World

The latest wave of ransomware attacks hitting the United States and globally portends a difficult battle against hackers, even as government and the private sector ramp up defenses.

The attacks hitting the Colonial Pipeline and the major JBS meatpacking operations are examples of a burgeoning cybercrime industry with the potential to inflict pain and extract profits by impacting “critical” networks, experts say.

Other recent targets include local governments, hospitals, insurers, a ferry system and others in the United States and globally, with many of the attacks attributed to Russia-based hackers operating with at least tacit approval from the Kremlin.

At least $18 billion was paid to ransomware attackers last year, according to the security firm Emsisoft, which found “tens of thousands” of victims so far in 2021.

“Ransomware is hitting epidemic proportions and business as usual isn’t going to cut it,” said Frank Cilluffo, director of Auburn University’s McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security.

Parham Eftekhari, chairman of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a thinktank focused on cybersecurity, noted that a rush to digitization of more systems has opened up more avenues for hackers.

“We are prioritizing speed to market, functionality, profits and business objectives over security,” Eftekhari said.

US officials in recent days have signaled a stepped-up effort on ransomware, calling these investigations a “top priority” and comparing the effort to the post-September 11 attacks fight against terror. 

– Covert US response –

The Justice Department said Monday it recovered more than half of the $4.4 million ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline, in a rare success story.

“The recovery of the ransom is, obviously, a positive as it signals to cybercriminals that their ill-gotten gains are not necessarily beyond the reach of law enforcement,” said Brett Callow, analyst at the security firm Emsisoft.

But Callow said ransomware remains a scourge because “the financial rewards are huge (and) the chances of being caught are near-zero… we still have a very, very long way to go before the ransomware problem will be solved.”

Following sanctions imposed on Moscow, US officials have said little about future responses, but analysts believe there is considerable activity under the radar.

“The US government appropriately responds sometimes in a covert manner,” said Eftekhari.

“We have the greatest cyber offensive and defensive abilities on the planet.”

But security specialists say cyber defense is complex and requires actions across the board, including training for employees to avoid mistakes that let malicious actors into networks.

Security firm Proofpoint found in a recent survey that two-thirds of computer security officers acknowledge they are unprepared to cope with a future cyberattack, noted Proofpoint’s Lucia Milica.

“Human error is one of the biggest vulnerabilities and we’ve seen that remote work has made networks more vulnerable,” Milica said.

– Line in the sand? –

The latest attacks, on the heels of big data breaches affecting Microsoft email servers and the widely deployed SolarWinds security software, raise questions about protecting 16 “critical infrastructure” sectors including energy, utilities, defense, food and manufacturing.

James Lewis, head of technology policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said these sectors have been victimized frequently but that successes are obscured by high-profile hacks.

“We probably need to rethink what critical infrastructure is,” Lewis said, suggesting that the label be used for public safety and national security.

Lewis said one lesson from the recent pipeline attack was panic buying of gasoline, which made the situation worse.

Making cryptocurrency transactions easier to trace could aid the fight against ransomware by curbing anonymous transactions, some analysts say.

Lewis said this is a good idea but that “a more sophisticated approach would be for central banks to issue their own digital currencies, which could dry up the market for cryptocurrencies.”

Cilluffo said the fight against ransomware will require a broad array of weapons.

“You really need to bring all instruments of power to bear: covert, diplomatic, military, sanctions,” he said.

A summit next week with President Joe Biden and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin offers a key moment for Washington to “draw a line” against Moscow for providing a haven for hackers, said Cilluffo.

“Cyber has to be items one, two and three,” he said. “Having a president put markers in the silicon around cyber behavior is important because it comes with the full weight of the federal government.”

Major media and government websites, including the White House, New York Times, Reddit and Amazon were temporarily down on Tuesday after being hit by a global outage blamed on a glitch from cloud computing services provider Fastly.

The widespread outages around 1000 GMT also hit the UK government website, CNN and the BBC before resuming services more than an hour later. 

“Error 503 Service Unavailable” and “connection failure” messages appeared on several websites, later blamed on a problem at San Francisco-based firm Fastly, which scrambled to restore sites. 

The company offers a service to websites around the world to speed up loading time for websites. 

It competes with rivals such as Akamai and Cloudflare, which handle hundreds of billions of requests every day, playing a key role in global internet access.

Fastly’s clients span the globe, and include Deliveroo, Pinterest and Shazam, with a turnover of $291 million last year alone.

The firm said in a tweet after the outages that “the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”

It later confirmed “our global network is coming back online”, as service was restored on most sites. 

– ‘Huge’ impact – 

A slew of sites around the world were hit, including major media such as The Guardian, the Financial Times, France’s Le Monde newspaper, Italy’s Corriere delle Serra and Spanish daily El Mundo. 

Social and entertainment site Reddit was hit, along with the White House and gov.uk websites plus a number of web pages in the Nordic region and the Swedish social security service Forsakringskassan.

“The impact is huge. It’s gone and affected millions of web pages and thousands of companies that rely on their services,” Jake Moore, a cybersecurity specialist at ESET, told AFP.

He added that since so few companies offer services similar to Fastly’s, any service disruptions can have widespread impact. 

“If they go down, then of course we then see lots of companies fall over and panic,” he said. 

Analyst Corinne Cath-Speth echoed the sentiment. 

“Almost all internet websites use content delivery networks and cloud services,” said the researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.

“So when those @fastly services fail or falter — it has major ramifications for everyone’s internet experience,” she said on Twitter. 

“This in turn–raises major questions about the dangers of (power) consolidation in the cloud market & the unquestioned influence these often invisible actors have over access to information.”

burs-aue/ach/rl/jv/dl

Ratko Mladic insists he was chosen by “fate” to defend the Serb people from a Western onslaught, but on Tuesday he found that his fate is to spend the rest of his life in jail for genocide.

UN judges dismissed his appeal against his 2017 conviction for war crimes in Bosnia that the tribunal said at the time were “amongst the most heinous known to humankind”. 

The most notorious was the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica in 1995 — a genocide, the court decided, orchestrated by military leader Mladic and his political comrade Radovan Karadzic.

The slaughter — the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II — led media across the world to dub him “the butcher of Bosnia”.

Former UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein described him as “the epitome of evil” after his conviction.

But most Serbs continue to revere him. 

“He only defended his people,” Serb veteran Ljubo Tomovic told AFP. “To convict him would be a disgrace and a sin.”

Mladic, who is in his late 70s, has repeatedly pushed the image of himself as “a simple man” chosen to protect his people.

“Fate put me in a position to defend my country that you Western powers had devastated with the help of the Vatican and the Western mafia,” he told his appeal hearing last year.

Yet he oversaw a siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, for more than three years, his snipers and artillery shells killing thousands of men, women and children in the streets and in their homes.

And video footage from Srebrenica shows him reassuring a 12-year-old Muslim boy shortly before his soldiers massacre thousands of civilians.

Days later, he is seen returning to a deserted Srebrenica, telling the camera: “We give this town to the Serb people as a gift.”

Mladic formed a Serb nationalist triumvirate with Karadzic and ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic that unleashed a wave of ethnic killing in a bid to redraw the map of the region.

While Karadzic was the ideologue and Milosevic the wily politician, Mladic was the soldier and his metier was waging war.

– ‘Narcissistic, conceited’ –

Mladic had barely drawn breath before his life was indelibly marked by conflict.

He was born during World War II in Kalinovik in eastern Bosnia — most accounts say in 1942, but Mladic told the tribunal he was actually born in 1943.

His father was killed at the bitter end of the war, fighting for Marshal Tito, the leader who managed to knit together the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia and suppress simmering enmities.

By most accounts, Mladic always wanted to be a soldier.

He left for army training in Belgrade in the early 1960s, becoming an officer by the age of 22 and ascending to be commander of the Bosnian Serb forces in the war.

Although he was revered by his men, former Yugoslav army spokesman Ljubodrag Stojadinovic once described him as “narcissistic, conceited, vain and arrogant”.

During the war, he baffled international negotiators with rambling diatribes on Serbian history.

In the closing days of the war, close allies questioned his mental faculties.

“I respected General Mladic as a soldier and a man,” the late former Montenegrin president Momir Bulatovic told a 1990s BBC documentary. 

“But after three years of war, he’d lost contact with reality.”

– ‘He’s a monster’ –

Mladic was dismissed from his post after being indicted in 1995, but he evaded capture for another 16 years.

At first, he led a life of luxury, pampered by the Serbian military, but the pressure on him mounted after Milosevic fell from power in 2000.

He was finally arrested in May 2011 at his cousin’s country house in northern Serbia, his mind immediately turning to an incident from during the war.

Not to the thousands of Muslims whose deaths he orchestrated, but rather to his daughter, Ana, who killed herself in 1994 at the age of 23.

Some accounts say she could not bear the shame of the crimes committed by her father, though Mladic’s family dispute this.

His last request before being transferred to the court was to visit her grave.

During all this time, his reputation grew, his wartime leadership immortalised in murals around Republika Srpska — the Serbian entity within Bosnia.

“I think that this verdict propelled general Mladic straight into a legend,” said Republika Srpska leader Milorad Dodik after his life sentence was upheld.

“Serbs know that without him our people would have suffered much more.”

Others disagree.

“He’s a monster who did not repent for what he has done, even after 26 years,” said Munira Subasic, president of one of the Mothers of Srebrenica associations. 

“Wherever their army came, wherever their boot stepped in, they committed genocide.”

Israel alleged Tuesday that a Gaza media building it destroyed was used by Hamas to jam air defenses as it offered to help the Associated Press rebuild its bureau.

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Gilad Erdan, gave the most detailed explanation yet of the decision to strike the tower as he met the head of the news agency, Gary Pruitt, at its New York headquarters.

“The unit was developing an electronic jamming system to be used against the Iron Dome defense system,” Erdan said, referring to the anti-missile shield that intercepts Hamas rockets.

He praised the role of the Associated Press, one of the world’s major news agencies along with Agence France-Presse and Reuters, and said he did not imagine AP employees were aware of the alleged use of the building by Hamas.

“Israel did everything it could to make sure that no employees or civilians were hurt during this important operation,” he said in a statement released a day after his meeting with AP executives.

“In contrast, Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization that has no regard for the press. It purposely places its terror machine in civilian areas, including in offices being used by international media outlets,” he said.

Erdan said that Israel is “willing to assist” the Associated Press in rebuilding its office in Gaza, which is controled by Hamas, a militant Islamist group.

The AP and international media rights groups earlier called for an independent investigation into allegations that the Jala Tower building was used by Hamas.

The air strike also destroyed the office of Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based television network that has frequently irritated both Israel and Arab states with its coverage.

The owner of the Jala Tower had unsuccessfully pleaded for 10 extra minutes to let Al Jazeera retrieve its equipment but an Israeli officer rejected the request and went ahead with the strike.

The attack came during a May 10-21 military escalation, with Hamas firing rockets into Israel in response to what it considered provocations in Jerusalem against the Palestinian population.

Israeli strikes killed 260 Palestinians, including 66 children adn some fighters, and wounded more than 1,900 people, the Gaza health ministry says.

Rockets and other fire from Gaza killed 13 people in Israel, including a child and an Arab-Israeli teenager and an Israeli soldier, medics and the military say. Some 357 people in Israel were wounded.

The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday approved Secretary General Antonio Guterres for a second term, with conflict resolution set to top his agenda at the world body’s helm.

The 72-year-old former prime minister of Portugal has held the office since 2017 and faced no competition for the next term in the job.

Around 10 other people also sought the post, but they were not formal candidates because none of the 193 UN member states endorsed them.

During a brief closed door session the Security Council voted unanimously to recommend that the General Assembly give Guterres another term, said the council’s current president, Estonian ambassador Sven Jurgenson.

Approval from the General Assembly is seen as a formality and expected to take place soon.

During his first term Guterres was forced to concentrate on limiting the potential damage from the unilateral, nationalist and alliance-wary foreign policy of then US president Donald Trump.

Now, as he embarks on a new term, Guterres will need “a battle plan” for all the crises around the globe, one diplomat said.

He can point to few major diplomatic victories over the past five years. Wars or conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Mali, for instance, are nowhere near resolution.

A peace process has begun in Libya, which descended into violent chaos after the death of Moamer Kadhafi in 2011, but the UN is mainly seen as playing an accompanying role.

Critics also point to the UN’s passivity in the face of Myanmar’s military crackdown against the Rohingya people since 2017, which UN investigators have said amounts to genocide.

Guterres said last month that “key elements” of his work depended on discretion.

“Sometimes to be effective, it needs to be done discreetly, to establish back channels between parties,” Guterres said.

Such channels, he said, “are essential to avoid the worst in the confrontations and to try to find solutions.”

Under constant pressure from major powers and small countries alike, Guterres managed to avoid alienating any of the five permanent members of the Security Council. This locked in a second term for him.

– Criticism from NGOs –

“We are in debt to him because the UN did not implode under Trump, which it could have,” one diplomat fron one of those five nations said.

Conflict resolution will be the defining challenge of his second term, diplomats say.

“He had a hard time being influential in the resolution of crises, but did his predecessors do any better?” another diplomat said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

During his first term Guterres also made the fight against global warming one of his priorities.

“We will not be able to reach our target solution to climate change if we have not a combined approach to these three areas: oceans, pollution, biodiversity,” he said recently. Here, too, he has little success to point to.

On the pandemic, Guterres has spoken out about the ravages of Covid-19 and dangers that still await the world from the health crisis.

But here as well his room for maneuver was limited, as countries opted to fight individual battles against the pandemic rather than make it a team effort against a common enemy.

The harshest criticism of Guterres comes from NGOs who accuse him of not doing enough on human rights. Guterres defends himself against this criticism. 

“Guterres’s first term was defined by public silence regarding human rights abuses by China, Russia, and the United States and their allies,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

“With his reelection behind him, Guterres should use the next five years to become a strong vocal advocate for rights,” Roth added.

“His recent willingness to denounce abuses in Myanmar and Belarus should expand to include all governments deserving condemnation, including those that are powerful and protected.”

Police arrested more than 800 people worldwide in a huge global sting involving encrypted phones that were secretly planted by the FBI, law enforcement agencies said Tuesday.

Cops in 16 countries were able to read the messages of underworld figures as they plotted drug deals, arms transfers and gangland hits on the compromised ANOM devices.

Mafia groups, Asian crime syndicates, motorcycle gangs and other criminal networks were all monitored using the spiked phones as part of operation “Trojan Shield”.

The sting, jointly conceived by Australia and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, prevented around 100 murders, foiled several large-scale narcotics shipments and led to seizures of weapons and cash, they added.

“The results are staggering,” FBI Assistant Director Calvin Shivers told reporters at the headquarters of the EU’s police agency Europol in The Netherlands.

Shivers said the FBI had provided criminal syndicates in over 100 countries with the devices over the past 18 months “that allowed us to monitor their communications”.

Europol hailed the “exceptional” operation, which saw around 12,000 of the ANOM devices distributed worldwide to criminals who thought they were chatting in secret.

“This information led over the last week to hundreds of law enforcement operations on a global scale from New Zealand to Australia to Europe and the USA, with impressive results,” said Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, deputy director of operations at Europol.

“More than 800 arrests, more than 700 locations searched, more than eight tonnes of cocaine.”

Police also seized 22 tonnes of cannabis, two tonnes of methamphetamine, 250 firearms, 55 luxury vehicles and over $48 million (39 million euros) in various currencies and cryptocurrencies, Europol said.

– ‘Heavy blow’ –

Australian police said the supposedly hardened encrypted devices were handed out to criminals as part of the FBI-led plot.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Tuesday that the operation had “struck a heavy blow against organised crime — not just in this country, but one that will echo around organised crime around the world”.

The operation began after global police work in the past two years disrupted two other major encrypted phone networks used by criminals, EncroChat and SkyGlobal.

“The closure of those two encrypted communication platforms created a significant void in the encrypted communication market,” said New Zealand police. 

To fill the void, “the FBI operated its own encrypted device company, called ‘ANOM'”, the New Zealand police added. 

The FBI’s Shivers said this enabled them to “turn the tables” on criminals.

“We were actually able to see photographs of hundreds of tonnes of cocaine that were concealed in shipments of fruit, we were able to see hundreds of kilos of cocaine that were concealed in canned goods,” Shivers said.

Showing the massive global scale of the sting, Australia said more than 200 people had been charged already. 

Sweden arrested 155 people, including five in Spain. The authorities had been able to hone in on around 600 suspects, preventing “more than 10 planned murders within Sweden” alone. 

Neighbouring Finland announced around 100 arrests, including a major seizure of machine guns and a 3D printing workshop turning out parts for firearms.

Germany detained 70 suspects, the Netherlands 49, and New Zealand 35 in the operation.

Most of the 27 million ANOM messages obtained by the sting were in Dutch, German and Swedish, Dutch police said.

“Criminals assumed that the service was safe and touted it among themselves as the platform you should use… Nothing could have been further from the truth,” Dutch police said in a statement.

– ‘People came to us’ –

According to unsealed court documents, the FBI worked with insiders to develop and distribute ANOM devices through the Phantom Secure network of existing criminal customers, unloading 50 — mostly to Australia — as a “beta test”.

The devices are said to have had no email, call or GPS services and could only message other ANOM phones.

They could only be bought on the black market — for around $2,000 — and required a code from an existing user to access.

“We didn’t hand them out, people actually came to us seeking those devices,” Shivers said. 

Australian agencies helped get the phones in the hands of underworld “influencers” — including an Australian fugitive drug boss on the run in Turkey — in a bid to gain trust.

The cover appeared to be blown in March 2021 when a blogger detailed ANOM security flaws and claimed it was a scam linked to Australia, the United States and other members of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network. The post was later deleted.

ANOM’s website was unavailable Tuesday, with a message that the “domain has been seized”.

burs-dk/pbr/ach 

French President Emmanuel Macron was slapped across the face by a bystander during a trip to southeast France on Tuesday in a security scare on the second stop of a nationwide tour.

Images on social media and broadcast on the BFM news channel showed Macron approach a barrier to greet voters, where a long-haired man in a green t-shirt took hold of his elbow and then slapped him.

Macron’s bodyguards quickly intervened and two people were detained afterwards, local officials said. 

The incident in the village of Tain-l’Hermitage in the Drome region sparked outrage across the political spectrum and overshadowed the start of Macron’s tour, which he said was designed to “take the country’s pulse.”

“Politics can never be violence, verbal aggression, much less physical aggression,” Prime Minister Jean Castex told parliament, adding that “through the president, it is democracy that has been targeted.” 

Macron continued his trip afterwards, said an aide, who described the incident as an “attempted slap” though video footage appeared to show the man making contact with the president’s face.

On the video of the incident, someone can be heard shouting “Down with Macronism!”

– Election tour –

Macron, who remains a highly divisive figure, is widely expected to seek a second term in next year’s presidential elections and polls show him with a narrow lead over far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

His planned nationwide tour includes around a dozen separate stops over the next two months, with the former investment banker keen to meet voters in person after more than a year of crisis management over the Covid-19 pandemic.

He has spoken regularly of his fondness for informal exchanges with citizens — “making contact” as he calls it — but previous meet-and-greet initiatives have seen the reformer verbally abused. 

A 2018 multi-stop tour to mark the centenary of the end of World War I was marked by scenes of furious citizens booing and heckling him.

It took place just as anti-government “yellow vest” protests were gathering momentum to denounce the government’s policies and the head of state personally for his leadership style, which was criticised as aloof and arrogant.

Macron conducted another tour billed as a listening exercise in the aftermath of protests in 2019, which shook the country and saw him promise to change his way of governing.

In July last year, Macron and his wife Brigitte were verbally abused by a group of protesters while taking an impromptu walk through the Tuileries gardens in central Paris on Bastille Day. 

– Condemnation –

Shortly before being slapped on Tuesday, Macron had been asked to comment on recent remarks from far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, who suggested at the weekend that next year’s election would be manipulated. 

“Democratic life needs calm and respect, from everyone, politicians as well as citizens,” Macron said.  

In a rare moment of national unity, even his fiercest critics and political rivals came to his defence after the event.

Le Pen called the slap “unacceptable and profoundly reprehensible in a democracy,” while Melenchon said he stood “in solidarity with the president.”

The slap is nevertheless likely to spur debate in France about the political climate just two weeks from the first round of regional elections and 10 months from the presidential contest next April.

“It’s tense everywhere,” ruling party MP Patrick Vignal commented. “This campaign stinks and it’s because of the personalities. No one is going to come out a winner.”

In 2011, right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy had a security scare in southwest France when he was grabbed violently by the shoulder by a 32-year-old local government employee.

In 2009, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi suffered face and mouth injuries when a man in a crowd threw a souvenir statuette that hit him in the face.

War crimes judges on Tuesday upheld the genocide conviction of former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s worst act of bloodshed since World War II.

The UN tribunal in The Hague rejected Mladic’s appeal against his 2017 life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity over the 1992-5 Bosnian war.

Dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia”, the once burly general who is now in his late 70s sat impassively and listened to the judgement through headphones as it was read out by presiding judge Prisca Nyambe.

“The appeals chamber affirmed the sentence of life imprisonment imposed on Mr Mladic by the trial chamber,” the tribunal in The Hague said in a statement.

The verdict by five judges at the UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals — which deals with cases from the now-closed Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal — is final and cannot be appealed any further.

Mothers of some of the 8,000 mostly Muslim men and boys killed in cold blood when Bosnian Serb troops overran Srebrenica were outside the court where they have long campaigned for justice. 

“Today is a historic day, not only for us mothers, but also for the whole Balkans, Europe and the world,” Munira Subasic, president of one of the “Mothers of Srebrenica” associations, told AFP outside court.

“He’s a monster who did not repent for what he has done, even after 26 years. Wherever their army came, wherever their boot stepped in, they committed genocide,” she added.

– ‘I have come to cry’ –

At the genocide memorial near Srebrenica, a giant screen broadcast witness testimony ahead of the verdict, near the lines of white headstones where the bodies of some 6,600 identified victims are laid to rest.

“Instead of rejoicing with grandchildren, I have come to cry here,” said Munevera Kabeljic, 69, resting on the graves of her husband and her sons aged 17 and 20, neither of whom were married.

Kabeljic hit out at members of the Serbian community in Bosnia who have denied that any massacre took place.

“What hurts is the most is that they deny genocide,” she added. 

“They say it didn’t happen, but these tombstones prove it. They didn’t come to sleep here, they were killed.”

Mladic was the military face of a brutal trio led on the political side by ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

Captured in 2011 after a decade on the run, Mladic was found guilty in 2017 of genocide for personally overseeing the massacre at the supposedly UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica.

Footage from the time showed him handing out sweets to children before they and the women of Srebrenica were taken away by bus, while the men of the town were marched into a forest and executed.

– ‘Target of NATO’ –

Mladic was also found guilty of orchestrating a wider campaign of “ethnic cleansing” to drive Muslims and Bosnians out of key areas to create a Greater Serbia as Yugoslavia tore itself apart after the fall of communism.

The war left around 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million displaced.

Mladic, who gives his age as 78 but it is 79 according to the court, insisted throughout the trial and appeal process that he was guilty of genocide or war crimes.

In one of a series of tirades to the court, he painted himself last August as a “target of the NATO alliance” and derided the court as a “child of western powers”.

His lawyers argued that he was far from the scene at the time of the actual killings in Srebrenica, and that he could not be held responsible for the crimes of his subordinates.

The appeal hearing was delayed repeatedly after Mladic needed surgery to remove a polyp, and then because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Access to the court on Tuesday was also limited because of coronavirus measures.

burs-dk/dl

The United Nations Security Council voted Tuesday to give Secretary General Antonio Guterres a second term, with conflict resolution set to top his agenda at the world body’s helm.

The 72-year-old former prime minister of Portugal has held the office since 2017 and faced no competition for the next term in the job.

Around 10 other people also sought the position, but they were not formal candidates because none of the 193 UN member states endorsed them.

During a brief closed door session the Security Council voted unanimously to recommend that the General Assembly give Guterres another term, said the council’s current president, Estonian ambassador Sven Jurgenson.

Approval from the General Assembly is seen as a formality and expected to take place soon.

During his first term Guterres was forced to concentrate on limiting the potential damage from the unilateral, nationalist and alliance-wary foreign policy of Donald Trump.

Now, as he embarks on a new term, Guterres will need “a battle plan” for all the crises around the globe, one diplomat said.

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has dedicated a prestigious rights award to all political prisoners in Russia and in Belarus, his daughter told a summit of rights defenders on Tuesday.

“My dad asked me today to give this award to every single political prisoner in Russia and Belarus,” Daria Navalnaya said in a video statement to the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, citing a letter from her father.

“He wrote that most of them are in a much worse situation compared to me, because they’re not as well known or famous,” the 20-year-old said in her first public comments since her father’s jailing in February.

“They should know that they are not alone or forgotten about.”

Navalnaya was participating in the annual summit sponsored by over two dozen non-governmental organisations to accept the “Courage Award” on behalf of her father.

Navalny is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken domestic critic.

Navalny was given the prize for his “extraordinary courage and heroic efforts to sound the alarm about the Putin regime’s grave violations of the human rights of the Russian people,” explained Hillel Neuer, head of the UN Watch NGO, one of the summit’s co-organisers.

Navalny, who survived a near-fatal poisoning with a Soviet-designed nerve agent last year, was imprisoned for two-and-a-half-years on old embezzlement charges in February.

He accuses the Kremlin of being behind the assassination attempt, which Russian officials have repeatedly denied.

The anti-corruption campaigner declared a hunger strike in March to demand proper medical treatment behind bars for a growing list of health complaints, including numbness in his limbs. 

In an increasingly weak state from the hunger strike, Navalny was transferred to a prison hospital on April 20 amid warnings from the West of serious consequences if he died. 

The 45-year-old politician called off the strike three days later.

On Monday, his team said he had been transferred back to his penal colony in Pokrov, 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Moscow.

Navalnaya voiced sadness that she, not her father, was there to accept his prize on Tuesday.

“You really should be looking at my father instead,” she said.

“But he’s in a Russian prison right now, simply because of what he says, does and believes in, and because he didn’t die when the Russian government wanted him to.”