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Greece to Ban Spyware

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced Monday that Greece would ban the sale of spyware, after his government was accused in a news report of targeting dozens of prominent politicians, journalists and business owners for surveillance, and judicial authorities began an investigation.

The announcement is the latest chapter in a scandal that erupted over the summer, when Mitsotakis conceded that Greece’s state intelligence service had been monitoring an opposition party leader with a traditional wiretap last year. That revelation came after the politician discovered that he had also been targeted with a spyware program known as Predator.

The Greek government said the wiretap was legal but never specified the reasons for it, and Mitsotakis said it was done without his knowledge. The government has also asserted that it does not own or use the Predator spyware and has insisted that the simultaneous targeting with a wiretap and Predator was a coincidence.

Mitsotakis has rejected allegations that he was personally running a Predator spyware scheme. He insisted that Greece’s intelligence service was not using Predator but said someone outside the government might be.

Governments the world over are struggling to regulate the use of cybersurveillance tools, the most prominent of which is Pegasus, a premium offensive cybersurveillance spyware made by the Israeli spyware company NSO Group. Predator is gaining prominence globally as a cheaper and less regulated alternative. The powerful weapons infiltrate smartphones, swoop up their contents, and turn them into listening and recording devices.

They have been used to hack the phones of employees at El Salvador’s leading news outlet, El Faro, and the devices of high-ranking Palestinian diplomats. According to recently leaked emails, spyware has also been deployed by the Mexican government to compromise the phones of journalists and activists.

Law enforcement and intelligence agencies say they need the spyware to maintain an edge over criminals and terrorists, but regulating their use and ensuring that they are not used against political opponents and journalists has proved to be difficult, even in Europe, where protections are supposed to be strong. Last year, the Biden administration blacklisted Pegasus, barring U.S. companies from doing business with NSO, because, it said, the company had acted “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.” (© The New York Times)

Apple Struggling with Demand

It’s not easy producing parts of the world’s most coveted item while operating in China, a country that has some of the harshest Covid rules in the world.

Foxconn, a supplier for Apple, has to comply with Chinese restrictions while ensuring that Apple’s shipments are not severely disrupted just before the key holiday season begins.

The Taiwanese company, which has been racing to control a Covid outbreak at its vast campus in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, has started recruiting for the facility once again and is offering bonuses for staff who had recently left.

This week, Apple said it expects iPhone 14 shipments to be hit by China’s Covid curbs, which have “significantly reduced capacity” at the Zhengzhou facility, the world’s biggest iPhone factory.

14 “The epidemic has disrupted our work and life, but…the company has achieved milestone results in the current epidemic The Jewish Home | NOVEMBER 10, 2022 prevention measures,” Foxconn said on its Zhengzhou recruitment WeChat account on Monday. Anxious workers had reportedly fled the locked-down facility. Videos of many people leaving Zhengzhou on foot have gone viral on Chinese social media in recent days. Foxconn is now dangling bonuses to entice workers to get back to work. If they return, staff who left between October 10 and November 5 will receive a one-off bonus of 500 yuan ($69), according to the company. New workers will be offered a salary of 30 yuan ($4) per hour, according to the post. Last Wednesday, Chinese authorities imposed a seven-day lockdown on the manufacturing zone that houses the Foxconn plant. Workers will be able to start their work as soon as the “district-level lockdown is lifted,” Foxconn said in the WeChat post, at which point employees will be collected and driven to the factory for a closed-loop system — where staff will work and live on site.

North Korea fired four short-range ballistic missiles off its west coast on Saturday morning, and hours later, two American B-1B supersonic strategic bombers flew over the Korean Peninsula in the first deployment of its kind since 2017.

North Korea has launched as many as 85 missiles this year, more than in any previous year, including 23 fired last Wednesday. It not only tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile under development but fired a flurry of short-range missiles to counter the United States and South Korea as the allies stepped up joint military drills.

One such drill, code-named Vigilant Storm, which involved about 240 warplanes from both allies, ended Saturday after a six-day run. The drill was scheduled to end Friday but was extended a day after North Korea launched an ICBM on Thursday.

The four short-range ballistic missiles on Saturday flew 81 miles, according to the South Korean military.

North Korea has typically protested joint military drills by the United States and South Korea, accusing them of preparing to invade, and cited them as a reason that it was building its nuclear arsenal. But this year, its reaction has been more aggressive.

It has fired a burst of missiles during such joint military drills by the allies, launching them from across North Korea. By sending them from many different locations, even from an underwater silo, the North sought to demonstrate that it could thwart the allies’ missile defense system, military experts said.

Three times since early last month, North Korean military aircraft have flown close enough to the border with South Korea for the South to scramble its own fighter jets. North Korea has also fired hundreds of artillery shells and rockets into buffer zones north of the inter-Korean maritime borders.

North Korea may have gained a sense of empowerment from its growing nuclear arsenal, becoming increasingly daring in its military provocations, analysts said.

South Korea and the United States demonstrated their own combined air power superiority this past week, with warplanes conducting a record 1,600 sorties. (© The New York Times)

Ebola Hits Uganda

Schools across Uganda will close two weeks before the scheduled end of term after 23 Ebola cases were confirmed among students, including eight children who died.

Education Minister Janet Kataha Museveni said on Tuesday that the cabinet had taken the decision to close preschools, primary schools, and secondary schools on November 25 because densely packed classrooms were making students highly vulnerable to infection.

Students in Uganda are currently in their third and final term of the calendar year.

On Saturday, the government extended a three-week lockdown on the neighboring districts of Mubende and Kassanda, which have been the center of the Ebola outbreak. The measures include a dusk-to-dawn curfew, a ban on personal travel, and the closure of markets, bars, and churches.

Since the outbreak was declared in Mubende on September 20, the disease has spread across the country, including to the capital, Kampala. Still, the president has said nationwide restrictions are not needed.

According to government figures from Sunday, 135 people have been infected with Ebola; fifty-three have died.

The virus circulating in Uganda is the Sudan strain of Ebola, for which there is no proven vaccine, unlike the more common Zaire strain, which spread during recent outbreaks in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ebola is spread through bodily fluids with common symptoms being fever, vomiting, bleeding, and diarrhea. Outbreaks are difficult to contain, especially in urban environments. Ebola generally kills about half the people it infects.

Pakistan’s Imran Khan Shot

Former Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan was wounded at a rally last week after at least one unidentified man opened fire on his convoy, in what aides have called a targeted attack.

Khan was in Wazirabad, in eastern Pakistan, leading a protest march to the capital, Islamabad, to demand that the government hold early elections, when his convoy came under attack.

Khan, 70, sustained bullet wounds in both legs and was moved to Lahore for treatment, officials said. Fawad Chaudhry, a senior member of Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf or PTI, called the shooting “100% an assassina-

16 tion attempt.” A video of the attack showed Khan standing with his aides in a container The Jewish Home | NOVEMBER 10, 2022 mounted on top of a truck as it moved slowly through a crowd of his supporters. As gunshots rang out, Khan and others on the truck appeared to duck down. Dr. Faisal Sultan, the former health minister who treated Khan, said at a news conference that Khan was in stable condition. Seven people including Khan were injured in the attack and one person died, according to Waqas Nazeer, the spokesperson for the Punjab police. One suspect has been detained, he added. Khan was removed from office in April in a vote of no confidence after falling out with the country’s top military leaders, who are widely considered to be the invisible hand guiding Pakistani politics. Khan claimed that the vote was part of a conspiracy by the country’s military establishment and his political opponents to oust him from power. And in the months since, the former cricket star turned politician has made a stunning comeback, drawing thousands to his rallies across Pakistan. In impassioned speeches, he has cast himself as a martyr to the domineering presence of the military in Pakistani politics and the insidious influence of corrupt politicians, tapping into deep-seated frustration among Pakistanis over the country’s political troubles.

In a video released by police to local television stations after the attack, a young man who appears to be in custody says that he wanted to kill Khan and that he had acted alone.

“Imran Khan was leading people astray,” the man said. “I could not tolerate this. That is why I tried to kill him. I only tried to kill Imran Khan and no one else. (© The New York Times)

Climate Capitalism

Switzerland, one of the world’s richest nations, has an ambitious climate goal: It promises to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.

But the Swiss don’t intend to reduce emissions by that much within their own borders. Instead, the European country is dipping into its sizable coffers to pay poorer nations, such as Ghana or Dominica, to reduce emissions there — and give Switzerland credit for it.

Here is an example of how it would work: Switzerland is paying to install efficient lighting and cleaner stoves in up to 5 million households in Ghana; these installations would help households move away from burning wood for cooking and rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

Then Switzerland, not Ghana, will get to count those emissions reductions as progress toward its climate goals.

Veronika Elgart, deputy head of international climate policy at the Federal Office for the Environment in Switzerland, said these sorts of arrangements could bring on additional climate action while benefiting the host countries.

Still, there are questions over whether this mechanism is fair. If other nations follow suit, critics say, it could delay climate action in the wealthier countries already responsible for producing a vast majority of the greenhouse gases that are warming the world, while shifting the work of reducing emissions toward the global poor. In addition, it could take advantage of projects in poorer countries that would have proceeded anyway, with or without foreign funding.

“It’s a way of passing on the responsibility to reduce emissions,” said Crispin Gregoire, a former ambassador to the United Nations from Dominica, a tiny island nation of 72,000 people that made an agreement with Switzerland last year. “Instead of reducing emissions itself, Switzerland is going to other countries — ones that have very low emissions — to fulfill that obligation.”

At last year’s global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Bolivian President Luis Arce called the idea tantamount to “carbon capitalism.”

The 2015 Paris Agreement tentatively allowed countries to cooperate in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. And nations have made progress in laying down some of the rules at global talks — for example, creating guidance to make sure emissions reductions aren’t double counted. But much of how that would work needs to be fine-tuned, including how projects will be assessed and monitored. The issues are part of a wide-ranging agenda at this week’s United Nations climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. (© The New York Times)