Rain is compounding misery and presenting new hurdles for relief efforts on Sunday in Myanmar, where state media reported the death toll from a devastating earthquake has risen to nearly 3,500 people. The 7.7-magnitude quake struck on March 28, razing buildings, cutting off power and destroying bridges and roads across the country. Damage has been particularly severe in the city of Sagaing near the epicentre, as well as in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second city and home to more than 1.7 million people. State media in the military junta-led country now say that the earthquake has caused 3,471 confirmed deaths and injured 4,671 people, while 214 remain missing. The UN said Friday that since the earthquake, the junta continued to conduct dozens of attacks against rebel groups, including at least 16 since Wednesday when the military government announced a temporary ceasefire - Bangkok Post
President Trump’s abrupt firing of the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command on Thursday was the latest in a series of moves that have torn away at the country’s cyberdefenses - just as they are confronting the most sophisticated and sustained attacks in the nation’s history. The commander, General Timothy D. Haugh, had sat atop the enormous infrastructure of American cyberdefenses until his removal, apparently under pressure from the far-right Trump loyalist Laura Loomer. He had been among the American officials most deeply involved in pushing back on Russia, dating to his work countering Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election. His dismissal came after weeks in which the Trump administration swept away nearly all of the government’s election-related cyberdefenses beyond the secure N.S.A. command centers at Fort Meade, Md. At the same time, the administration has shrunk much of the nation’s complex early-warning system for cyberattacks, a web through which tech firms work with the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies to protect the power grid, pipelines and telecommunications networks. Cybersecurity experts, election officials and lawmakers — mostly Democrats but a few Republicans — have begun to raise alarms that the United States is knocking down a system that, while still full of holes, has taken a decade to build. It has pushed out some of its most experienced cyberdefenders and fired younger talent brought in to design defenses against a wave of ransomware, Chinese intrusions and vulnerabilities created by artificial intelligence. “At a time when the United States is facing unprecedented cyberthreats — as the Salt Typhoon cyberattack from China has so clearly underscored — how does firing him make Americans any safer?” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Thursday night after General Haugh’s ouster. Mr. Warner was referring to an operation in which Chinese intelligence bored so deeply into American telecommunications networks that it had access to the Justice Department’s system for lawful interception of calls or text messages and could listen in on some conversations, including Mr. Trump’s during his campaign last year - NYT
More than 100 chemical weapons sites are suspected to remain in Syria, left behind after the fall of the longtime president, Bashar al-Assad, according to the leading international organization that tracks these weapons. That number is the first estimate of its kind as the group, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, seeks to enter Syria to assess what remains of Mr. al-Assad’s notorious military program. The figure is far higher than any that Mr. al-Assad has ever acknowledged. The sites are suspected to have been involved in the research, manufacturing and storage of chemical weapons. Mr. al-Assad used weapons like sarin and chlorine gas against rebel fighters and Syrian civilians during more than a decade of civil war. The number of sites, and whether they are secured, has been a mystery since rebels toppled Mr. al-Assad last year. Now, the chemicals represent a major test for the caretaker government, which is led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The group is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, but it has renounced its links to Al Qaeda - NYT
Donald Trump risks making a “historical mistake” if his negotiations to end the war in Ukraine result in the US recognising Russia’s claims to Crimea and other occupied territory, says the Polish government’s adviser on Ukraine. Paweł Kowal, who advises Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Ukraine and heads the Polish parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said in an interview that a “red line” would be crossed for Poland and the rest of central Europe if expanded Russian borders were legally recognised as a result of the invasion of a neighbouring country. Kowal was speaking before flying to Washington on Sunday to meet senior members of the US Congress and Keith Kellogg, President Trump’s special envoy on Ukraine. There was a clear difference, Kowal said, between “provisional solutions” to end the fighting in Ukraine and the fulfilment of “Russian expectations to recognise Crimea, Donbas or other parts of Ukraine, which would be a historical mistake”. In terms of the precedent this would set enabling Putin to expand “imperial Russia”, Kowal warned, “it would be horrible”. - FT
This content is reprinted from the author’s daily World Briefing with permission. Please find the original here.