Day: January 15, 2023

Pakistan launched its first anti-polio campaign of the year Sunday, targeting 44.2 million children under the age of five.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where polio continues to threaten the health and well-being of children. Polio affects the nervous system of children and ultimately leads to paralysis.

Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif kicked off the nationwide drive by administering polio drops to children in the capital, Islamabad, saying Pakistan was unfortunately among the few countries that still suffered from the disease.

Twenty cases were reported in the tribal North Waziristan area last year, though the disease was contained among other children through immunization, Sharif said.

Around 44 million children in 156 districts will be immunized.

This includes 22.54 million children in Punjab, 10.1 million in Sindh and 7.4 million in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces.

Sharif said his government along with other stakeholders, including U.S. billionaire Bill Gates and the World Health Organization, were effectively contributing to polio eradication in Pakistan.

He gave out appreciation certificates at the launch to front-line polio workers and praised their “invaluable sacrifices.”

Pakistan has witnessed frequent attacks on polio teams and police officers deployed to protect them. Militants falsely claim that vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children. 
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The U.S. has now collected 510 reports of unidentified flying objects, many of which are flying in sensitive military airspace. While there’s no evidence of extraterrestrials, they still pose a threat, the government said in a declassified report summary released Thursday.

Last year the Pentagon opened an office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, solely focused on receiving and analyzing all of those reports of unidentified phenomena, many of which have been reported by military pilots. It works with the intelligence agencies to further assess those incidents.

The events “continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in its 2022 report.

The classified version of the report addresses how many of those objects were found near locations where nuclear power plants operate or nuclear weapons are stored.

The 510 objects include 144 objects previously reported and 366 new reports. In both the old and new cases, after analysis, the majority have been determined to exhibit “unremarkable characteristics,” and could be characterized as unmanned aircraft systems, or balloon-like objects, the report said.

But the office is also tasked with reporting any movements or reports of objects that may indicate that a potential adversary has a new technology or capability.

The Pentagon’s anomaly office is also to include any unidentified objects moving underwater, in the air, or in space, or something that moves between those domains, which could pose a new threat.

ODNI said in its report that efforts to destigmatize reporting and emphasize that the objects may pose a threat likely contributed to the additional reports.
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Astronomers have detected in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way’s outer limits a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy – almost halfway to a neighboring galaxy.

The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the most remote reaches of the Milky Way’s halo, a spherical stellar cloud dominated by the mysterious invisible substance called dark matter that makes itself known only through its gravitational influence. The furthest of them is 1.08 million light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km (5.9 trillion miles).

These stars, spotted using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea mountain, are part of a category of stars called RR Lyrae that are relatively low mass and typically have low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The most distant one appears to have a mass about 70% that of our sun. No other Milky Way stars have been confidently measured farther away than these.

The stars that populate the outskirts of the galactic halo can be viewed as stellar orphans, probably originating in smaller galaxies that later collided with the larger Milky Way.

“Our interpretation about the origin of these distant stars is that they are most likely born in the halos of dwarf galaxies and star clusters which were later merged – or more straightforwardly, cannibalized – by the Milky Way,” said Yuting Feng, an astronomy doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the study, presented this week at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

“Their host galaxies have been gravitationally shredded and digested, but these stars are left at that large distance as debris of the merger event,” Feng added.

The Milky Way has grown over time through such calamities.

“The larger galaxy grows by eating smaller galaxies – by eating its own kind,” said study co-author Raja GuhaThakurta, UC Santa Cruz’s chair of astronomy and astrophysics.

Containing an inner and outer layer, the Milky Way’s halo is vastly larger than the galaxy’s main disk and central bulge that are teeming with stars. The galaxy, with a supermassive black hole at its center about 26,000 light years from Earth, contains perhaps 100 billion–400 billion stars including our sun, which resides in one of the four primary spiral arms that make up the Milky Way’s disk. The halo contains about 5% of the galaxy’s stars.

Dark matter, which dominates the halo, makes up most of the universe’s mass and is thought to be responsible for its basic structure, with its gravity influencing visible matter to come together and form stars and galaxies.

The halo’s remote outer edge is a poorly understood region of the galaxy. These newly identified stars are almost half the distance to the Milky Way’s neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

“We can see that the suburbs of the Andromeda halo and the Milky Way halo are really extended – and are almost ‘back-to-back,'” Feng said.

The search for life beyond the Earth focuses on rocky planets akin to Earth orbiting in what is called the “habitable zone” around stars. More than 5,000 planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, already have been discovered.

“We don’t know for sure, but each of these outer halo stars should be about as likely to have planets orbiting them as the sun and other sun-like stars in the Milky Way,” GuhaThakurta said.
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Israel’s Cognyte Software Ltd won a tender to sell intercept spyware to a Myanmar state-backed telecommunications firm a month before the Asian nation’s February 2021 military coup, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.

The deal was made even though Israel has claimed it stopped defense technology transfers to Myanmar following a 2017 ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court, according to a legal complaint recently filed with Israel’s attorney general and disclosed Sunday.

While the ruling was subjected to a rare gag order at the request of the state and media cannot cite the verdict, Israel’s government has publicly stated on numerous occasions that defense exports to Myanmar are banned.

The complaint, led by high-profile Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack who spearheaded the campaign for the Supreme Court ruling, calls for a criminal investigation into the deal.

It accuses Cognyte and unnamed defense and foreign ministry officials who supervise such deals of “aiding and abetting crimes against humanity in Myanmar.”

The complaint was filed on behalf of more than 60 Israelis, including a former speaker of the house as well as prominent activists, academics and writers.

The documents about the deal, provided to Reuters and Mack by activist group Justice for Myanmar, are a January 2021 letter with attachments from Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) to local regulators that list Cognyte as the winning vendor for intercept technology and note the purchase order was issued “by 30th Dec 2020.”

Intercept spyware can give authorities the power to listen in on calls, view text messages and web traffic including emails, and track the locations of users without the assistance of telecom and internet firms.

Representatives for Cognyte, Myanmar’s military government and MPT did not respond to multiple Reuters requests for comment. Japan’s KDDI Corp and Sumitomo Corp, which have stakes in MPT, declined to comment, saying they were not privy to details on communication interception.

Israel’s attorney general did not respond to requests for comment about the complaint. The foreign affairs ministry did not respond to requests for comment about the deal, while the defense ministry declined to comment.

Two people with knowledge of Myanmar’s intercept plans separately told Reuters the Cognyte system was tested by MPT.

They declined to be identified for fear of retribution by Myanmar’s junta.

MPT uses intercept spyware, a source with direct knowledge of the matter and three people briefed on the issue told Reuters although they did not identify the vendor. Reuters was unable to determine whether the sale of Cognyte intercept technology to MPT was finalized.

Even before the coup, public concern had mounted in Israel about the country’s defense exports to Myanmar after a brutal 2017 crackdown by the military on the country’s Rohingya population while Aung San Suu Kyi’s government was in power. The crackdown prompted the petition led by Mack that asked the Supreme Court to ban arms exports to Myanmar.

Since the coup, the junta has killed thousands of people including many political opponents, according to the United Nations.

Cognyte under fire

Many governments around the world allow for what are commonly called “lawful intercepts” to be used by law enforcement agencies to catch criminals but the technology is not ordinarily employed without any kind of legal process, cybersecurity experts have said.

According to industry executives and activists previously interviewed by Reuters, Myanmar’s junta is using invasive telecoms spyware without legal safeguards to protect human rights.

Mack said Cognyte’s participation in the tender contradicts statements made by Israeli officials after the Supreme court ruling that no security exports had been made to Myanmar.

While intercept spyware is typically described as “dual-use” technology for civilian and defense purposes, Israeli law states that “dual-use” technology is classified as defense equipment.

Israeli law also requires companies exporting defense-related products to seek licenses for export and marketing when doing deals. The legal complaint said any officials who granted Cognyte licenses for Myanmar deals should be investigated. Reuters was unable to determine whether Cognyte obtained such licenses.

Around the time of the 2020 deal, the political situation in Myanmar was tense with the military disputing the results of an election won by Suu Kyi.

Norway’s Telenor, previously one of the biggest telecoms firms in Myanmar before withdrawing from the country last year, also said in a Dec. 3, 2020 briefing and statement that it was concerned about Myanmar authorities’ plans for a lawful intercept due to insufficient legal safeguards.

Nasdaq-listed Cognyte was spun off in February 2021 from Verint Systems Inc, a pioneering giant in Israel’s cybersecurity industry.

Cognyte, which had $474 million in annual revenue for its last financial year, was also banned from Facebook in 2021.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc said in a report Cognyte “enables managing fake accounts across social media platforms.”

Meta said its investigation identified Cognyte customers in a range of countries such as Kenya, Mexico and Indonesia and their targets included journalists and politicians. It did not identify the customers or the targets.

Meta did not respond to a request for further comment.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund last month dropped Cognyte from its portfolio, saying states said to be customers of its surveillance products and services “have been accused of extremely serious human rights violations.” The fund did not name any states.

Cognyte has not responded publicly to the claims made by Meta or Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.
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