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The Week In News

Venezuela’s Crime Against Humanity

According to the United Nations, the Venezuelan government has been committing crimes against humanity.

The report by a UN-backed fact-finding mission was published last week and investigated 223 cases of alleged extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and torture and reviewed an additional 2,891 instances to cor- roborate patterns of violations and crimes. In conclusion, the UN Inde- pendent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela found that the Vene- zuelan government, as well as other state agents and groups working with them, had committed “egregious vio- lations.”

“The Mission found reasonable grounds to believe that Venezuelan authorities and security forces have since 2014 planned and executed se- rious human rights violations, some of which – including arbitrary killings and the systematic use of torture – amount to crimes against humanity,” said Marta Valiñas, chairperson of the UN mission.

“Far from being isolated acts, these crimes were coordinated and committed pursuant to State policies, with the knowledge or direct support of commanding officers and senior government officials.”

The 411-page report is the first published by the UN mission. Commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, it includes 48 in-depth case studies and expands on the extraju- dicial executions and politically moti- vated detentions and torture, as well as protest-related violence.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza has repeatedly criti- cized the UN Human Rights Council and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) as “biased.”

The report singles out two Ven- ezuelan security forces as being re- sponsible for nearly two-thirds of all extrajudicial killings: the Scientific, Criminal and Criminological Investi- gator Corps (CICPC) and the Special Action Forces (FAES) of the National Bolivarian Police (PNB).

Dressed in black uniforms and sometimes wearing Halloween-style masks, FAES special forces generally show up in large numbers in some of Venezuela’s poorest neighborhoods – the barrios – and target young men seemingly at random.

According to the UN report, su- periors grant FAES officers a “green light to kill.”

“High-ranking officials had effec- tive command and control over the perpetrators and knowledge of their actions but failed to prevent or repress the violations,” said Marta Valiñas. “The killings appear part of a policy to eliminate unwanted members of society under the cover of combating crime.”

The UN report calls for FAES to be dismantled and for those responsible for its actions to be held accountable.

Violence in Venezuela is not re- stricted to state security forces, es- pecially in recent years as the government began to increasingly rely on armed civilian groups – known as colectivos – to help maintain public order. The report found that authori- ties failed to intervene when protesters were killed by these groups.

“The violations must stop. And impunity must end. Venezuelan au- thorities must immediately carry out prompt, effective, thorough, inde- pendent, impartial and transparent investigations into the violations and crimes, bringing perpetrators to ac- count and providing justice for victims,” Valiñas said, calling for other international bodies, like the Inter- national Criminal Court, to consider legal action against those responsible for the crimes identified by the UN mission.

“Victims must have full redress for the harm they suffered.”

Japan is Getting Old

ing to Japan’s Health, Labor, and Welfare Ministry.

The government figures show that the number of centenarians went above 80,000 for the first time this year – the 50th consecutive annual increase and the biggest rise to date.

There were 80,450 people aged 100 and over as of last Tuesday – 9,176 more than last year – which equates to one in every 1,565 people.

Women in Japan are far more likely than men to live for a century or more; 88% of centenarians are female.

Japan has a rapidly aging population and average life expectancy across the country is also at a record high. On average, women are expected to live to 87.45 years and men are expected to live to 81.41.

Japan began documenting the number of centenarians in 1963. At the time, there were only 153 people aged 100 or over in the country. By 1988, that had ballooned to 10,000.

Japan’s oldest person, 117-yearold Kane Tanaka from Fukuoka, was confirmed as the world’s oldest person by Guinness World Records last year. Her secret to a long life? Eating good food and practicing math. A Daring Escape

Last week, after planning his escape for months, a Chinese drug trafficker escaped death row in Indonesia by tunneling through the sewage system.

Cai Changpan, also known as Cai Ji Fan, was jailed in the Tangerang area on the outskirts of the capital city Jakarta, on charges of smuggling methamphetamine. Last Monday, he escaped by digging a hole from his cell into waste pipes and onto a road outside the prison.

Cai had been planning this escape for five to six months. He dug the hole using tools from a construction project in the prison kitchen. He had timed his escape during the changing of the prison guards.

This isn’t Cai’s first escape. In 2017, he broke out of a police detention center in Jakarta by breaking a hole in a bathroom wall.

Police are now on the search, with Cai on their most wanted list.

Vatican & China

Deal

The Vatican and China are preparing to renew a historic deal on the appointment of bishops that has slightly thawed icy relations between the two forces. The renewed warmth, though, runs contrary to what U.S. President Donald Trump has been attempting to do in regards to pushing religious freedom in the communist country.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in an article in U.S. religious magazine First Things, slammed the “horrific” persecution of believers of all faiths in China.

He wrote that many countries had expressed “revulsion” at “accelerating violations of human rights.”

“The Vatican endangers its moral authority, should it renew the deal,” he added on Twitter.

China’s roughly 12 million Catholics have for decades been split between a government-run association, whose clergy are chosen by the atheist Communist Party, and an unofficial underground church loyal to the Vatican.

The latter recognizes the pope’s authority and is often persecuted for it.

In September 2018, the Vatican sealed a historical “provisional” agreement with Beijing, although the exact content of which has never been published. One thing that did come out was that both Beijing and the Vatican now have a say in appointing Catholic bishops.

Right after the deal, Pope Francis immediately recognized eight Chinese bishops that had been appointed by Beijing without his approval. Since then, two new bishops

have been appointed in China.

Pope Francis has just given the go-ahead for the renewal of the agreement, which is still in “experimental” mode, for another two years. The extension is expected to be sealed next month.

Bahrain Foils Terror

On Sunday, it was reported that Bahrain thwarted a plot by militants backed by Iran to launch attacks on diplomats and foreigners in Bahrain, just days after normalizing relations with Israel.

The Saudi state TV report aired footage of what appeared to be police raiding a home with a hidden passage. The footage showed assault rifles and explosives, apparently seized in the raid. A Saudi state TV reporter said those planning the attacks wanted to carry them out in revenge for the U.S. killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani this January in a drone strike in Baghdad.

Nine militants have been arrested, while another nine are believed to be in Iran.

Authorities uncovered the plot after finding an explosive on the street, the pro-government Bahraini newspaper Akhbar Al-Khaleej reported, citing the Interior Ministry. The ministry accused Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard of supporting the militants, who also had surveilled oil sites and military bases. The militants also planned on assassinating bodyguards of Bahraini officials.

Bahrain is home to the U.S.’s 5th Fleet, which patrols the waterways of the Mideast. Officials have worried in the past that the sailors and Marines attached to the base in Manama could be targeted, as well as others who make up the 7,000 American troops there.

Who is Leading ISIS?

The leader of ISIS has a bachelor’s degree, served as a judge, and was jailed by the United States.

Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abd-alRahman al-Mawla, the real name of the person identified by ISIS only as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi alQurashi, was born in 1976 in a village near Mosul.

He is the second leader of ISIS after al-Baghdadi, who was killed in a U.S. raid in northern Syria last October, to have formal religious training. Al-Mawla holds a bachelor’s degree in Islamic studies from a shariah college at the University of Mosul. His father was also an imam at a mosque in Mosul. The current leader developed a nickname as the teacher or master, for his religious knowledge. Al-Mawla even served as a judge in the Islamic State of Iraq (known at the time as al-Qaeda in Iraq) before he was captured and jailed by the United States in southern Iraq in Camp Bucca in 2008.

Al-Mawla was released the following year. Iraqi sources say he was released after he denied that he pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and after informing on all his fellow jihadists, as detailed in documents of the U.S. authorities’ interrogation of the current leader when he was in jail. But other Iraqi sources deny this claim – pushing back against “weak” claims about the ISIS leader. Al-Mawla had been a trusted aide of al-Baghdadi before al-Baghdadi was killed, which would not have been the case if al-Mawla had informed on his fellow jihadists. Such groups have developed a system of surrounding their leaders with reliable and trusted individuals trained to withhold critical information.

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Save the Whales

Crews are working to bring tens of whales back into the sea after around 270 pilot whales became stranded on Australia’s island state of Tasmania. So far, 25 have been brought back to sea, while 90 whales have already died.

The whales were discovered on Monday on a beach and two sand bars near the west coast town of Strahan. Sixty people have joined the rescue effort.

“We’ve rescued about 25 at the present time and escorted them out the channel and out to sea and crews are continuing to work, so that number will increase before we get to the end of the day,” Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service Manager Nic Deka told reporters late Tuesday afternoon.

Tasmania is prone to whale strandings, but this is the largest mass stranding on Australia’s most southern state in years.

Authorities do not know why the whales became stranded.

Wildlife scientist Vanessa Pirotta noted, “To see a stranding like this is not unusual. It just doesn’t happen

every day.”

Jail for Insults

Sebahat Tuncel, a former Kurdish parliamentarian, has been handed an additional prison term for insulting President Tayyip Erdogan. She is currently jailed in Turkey on terrorism charges.

Tuncel was sentenced last week to 11 months and 20 days for calling Erdogan an enemy of Kurds and women in a speech in 2016, comments one of her lawyers defended as legitimate criticism of a political opponent.

Tuncel had served in Turkey’s parliament for the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Her lawyer said her words had been taken out of context.

Last year, Tuncel was jailed for 15 years for spreading terrorist propaganda and belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is banned in Turkey and branded a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union. She had denied the charges.

Charges of insulting the president in Turkey carry a maximum four-year prison sentence. Such cases rose by 30% in 2019, with 26,115 people investigated, more than 5,000 facing court hearings, and 2,462 jailed, according to data from the justice ministry.

Chinese Tycoon Jailed for Criticism

Ren Zhiqiang, a retired real estate tycoon, has been jailed for 18 years on corruption charges in China. The billionaire had been critical of President Xi Jinping’s h andling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Ren had disappeared in March after writing a scathing essay criticizing Xi’s response to the coronavirus epidemic. He was later charged with corruption-related offenses.

On Tuesday, a court in Beijing found Ren guilty on multiple charges, including embezzling some $16.3 million in public funds, accepting bribes, and abuse of power that caused losses totaling $17.2 million for the state-owned property company that he once headed.

Judges sentenced him to 18 years in prison and imposed a fine of $620,000. The court said he “voluntarily confessed all of his crimes” and “was willing to accept the court’s verdict after all of his illegal gains were recovered.”

China’s court system has a conviction rate of around 99%. Corruption charges are often used to go after Communist Party insiders who fall afoul of the leadership.

Born into the Communist Party’s ruling elite, the 69-year-old Ren had often been outspoken on Chinese politics, far more than is usually allowed in the authoritarian state.

His forthrightness earned him the nickname “The Cannon” on Chinese social media.

Emotional Support for Unwanted Touching

MOUNT SINAI BETH ISRAEL

TV Knocks Out Internet

In the essay published in March, widely attributed to Ren, the author lashed out at the party’s crackdown on press freedom and intolerance of dissent. While the essay did not mention Xi by name, it obliquely referred to the country’s top leader as a power-hungry “clown.”

“I saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown who stripped off his clothes and insisted on continuing being an emperor,” Ren allegedly wrote of Xi’s

address to 170,000 officials across the country at a mass video conference on epidemic control measures on February 23.

The essay went on to accuse the Communist Party of putting its own interests above the safety of the Chinese people to secure its rule.

“Without a media representing the interests of the people by publishing the actual facts, the people’s lives are being ravaged by both the virus and the major illness of the system,” Ren allegedly wrote.

This is not the first time Ren ran afoul of the Chinese leadership for speaking his mind.

In 2016, he was disciplined after questioning on social media Xi’s demands that Chinese state media must stay absolutely loyal to the party. He was put on a year’s probation for his party membership and his wildly popular account on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, was shuttered.

For 18 months, the residents of a village in Wales had trouble logging onto the internet every morning. The daily crashes mystified engineers for over a year – although they have now found the culprit: a second-hand television.

It seems that the old TV emits a signal that interferes with the internet connection.

A crack team of engineers-turned-detectives are now heroes in the village of Aberhosan after finally finding the source of the problem.

Staff had visited the village repeatedly and found no fault with the network. They even replaced cables in the area to try and solve the problem, but to no avail.

Local engineer Michael Jones called in assistance from experts at the Openreach chief engineer team.

After carrying out a plethora of tests, engineers had a theory that the problem could be caused by a phenomenon called single high-level impulse noise (SHINE), in which an appliance emits electrical interference that impacts broadband connectivity.

Engineers used a device called a spectrum analyzer and walked up and down the village “in the torrential rain” at 6 a.m. to see if they could locate an electrical noise, Jones said in a statement.

At 7 a.m. – “like clockwork” – the device “picked up a large burst of electrical interference in the village.”

“The source of the ‘electrical noise’ was traced to a property in the village. It turned out that at 7 a.m. every morning the occupant would switch on their old TV which would in-turn knock out broadband for the entire village.”

The resident was, understandably, “mortified” by the news and “immediately agreed to switch it off and not use again.”

Since the old TV was retired, there have been no more problems with the connection.

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Arab Bank Financed Terror

A massive leak of financial intelligence reports reveal that Arab Bank continued to be involved with financing terror until the year 2016, even after the Jordan-based bank had agreed to pay massive amounts in compensation to terror victims.

The information appears in a confidential financial intelligence report compiled by a British bank named Standard Chartered Bank (SCB), which served as a correspondent bank for Arab Bank. SCB suspected that Arab Bank continued to transfer money to “entities with suspected links to terrorist groups” until 2016, the year the report was filed.

The Arab Bank, which operates from Amman, is one of the largest banks in the Arab world.

In 2004, Arab Bank w as sued in the United States by American victims of terror attacks carried out in Israel. The plaintiffs claimed that the bank had carried out wire transfers to various entities linked to Hamas and had thus been a party to terror financing.

The trial itself opened a decade later, in 2014. After six weeks, the jury decided in favor of the plaintiffs.

The bank appealed the verdict but at the same time entered into settlement negotiations. The details of the settlement that was ultimately reached remain confidential, but according to Israeli media reports, the bank agreed to compensate the plaintiffs for about $1 billion.

In 2018, the bank won its appeal on the basis of the claim that the judge had given incorrect instructions to the jury prior to the trial. While the jury verdict was voided, the settlement remained in effect.

At the end of 2019, another lawsuit was filed against the bank by more than 1,000 terror victims and their families. This lawsuit was filed by Israeli citizens in Jerusalem District Court. The complaint mentions a long list of terror attacks, including the March 2002 Passover suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya, in which 30 civilians were killed in the worst such attack of the Second Intifada; the June 2001 Dolphinarium disco attack in Tel Aviv, in which 21 Israelis, most of them teenagers, were killed; and the August 2001 suicide bombing at the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, in which 15 civilians were murdered.

A recent leak of classified financial reports submitted by banks all over the world to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the U.S. Treasury Department (FinCen) has revealed that the British bank continued to work with the Jordanian bank during the years of the lawsuit and afterwards, and that some of the bank transfers that passed through the British bank raised its suspicions.

The financial reports, which were submitted to the U.S. Congress as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, were leaked to the B uzzfeed news site, which in turn shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and through them with 400 journalists from 108 media outlets around the world.

In a statement, Arab Bank said that it “abhors terrorism and does not support or encourage terrorist activities.” The bank said that allegations against it date back nearly 20 years to a time when anti-money-laundering laws, tools and technologies were different than they are now.

“In every country where it operates, Arab Bank is in good standing with government regulators and complies with anti-terrorism and money laundering laws,” the bank asserted.

Hezbollah Stored Ammonium Nitrate

According to a U.S. State Department official, the Hezbollah terror group has stored ammonium nitrate in several European countries.

Nathan Sales, the State Depart-