The Brazilian economic canary in the coal mine
Desmond Lachman, Opinion Contributor 1 day ago



Troubles come to the Brazilian economy not as single spies but in battalions. Especially at a time of rising U.S. interest rates, this hardly bodes well for the international economy. Brazil is Latin America's largest economy, so a full-blown Brazilian economic crisis could have a domino effect on the rest of Latin America's troubled economy. It could do so in much the same way as economic troubles in Thailand triggered the 1998 Asian economic crisis.

© getty: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro The Brazilian 

economic canary in the coal mine

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic delivered Brazil the severest of public health and economic blows, the country had a troubled economy. The pandemic found a Brazil still struggling to kickstart its economy after the unusually deep 2015-2016 economic recession. It also found Brazil with an uncomfortably large budget deficit and a record-high public debt level.

In no small measure due to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's incompetence and apparent indifference, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacted a high human toll on Brazil. To date, some 277,000 Brazilians have lost their lives due to COVID. With Brazil's vaccination program still in first gear and infections still surging, there seems to be little sign of light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel for Brazil.

Thanks to a very generous public spending program, including very popular handouts to the poorest segments of the Brazilian population, Bolsonaro has succeeded in limiting the depth of the country's COVID-induced economic recession. However, he has done so at a considerable cost to the country's public finances. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2020 Brazil's budget deficit ballooned to almost 15 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product, while its public debt skyrocketed to a level approximately the size of its economy.

Adding to the country's economic and political woes has been a Brazilian Supreme Court judge's decision to overturn former far-left President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's criminal conviction. That opens the way for Lula to challenge Bolsonaro in next year's Brazilian presidential election. It also makes it all the more difficult for Bolsonaro to begin addressing the country's highly precarious public finances or to begin reforming its sclerotic economy.

In an environment of ample global liquidity, markets have been very forgiving of Brazil's public finance excesses. However, with the bold Biden budget stimulus now threatening to cause the U.S. economy to overheat by year-end, it is very unlikely that today's ultra-easy global liquidity conditions will last very long. As if to underline this point, since the start of the year, the key U.S. 10-year Treasury bond yield has moved up sharply from less than 1 percent to its present level of over 1.5 percent.

The gathering clouds over the Brazilian economy have not gone unnoticed by the markets. Since the start of the year, the Brazilian currency has been among the world's worst performing currencies and now stands at close to its all-time low. Meanwhile, the Brazilian government is running into increased difficulties in placing its debt as reflected in higher government bond yields and in the fact that almost 30 percent of the country's debt comes due over the next year.

In 1998, as global liquidity conditions tightened, Thailand's economic troubles triggered the Asian currency crisis. With Brazil being a much larger economy and having much worse public finances than Thailand in 1998, one has to wonder whether Brazil's troubles might not trigger a more widespread emerging market debt crisis if U.S. interest rates do indeed continue to rise out of fear of U.S. economic overheating.

All of this should be of particular concern to U.S. economic policymakers. With emerging market economies now constituting around half of the global economy, an emerging market debt crisis today would be much more serious than the 1998 Asian currency crisis. With U.S. interest rates likely to rise for the remainder of this year, it would not seem to be too early for the Biden administration to start thinking about how it would respond to an emerging market debt crisis.

BOURGEOIS ECONOMIST GLOBALIST
Desmond Lachman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was formerly a deputy director in the International Monetary Fund's Policy Development and Review Department and the chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney.

Europe's droughts since 2015 'worst in 2,000 years'

AFP 3/15/2021

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Recent summer droughts in Europe were the most severe the region has seen in 2,110 years as climate change has stoked punishing heat waves, according to new research Monday that raises the alarm for ecosystems and agriculture.

© LOIC VENANCE Samples from 2015 to 2018 showed drought

 conditions that far exceeded anything in two thousand years

Using data from tree rings in living and dead European oaks going back to the time of the Romans, scientists identified a long-term drying trend that suddenly intensified in 2015 beyond anything seen in two millennia.

The researchers said that this cluster of abnormally dry summers was likely caused by human-driven climate warming and changes to the circulation of the jet stream.

"Climate change does not mean that it will get drier everywhere: some places may get wetter or colder, but extreme conditions will become more frequent, which could be devastating for agriculture, ecosystems and societies as a whole," said lead author Ulf Buntgen, of Cambridge University.

Buntgen, a professor of environmental systems analysis, said the research showed that consecutive summers of intense heat and drought experienced since 2015 is "extraordinary for central Europe", in a statement by the university.

- Intensifying heat -

To study the timing and severity of historical droughts, researchers analysed 147 oak trees -- including logs pulled from old buildings and archaeological sites and living trees from what is now the Czech Republic and parts of Bavaria -- covering a period of 2,110 years.

They then measured the oxygen and carbon isotope composition of 27,080 growth rings, as opposed to the usual tree-ring measurements of width and density, to plot changes as trees respond to water and heat stress.

The data, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, revealed a trend of Europe gradually getting drier, punctuated by very wet summers in the years 200, 720 and 1,100 and very dry summers in the years 40, 590, 950 and 1,510.

But samples from the summers of 2003, 2015 and 2018 showed drought conditions that far exceeded anything in the 2,110-year period.

Co-author Mirek Trnka, a professor at the CzechGlobe Research Centre in Brno, said the results are "particularly alarming for agriculture and forestry".

"Unprecedented forest dieback across much of central Europe corroborates our results," he said.

With one degree of warming since pre-industrial times so far, extreme weather of this kind has already become more intense, with a single heatwave in 2003 leading to 70,000 excess deaths in Europe alone.

Since the 2015 Paris climate deal, the world has experienced its five hottest years on record.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that food production is "extremely sensitive" to climate change.

In 2019, a report in Nature Climate Change warned that changes in the jet stream sharply increased the risk of heatwaves in regions responsible for up to a quarter of global food production -- Western North America, Western Europe, Western Russia and Ukraine.

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Asian Americans reported being targeted at least 500 times in the last two months
By Nicole Chavez, 

CNN 5 hrs ago

A coalition tracking reports of racism and discrimination against Asian Americans says it has received at least 3,795 firsthand complaints since last year.

© RINGO CHIU/AFP via Getty Images

 Advocates say Asian Americans have faced bigotry and discrimination.

Stop AAPI Hate began tracking violence and harassment against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders on March 19 last year.

From then through the end of 2020, Stop AAPI Hate received a total of 3,292 complaints from all 50 states and Washington, DC, according to a Stop AAPI Hate news release. The coalition, which had previously reported a lower number of complaints for 2020, said some incidents that took place in 2020 were not reported until earlier this year.

There were at least 503 anti-Asian hate incidents reported between January 1 and February 28 according to the group's latest report, released Tuesday.

While the incidents reported through their website likely only represent a portion of the number of hate incidents in the United States, the coalition says those numbers show that anti-Asian sentiment is still prevalent.

"Hate incidents are not abating. We cannot let anti-Asian American hate be a legacy of COVID-19 or the last presidential administration, but that's exactly what will happen unless we demand concrete action," Russell Jeung, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, said in a statement.

The majority of the incidents -- about 68% -- were cases of verbal harassment, while shunning or avoidance made up about 20.5%. About 11% of the incidents involved physical assaults, according to Stop AAPI Hate.

Video: 'It must stop': Biden condemns hate crimes against Asian-Americans (CNN)

More than a third of the incidents -- 35.4% -- took place in businesses, 25.3% were in public streets and 9.8% in public parks. Nearly 11% of the reports involved online incidents, according to the organization.

Among those saying they've experience hate, 42.2% identify as Chinese, followed by 14.8% who said are Korean. Vietnamese and Filipinos make 8.5% and 7.9% of those reporting the incidents, respectively.

Stop AAPI Hate said it doesn't independently verify any of the reports it receives, but that its total number of incidents only includes those reports that came with a description.

"We just report what we receive. We do tend to believe the impacted person, especially as so many are willing to go on record and to speak publicly about what happened to them," Stop AAPI Hate said in a statement.

In recent months, advocates, actors and officials have come together to denounce violence following a string of attacks in California and New York that left several people severely injured and some dead.

Last week, President Joe Biden addressed the nation on the one-year anniversary of the Covid-19 shutdown. During his speech, he condemned the hate and discrimination that Asian Americans have faced.

"Too often, we have turned against one another," Biden said. "A mask, the easiest thing to do to save lives, sometimes, it divides us, states pitted against one another, instead of working with each other, vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans, who have been attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated."

"At this very moment, so many of them, our fellow Americans, they're on the front lines of this pandemic trying to save lives, and still, still they're forced to live in fear for their lives just walking down streets in America. It's wrong. It's un-American. And it must stop," he added.

Hours before Biden's speech, two Democratic lawmakers reintroduced legislation in the House and the Senate calling for the expedited review of hate crimes related to the pandemic.

Rep. Grace Meng of New York, who sponsored the bill in the House, said she hopes the legislation tackles the "disgusting pattern of hate" that Asian Americans are facing since the start of the pandemic.

AFL-CIO urges U.S. to block imports of solar products from China's Xinjiang

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The leader of the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor federation, is calling on the Biden administration and Congress to stop imports of solar products from China's Xinjiang region over human rights concerns

.

© Reuters/CHINA STRINGER NETWORK Worker operates a machinery to clean solar panels at a photovoltaic industrial park in Hami

In letters to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said there is "convincing evidence of systematic forced labor" in solar production in Xinjiang and he demanded "immediate focused action."

"The Biden administration and Congress must act to block imports of solar products that contain polysilicon made with forced labor," Trumka said in the letters, dated March 12.

The State Department and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The AFL-CIO was an important supporter of President Joe Biden in his victory over former President Donald Trump in the November election.

The Biden administration has endorsed a last-minute determination by the Trump administration that China has committed genocide against Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang and has said the United States must be prepared to impose costs on China.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by Michael Perry)

Deadly Super Yeast Found in the Wild for the First Time

Ed Cara 

3/16/2021

A frightening superbug yeast that’s killing people in hospitals can also survive just fine outside of them, according to a new study out Tuesday. 

For the first time, researchers say they’ve discovered multidrug-resistant strains of the fungus Candida auris in a natural environment, in the remote wetlands of India. 

The findings indicate that these sorts of environments could be the yeast’s native home, while also providing evidence that warming temperatures due to climate change have recently made the fungus dangerous to humans, as some scientists have theorized.

© Photo: Shawn Lockhart (AP) A strain of Candida auris being cultured in a petri dish at a CDC laboratory.

C. auris was first discovered in 2009 by doctors in Japan, who isolated it from a patient’s ear infection (the first known cases date back to the mid-1990s, however). Since then, the yeast has been found in over a dozen countries, including the U.S. It can cause life-threatening infections, especially in already weakened hospital patients. But what makes the yeast especially scary is that it’s often resistant to multiple antifungal medications at once, making these infections difficult to treat and frequently fatal. The fungus is also a survivor outside of the human body, so once it’s established somewhere, it’s incredibly hard to remove it from the environment. If that wasn’t enough, C. auris can’t be identified easily through conventional tests, which can delay care and increase the risk of death.


There have only been around 1,600 cases of the yeast infection identified in the U.S. since 2009, but it’s considered one of the most serious emerging germ threats we face today. That threat has made understanding its origins and likely recent introduction to people all the more important. This new study, published in mBio on Tuesday, seems to provide the first real clues to that mystery.

Researchers in India and Canada went looking in environmental niches of India largely isolated from humans that could have been habitable for the yeast, based on its known biology and that of related species. They collected soil and water samples from the coastal wetlands of the Andaman Islands, an archipelago not far from the mainland. In two of the eight sites they searched—a salt marsh and a sandy beach—they found the fungus. The team found strains of C. auris that were susceptible and resistant to antifungals, and these strains bore a close genetic resemblance to strains collected from patients in India.

Altogether, their work on C. auris suggests that “prior to its recognition as a human pathogen, it existed as an environmental fungus,” the authors wrote.

Compared to other species of Candida, C. auris is known to thrive especially well in warmer temperatures. That’s made some researchers wonder if climate change played a part in in its emergence as a human germ. The theory argues that changes to the climate in their natural environment led the yeast to slightly adapt and become even more tolerant of warmer temperatures—the exact sort of temperatures that would make humans and other mammals a comfortable home once the yeast started regularly coming into contact with us.

The new findings seem to add more weight to that theory. Aside from showing that these fungi can and do live far from people, the team found subtle differences between the samples they found. One strain of yeast found in the more remote salt march was slower to grow under warmer temperatures than the strains found on the sandy beach and another salt march strain; this strain was also the only one found to be susceptible to common antifungals and less closely related to the strains seen in people. Meanwhile, the other strains were all resistant to antifungals and more warm-loving. The strains found on the beach, where people do visit sometimes, could have been reintroduced to the environment by humans, which could explain why they were more closely related to the strains found in patients.

It’s possible that the researchers have essentially collected snapshots of the yeast’s evolutionary journey, before and after climate change started to alter their biology and they first infected people. In an accompanying commentary written by some of the researchers who first proposed this theory—Arturo Casadevall from Johns Hopkins, Dimitrios Kontoyiannis from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Vincent Robert from the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute in the Netherlands—they agreed with those conclusions.

“This landmark discovery is crucial for understanding the epidemiology, ecology, and emergence of C. auris as a human pathogen,” they wrote.

In a statement released by the American Society For Microbiology, which publishes mBio, lead author Anuradha Chowdhary, a medical mycobiologist at the University of Delhi in India, said: “This study takes the first step in toward understanding how this pathogen survives in the wetland, but this is just one niche.”

The findings are still just one study’s worth, so they alone don’t prove that climate change introduced this latest nightmare into our lives, which the authors acknowledge. And there’s still a lot to be solved about how and from where C. auris emerged from the wild and into our hospitals, not to mention whether there’s anything that can be done to stop its spread.

2 charts show how much the world depends on Taiwan for semiconductors

Yen Nee Lee 

CNBC 3/15/2021

The global shortage of chips that forced several automakers to halt production has brought attention to Taiwan's outsized role in semiconductor manufacturing.

Taiwan dominates the foundry market, or the outsourcing of semiconductor manufacturing.

Much of that dominance comes down to TSMC, the world's largest foundry that counts major technology firms such as Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia as its clients.

© Provided by CNBC A man walks past TSMC's logo at the company's headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan. TSMC is the world's largest semiconductor foundry.

Taiwan's outsized role in chipmaking has come under the spotlight as a global shortage of semiconductors forced several automakers to halt production.

Countries including the U.S. and Germany reached out to Taiwan to help alleviate bottlenecks in the production of chips. The shortage was a result of increased demand for electronics during the Covid-19 pandemic, and was exacerbated by former President Donald Trump's trade war with China.

Taiwan dominates the foundry market, or the outsourcing of semiconductor manufacturing. Its contract manufacturers together accounted for more than 60% of total global foundry revenue last year, according to data by Taipei-based research firm TrendForce.

Much of Taiwan's dominance can be attributed to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co or TSMC, the world's largest foundry that counts major technology firms such as Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia as its clients. TSMC accounted for 54% of total foundry revenue globally last year, TrendForce data showed.

Semiconductors are critical components that power electronics from computers and smartphones to the brake sensors in cars. The production of chips involves a complex network of firms that design or make them, as well as those that supply the technology, materials and machinery to do so.

TSMC focuses solely on manufacturing and has been the go-to producer for many cutting-edge semiconductors, Dan Wang, a technology analyst at research firm Gavekal, said in a podcast by Singapore's DBS bank.

"So TSMC, if you just have a look at market share, I believe manufactures around 50% of all semiconductors in the world. And I think that still understates how important it is, because these are some of the most advanced chips out there," said Wang.

Semiconductor designers and manufacturers are on a quest to make chips smaller and better. Currently, TSMC and its South Korean rival Samsung are the only foundries capable of manufacturing the most advanced 5-nanometer chips.

TSMC is already gearing up for the next-generation 3-nanometer chips, that will reportedly start production in 2022.

VIDEO 9 MIN

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China playing catch up

Some countries are planning to boost their own semiconductor production — and one of them is China, which is aiming to be more self-reliant.

But China's tech fight with the previous U.S. administration is holding back its largest chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, said Paul Triolo, geo-technology practice head at risk consultancy Eurasia Group.

Last year, the Trump administration placed SMIC on a blacklist known as the entity list, which limits the company's access to technology and machinery that it needs.

SMIC was the fifth largest semiconductor foundry globally by revenue in 2020 — behind Taiwan's TSMC and UMC, South Korea's Samsung, and GlobalFoundries in the U.S., TrendForce data showed.

"The target right now is being able to compete at the cutting edge with companies like TSMC, Samsung and Intel," Triolo told CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia."

"The problem that SMIC is in now, the dilemma, is the U.S. government has put them on the entity list," he said. "But the bigger picture is that SMIC has been cut off, at least for the moment, from acquiring the really cutting-edge equipment it needs from ASML, which is a Dutch company."

ASML makes the so-called extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment that's used to produce the most advanced chips such as those manufactured by TSMC and Samsung. Reuters reported last year that the Trump administration pressured the Netherlands government to stop the sale of the machine to SMIC.

Even if SMIC has access to ASML's equipment, the company would take years to start producing high-end chips in large quantities, said Triolo.

Until then, it appears that TSMC would maintain its leading position.

"TSMC is just so dominant. It no longer really has much competition at all on the high end. And so, it took a while for this model really to work out. But at this point, it can be a very profitable company indeed," said Wang of Gavekal.

— CNBC's Eustance Huang and Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.

HUGO GINZBURG'S AGE OF SCIENTIFICTION

Charles Steinmetz's Predictions About 2021 From the Year 1921 Were Amazingly Accurate

Matt Novak 

GIZMONDO

3/16/2021

Back in 1921, Dr. Charles P. Steinmetz, the pioneering inventor and mathematician, was published in a Massachusetts newspaper predicting what the fantastical world of 2021 would look like. Steinmetz made some amazingly accurate predictions about things like air conditioning, cooking, electric bicycles, and home entertainment in the future.© Photo: AP (AP) Inventors Charles Steinmetz, right, and Thomas A. Edison are seen in Steinmetz’s Schenectady, N.Y. laboratory circa 1922.

At first glance, the predictions may not seem that exceptional to people from the vantage point of 2021. But Steinmetz describes technological advancements that were astonishing for the early 1920s.

© Photo: AP (AP) Inventors Charles Steinmetz, right, and Thomas A. Edison are seen in Steinmetz’s Schenectady, N.Y. laboratory circa 1922.

From Steinmetz:


When heating is all done and I want 70 degrees in my home I shall set the thermostat at 70 and the temperature will not rise above that point. This temperature will be maintained uniformly regardless of the weather outside. This will also hold true on the warm days when the temperature outside may be 90 or 100 degrees. The same electrical apparatus will cool the electrical air, and what’s more it will also keep the humidity normal at all times.

That may not sound quite so remarkable, but consider the life that most Americans were living in 1921. At the start of the 1920s, just 35% of Americans had electricity at home. The most high-tech gadgets in hotels of 1921 were alarm clocks centrally controlled to make sure they were accurate and an automatic potato peeler.

With that kind of context, it’s easier to see why predictions about indoor temperature controls were revolutionary for a time when most Americans didn’t even have electricity.

But what about cooking? Steinmetz saw a future filled with automatic temperature controls in the oven, along with a timer to make sure the oven was turned off:


Cooking by electricity will also be much more satisfactory. No more coal ranges. A great deal of our food can be cooked on the table. This can also be automatically regulated. For example, we want to cook a cake. We know this should be at a heat of 230 degrees for a period of 45 minutes so we set the regulator at 230 deg, 45 min. and cease to worry. At the expiration of 45 minutes the heat is automatically turned off.

Steinmetz also imaging what entertainment of the year 2021 would look like, and it had plenty of music:


Entertainment in our homes will also be improved. There will be no need to go to some congested, poorly ventilated hall for a musical concert. We just push a plug into a base receptacle, as we do for the vacuum cleaner or table lamp, and we can have the concert brought into our homes.

Music will be supplied by a central station and distributed to subscribers by wire, just as we get our telephone service today. Perhaps this may be by wireless, the home being equipped with a radio-receiving apparatus.

With this arrangement improved, we can hear grand opera stars as they sing in European capitals while sitting in our libraries at home.

It’s curious to see Steinmetz mention radio, or in the language of the time “wireless,” almost as an aside rather than as a given. It shows just how rudimentary radio technology was at the time, but also speaks to some of the challenges of imagining a business model for radio in 1921. How do you get someone to pay for radio? Advertising became the most dominant business model for radio of the 20th century, but plenty of inventors tried other means, like playing static-filled broadcasts that could only be unscrambled by special receivers in the 1940s. Some inventors even tried to build their own radio adblockers in the 1930s, proving there really is nothing new under the sun.

Steinmetz saw the incredible advances of electricity—many of which he helped create—and predicted a wondrous world of electric transportation:


With the electrical improvements to come, there will be a change in our transportation system. There will be more electric automobiles and electric bicycles and tricycles will be developed. Because of their simplicity and low price they will be available to almost everyone. Our cellars will be the place to keep them.

We will have driveways going under the house. This will eliminate the need for garages, which many times mar the beauty of the landscape of the property. While the cars are in the basement they will have their own batteries recharged.

Electricity will be used so generally then that the cost will likely be apportioned on the basis of a tax, like our water tax of today. The charge will probably be so much a plug, as we are now charged so much a faucet. Electricity will be so cheap that it will not pay to have meters installed, readings taken and a system of accounts kept.

In this prediction about electricity that’s “too cheap to meter,” Steinmetz was way ahead of his time. This idea wouldn’t become commonplace in futurist circles until the 1950s, when nuclear power was seen as the future of creating abundant energy. But that promise is still unfulfilled, as anyone who pays their home’s energy bill can tell you.


Today water is used universally and no one would think of charging a friend or even a stranger for a drink. The same will be true of electricity. When the friend calls with his electric vehicle, it will be driver into your cellar and the battery will be recharged while he is making his call.

Steinmetz may sound like he’s making a bold prediction for the future or electric cars, but this one is actually a blast from the past in many ways. Back in 1900, a third of all cars on U.S. roads were electric, and there were plenty of electric vehicles driving around in the 1910s. It wasn’t until the 1920s when gasoline had truly won out as the fuel of choice for motorists. But people of the 1920s would probably be astonished that we’re using fossil fuels to power our cars a hundred years later.

Steinmetz imagined what great thinks of the past like Benjamin Franklin would think of his time, and looked even further into the future to imagine the wonders of 2021:

Benjamin Franklin said that he would like to be sealed up in a wine cask for 100 years and then come out and view the world as it would be at the end of that time. We can imagine how amazed and delighted Franklin would be permitted to behold the electrical marvels of the twentieth century.

Yet, I feel safe in saying this would be but slight as compared to our surprise if we should seclude ourselves at this time for a like period and view the world in 2021.

Steinmetz died in October 1923, just two years after this article was published, so, of course, he didn’t live long enough to see the kind of indoor temperature controls or electrical appliances that he predicted. He also didn’t live long enough to see water become a precious commodity that wouldn’t be safe to drink in some parts of the United States.

Living as a realist in the world is all about trade-offs, of course, but it’s hard not to get a little depressed about the countless ways we’ve gone backwards over the past decade. Yes, things like electric cars have made great strides, but we have such a long way to go as a species. And I can’t help but wonder whether Steinmetz would be somewhat underwhelmed by our advances.

McAfee uncovers espionage campaign aimed at major telecommunication companies

Jonathan Greig 

3/16/2021

The McAfee Advanced Threat Research Strategic Intelligence team has identified an espionage campaign that is specifically targeting telecommunication companies in an attack dubbed "Operation Diànxùn." McAfee researchers Thomas Roccia, Thibault Seret and John Fokker said in a blog post that the malware is using tactics similar to those seen from groups like RedDelta and Mustang Panda.

© Provided by TechRepublic Image: iStockphoto/Gangis_Khan

© Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has teamed up with Telecom Italia on a real-time mapping system that tracks how people move in urban spaces. The project, known as Real Time Rome, made its debut Friday at the 10th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The technology maps real-time data gathered from mobile operators and transportation authorities. This projection screen shows buses in yellow, while the red represents the density of people.

Roccia, Seret and Fokker wrote that they believe the campaign's goal is to steal or gain access to covert information related to 5G technology using malware masquerading as Flash applications.

SEE: Future of 5G: Projections, rollouts, use cases, and more (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Cybersecurity companies Intsights and Positive Technologies both identified Mustang Panda last year as an advanced persistent threat group behind a number of COVID-19-themed attacks on people in Vietnam and Mongolia. The attacks involved COVID-19-related phishing emails loaded with malicious .rar files that, when unzipped, installed a backdoor trojan on the victim's machine.

RedDelta is also well known by security researchers for its work attacking the Vatican, the former civilian government of Myanmar and two Hong Kong universities last year. According to McAfee, the attacks used "the PlugX backdoor using DLL side loading with legitimate software, such as Word or Acrobat, to compromise targets."

Now, the group--which is believed to be based in China--is going after the telecom sector, and McAfee researchers wrote that they believe the attack is related to the ban of Chinese technology in the global 5G rollout.

"While the initial vector for the infection is not entirely clear, we believe with a medium level of confidence that victims were lured to a domain under control of the threat actor, from which they were infected with malware which the threat actor leveraged to perform additional discovery and data collection," the McAfee report said.

"We believe with a medium level of confidence that the attackers used a phishing website masquerading as the Huawei company career page to target people working in the telecommunications industry. We discovered malware that masqueraded as Flash applications, often connecting to the domain "hxxp://update.careerhuawei.net" that was under control of the threat actor. The malicious domain was crafted to look like the legitimate career site for Huawei, which has the domain: hxxp://career.huawei.com. In December, we also observed a new domain name used in this campaign: hxxp://update.huaweiyuncdn.com."

According to McAfee's research, the targets for the attacks are based in the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia, with a specific focus on German and Vietnamese telecommunication companies.  

© Provided by TechRepublic A map of where the attacks were targeted. Image: McAfee

"McAfee ATR's research into Operation Diànxùn reveals a capable threat actor that continuously updates tactics in an effort to extract data for their own purposes," Raj Samani, a McAfee fellow and chief scientist, told TechRepublic.

"Whilst the focus will be on the threat actor, the recommendation is to focus on the available IoCs and TTPs to not only hunt for the threat but implement controls that prevent such adversaries from being successful."

While there was initial interest from dozens of governments in allowing Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE to build out 5G networks, the United States and some European countries have in recent months pressed countries to stop rollout efforts over concerns that the Chinese government would have some level of access or control over the systems, according to Foreign Policy and Reuters.

Former President Donald Trump and his administration pressed other countries through a series of bilateral declarations to avoid hiring Chinese companies for 5G systems, sparking outrage from the Chinese government, who accused the US and Europe of rigging the free market in favor of companies based in their own countries.

"In this report we have brought to light a recent espionage operation allegedly attributed to a Chinese APT group. Regarding the targeted sector (telecoms), we believe that this campaign was used to access sensitive data and to spy on companies related to 5G technology. Additionally, the use of a fake Huawei website gives more clues about the telecom targets," the report said.

"The announcement of the ban on Huawei in several countries could have motivated the operation. The operating methods were previously assigned to the Chinese groups RedDelta and Mustang Panda. While we believe that the two actors could be the same, based on similar techniques, tactics and procedures, we currently have no further evidence. Interestingly, the RedDelta group has previously targeted Catholic organizations, while this campaign is primarily focused on telecommunications."

A new UN report proposes a radical shift in the way we think about nature

The United Nations released a report Thursday on the health of the planet that proposes a radical shift in the way mankind thinks about it.

© Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images Smoke rises from an illegally lit fire in Amazon rainforest reserve, south of Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil, on August 15, 2020.

By Caitlin Hu, CNN 7 hrs ago

The report, "Making Peace with Nature," spans 168 pages and distills the latest science on climate change and mankind's "war" on the planet. It also argues that amid our pursuit of wealth and security, humans must now learn to value the fundamental "natural capital" of geology, soil, air and water -- and urgently.

"For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature," said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at a news briefing Thursday presenting the report. "The result is three interlinked environmental crises: climate disruption, biodiversity loss and pollution that threaten our viability as a species."

"We are destroying the planet, placing our own health and prosperity at risk," said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which released the report.

The world is far from meeting its agreed objectives to protect the planet. Species and ecosystems are vanishing faster than ever, despite long-standing global commitments to protect them. While the ozone layer is slowly being restored, mankind has fallen off track to limit global warming as envisioned in the landmark Paris Agreement, the report says.

"At the current rate, warming will reach 1.5°C by around 2040 and possibly earlier. Taken together, current national policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions put the world on a pathway to warming of at least 3°C by 2100," it reads.

Humans are already paying a bitter price, and not only in the form of the increasingly extreme weather. According to the report, a quarter of the world's disease burden now stems from environment-related risks, including diseases that emerge from increasing proximity to wildlife -- such as Covid-19, thought to have originated with bats -- and exposure to our own toxic waste; pollution causes some 9 million premature deaths every year, according to the report.

Now could be the time to change all that, as the world reemerges from a pandemic that has upturned business as usual. Governments thinking about big policies to restart their economies could seize this unique historic moment to prioritize the planet, the report says. "The COVID-19 crisis provides the impetus to rethink how society can accelerate the transformation to a sustainable future."

The report offers suggestions for everyone from governments to financial institutions to individuals, but its proposition for a new way to think about the environment and the global economy is civilizational in scale.

"Economic and financial systems fail to account for the essential benefits that humanity gets from nature and to provide incentives to manage nature wisely and maintain its value. ... Conventional metrics like gross domestic product (GDP) overstate progress because they fail to adequately capture the costs of environmental degradation or reflect declines in natural capital," it says.

If mankind began to factor the value of our environment -- and the costs of its degradation to our health and security -- into economic activity, our decisions might be different, the report argues. "Excluding the value of nature skews investment away from economic solutions that conserve and restore nature, reduce pollution, expand renewable energy and make more sustainable use of resources while also increasing prosperity and well-being."

Guterres put it this way: "Just to give you an example of how important is this mind-shift requirement, even in the way we organize economic policies and economic data, we can see GDP growth when we overfish. We are destroying nature, but we count it as increase of wealth."

He added, "We can see the GDP growth when we cut forests, and we are destroying nature, and we are destroying wealth, but we consider it GDP growth."

Several global meetings planned for this year could begin to shift mankind's perspective on nature. The virtual UN Environment Assembly falls next week, followed by the COP15 Conference on Biodiversity and the UN Climate Change Conference later in the year.

Guterres said another "key moment" in the momentum of 2021 will come as early as Friday, when the United States officially rejoins the Paris Climate Agreement. Former US President Donald Trump withdrew the country from the accord last year.

"There is indeed no precedent for what we have to do, but if 2020 was a disaster, let 2021 then be the year humanity began making peace with nature and secured a fair, just and sustainable future for everyone," he said.


Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme

NEWLY EXCAVATED

Israeli experts announce discovery of more Dead Sea scrolls

JERUSALEM — Israeli archaeologists on Tuesday announced the discovery of dozens of Dead Sea Scroll fragments bearing a biblical text found in a desert cave and believed hidden during a Jewish revolt against Rome nearly 1,900 years ago.

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The fragments of parchment bear lines of Greek text from the books of Zechariah and Nahum and have been dated around the first century based on the writing style, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority. They are the first new scrolls found in archaeological excavations in the desert south of Jerusalem in 60 years.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of Jewish texts found in desert caves in the West Bank near Qumran in the 1940s and 1950s, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. They include the earliest known copies of biblical texts and documents outlining the beliefs of a little understood Jewish sect.

The roughly 80 new pieces are believed to belong to a set of parchment fragments found in a site in southern Israel known as the “Cave of Horror” — named for the 40 human skeletons found there during excavations in the 1960s — that also bear a Greek rendition of the Twelve Minor Prophets, a book in the Hebrew Bible. The cave is located in a remote canyon around 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Jerusalem.

The artifacts were found during an operation in Israel and the occupied West Bank conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority to find scrolls and other artifacts to prevent possible plundering. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war, and international law prohibits the removal of cultural property from occupied territory. The authority held a news conference Tuesday to unveil the discovery.

The fragments are believed to have been part of a scroll stashed away in the cave during the Bar Kochba Revolt, an armed Jewish uprising against Rome during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, between 132 and 136. Coins struck by rebels and arrowheads found in other caves in the region also hail from that period.

“We found a textual difference that has no parallel with any other manuscript, either in Hebrew or in Greek,” said Oren Ableman, a Dead Sea Scroll researcher with the Israel Antiquities Authority. He referred to slight variations in the Greek rendering of the Hebrew original compared to the Septuagint — a translation of the Hebrew Bible to Greek made in Egypt in the third and second centuries B.C.



“When we think about the biblical text, we think about something very static. It wasn’t static. There are slight differences and some of those differences are important,” said Joe Uziel, head of the antiquities authority's Dead Sea Scrolls unit. “Every little piece of information that we can add, we can understand a little bit better” how the Biblical text came into its traditional Hebrew form.

Alongside the Roman-era artifacts, the exhibit included far older discoveries of no lesser importance found during its sweep of more than 500 caves in the desert: the 6,000-year-old mummified skeleton of a child, an immense, complete woven basket from the Neolithic period, estimated to be 10,500 years old, and scores of other delicate organic materials preserved in caves’ arid climate.

In 1961, Israeli archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni excavated the “Cave of Horror” and his team found nine parchment fragments belonging to a scroll with texts from the Twelve Minor Prophets in Greek, and a scrap of Greek papyrus.

Since then, no new texts have been found during archaeological excavations, but many have turned up on the black market, apparently plundered from caves.

For the past four years, Israeli archaeologists have launched a major campaign to scour caves nestled in the precipitous canyons of the Judean Desert in search of scrolls and other rare artifacts. The aim is to find them before plunderers disturb the remote sites, destroying archaeological strata and data in search of antiquities bound for the black market.

Until now the hunt had only found a handful of parchment scraps that bore no text.

Amir Ganor, head of the antiquities theft prevention unit, said that since the commencement of the operation in 2017 there has been virtually no antiquities plundering in the Judean Desert, calling the operation a success.

“For the first time in 70 years, we were able to preempt the plunderers,” he said.