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GENEVA – The U.N. Human Rights Council has begun its annual session in Geneva, and in an opening address Monday, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet warned that climate change and pollution pose grave threats to human rights and humanity itself.

The U.N. rights chief says human inaction in the face of planetary disasters is having a severe impact on a broad range of rights, including the rights to adequate food, water, education, health and even life itself.

Michele Bachelet says extreme and murderous climate events have been unleashed on people in every region in recent months.

“Monumental fires in Siberia and California; huge sudden floods in China, Germany and Turkey; Arctic heatwaves leading to unprecedented methane emissions; and the persistence of interminable drought, from Morocco and Senegal to Siberia, potentially forcing millions of people into misery, hunger, and displacement,” Bachelet said.

Bachelet warns intensifying environmental threats constitute the single greatest challenge to human rights. She says environmental disasters amplify conflicts, tensions, increase vulnerabilities, and structural inequalities around the world.

For example, she notes the humanitarian emergency in Africa’s Sahel countries is being fueled by climate change. She says long droughts followed by flash floods, unequal access to natural resources, and high rates of youth unemployment are plaguing the region.

“These trends compel people into displacement, aggravate conflicts and political instability, and fuel recruitment by violent extremist groups,” Bachelet said. “In such a situation it should be clear that there can be no purely military solution to the conflicts in the region. To date, four million people across the Sahel have been displaced, according to UNHCR estimates.”

Bachelet says similar trends and challenges exist in different forms and to varying degrees in all regions of the world. For example, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa are gripped by water shortages causing tensions to rise over this scarce resource.

She reports climate change is having a striking impact on poverty, displacement and fundamental human rights in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. She says environmental and human rights defenders are being threatened, harassed, and even killed, often with complete impunity, in Latin America, South-East Asia and other regions.

The U.N. rights chief says a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is the foundation of human life. She adds the future of humanity depends on governments acting to preserve the world’s precious resources.

Source: Voice of America

A World Bank report released Monday suggests climate change could force 216 million people across six regions to migrate within their countries in the next 30 years, with “hotspots” emerging within the next nine years unless urgent steps are taken.

The “Groundswell Part 2” report examines how climate change is a powerful driver of migration within a nation because of its impact on people’s livelihoods through droughts, rising sea levels, crop failures and other climate-related conditions.

The original Groundswell climate report was published in 2018 and detailed projections and analysis for three world regions: sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America. “Groundswell 2” conducted similar studies on East Asia and the Pacific, North Africa, and eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Both studies established different scenarios to explore potential future outcomes and identify internal climate in- and out- migration hotspots in each region — that is, the areas from which people are expected to move, and the areas to which they might go.

The study suggests that by 2050, sub-Saharan Africa could see as many as 86 million internal climate migrants; East Asia and the Pacific, 49 million; South Asia, 40 million; North Africa, 19 million; Latin America, 17 million; and eastern Europe and Central Asia, 5 million.

To slow the factors driving climate migration and avoid these worst-case outcomes, the report recommends a series of steps world leaders can take, including reducing global emissions in line with the goals established by the Paris 2015 climate agreement, and taking steps to better understand the drivers of internal climate migration, so appropriate policies to address them can be developed.

Source: Voice of America

A cyber surveillance company based in Israel developed a tool to break into Apple iPhones with a never-before-seen technique that has been in use since February, internet security watchdog group Citizen Lab said Monday.

The discovery is important because of the critical nature of the vulnerability, which requires no user interaction and affects all versions of Apple’s iOS, OSX, and watchOS, except for those updated Monday.

The vulnerability developed by the Israeli firm, named NSO Group, defeats security systems designed by Apple in recent years.

Apple said it fixed the vulnerability in Monday’s software update, confirming Citizen Lab’s finding. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment regarding whether the hacking technique came from NSO Group.

In a statement to Reuters, NSO did not confirm or deny that it was behind the technique, saying only that it would “continue to provide intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world with life-saving technologies to fight terror and crime.”

Citizen Lab said it found the malware on the phone of an unnamed Saudi activist and that the phone had been infected with spyware in February. It is unknown how many other users may have been infected.

The intended targets would not have to click on anything for the attack to work. Researchers said they did not believe there would be any visible indication that a hack had occurred.

The vulnerability lies in how iMessage automatically renders images. IMessage has been repeatedly targeted by NSO and other cyber arms dealers, prompting Apple to update its architecture. But that upgrade has not fully protected the system.

“Popular chat apps are at risk of becoming the soft underbelly of device security. Securing them should be top priority,” said Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had no immediate comment.

Explosion in attacks

Citizen Lab said multiple details in the malware overlapped with prior attacks by NSO, including some that were never publicly reported. One process within the hack’s code was named “setframed,” the same name given in a 2020 infection of a device used by journalists at Al Jazeera, the researchers found.

“The security of devices is increasingly challenged by attackers,” said Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak.

A record number of previously unknown attack methods, which can be sold for $1 million or more, have been revealed this year. The attacks are labeled “zero-day” because software companies had zero days’ notice of the problem.

New cybersecurity focus

Along with a surge in ransomware attacks against critical infrastructure, the explosion in such attacks has stoked a new focus on cybersecurity in the White House as well as renewed calls for regulation and international agreements to rein in malicious hacking.

As previously reported, the FBI has been investigating NSO, and Israel has set up a senior inter-ministerial team to assess allegations that its spyware has been abused on a global scale.

Although NSO has said it vets the governments it sells to, its Pegasus spyware has been found on the phones of activists, journalists and opposition politicians in countries with poor human rights records.

Source: Voice of America

Britain’s Health Ministry announced Sunday that it would reverse its decision to require ‘vaccine passports’ for Britons entering nightclubs and bars.

Health Minister Sajid Javid said Sunday that the idea, which faced pushback from conservative lawmakers, had been shelved but would be reconsidered if rates of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, increased substantially.

Britain is expected to announce this week its plans for inoculating 12- to 15-year-old youngsters in the battle against the virus. The vaccine campaign will likely start later this month.

Elsewhere, Bangladesh reopened schools after over 500 days of closure Sunday, as the government reported that 97% of teachers throughout the country have been fully vaccinated.

Children were still required to wear masks in schools and the government warned against being lax on safety measures. For now, students in each class will attend school once a week.

More than 50% of Japan’s population has received COVID-19 vaccines, according to the Japanese government. Economy Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura said in a television interview Sunday that the inoculation rate is expected to reach 60% by the end of September.

Myanmar is fighting a third COVID-19 wave at a time of increasing political tensions. According to World Health Organization data, more than 400,000 people have been infected with COVID-19 in Myanmar, with more than 16,000 dead. Public health officials, however, say they believe the figures are widely undercounted.

The Times of India reported that the northeastern state of Mizoram’s COVID-19 tally reached 70,000, after 1,089 new cases were recorded Sunday, including 245 children.

The Johns Hopkins University has recorded 33.2 million COVID-19 cases in India and more than 442,000 deaths. Health officials say they believe that India’s COVID-19 numbers are likely undercounted.

India is second only to the United States in COVID infections. The U.S. has a COVID-19 tally of 41 million infections and nearly 660,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday that it has recorded 224.4 million global COVID-19 infections and 4.6 million global deaths. The center also said 5.7 billion vaccines have been administered.

Source: Voice Of America

WASHINGTON – U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Sunday defended President Joe Biden’s new directives requiring millions of workers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus under the possible threat of losing their jobs, although there is widespread opposition from Republican state governors.

“This is not an unusual step,” Murthy told ABC’s “This Week” show. “This is an appropriate response.”

With about 150,000 new delta variant coronavirus cases and 1,500 more deaths being recorded daily in the United States, Biden last week directed businesses with 100 employees or more to mandate vaccinations for their workers or require the employees to undergo weekly COVID-19 testing if they refuse inoculations.

About 80 million workers throughout the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, could be affected by the Biden mandate, potentially costing them their jobs if they refuse vaccinations or testing.

The president also ordered about 2.5 million workers employed by the national government to get the shot if they haven’t already, and he ended a previous option they had for weekly testing if they choose not to get the vaccine.

Some large companies had already started mandating vaccinations and executives at major businesses have generally voiced support for Biden’s orders. But 19 Republican governors, many of them frequent critics of the Democratic president, have objected to his directives and say they are considering legal challenges.

One of the Republican governors, Nebraska’s Pete Ricketts, told the “Fox News Sunday” show that the president’s orders are an “egregious overreach” by the national government.

Ricketts said he has heard from many workers who are afraid they will be fired if they are forced to take the shot.

“You shouldn’t have to make a choice between keeping your job or getting a jab in the arm,” Ricketts said. “There’s just a lot of people who don’t know what to trust right now,” even though federal health regulators have given full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and emergency use authorization for the Moderna vaccine, the two most commonly administered coronavirus vaccines in the U.S.

Ricketts said that for some people, hesitancy “is really an outcome of what the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has done because they’ve flip-flopped on so many issues,” such as whether one should wear a mask if they have been vaccinated and under what circumstances.

“It should be a personal choice (whether to get vaccinated), not something mandated by the government,” he said.

Another Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” show, “This is a very serious deadly virus, and we’re all together in trying to get an increased level of vaccination out in the population.”

But he added, “The problem is that I’m trying to overcome resistance, but the president’s actions in a mandate hardens the resistance.”

States throughout the country routinely require children to be vaccinated against communicable childhood diseases. Such requirements, Hutchinson said, “have always come at the state level, never at the national level.”

“And so, this is an unprecedented assumption of federal mandate authority that really disrupts and divides the country,” he said. “It divides our partnership between the federal government and the states, and it increases the division in terms of vaccination when we should all be together trying to increase the vaccination uptake.”

Hutchinson said he, unlike some other Republican governors, supports the right of individual businesses to mandate inoculations for their workers.

“But to have the federal mandate will be counterproductive,” he argued.

Months ago, Biden heralded what appeared to be a growing success in the fight against the coronavirus, but the delta variant has led to a new wave of concern, and the workplace vaccination mandates he ordered last week.

“Delta is a tough foe,” Murthy told ABC. “It’s throwing curve balls at us.”

But he said health officials “know these kinds of vaccinations work,” and described Biden’s orders as “the next step” in fighting the virus that causes COVID-19.

Source: Voice Of America