member strong teams of officers will also be formed to raid the establishments upon notice, arresting and fining the offenders, authorities told VOA. 
 
Fines range between $365 to over $6,000. 
 
Officials tell VOA the measures, coupled with heightened police controls, inspections and added surveillance cameras across Mykonos, will serve as a blueprint for other popular hotspots among foreign travelers. These include Rhodes, Santorini and Paros, according to authorities. 
 
“Illegal parties spell a greater risk of seeing the virus spread, infecting more and more people,” warned Nikos Hardalias, the head of Greece’s Civil Protection Agency, on Sunday. “It spells a spike in COVID cases that can lead to fresh restrictions, leading businesses to shut down, causing major damage to tourist areas.” 
 
“It is high time,” he warned, “for everyone to size up to the challenge and take on full responsibility of their actions.” 
 
On Monday, government spokesman Aristotelia Peloni also criticized the mushrooming “corona-parties” gripping the country, saying she wished “Greece’s youth showed similar zeal and enthusiasm in the state’s nationwide vaccination drive.” 
 
“The country’s freedom,” she said, “can only come through comprehensive immunization.” 
 
Effectively in lockdown since last November, Greece started easing some of its sweeping restrictions, including curfews and travel bans, in mid-May when it re-launched international travel. 
 
The latest crackdown, however, underscores the paradox of what critics call a hasty and ill-thought-out strategy.  FILE – A waiter serves a group of people in a restaurant of Plaka district, as restaurants and cafes in Greece open after six months of lockdown, amid the coronavirus outbreak, in Athens, Greece, May 3, 2021.“You can’t say ‘restaurants and bars can open but no music playing in the background to block crowds from gathering,’” said Heracles Zissimopoulos, a leading entrepreneur on the island of Mykonos. “It’s absurd.” 
 
“The government should seriously rethink its policy, and provide locals and tourists with an outlet, instead. Otherwise, these types of parties will be difficult to stop,” he added. 
 
Greece recorded less than 3,000 cases during the country’s first bout with the pandemic. But as tourists streamed in last summer, infections and deaths sky-rocketed, making Greeks apprehensive to foreign travelers. 
 
But with 20 percent of the nation’s domestic output reliant on tourism, Greeks now know they can ill afford to lose a second summer tourism season in a row. 
 FILE – People wait at the reception hall of a COVID-19 vaccination mega center in Athens, Feb. 15, 2021.Under a campaign called “Blue Freedom,” the government wants to vaccinate all 700,000 or so adult residents of Greece’s islands in the Aegean and Ionian Seas by the end of June, hoping Greece can be included in Britain’s revised green-list of travel nations. All islanders are being offered the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine to boost immunization. 
 
As of early June, Mykonos had vaccinated about four in ten of its residents, and Santorini over 50% — among the highest in the country. 
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Environmentalists, for decades, have had mixed feelings about nuclear power. Now, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has decided to cautiously embrace the energy resource — despite lingering safety concerns — to help achieve its goal of a net zero carbon economy for America by the year 2050. VOA’s White House bureau chief Steve Herman reports from the North Anna Power Station in Mineral, Virginia.   
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Western military experts are assessing whether an autonomous drone operated by artificial intelligence, or AI, killed people — in Libya last year — for the first time without a human controller directing it remotely to do so.
 
A report by a United Nations panel of experts issued last week that concluded an advanced drone deployed in Libya “hunted down and remotely engaged” soldiers fighting for Libyan general Khalifa Haftar has prompted a frenetic debate among Western security officials and analysts.  
 
Governments at the United Nations have been debating for months whether a global pact should be agreed on the use of armed drones, autonomous and otherwise, and what restrictions should be placed on them. The U.N.’s Libya report is adding urgency to the debate. Drone advances have “a lot of implications regionally and globally,” says Ziya Meral of the Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank.
 
“It is time to assess where things are with Turkish drones and advanced warfare technology and what this means for the region and what it means for NATO,” he said at a RUSI-hosted event in London.  
 
According to the U.N. report, Turkish-made Kargu-2 lethal autonomous aircraft launched so-called swarm attacks, likely on behalf of Libya’s Government of National Accord, against the warlord Haftar’s militias in March last year, marking the first time AI-equipped drones accomplished a successful attack. Remnants of a Kargu-2 were recovered later.  
 
The use of autonomous drones that do not require human operators to guide them remotely once they have been programmed is opposed by many human rights organizations. There were rumors that Turkish-supplied AI drones, alongside remote-guided ones, were used last year by Azerbaijani forces in their clashes with Armenia in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and its surrounding territories.
 Myriad of dilemmas
If AI drones did launch lethal swarm attacks it would mark a “new chapter in autonomous weapons,” worries the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Critics of AI drones, which can use facial-recognition technology, say they raise a number of moral, ethical and legal dilemmas.  
 
“These types of weapons operate on software-based algorithms ‘taught’ through large training datasets to, for example, classify various objects. Computer vision programs can be trained to identify school buses, tractors, and tanks. But the datasets they train on may not be sufficiently complex or robust, and an artificial intelligence (AI) may ‘learn’ the wrong lesson,” the non-profit Bulletin warns.  
 
The manufacturer of the Kargu-2, Defense Technologies and Trade (STM), told Turkish media last year that their drones are equipped with facial-recognition technology, allowing individual targets to be identified and neutralized without having to deploy ground forces. And company executives say Kargu-2 drones can swarm together overwhelming defenses.
 
Last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lauded the success of Turkish unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), saying the results they had produced “require war strategies to be rewritten.” Turkey has deployed them in military operations in northern Syria, Turkish officials have acknowledged.  
 
Speaking at a parliamentary meeting of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara, Erdogan said Turkey plans to go further and is aiming to be among the first countries to develop an AI-managed warplane. Recently the chief technology officer of Baykar, a major Turkish drone manufacturer, announced the company had slated 2023 for the maiden flight of its prototype unmanned fighter jet.
 ‘A significant player’
Sanctions and embargoes on Turkey in recent years have been a major driving force behind Ankara pressing ahead to develop a new generation of unconventional weapons, says Ulrike Franke of the European Council for Foreign Relations. “Turkey has become a significant player in the global drone market,” she said at the RUSI event. When it comes to armed drones, she noted, there are four states dominating drone development — the U.S., Israel, China and Turkey. The latter pair, the “new kids on the block,” are driving drone proliferation because unlike the U.S. they are not reticent about export sales, she said.  
 
“Turkey has shown that a mid-sized power, when it puts its mind and money behind it, can develop very sophisticated armed drones,” says Franke.
 
Last October when the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh saw the worst fighting there since 1994, Turkish drones were assessed as having given Azerbaijan a key edge over the Armenians. Turkish drones sliced through Armenia’s air defenses and pummeled its Russian-made tanks.  
 
Analysts calculate around 90 countries have military drones for reconnaissance and intelligence missions and at least a dozen states have armed drones. Britain is believed to have ten; Turkey around 140. The U.S. air force has around 300 Reaper drones alone. The deployment of armed drones to conduct targeted killings outside formal war zones has been highly contentious. But AI drone development is adding to global alarm.
 
“With more and more countries acquiring armed drones, there is a risk that the controversies surrounding how drones are used and the challenges these pose to international legal frameworks, as well as to democratic values such as transparency, accountability and the rule of law, could also increase,” Britain’s Chatham House noted in a research paper published in April.  
 
“This is accentuated further, given that the use of drones continues to expand and to evolve in new ways, and in the absence of a distinct legal framework to regulate such use,” say the paper’s authors Jessica Dorsey and Nilza Amaral.   
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A slew of crypto-related accounts in China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform were blocked over the weekend, as Beijing stepped up a crackdown on bitcoin trading and mining. More actions are expected, including linking illegal crypto activities in China more directly with the country’s criminal law, according to analysts and a financial regulator. Last month, China’s State Council, or cabinet, vowed to crack down on bitcoin mining and trading, escalating a campaign against cryptocurrencies days after three industry bodies banned crypto-related financial and payment services. Over the weekend, access to several of widely followed crypto-related Weibo accounts was denied, with a message saying each account “violates laws and rules.” “It’s a Judgment Day for crypto KOL,” wrote a Weibo bitcoin commentator, or key opinion leader (KOL), who calls herself “Woman Dr. bitcoin mini.” Her main account was also blocked on Saturday. “The government makes it clear that no Chinese version of Elon Musk can exist in the Chinese crypto market,” said NYU Law School adjunct professor Winston Ma, referring to the Tesla founder and cryptocurrency enthusiast. Ma, author of the book “The Digital War,” also expects China’s supreme court to publish a judicial interpretation soon that may link crypto mining and trading businesses with China’s body of criminal law. The view was echoed by a financial regulator, who said that such an interpretation would address the legal ambiguity that has failed to clearly identify bitcoin trading businesses as “illegal operations.” All the rules against cryptocurrencies so far in China have been published by administrative bodies. The Weibo freeze comes as Chinese media have stepped up reporting against crypto trading. The official Xinhua News Agency has published articles that exposed a series of crypto-related scams. State broadcaster CCTV has said cryptocurrency is a lightly regulated asset often used in black market trade, money laundering, arms smuggling, gambling and drug dealings. The stepped-up crackdown also comes as China’s central bank is accelerating testing of its own digital currency. 
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