Unseasonably cold weather is worsening the outlook for survivors of this week’s massive earthquakes and aftershocks in Turkey and Syria with more than 20,000 deaths confirmed as of today. “We’ve got a lot of people who have survived now out in the open and in worsening and horrific conditions,” said Robert Holden, the World Health Organization’s incident manager. “We are in real danger of seeing a secondary disaster.” [node:read-more:link]
More than 11,000 people in Turkey and Syria are now confirmed dead and thousands more remain missing today after a earthquakes and aftershocks in their border region February 6. International rescue teams are racing against time, their work hampered by winter weather, to find survivors in devastated communities but logistics and politics in war-torn Syria exacerbate the difficulties. [node:read-more:link]
Moldova’s prime minister is accusing Russia of sponsoring protests and conducting cyberattacks in an attempt to destabilize the former Soviet republic abutting southwestern Ukraine. “We are seeing . . . pro-Russian forces trying to destabilise the country politically through paid protests,” Natalia Gavrilița said February 7. “We've had the biggest cyberattacks in 2022 in the history of our country, and we are seeing bomb threats.” [node:read-more:link]
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign affairs and security chief, said February 7 that EU missions worldwide are being assigned special staff to deal with growing traffic in disinformation. “We have to address this politically at the highest possible level,” he said, having specifically mentioned Russian-sourced fake news. [node:read-more:link]
U.S. intelligence officials believe that the Chinese balloon shot down by the U.S., and now in the hands of the FBI, is part of an extensive military surveillance program which has conducted at least two dozen missions over at least five continents in recent years. Roughly half have been into U.S. airspace, including the downed “weather” balloon which also entered Canadian airspace after being detected by NORAD. The debris now is being analyzed by FBI engineers in an attempt to learn what kind of intelligence it could have collected as well as how future incursions can be tracked. [node:read-more:link]
An RCAF CP-140 Aurora maritime patrol and surveillance aircraft headed back to base in Atlantic Canada today after intelligence gathering flights over Haiti. The aircraft was retasked from a U.S.-led counter-narcotics mission and a Canadian Armed Forces official said the data collected over two days would be used by the government “to further assess the situation in Haiti,” which has requested military help in dealing with endemic gang violence. [node:read-more:link]
As the death toll from the weekend’s earthquakes and aftershocks in Turkey and Syria topped 6,200 today, the Canadian government has committed an initial $10 million to the international relief effort. International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan said further aid and potential deployment of disaster response teams are being considered. [node:read-more:link]
The European Union’s ban on imports of Russian refined oil products, notably diesel and jet fuel, went into effect February 5. The EU used to be the largest buyer of Russian products, amount to some €70 million daily and while EU industry has built up stocks of diesel in recent months, the long-term outlook is uncertain. [node:read-more:link]
The federal government has deployed one of the RCAF’s Lockheed Martin CP-140 Aurora maritime patrol aircraft to Haiti. Capable of flying for 17 hours at a time, it is tasked with providing surveillance and intelligence support for the authorities’ campaign against endemic gang violence which has paralyzed the country for months. [node:read-more:link]
The U.S. Coast Guard’s rescue of a Canadian at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon took a strange twist on the weekend. A massive wave had rolled the trawler yacht which he was aboard, which turned out to be stolen. He was not only arrested in connection with another incident in Oregon but also is wanted in B.C. on a variety of other outstanding charges [node:read-more:link]
Bipartisan forces in the U.S. Senate are pressing President Joe Biden to block a $20-billion arms sale to Turkey as long as it continues to block NATO membership for Sweden and Finland. “Once the NATO accession protocols are ratified . . . Congress can consider the sale,” the Senators say in a letter to Biden. “Failure to do so, however, would call into question this pending sale.” [node:read-more:link]
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told his parliament today that he has no plan to join NATO and will remain militarily neutral while maintaining ties with alliance members through weapons procurements. Kosovo and Bosnia & Herzegovina are the only other Balkan states which have not joined NATO. [node:read-more:link]
A Turkish engineering firm has won two contracts worth some €31.5 million to modernize intelligence infrastructure in the NATO Communications and Information Agency. STM says it is one of the largest software development projects assigned by the alliance to a Turkish company. [node:read-more:link]
Swedish Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer says proposed legislation would restrict activities linked to militant Kurdish groups in the hopes of persuading Turkey’s objections to his country’s bid for NATO membership. “It's a broader criminalisation, targeting a large number of activities within a terrorist organisation that are not concretely connected to a particular terrorist crime,” he said. [node:read-more:link]
Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness said February 1 that his government is willing to send troops and police to Haiti as part of a proposed multinational security force. The UN special envoy for Haiti said a week ago that she hoped the Security Council would deal “positively” with the request from Haiti’s government which has been dealing with widespread gang violence. [node:read-more:link]
