Tag Archives: Sabotage

U.S. Power Grid vulnerable to sabotage and attacks

  • US Power Grid Attacks Happening More and More, and the System Remains Very Vulnerable
  • In 2013, a well-planned attack against a Silicon Valley electrical substation caused millions of dollars in damages, while nearly taking out power to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Intel. Since that attack, no suspects have been identified. The question remains, was it terrorism or extreme vandalism?
  • Now, a new wave of attacks is targeting America’s electrical grid at the same time as Russia’s brutal attacks on Ukraine’s energy system dominate the news.
  • On Dec. 3, 2022, gunfire took out two North Carolina substations, knocking out power to 40,000 homes and businesses.
  • Then on Christmas Day, attackers struck four substations in Washington State, causing power outages.
  • The infrastructure law passed last year includes $15 billion to upgrade and strengthen the power grid, but some energy experts estimate it would cost as much as $5 trillion dollars to modernize and upgrade the protection of the country’s electric system.
  • Tim Miller told us. “Back when I was working on the staff of the Secretary of Homeland Security, we had major concerns about how vulnerable our power grid is. And unfortunately, it’s gotten worse since then.”
  • “We’ve got a bunch of enemies now that hate this country and some are internal. So it should cause us to go, ‘Hey, wait a minute now we need to really look at hardening up our power grid,'” he said.

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Sen. Tom Cotton reveals ‘Decline by Design’ and what it really means

William Penn – “If we are not governed by God, then we will be Governed by a tyrant”

Important Takeaways:

  • ‘Decline by Design’: Sen. Tom Cotton Exposes Decades-Long Plot to Sabotage American Power
  • How America handles threats and relations with other countries will likely be under a microscope for the foreseeable future.
  • Cotton argues that Democrats are participating in what he calls “decline by design.”
  • “It’s the genuine belief that American power is not likely to lead to strength, safety, prosperity, but rather to war, oppression, and arrogance. That the world would be a better place if America was simply pulling its horns and atone for its sins and become a more ‘normal’ nation. That’s what I mean when I say it’s decline by design and an intentional sabotage of American power. Not that progressives are, again, necessarily anti-American, although plenty are, but they have deep ambivalence about America and American power and its role in the world.”
  • “Strength and resolution with clarity about our intentions will lead to peace, it won’t lead to war,” Cotton said.

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3 Nord Stream pipelines damaged after explosion

Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.

Important Takeaways:

  • Nord Stream suffers damage to three offshore gas pipelines
  • “The destruction that occurred on the same day simultaneously on three strings of the offshore gas pipelines of the Nord Stream system is unprecedented. It is not yet possible to estimate the timing of the restoration of the gas transport infrastructure,” the operator told reporters.
  • Nord Stream 1 features two parallel lines with a nominal capacity of 27.5 billion cubic meters per year each and started supplying gas directly from Russia to Germany in 2011.
  • Some are suggesting sabotage but no one knows for sure who did it

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Nigerians win UK court OK to sue Shell over oil spills

By Julia Payne and Kirstin Ridley

LONDON (Reuters) – The UK Supreme Court on Friday allowed a group of 42,500 Nigerian farmers and fishermen to sue Royal Dutch Shell (RDS) in English courts after years of oil spills in the Niger Delta contaminated land and groundwater.

Senior judges said there was an arguable case that UK-domiciled Shell, one of the world’s biggest energy companies, is responsible, in the latest test of whether multinationals can be held to account for the acts of overseas subsidiaries.

Represented by law firm Leigh Day, the group of Nigerians have argued that the parent company Shell owed them a duty of care because it either had significant control of, and was responsible for, its subsidiary SPDC. Shell countered that the court had no jurisdiction to try the claims.

“(The ruling) also represents a watershed moment in the accountability of multinational companies. Increasingly impoverished communities are seeking to hold powerful corporate actors to account and this judgment will significantly increase their ability to do so,” Daniel Leader, partner at Leigh Day, said.

“UK common law is also used in countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand so this is a very helpful precedent.”

The decision comes almost two years after a seminal ruling by the Supreme Court in a case involving mining firm Vedanta. The judgment allowed nearly 2,000 Zambian villagers to sue Vedanta in England for alleged pollution in Africa.

That move was seen as a victory for rural communities seeking to hold parent companies accountable for environmental disasters. Vedanta ultimately settled out of court in January.

Nigeria’s Ogale and Bille communities allege their lives and health have suffered because repeated oil spills have contaminated the land, swamps, groundwater and waterways and that there has been no adequate cleaning or remediation.

SPDC is the operator of oil pipelines in a joint venture between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation which holds a 55% stake, Shell which holds 30%, France’s Total with 10%, Italy’s Eni with 5%.

A Shell spokesman said the decision was disappointing.

“Regardless of the cause of a spill, SPDC cleans up and remediates. It also works hard to prevent these sabotage spills, by using technology, increasing surveillance and by promoting alternative livelihoods for those who might damage pipes and equipment,” Shell said.

Shell has blamed sabotage for oil spills. It said in its annual report published last March that SPDC, which produces around 1 million barrels of oil per day, saw crude oil spills caused by theft or pipeline sabotage surge by 41% in 2019.

Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said last week that the firm would take “another hard look at its onshore oil operations” in the west African country.

The ruling is the second judgement against Shell this year regarding claims against its Nigerian operations. In a landmark Dutch ruling two weeks ago, an appeals court held Shell responsible for multiple oil pipeline leaks in the Niger Delta and ordered it to pay unspecified damages to farmers, in a victory for environmentalists.

Leigh Day said that the amount of compensation sought would be quantified as the case enters the trial stage. Shell could however try to settle the matter out of court.

In 2015, Shell agreed to pay out 55 million pounds ($83.4 million) to the Bodo community in Nigeria in compensation for two oil spills, which was the largest ever out-of-court settlement relating to Nigerian oil spills.

(Reporting by Julia Payne and Kirstin Ridley; editing by John Stonestreet, William Maclean)

Anger in India over two rapes puts government in bind US-INDIA-RAPE

People hold placards at a protest against the rape of an eight-year-old girl, in Kathua, near Jammu and a teenager in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh state, in New Delhi, India April 12, 2018. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton

By Krishna N. Das and Rupam Jain

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Mounting outrage over two rapes, one in the disputed region of Kashmir and another allegedly involving a lawmaker from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party, gripped India on Friday, with government ministers struggling to dampen political fires.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi held a candlelit vigil at India Gate in New Delhi, the same site where thousands of people demonstrated in 2012 against a brutal gang-rape in the capital.

“Like millions of Indians, my heart hurts tonight,” Gandhi wrote on Twitter after addressing an estimated 5,000 people at Thursday’s midnight vigil. “India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does.”

Modi has yet to speak out on the rapes, which have drawn conflicted responses among the lower ranks of his own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Horrifying details of the alleged gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl, Asifa, in a Hindu-dominated area of Jammu and Kashmir state in January, emerged this week from a police charge sheet.

The BJP shares power in the state, where party members joined a rally to show support for eight Hindu men accused of the crime, including a former bureaucrat and four police officers.

“Yet again we’ve failed as a society,” Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar said in a Twitter message.

“Can’t think straight as more chilling details on little Asifa’s case emerge…her innocent face refuses to leave me. Justice must be served, hard and fast!”

Amid fears the case could escalate unrest in a region where security forces are battling separatist militants, separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq vowed to launch an agitation if any attempt was made to shield culprits or sabotage investigations.

“It is a criminal act and perpetrators of the crime should be punished,” he added.

Thousands of Kashmiris joined street protests in Srinagar this week, following the death of four protesters in a clash with security forces.

In the crime-ridden northern state of Uttar Pradesh, federal police on Friday began questioning a BJP member of the state legislature who is accused of raping a teenage woman in June.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a rising star in the party, asked the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to take over the case this week after the state’s police were heavily criticized for not acting sooner on the victim’s complaint.

A CBI spokesman said the lawmaker, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, was being questioned on Friday, but had not been arrested.

Sengar’s lawyer has said his client was innocent and the case was a conspiracy to harm his political career.

Ministers have insisted that justice will be done no matter who committed the crime, while defending the government’s record on fighting violence against women.

“We are here to safeguard the interest of our daughters, they are the daughters of the nation,” federal minister Mahesh Sharma told reporters on Thursday.

Maneka Gandhi, the minister for women and child development, said her ministry planned to propose the death penalty for the rape of children younger than 12. The maximum punishment now is life imprisonment.

Responding to the outpouring of national shame and anger after the 2012 New Delhi case, the then Congress-led government tightened laws on crimes against women.

India registered about 40,000 rape cases in 2016, up from 25,000 in 2012, the latest data show. Rights activists say thousands more go unreported because of a perceived stigma.

(Writing by Simon Cameron-Moore; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

U.N. to assess if either side trying to ‘sabotage’ Syria talks

U.N. to assess if either side trying to 'sabotage' Syria talks

By Tom Miles

GENEVA (Reuters) – The mediator of U.N.-led Syrian peace talks in Geneva will assess next week whether either side is trying to sabotage the process, he said on Thursday, after President Bashar al-Assad’s negotiators said they would turn up five days late.

“We shall assess the behaviour of both sides, government and opposition, in Geneva,” U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura said. “And based on that we will then decide how this… can be a building up or not, or a sabotage of Geneva.”

If either side were seen to be sabotaging the process it could have “a very bad impact on any other political attempt to have processes elsewhere,” he said.

He said the Geneva rounds of talks were the only peace process backed by the U.N. Security Council, although there were many other initiatives being planned.

He did not elaborate, but Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is seeking re-election next year, has suggested holding a “Syrian Congress” in the Russian city of Sochi early in 2018.

Diplomats see Putin’s plan as a bid to draw a line under the war after seven years of fighting and to celebrate Russia’s role as the power that tipped the balance of the war and became the key player in the peace process.

The Geneva talks have failed to build up any speed despite eight rounds of negotiations.

After months away from the U.N. talks, the two sides returned to Geneva at the end of November, with de Mistura hoping to discuss an agenda including constitutional and electoral reform.

But the government delegation arrived a day late and left after two days, saying the opposition had “mined the road” to the talks by insisting that Assad could not play any interim role in Syria’s political transition.

The delegation returned to Damascus to “consult and refresh”, but chief negotiator Bashar al-Ja’afari initially threatened not to come back, which the opposition said would be “an embarrassment to Russia”.

De Mistura said on Thursday that Ja’afari’s delegation had confirmed it would return on Sunday, five days later than expected.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Hugh Lawson)

Half of German companies hit by sabotage, spying in last two years, BSI says

FILE PHOTO: A man types on a computer keyboard in front of the displayed cyber code in this illustration picture taken on March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration/File Photo

BERLIN (Reuters) – More than half the companies in Germany have been hit by spying, sabotage or data theft in the last two years, the German IT industry association Bitkom said on Friday, and estimated the attacks caused around 55 billion euros’ worth of damage a year.

Several high-profile attacks have occurred recently, such as the WannaCry ransomware attacks in May and a virus dubbed “NotPetya” that halted production at some companies for more than a week. Others lost millions of euros to organized crime in a scam called “CEO Fraud”.

Some 53 percent of companies in Germany have been victims of industrial espionage, sabotage or data theft in the last two years, Bitkom found – up from 51 percent in a 2015 study.

At the same time, the damage caused rose by 8 percent to around 55 billion euros a year, the survey of 1,069 managers and people responsible for security in various sectors found.

Arne Schoenbohm, president of Germany’s BSI federal cyber agency, said many big companies and especially those operating critical infrastructure were generally well-prepared for cyber attacks. But many smaller and medium-sized companies did not take the threat seriously enough, he said.

“The high number of companies affected clearly shows that we still have work to do on cyber security in Germany,” he said in a statement on Friday.

The BSI urged companies in Europe’s largest economy to make information security a top priority and said all companies need to report serious IT security incidents, even if anonymously.

Schoenbohm told Reuters in an interview that hardware and software makers should do their part to shore up cyber security and patch weaknesses in software more quickly once identified.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done,” he said. “We have to be careful that we don’t focus solely on industry and computer users, but also look at the producers and quality management.”

Some 62 percent of companies affected found those behind the attacks were either current or former employees. Forty-one percent blamed competitors, customers, suppliers or service providers for the attacks, Bitkom said.

Foreign intelligence agencies were found to be responsible in 3 percent of the cases, it said.

Twenty-one percent believed hobby hackers were responsible while 7 percent attributed attacks to organized crime.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin, Andrea Shalal and Thorsten Severin; Editing by Larry King and Hugh Lawson)