Monthly: April 2021

Наглядова рада «Нафтогазу» оголосила про відставку після нестатутної зміни керівництва компанії

Кабінет міністрів змінив керівництво компанії, оминувши передбачене статутом виключне право наглядової ради ініціювати такі зміни

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У ЄС засудили санкції Росії проти посадовців Євросоюзу і залишили собі право на відповідь

Раніше 30 квітня МЗС Росії оголосило, що закриває в’їзд на територію країни восьми посадовцям Європейського союзу і країн-членів ЄС

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У Зеленського засудили марш до річниці «Галичини» і хочуть звіту Кличка

Цей марш уже широко засудили в Україні і в світі

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Російське МЗС заявило про заборону на в’їзд голові Європарламенту та ще сімом громадянам ЄС

Європейський парламент та інші установи Євросоюзу наразі не коментували це рішення Росії

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СБУ не має інформації щодо «депортації» блогера Ісаєва

У січні 2020 року у Державній міграційній службі України повідомили, що відомство не ухвалювало жодних рішень про видворення з країни Ельвіна Ісаєва

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Туреччина схвалила екстрене використання російської вакцини від коронавірусу «Спутнік V»

Днями міністр охорони здоров’я повідомляв, що Туреччина отримає 50 мільйонів доз «Спутніка V» протягом наступних шести місяців

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ЄС приєднується до міжнародного занепокоєння через зміни в «Нафтогазі»

Попередніми днями зі схожими заявами виступили посли країн «Групи семи» в Україні, а також Держдепартамент США й Американська торговельна палата

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YouTube Child Stars Top Charts but Raise Concerns

Videos of kids having fun are among the most popular on YouTube. They are also a fast-growing business, one that critics say comes with little regulation and oversight to protect children on either side of the screen. Michelle Quinn reports.
Producer: Michelle Quinn

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Germany to Return Looted Benin Bronzes to Nigeria

German officials say they have reached an agreement with Nigeria to return some of the famed Benin Bronzes that were looted from Nigeria in the 19th century.About 500 of the plundered artifacts are on display in several German museums.The handoff is expected to take place next year under an agreement reached between Germany and Nigeria on Thursday.The return of the artifacts is “a turning point in our approach to colonial history,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said.In 1897, British soldiers snatched thousands of exquisitely decorated bronze and brass plaques and sculptures created by guilds in the Kingdom of Benin in what is now Nigeria.  The objects have become known as the Benin Bronzes and are on display in museums around the world.The British Museum has more than 900 of the objects.  Germany’s agreement with Nigeria pertains only to the artifacts that are in Germany.

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Blinken Heads to Ukraine Amid Russia’s Recent Military Buildup Along Border

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is heading to Ukraine next week as Washington coordinates closely with Kyiv over Russia’s recent military buildup along Ukraine border.  
 
Blinken will travel to Ukraine on May 5-6, “where he will meet with President Zelensky, Foreign Minister Kuleba, other officials, and representatives of Ukrainian civil society to reaffirm unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement Friday.
 
The United States is keeping a close watch on Russia’s movement after Moscow announced last Thursday that it would begin withdrawing its troops from the border of Ukraine.   
 
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said this week it is too soon to tell and are taking at face value Russia’s claims they are pulling everybody back, while noting “some departure of some [Russia] forces away from Ukraine.”US Keeping Wary Eye on Russian Troops Near UkrainePentagon says too soon to know if the threat from Moscow’s largest military buildup since it seized Crimea in 2014 is truly over Senior American and European Union officials had said roughly 150,000 Russian troops massed along the border of Ukraine and in Crimea, more troops in the area than seven years ago when Russia invaded and seized Crimea in 2014.  
 
The U.S. has reaffirmed its support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrities, urging the Russian Government to immediately cease all aggressive activity in and around Ukraine.
 
Blinken’s trip to Ukraine would be his first as the U.S. secretary of state. In Kyiv, he “will also encourage continued progress on Ukraine’s institutional reform agenda, particularly anti-corruption action, which is key to securing Ukraine’s democratic institutions, economic prosperity, and Euro-Atlantic future,” said Price in the Friday statement.
Prior to traveling to Ukraine, the chief U.S. diplomat will attend a G-7 foreign ministers meeting in London from May 3-5, which is the first in-person such gathering in two years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.  
 
“The United States will discuss how we can work with other countries to address the key geopolitical issues we face as we build back better from this pandemic,” said the State Department spokesman. “Tackling the COVID-19 and climate crises will feature prominently on the agenda, as will advancing economic growth, human rights, food security, gender equality, and women’s and girls’ empowerment.”
 
While in Britain, Blinken will also meet with Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Foreign Secretary Raab “to discuss shared U.S.-U.K. priorities.”
 
In addition to G-7 countries, officials from Australia, India, South Africa, South Korea, and Brunei, in its capacity as Chair of ASEAN, will join the G-7 Foreign and Development Ministers’ meeting as guests. Price said, “these meetings will lay the groundwork for the 46th Leaders’ Summit in Cornwall in June.”VOA’s Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
 

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Росія: штаби Навального внесли у список «причетних до тероризму і екстремізму»

Напередодні соратник Навального Леонід Волков оголосив, що офіційно розпускає штаби

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Росія: у Москві затримали адвоката ФБК Навального

Група юристів «Команда 29», яку очолює Павлов, повідомила, що співробітники ФСБ затримали адвоката після обшуку його номеру у готелі в Москві

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Раді пропонують звільнити міністра фінансів Марченка

Тексту проєкту постанови на сайті ВРУ наразі немає

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Ізраїль засудив акцію до дня створення дивізії «Галичина» в Києві

28 квітня у Києві відбувся марш з нагоди річниці дня створення 14-ї добровольчої дивізії «Ваффен СС» «Галичина», ініційований праворадикальною організацією «С14», Всеукраїнським об’єднанням «Свобода» та «Правим сектором»

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Болгарія висилає ще одного російського дипломата

У російському МЗС пообіцяли відповісти на видворення свого дипломата

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Сенат затвердив кандидатуру Нуланд на посаду заступника держсекретаря

З призначенням Нуланд привітав державний секретар США Ентоні Блінкен, відзначивши її великий досвід

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Держсекретар США Блінкен приїде в Україну наступного тижня

Точна дата візиту державного секретаря США Ентоні Блінкена в Україну наразі невідома

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US Government Probes VPN Hack Within Federal Agencies, Races to Find Clues

For at least the third time since the beginning of this year, the U.S. government is investigating a hack against federal agencies that began during the Trump administration but was only recently discovered, according to senior U.S. officials and private sector cyber defenders.  It is the latest supply chain cyberattack, highlighting how sophisticated, often government-backed groups are targeting vulnerable software built by third parties as a steppingstone to sensitive government and corporate computer networks.  The new government breaches involve a popular virtual private network (VPN) known as Pulse Connect Secure, which hackers were able to break into as customers used it.  More than a dozen federal agencies run Pulse Connect Secure on their networks, according to public contract records. An emergency cybersecurity directive last week demanded that agencies scan their systems for related compromises and report back.  The results, collected Friday and analyzed this week, show evidence of potential breaches in at least five federal civilian agencies, said Matt Hartman, a senior official with the U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency.  “This is a combination of traditional espionage with some element of economic theft,” said one cybersecurity consultant familiar with the matter. “We’ve already confirmed data exfiltration across numerous environments.”  The Ivanti logo and cyber binary codes are seen in this illustration taken April 20, 2021.The maker of Pulse Connect Secure, Utah-based software company Ivanti, said it expected to provide a patch to fix the problem by this coming Monday, two weeks after it was first publicized. Only a “very limited number of customer systems” had been penetrated, it added.  Over the last two months, CISA and the FBI have been working with Pulse Connect Secure’s maker and victims of the hack to kick out the intruders and uncover other evidence, said another senior U.S. official who declined to be named but is responding to the hacks. The FBI, Justice Department and National Security Agency declined to comment.  The U.S. government’s investigation into the Pulse Connect Secure activity is still in its early stages, said the senior U.S. official, who added the scope, impact and attribution remain unclear.  Security researchers at U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye and another firm, which declined to be named, say they’ve watched multiple hacking groups, including an elite team they associate with China, exploiting the new flaw and several others like it since 2019.  FILE – Security firm FireEye’s logo is seen outside the company’s offices in Milpitas, California.In a statement last week, Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said China “firmly opposes and cracks down on all forms of cyberattacks,” describing FireEye’s allegations as “irresponsible and ill-intentioned.”  The use of VPNs, which create encrypted tunnels for connecting remotely to corporate networks, has skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet with the growth in VPN usage so too has the associated risk.  “This is another example in a recent pattern of cyber actors targeting vulnerabilities in widely used VPN products as our nation largely remains in remote and hybrid work postures,” Hartman said.  Three cybersecurity consultants involved in responding to the hacks told Reuters that the victim list is weighted toward the United States and so far includes defense contractors, civilian government agencies, solar energy companies, telecommunications firms and financial institutions.  The consultants also said they were aware of fewer than 100 combined victims so far between them, suggesting a fairly narrow focus by the hackers.  Analysts believe the malicious operation began around 2019 and exploited older flaws in Pulse Connect Secure and separate products made by cybersecurity firm Fortinet before invoking the new vulnerabilities.  Hartman said the civilian agency hacks date to at least June 2020.  Hacking the supplyA recent report by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, studied 102 supply chain hacking incidents and found they surged the last three years. Thirty of the attacks came from government-backed groups, primarily in Russia and China, the report said.  The Pulse Connect Secure response comes as the government is still grappling with the fallout of three other cyberattacks.  FILE – The SolarWinds logo is seen outside its headquarters in Austin, Texas, Dec. 18, 2020.The first is known as the SolarWinds hack, in which suspected Russian government hackers commandeered the company’s network management program to burrow inside nine federal agencies.  A weakness in Microsoft’s email server software, named Exchange, exploited by a different group of Chinese hackers, also required a massive response effort, although there was ultimately no impact to federal networks, according to U.S. officials.  Then a weakness at a maker of programming tools called Codecov left thousands of customers exposed inside their coding environments, the company disclosed this month.  Some government agencies were among the customers whose credentials were taken by the Codecov hackers for further access to code repositories or other data, according to a person briefed on the investigation. Codecov, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on that case.  The U.S. plans to address some of these systemic issues with an upcoming executive order that will require agencies to identify their most critical software and promote a “bill of materials” that demands a certain level of digital security across products sold to the government.  “We think [this is] the most impactful way to really impose costs on these adversaries and make it that much harder,” said the senior U.S. official. 

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In France, Chauvin Conviction Has Not Brought Comfort

The trial of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin made headline news in France. But much of the reporting about the trial, and its underlying themes of police violence and racism, largely zoomed in on the United States.“I think it’s viewed as an American problem with some resonance in France,” said Steven Ekovich, a U.S. politics and foreign policy professor at the American University of Paris.American University of Paris professor Steven Ekovich says the French viewed the Derek Cauvin trial in the death of George Floyd as an American problem, but with some resonance in France. (Lisa Bryant/VOA)”It also feeds into a certain strain of French anti-Americanism, on the left and on the right, so that the French can moralize about the United States, and its difficulties and its flaws,” he said.That wasn’t the case last year, when George Floyd’s death caused many French to look inward. They joined spreading global protests for police accountability. Traore deathAlong with Floyd, many chanted the name of Frenchman Adama Traore, 24, whose family said he died under circumstances similar to Floyd’s, although that claim is disputed. The Black American’s death opened a broader spigot here of soul-searching about France’s colonial past and continuing injustices today.French authorities vowed zero tolerance of police racism and brutality and pledged to ban a controversial police chokehold. President Emmanuel Macron called racial profiling “unbearable.”Police representatives deny systemic racism. They say police are overworked and underappreciated as they tackle violence in tough neighborhoods, and they sometimes become targets of terrorism.David-Olivier Reverdy of the National Police Alliance union said the country’s police aren’t racist. To the contrary, he said, they’re Republican and diverse, from all ethnic origins and religions. There may be some problematic individuals, he added, but the force itself isn’t racist.Critics argue otherwise. A 2017 report by an independent citizens rights group found young Black or Arab-looking men here are five times more likely to be stopped for police identity checks than the rest of the population. Four Paris police officers were suspended last November after TV footage showed them punching a Black music producer. In January, six nongovernmental groups announced the country’s first class-action lawsuit on alleged racial profiling by police.’Struggling’ for a decade“We’ve been struggling with the state for 10 years,” said Slim Ben Achour, one of the lawyers representing the groups in the case.“The French Supreme Court convicted the state in November 2016 for discrimination, and after that we could have expected from the state … which should respect the rule of law — to do police reform. They have done nothing,” he said.Allegations of police violence and racism are an old story in France. In 2005, the deaths of two youngsters fleeing police sparked rioting in the banlieues — code word for the multicultural, working-class suburbs ringing cities here. Activists point to bigger, long-standing inequalities going far beyond policing.Some aren’t waiting for change from above. In the Paris suburb of Bobigny, youth group Nouvel Elan 93 is mentoring youngsters, helping them with schoolwork and giving them alternatives to hanging in the streets.Aboubacar N’diaye, left, helped launch a youth group in the Paris suburb of Bobigny. He says police profiling is something that could happen to him. (Lisa Bryant/VOA)One of Nouvel Elan’s founders, Aboubacar N’Diaye, said the group is trying to push youngsters to the maximum of their potential. They’re talented, he said, in sports, music, theater — everything.N’Diaye said Floyd’s death has resonated in this community and that it could happen to Blacks here like him. There’s a close relationship, he added, in the protests for Floyd and Traore.He and other activists said it would take time for the lessons from Floyd’s death — and France’s colorblind creed of liberty, equality and fraternity —to take hold.

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In France, Derek Chauvin Verdict Brings No Comfort  

Reports of police violence and racial injustice resonate especially strongly in France, with its large population of ethnic Africans and Arabs. Yet cautious optimism by some in the United States and elsewhere that the guilty verdict in American former police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial might trigger societal change is less shared in France. From the Paris suburb of Bobigny, Lisa Bryant reports for VOA.   Camera:   Lisa Bryant, Agencies  

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Kid YouTube Stars Top the Charts but Raise Concerns

Videos of kids having fun are among the most popular on YouTube. They are also a fast-growing business, one that critics say comes with little regulation and oversight to protect children on either side of the screen. Michelle Quinn reports.
Producer: Michelle Quinn

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США та НАТО почали виводити війська з Афганістану

29 квітня Білий дім повідомив, що американські війська почали виводити з Афганістану. За даними CNN, менш ніж 100 військових залишили Афганістан авіатранспортом

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Попри обмеження, «слуги народу» під час локдауну збирались у готельно-ресторанному комплексі – «Схеми»

У розпал локдауну народні депутати від партії «Слуга народу» Мотовиловець, Гунько і Культенко та їхні однопартійці-депутати з Київської облради провели кількагодинну зустріч у заміському готельно-ресторанному комплексі Koncha Zaspa Park

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WHO Europe Reports First Drop in COVID Cases in 2 Months

The World Health Organization’s Europe Regional Director Hans Kluge reported Thursday the number of new COVID-19 infections in the region dropped significantly in the last week for the first time in two months. Speaking from WHO regional headquarters in Copenhagen, Kluge said hospitalizations and deaths were also down in the past week. He also said as of Thursday, 7% of Europeans have been totally vaccinated, more than the 5.5% of the population that has contracted COVID-19. Kluge cautioned that while that is good news, the virus remains a threat, as infection rates remain high in several areas. He said individual and collective public health and social measures remain dominant factors in shaping the pandemic’s course. A man receives his first dose of the of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, at a vaccination center in Piraeus, near Athens, April 29, 2021.But he also noted that in those areas where high-risk groups such as health and other frontline workers were prioritized with vaccines, admissions to hospitals and death rates are falling. Kluge said in the context of the pandemic, it is a combination of vaccines and strong public health measures that offer the clearest path back to normal. But noting it is European Immunization Week, the WHO regional director said he wanted to send a message beyond COVID-19 and pressed the value of vaccines in general. He said before the pandemic, vaccines had protected the world against life-threatening diseases for more than 200 years. While vaccines bring the world closer to ending the pandemic, he said they could also end measles, cervical cancer and other vaccine-preventable diseases. He said when COVID-19 interrupted routine vaccine programs around the world, the results can be other severe infectious disease outbreaks just down the line. He urged public health systems to maintain routine primary health care while continuing to control the pandemic. “Once again, vaccines are about to change the course of history — but only if we act responsibly and get vaccinated when offered the opportunity to do so,” Kluge said. 
 

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