BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Cyprus is blocking new European Union sanctions against several officials from Russia-annexed Crimea in a bid to secure EU backing for tougher action against Turkey in a separate row over drilling for hydrocarbons, three diplomatic sources said.

Nicosia denied linking the two issues and said it needed time to review the proposed measures against the Crimean officials.

Cyprus, backed by the EU, accuses Turkey of drilling illegally for oil and gas in its territorial waters. The EU has prepared the ground for travel bans and asset freezes but has postponed saying which Turkish officials they would target in order to give Ankara time to change tack.

The EU has also agreed to blacklist more officials in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, but the sanctions require unanimous support from all 28 member states and Cyprus has recently blocked the process at the technical level, the sources said.

“The way Cyprus is hijacking the Russia listings has deeply irritated its friends and partners around the table. It is all the more surprising since Cyprus has enjoyed unparalleled solidarity from its EU partners over the last few months (in the dispute with Turkey),” said one EU diplomat.

A second diplomat, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Poland and Germany were among those pushing Cyprus to stop blocking the new Crimea measures.

“The Cypriots want to have sanctions on Turkey for drilling and have been frustrated that it is taking time,” said the second diplomat. “This is why they are meddling with the Crimea listings.”

“NO CONNECTION”
Cyprus’ foreign ministry rejected the criticism.

“There is no connection made between the two sanctions regimes. We are in the process of reviewing the information provided with regard to the Ukraine sanctions,” Cypriot foreign ministry spokesman, Demetris Samuel told Reuters.

On Turkey, Samuel added: “Our aim is to see the (EU decisions) implemented. We feel that it is important... to expedite and finalize this work with regards to the listings.”

A third EU diplomat said he still hoped the list of sanctioned Crimean officials would be approved “early next week”, or the matter would have to go before EU ambassadors.

“Everything depends on Cyprus and whether they will drop their objections,” he said.

If sanctions are imposed, the asset freezes and travel bans are likely to target the Turkish military and captains of the drilling ships, rather than senior Turkish officials, diplomats said. The decision aims to punish Ankara for violating Cyprus’ maritime economic zone by drilling off the divided island.

Cyprus was divided in 1974 after a Turkish invasion triggered by a brief Greek-inspired coup. Several peacemaking efforts have failed and the discovery of offshore resources has complicated the negotiations.

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"The invisible dimension of dirty oil and gas in Libya and Syria, is the Russian private military company Wagner," the Turkish press writes, "as it is natural for Turks to be" locked up "for deposits in Syria, Libya as well as about them in the Mediterranean and the Cypriot EEZ.
One of the most decisive elements of the power struggle of the main rivals in Syria and Libya is mainly the control of energy resources.

In Syria, about three-quarters of the country's natural resources are under US and YPG control.

The vast majority of these resources are sold through various trade networks located in the country. It is known that my YPG members carry oil to the Assad forces in Israel, many different customers through Israel.

Recently, it has begun to reveal that there are other factors that are very interested in Syria's oil and gas reserves.

According to Novayagazete and some other Russian news agencies, Russia's private military company Wagner not only took over some oil and gas fields, but also started exploration activities, reports Turkish media, which is blaming Russia, as disturbed by the presence of the Wagner team in the region.

Given Wagner's growing effectiveness in Libya, the nature of this development is growing even more.

On December 16, 2019, the Syrian parliament passed a number of laws to agree to the development of three pieces of natural gas and oil with two Russian companies. Behind the so-called owners and presidents of these companies is Concord Management, Russia's Evgeny Prigozhin.

Interventions cover at least 12 thousand square kilometers. The amount of gas reserves projected to be discovered corresponds to three-quarters of the total estimated stocks of 250 billion cubic meters.

According to Novayagazeta, these companies are only part of the many companies involved in the Syrian business in this context.

In Libya, the Russian company Tatneft has entered into a contract with Libyan AGESCO to conduct a seismic survey at 4/82 in Ghadames Basin to complete the seismic research program postponed in 2014.
 
But Moscow has recently sent mercenary troops to Libya to support General Khalifa Haftar's forces in the east of the country. A move that could prove problematic for Turkey, which backs the government based in the capital Tripoli.

Kerim Has, a professor of Russian and Turkish history based in Moscow, predicts that Moscow's support for Haftar "will continue and expand". "Deeper struggle for new energy reserves amid security concerns in the region and the catastrophic experience of Syria has pushed Russia to play strongly in Libya, "he said.

"But this will certainly affect Turkey-Russia relations, as the Erdogan government opposes not only leaders in the region, such as Syria, Egypt, Israel and Greece, but also Haftar, who is the main partner. of Russia to Libya ".

"Turkey seems to be particularly endangering its interests in Libya and the eastern Mediterranean region, as it had done in Syria before. The November agreement between Turkey and Sharjah, affecting Greece and Cyprus, ignoring their territorial waters has has already caused tensions in Turkish-Russian relations.

"Although Russia has enormous security, energy and trade interests with Turkey, the Libyan issue is emerging as a new potential obstacle to Moscow-Ankara relations." It is not just a possibility but it is in fact transformed that Turkey and Russia are again appearing on opposite sides of a civil war in Libya unless they can manage the tensions, "he said.

Wagner's Russian mercenaries, both in Libya and in Syria, were there to safeguard Russian interests primarily in hydrocarbon deposits, which is why Russian President Putin himself went to Berlin a few days ago for Libya, because it is very simple. many.

Turkey continues to transport weapons, military equipment, anti-aircraft defense systems, experts and military through Mitiga Airport in Tripoli
A spokesman for Haftar's military, General Ahmet Al-Mismari, confirmed that the decision of the General Administration to activate the no-fly zone over the capital Tripoli is due to the fact that the Turkish regime uses its airports to fly over the International Airport with political flights.

Al-Mismari said Turkey continues to carry weapons, military equipment, anti-aircraft defense systems, experts and military through the Mitga airport in Tripoli, accusing the Sharjah government of receiving terrorists and weapons from Erdogan.

He explained that armed militias affiliated with the Al-Wefaq government have greatly benefited from the ceasefire in Tripoli, noting that the no-fly zone will be extended to other cities, if there are grounds.

A Libyan National Army spokesman called on the United Nations mission in Libya, led by Ghassan Salameh, to monitor the movements of prisoners by the Tripoli government into combat areas prohibited by the Geneva Convention, stressing that detainees were detained at the Geneva convention. is illegal because the military base is a military target.

While Haftar fights the "Turkophile" government of Tripoli, the Turkish press accuses him of forcing over 100,000 Turkish Libyans who have been forced to migrate to the western parts of the country, especially after the occupation of Benghazi by LNA .

“The Ottoman Turks in Libya are systematically driven out of the Haftar National Army as they are being forced into displacement.

We are talking about the presence of thousands of Libyan residents of Ottoman origin who have been targeted by Khalifa Haftar and his Gulf allies, writes a large Turkish newspaper.

They are called "Turk Kuloglu", also known as "Kouluglides", a term used during the Ottoman period to characterize the mixed descendants of Turks, mainly Ottoman officers, with North African women.

"Although there is no apparent separation between indigenous Libyans and foreigners, including Turks, tribal difference was deliberately revealed by those who are loyal to Haftar," Turkish Libyan politician Ali Sait Akın told the Daily in an exclusive interview. Sabah.

The Kuloğlu Turks, consisting of various separate ethnicities, including Albanians or Circassians, were formerly Ottoman Muslim populations, mainly inhabiting large cities in the country, such as Tripoli, Tripura, Bengal, and Bengaluru, but also OK.

Haftar caused a split between the Turkic Libyans and the locals. The general stepped up his campaigns, displacing Turkish residents since he gained power in the eastern parts of the country.

Massive concern after outbreaks of coronavirus in China and the quarantine in which three Chinese cities have been put. The world community is on alert to respond to the situation.

In this gloomy climate, a ruthless "information war" erupted at the same time, prompting a Russian publication of the long-running Russian newspaper Izvestia, which cites a Russian scientist with a UN mandate, who is blaming the US for "biological war" against China.

"A pneumonia outbreak of unknown origin recorded in China at the end of 2019 may be a kind of biological weapon", this is the opinion expressed on January 20, 2020, by Igor Nikulin, a member of the United Nations Commission on Biological Weapons in the period 1998-2003, the Russian newspaper reports.

According to a Russian expert, “about 400 US military biological laboratories are located around the world. Americans spend billions of dollars on them every year and "are unlikely to do it for anything," he says.

"In 2010, such a laboratory under the jurisdiction of the US Navy was shut down in Indonesia, precisely because they were conducting unauthorized experiments, including avian influenza, as Americans refused to share the results of their experiments with the United States. ", the Russian expert recalled speaking on the Russian channel" Star ".

According to Nikulin, the new virus in China "could be a malicious act by the United States to put pressure on the Chinese, while also increasing the turnover of private US drug makers."

So propaganda war between Russians and Americans over the virus, while the US is expected to respond, refuting Russian claims of "biological warfare".

It is only as the virus spreads and the public's fear of what it really is is growing steadily. According to experts, the causative factor was a new type of coronavirus.

Coronaviruses are a family of more than 30 viruses. They can damage the respiratory system, the gastrointestinal tract and the nervous system.

Coronavirus causes pneumonia, started in the city of Wuhan, China, is transmitted from person to person, and has already killed at least 17 people.

The World Health Organization (WHO) held an emergency meeting yesterday to consider whether a "state of emergency" should be declared, since emerging viral infections - from bird flu to Ebola and Zika infections - pose major threats to the global public health and understanding their origins can help researchers design defensive strategies against future outbreaks.

A new study * provides important information on the possible origin of the most recent outbreak of viral pneumonia in China. The findings are published in the Journal of Medical Virology.

The study finds that coronavirus-infected patients - named 2019-nCoV by the World Health Organization - were exposed to wildlife at a wholesale market in Wuhan, China, where seafood, poultry, poultry and poultry are sold, animals.

Carrying out detailed genetic analysis of the virus and comparing it with the genetic information available for different viruses and host species, the researchers concluded that the new 2019-nCoV virus was formed by coronavirus recombinant living in bats and rodents.

The hybrid virus developed a recombinant viral protein that recognizes and binds to receptors on cells of various hosts. The findings indicate that the snake is the most likely wildlife tank for the 2019-nCoV virus.

Simply put, the research team found evidence that the 2019-nCoV hybrid virus may have been a snake host before it was transmitted to humans.

Homologous recombination within viral glycoprotein binding may allow transmission from snakes to humans.

Finally, the Russian Ministry of Health's Center for Strategic Planning (CSP) has set up a special test to detect the 2019-nCoV coronavirus, which will take 15-20 minutes and take place at the country's airports.

*Bibliography. "Homologous recombination within the newly identified coronavirus glycoprotein spike may boost cross-species transmission from snake to human." Wei Ji, Wei Wang, Xiaofang Zhao, Junjie Zai, and Xingguang Li. Journal of Medical Virology; Published Online: January 22, 2020 (DOI: 10.1002 / jmv.25682).

Cybersecurity experts said Thursday there were still many unanswered questions from an investigation commissioned by Jeff Bezos that concluded the billionaire’s cellphone was hacked, apparently after receiving a video file with malicious spyware from the WhatsApp account of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince.

The experts said the evidence in the privately commissioned report does not show with certainty that Bezos’ phone was actually hacked, much less how it was compromised or what kind of malware was used.

The report on the investigation, which was managed by FTI Consulting and overseen by Anthony Ferrante, a former head of the FBI’s Cyber Division, was made public Wednesday.

In it, investigators said a digital forensic review concluded with “medium to high confidence” that Bezos’ phone was compromised via malware sent from a WhatsApp account used by Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Two U.N. experts issued their own take on the report’s findings, calling on the U.S. to investigate further. They said it appeared the Amazon founder may have been targeted because of his ownership of The Washington Post, which was publishing reports critical of the crown prince by columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was killed by Saudi agents inside the kingdom’s consulate in Turkey in October 2018, five months after Bezos’ phone was apparently hacked.

The report’s conclusions drew heavily from the unusually high volume of data that left Bezos’ iPhone X within 24 hours of receiving the video file from Prince Mohammed’s WhatsApp account on May 1, 2018, a month after the two exchanged phone numbers. The size of the file, the investigators suggested, indicated a malware payload may have been included.

The investigators said Bezos’ phone began transmitting large volumes of data — an increase of some 29,000% — after receiving the video file.

The report further pointed to messages later sent from the prince’s WhatsApp account to Bezos that showed “apparent awareness” of private information. One included a meme with a photo of a woman the report said resembled the woman Bezos was having an extramarital relationship with before going public with his divorce.

Another, sent two days after Bezos was briefed in phone calls last February about a Saudi online campaign against him, advised the technology mogul that what he was hearing was not true. “There is nothing against you or amazon from me or Saudi Arabia,” the message said.

The report additionally pointed to Saudi Arabia’s documented use of spyware against critics and other adversaries as further potential proof.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud called the allegations “purely conjecture” and said if there was real evidence, the kingdom looked forward to seeing it.

Cybersecurity experts said that while it was likely a hack occurred, the investigation did not prove that definitively.

“In some ways, the investigation is very incomplete. … The conclusions they’ve drawn I don’t think are supported by the evidence. They veered off into conjecture,” said Robert Pritchard, the director of U.K.-based consultancy Cyber Security Expert.

Similarly, the former chief security officer at Facebook, who now directs a cyber policy center at Stanford, wrote that the report is filled with circumstantial evidence, but no smoking gun.

“The funny thing is that it looks like FTI potentially has the murder weapon sitting right there, they just haven’t figured out how to test it,” Alex Stamos wrote on Twitter.

One sticking point centered on WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, which the report said made it “virtually impossible to decrypt contents of the downloader to determine if it contained malicious code” — meaning the investigators could not conclude whether the video file sent from Prince Mohammed’s WhatsApp account was infected and used to hack Bezos’ phone.

Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab, disputed that assertion, saying it is possible to decrypt the contents of a WhatsApp file. In a post written for The Medium that presents ways to further the investigation, Marczak shared a link to decryption instructions and code.

The FTI investigators did not reach out to WhatsApp to seek assistance, a Facebook spokesperson said.

FTI’s Ferrante did not respond to emails and text messages seeking comment. The company said in a statement that all FTI’s work for clients is confidential and that the company does not “comment on, confirm or deny client engagements.”

Matt Suiche, a French entrepreneur based in Dubai who founded cybersecurity firm Comae Technologies, said the video file was presumably on the iPhone because the report showed a screenshot of it. If the file had been deleted, he said the report should have stated this or explained why it was not possible to retrieve it.

“They’re not doing that. It shows poor quality of the investigation,” Suiche said.

Still, security professionals and the report itself said the fact that investigators failed to identify any embedded malicious code does not mean there wasn’t a hack because sophisticated spyware can erase itself, leaving no trace.

Steve Morgan, founder and editor-in-chief at Cybersecurity Ventures, a cybersecurity research firm in New York, said the report makes reasonable assumptions and speculations, but does not claim 100% certainty or proof.

“Given their detailed analysis and all of the evidence they reviewed, their conclusions are reasonable,” Morgan said. “The tools they used, including forensic software and hardware from Cellebrite, are widely acknowledged to be amongst the best available,” he said.

Theresa Payton, founder and CEO of Fortalice Solutions, said the report is credible in her opinion, but leaves some questions unanswered, including whether the crown prince’s WhatsApp account may have been hacked by a third party, meaning he was not the true attacker.

“Unless Mohammed bin Salman has a thorough forensic review of dates, times, phone logs, geocoded locations, and logins, it’ll be hard to know for sure who was behind that WhatsApp message,” she said.

Associated Press Technology Writer Frank Bajak in Boston contributed to this report.

Anger and panic are rife in Turkey over the expressed intention of Greece, Italy and Britain to join a peacekeeping force in Libya, aimed at ceasefire on both sides, something the EU is really considering.

These three countries sent the message "We are ready to help Libya", with the issue being discussed in Brussels ", the Turkish press reports.

The reason for the Turkish outrage is the fact that all three countries belong to the EU, which is actually considering the plan of military deployment in the country of a European force, especially after Merkel's initiative in Berlin last Sunday.

"The goal is to control the ceasefire," the EU foreign relations spokesman said.

Greece, the Turks emphasize, on the other hand, declared a voluntary military presence through the Foreign Ministry with the words "We are ready to help".

According to the Turkish daily Yeni Şafak, Italian Minister for European Affairs Vincenzo Amendola said the country is ready to deploy a peacekeeping force in Libya.

He pointed out that Italy already has more than 6,000 troops involved in peacekeeping missions.

Amendola claimed that Italy's possible presence in Libya "will give priority to maintaining peace unlike other forces".

Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias has said, "that we agree with General Haftar on all matters, such as the withdrawal of Islamist mercenaries from Libya", while formally he himself wants to cancel the memorandum between Sharjah and Turkey.

"Greece is ready to help Libya the next day," Mr Dendias said, stressing that "the country will send Greek troops under the auspices of the EU or other" peacekeeping force "to Libya to protect the ceasefire and to control the arms embargo ".

This fact and the Greek backstage movements of our country in the EU have caused anger and panic in Ankara, because the Turks are simply afraid of being isolated.

That is why Ankara continues to press Berlin on this issue, with the German Chancellor reporting yesterday, about a new conference on Libya in February, to make Turkish military presence well-received and now "frozen". Temporarily, while Haftar does not sign any paper mentioning the word "Turkish".

But the reins of EU defense policy were essentially taken over by France, which is sending a naval squad to the Mediterranean, aiming for a provocative Turkish presence, bearing in mind the interests of the French oil pipelines.

Within these plans it is estimated that Greece is also "fit", which can be very good if hoped for.

Josep Borrell, the EU's High Representative for External Relations and Security Policies, said the EU could send troops to Libya if a permanent and formal ceasefire is achieved.

He said Brussels would consider sending a military peacekeeping force because: ceasefire should be monitored, while stressing that Brussels should do more to defend its interests.

Also, British Prime Minister M. Johnson noted that, if the ceasefire was achieved, an EU "peacekeeping force" could be sent to Libya to monitor the situation there.

Thus Italy, Greece and Britain are considered as the main candidates for the creation of a possible peacekeeping force, which is, as they all sho
w, institutionally now dealt with by the EU.

As soon as the Greek army breaks its ground in Libya, Turkey will lose everything, even the EEZ agreement with Turkey.