Category: Non-EU Countries

London to ‘develop as Chinese yuan trading hub’

Chinese vice-premier Wang Qishan is in London to discuss trade

China and the UK are to develop an offshore trading hub for the yuan based in London.

UK Chancellor George Osborne confirmed the agreement after meeting with Chinese vice-premier Wang Qishan in the UK.

“We agreed to collaborate on the development of renminbi-denominated financial products and services in London,” he said.

Trading in the yuan is gradually being liberalised.

As the yuan has slowly been appreciating and becoming more flexible, Hong Kong has been the only place that China has allowed as a centre for deposits in the Chinese currency.

London is the largest foreign-exchange trading centre in the world.

Mr Osborne said that the UK represented an “attractive investment opportunity for Chinese investors and a gateway for further investment in Europe”.

The talks also involved discussion of investment in UK infrastructure, such as the legacy projects following next year’s Olympics.

China and the UK reaffirmed their commitment to the target of doubling trade to $100bn (£62bn) by 2015.

www.bbc.co.uk, 8 September 2011

September 9, 2011
Life in the UK: Osman Bozkurt & Didem Özbek of PiST/// at Castlefield Gallery

Posted by Katy Cowan in Events on Wednesday 7th September 2011. Tagged with Manchester, Art.

Castlefield Gallery is pleased to present Life in the UK, a debut UK commission by Istanbul based artists Osman Bozkurt and Didem Özbek of PiST/// for the Asia Triennial Manchester 2011. As the only artists to participate in the Triennial from Turkey, this project focuses on the issue of freedom of travel exploring one of the most salient issues of our time; the migration of people from one place to other parts of the world.

For this ambitious multi artform project, Bozkurt and Özbek will transform the gallery into a temporary VISA application centre using the exterior and interior of the gallery as a mechanism to explore real stories fused with history and fiction. Examining the growth of the VISA ‘industry’ in Istanbul as its starting point, the project that combines the theatrical and participatory with installation and film, and will explore the radical impact that migration has had on demography, identity, politics, global economic changes, community and belonging.

This exhibition is co-curated by Lora Sariaslan, curator at Istanbul Modern and Castlefield Gallery.

Osman Bozkurt b. Istanbul 1970 is a photographer and video artist. He was recently featured in the Independent newspaper as one of the world’s ‘up and coming international artists’, nominated by Alistair Hicks, art advisor for the Deutsche Bank Collection. His work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre, Istanbul; Villa Manin Centro d’Arte Contemporanea, Udine; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille; Frieze Art Fair, 2008 among many others.

Didem Özbek b. 1970 lives and works in Istanbul. Her work has been exhibited at Akbank Sanat, Istanbul; Umetnostna Galerija Maribor, Slovenia; International Design Centre Nagoya, Japan among others. She also developed and created other conceptual projects for PiST/// such as Artist Information, Tea Stand and White Sugar Cube Book.

PiST/// is an interdisciplinary project space that creates new platforms for discourse and presentation from young and emerging artists, writers, critics, architects or musicians to generate an international dynamic in the art scene of Istanbul and Turkey. Located on 3 neighbouring shop fronts in Pangalti, Istanbul, PiST/// is an independent project run by artists Didem Özbek and Osman Bozkurt founded in May 2006.

Asia Triennial Manchester 2011 (ATM11) The UK’s only Asian Art Triennial opens 1 October – 27 November 2011 in Manchester. Initiated and led by Shisha, ATM11 will showcase current contemporary visual art and craft from Asia. ATM11 is a festival of visual culture that features a series of exhibitions, commissions and interventions by international and UK artists exploring the theme of Time and Generation, presenting new site-specific work alongside work not seen before in the UK, and challenging stereotypical viewpoints of contemporary Asian artistic practice.

via Life in the UK: Osman Bozkurt & Didem Özbek of PiST/// at Castlefield Gallery | North West | Creative Boom Magazine.

September 8, 2011
Nearly 40 percent of Europeans suffer mental illness

By Kate Kelland

LONDON

(Reuters) – Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study.

With only about a third of cases receiving the therapy or medication needed, mental illnesses cause a huge economic and social burden — measured in the hundreds of billions of euros — as sufferers become too unwell to work and personal relationships break down.

“Mental disorders have become Europe’s largest health challenge of the 21st century,” the study’s authors said.

At the same time, some big drug companies are backing away from investment in research on how the brain works and affects behavior, putting the onus on governments and health charities to stump up funding for neuroscience.

“The immense treatment gap … for mental disorders has to be closed,” said Hans Ulrich Wittchen, director of the institute of clinical psychology and psychotherapy at Germany’s Dresden University and the lead investigator on the European study.

“Those few receiving treatment do so with considerable delays of an average of several years and rarely with the appropriate, state-of-the-art therapies.”

Wittchen led a three-year study covering 30 European countries — the 27 European Union member states plus Switzerland, Iceland and Norway — and a population of 514 million people.

A direct comparison of the prevalence of mental illnesses in other parts of the world was not available because different studies adopt varying parameters.

Wittchen’s team looked at about 100 illnesses covering all major brain disorders from anxiety and depression to addiction to schizophrenia, as well as major neurological disorders including epilepsy, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.

The results, published by the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ENCP) on Monday, show an “exceedingly high burden” of mental health disorders and brain illnesses, he told reporters at a briefing in London.

Mental illnesses are a major cause of death, disability, and economic burden worldwide and the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, depression will be the second leading contributor to the global burden of disease across all ages.

Wittchen said that in Europe, that grim future had arrived early, with diseases of the brain already the single largest contributor to the EU’s burden of ill health.

The four most disabling conditions — measured in terms of disability-adjusted life years or DALYs, a standard measure used to compare the impact of various diseases — are depression, dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, alcohol dependence and stroke.

The last major European study of brain disorders, which was published in 2005 and covered a smaller population of about 301 million people, found 27 percent of the EU adult population was suffering from mental illnesses.

Although the 2005 study cannot be compared directly with the latest finding — the scope and population was different — it found the cost burden of these and neurological disorders amounted to about 386 billion euros ($555 billion) a year at that time. Wittchen’s team has yet to finalize the economic impact data from this latest work, but he said the costs would be “considerably more” than estimated in 2005.

The researchers said it was crucial for health policy makers to recognize the enormous burden and devise ways to identify potential patients early — possibly through screening — and make treating them quickly a high priority.

“Because mental disorders frequently start early in life, they have a strong malignant impact on later life,” Wittchen said. “Only early targeted treatment in the young will effectively prevent the risk of increasingly largely proportions of severely ill…patients in the future.”

David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacology expert at Imperial College London who was not involved in this study, agreed.

“If you can get in early you may be able to change the trajectory of the illness so that it isn’t inevitable that people go into disability,” he said. “If we really want not to be left with this huge reservoir of mental and brain illness for the next few centuries, then we ought to be investing more now.”

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Matthew Jones)

www.reuters.com, 4 Sep 2011

September 7, 2011
Turkey moved out of Europe – by Post Office travel insurance

Turkey moved out of Europe – by Post Office travel insurance

By Simon Calder, Travel Editor at Large

Wednesday, 31 August 2011

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Last year, 2.7 million British citizens visited Turkey

As Turkey moves closer to the EU, the Post Office in Britain has deemed that the nation lies entirely beyond Europe. Last month, at the start of the school summer holidays, the Post Office moved the boundaries used for its travel insurance policies to exclude Turkey from European cover. Even the European part of Turkey, including Istanbul, is deemed as lying outside the Continent for insurance purposes.

A British woman who bought a policy for her package holiday in the resort of Kusadasi discovered she was not covered only when she was hospitalised. Rebecca Thomas, 22, a retail manager from Solihull, was admitted for treatment for a stomach complaint. But when she contacted the travel insurers, she was told her she was not covered. Her father, David Thomas, is paying the bill – currently standing at £1,400 – by credit card. Yesterday he said: “The Post Office are perfectly entitled to change their geographical coverage, but Turkey is such a big destination that they should make it absolutely clear on the website.”

For travellers buying online, such as Rebecca Thomas, the change is revealed only by clicking on a small question mark icon on the Post Office’s web page offering travel insurance quotes.

Last year, 2.7 million British citizens visited Turkey. Travel insurance policies covering European holidays have traditionally included it, as well as other nations bordering the Mediterranean. The Post Office followed this practice until 15 July, when it decided to exclude Turkey – together with Egypt. Travellers to these two countries who choose Post Office travel insurance must buy a “Rest of the World” policy, priced at £37 for a week – more than twice as much as the price for Europe. Policies issued before 15 July this year are unaffected.

James Eadie, a spokesman for the Post Office, said: “This change was made to reflect the increased cost in providing this cover. The price charged for the Rest of the World policy is more reflective of the costs associated with the level of claims we are experiencing for Turkey and Egypt.”

Both countries specialise in “all-inclusive” holidays, which critics say encourages excessive drinking and thereby increases the risks to travellers. Turkey and Egypt also have very dangerous roads compared with the UK. Although the Foreign Office reports that a relatively small proportion of travellers – one in 5,000 – sought consular assistance, the Post Office move suggests that it was paying out more in claims than it was receiving for policies.

Two of the Post Office’s leading rivals, Columbus and InsureandGo, continue to regard Turkey and Egypt as part of Europe. Bob Atkinson, of TravelSupermarket.com, said “Standard practice has always been that Europe is everything west of the Urals, and Turkey has always been considered as Europe by travel insurance companies. It is confusing for customers for them to be treating this differently to the bulk of other companies in the market place.”

Despite moving Turkey and Egypt to the “Rest of the World”, the Post Office continues to offer “European” cover for visitors to Algeria, Israel and Morocco – all nations carrying strong Foreign Office warnings about risks to travellers.

Case study: ‘We never thought she wasn’t covered’

Rebecca Thomas, 22, works as a retail manager at the Bullring Centre in Birmingham. She booked a last-minute package holiday to the resort of Kusadasi on the Mediterranean coast – a favourite with many British travellers. Turkey has been the Med’s success story of the 21st century, due to its combination of reliable sun, classical heritage and sheer good value.

Before her trip, Rebecca went online to buy travel insurance from the Post Office. “Neither she nor I thought for a second that ‘Europe’ wouldn’t include Turkey,” said her father, David.

When Rebecca was hospitalised with a stomach complaint and learned the policy excluded Turkey, David contacted the underwriter, Ageas, who told him to take up the matter with the Post Office. He has filed an online complaint. Her bill stands at £1,400. Meanwhile, Rebecca hopes to fly home as planned tomorrow. David Thomas reports that “the private hospital in Kusadasi were very comprehensive in their treatment and extremely helpful and courteous”.

Approved: Israel

Israel receives 165,000 British visitors a year with one in 3,000 requiring consular assistance. While it remains under the threat of terrorist attacks, claims for more everyday problems associated with Turkey are relatively rare, keeping insurance costs low.

Approved: Morocco

Although 17 people were recently killed by a bomb in busy tourist square in Marrakesh, Morocco is deemed a lesser risk. Only about 1 in 3,500 of the 362,000 British visitors require assistance, but its abstinence from alcohol, among other things, means it is not thought to be the source of many minor issues resulting in insurance claims.

Off limits: Turkey

Despite welcoming 2.7 million British visitors a year, a relatively small number – 1 in 5,000 – require consular assistance. It is perhaps the nature of their troubles, however, behind the high cost of insurance. Traffic accidents are common, according to the Foreign Office, and “all-inclusive” trips are blamed for encouraging excessive drinking.

Approved: Algeria

The terrorist threat is high, but only 1 in every 800 of the 10,000 British visitors need consular help. The Foreign Office warns visitors to “exercise extreme caution”, but the country is bracketed with Europe due to the low cost of insuring visitors.

September 6, 2011
Secret Libyan files claim MI6 and the CIA aided human rights violations

Intelligence helped Gaddafi regime track and apprehend dissidents, according to files seized from Tripoli offices

Cherry Wilson

Files found in Tripoli offices claim MI6 and the CIA were complicit in human rights violations by the Gaddafi regime. Photograph: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters

British and US intelligence agencies built up close links with Muammar Gaddafi and handed over detailed information to assist his regime, according to secret files found in Libyan government offices.

The documents claim that MI6 supplied its counterparts in Libya with details on exiled opponents living in the UK, and chart how the CIA abducted several suspected militants before handing them over to Tripoli.

They also contain communications between British and Libyan security officials ahead of Tony Blair’s visit in 2004, and show that British officials helped write a draft speech for Gaddafi when he was being encouraged to give up his weapons programme.

The discovery was made by reporters and members of Human Rights Watch in the private offices of Moussa Koussa, the former foreign minister and head of Libyan intelligence, who defected to Britain in February. He is now believed to be in Qatar.

According to the documents, Libya’s relationship with MI6 and the CIA was especially close between 2002 and 2004, at the height of the war on terror. The papers give details of how No 10 insisted that the 2004 meeting between Blair and Gaddafi took place in his bedouin tent, with a letter from an MI6 official saying: “I don’t know why the English are fascinated by tents. The plain fact is that the journalists would love it.”

They also show how a statement made by Gaddafi during the time in which he pledged to give up his nuclear programme and destroy his stock of chemical and biological weapons was put together with the help of British officials. A covering letter states: “For the sake of clarity, please find attached a tidied-up version of the language we agreed on Tuesday. I wanted to ensure that you had the same script.”

Other letters seem to reveal that British intelligence gave Tripoli details of a Libyan dissident who had been freed from jail in Britain. One US document stated the CIA was in a position to deliver a prisoner into the custody of Libyan authorities.

The papers, which have not been independently verified, also suggest the CIA abducted several suspected militants from 2002 to 2004 who were subsequently handed over to Tripoli. Human Rights Watch has accused the CIA of condoning torture.

“It wasn’t just abducting suspected Islamic militants and handing them over to the Libyan intelligence,” said Peter Bouckaert, director of Human Rights Watch’s emergencies division. “The CIA also sent the questions they wanted Libyan intelligence to ask and, from the files, it’s very clear they were present in some of the interrogations themselves.”

Foreign secretary, William Hague, said he could not comment on security matters. Further documents found at the British ambassador’s residence in Tripoli, and obtained by a Sunday newspaper, concerned the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. A memo written in January 2009 by Robert Dixon, head of the North Africa team at the Foreign Office, and sent to then foreign secretary David Miliband, warned that Gaddafi’s ministers said there would be “dire consequences” for the UK-Libya relationship in the event of Megrahi’s death in custody.

www.guardian.co.uk, 3 September 2011

September 5, 2011
Hackers steal SSL certificates for CIA, MI6, Mossad

Criminals acquired over 500 DigiNotar digital certificates; Mozilla and Google issue ‘death sentence’

By Gregg Keizer

Computerworld – The tally of digital certificates stolen from a Dutch company in July has exploded to more than 500, including ones for intelligence services like the CIA, the U.K.’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad, a Mozilla developer said Sunday.

The confirmed count of fraudulently-issued SSL (secure socket layer) certificates now stands at 531, said Gervase Markham, a Mozilla developer who is part of the team that has been working to modify Firefox to blocks all sites signed with the purloined certificates.

Among the affected domains, said Markham, are those for the CIA, MI6, Mossad, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft’s Windows Update service.

“Now that someone (presumably from Iran) has obtained a legit HTTPS cert for CIA.gov, I wonder if the US gov will pay attention to this mess,” Christopher Soghoian, a Washington D.C.-based researcher noted for his work on online privacy, said in a tweet Saturday.

Soghoian was referring to assumptions by many experts that Iranian hackers, perhaps supported by that country’s government, were behind the attack. Google has pointed fingers at Iran, saying that attacks using an ill-gotten certificate for google.com had targeted Iranian users.

All the certificates were issued by DigiNotar, a Dutch issuing firm that last week admitted its network had been hacked in July.

The company claimed that it had revoked all the fraudulent certificates, but then realized it had overlooked one that could be used to impersonate any Google service, including Gmail. DigiNotar went public only after users reported their findings to Google.

Criminals or governments could use the stolen certificates to conduct “man-in-the-middle” attacks, tricking users into thinking they were at a legitimate site when in fact their communications were being secretly intercepted.

Google and Mozilla said this weekend that they would permanently block all the digital certificates issued by DigiNotar, including those used by the Dutch government.

Their decisions come less than a week after Google, Mozilla and Microsoft all revoked more than 200 SSL (secure socket layer) certificates for use in their browsers, but left untouched hundreds more, many of which were used by the Dutch government to secure its websites.

“Based on the findings and decision of the Dutch government, as well as conversations with other browser makers, we have decided to reject all of the Certificate Authorities operated by DigiNotar,” Heather Adkins, an information security manager for Google, said in a Saturday blog post.

Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox engineering, echoed that late on Friday.

“All DigiNotar certificates will be untrusted by Mozilla products,” said Nightingale, who also said that the Dutch government had reversed its position of last week — when it had asked browser makers to exempt its DigiNotar certificates.

“The Dutch government has since audited DigiNotar’s performance and rescinded this assessment,” Nightingale said. “This is not a temporary suspension, it is a complete removal from our trusted root program.”

On Saturday, Piet Hein Donner, the Netherlands’s Minister of the Interior, said the government could not guarantee the security of its websites because of the DigiNotar hack, and told citizens not to log into its sites until new certificates had been obtained from other sources.

The DigiNotar breach is being audited by Fox-IT, which told the Dutch government that it was likely certificates for its sites had been fraudulently acquired by hackers.

Several security researchers said the move by browser makers puts an end to DigiNotar’s certificate business.

“Effectively a death sentence for DigiNotar,” said Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, in a Friday tweet.

Mozilla was scathing in its criticism of DigiNotar.

Nightingale ticked off the missteps that led Mozilla to permanently block all sites signed with the company’s certificates, including DigiNotar’s failure to notify browser vendors in July and its inability to tell how many certificates had been illegally obtained. “[And] the attack is not theoretical,” Nightingale added. “We have received multiple reports of these certificates being used in the wild.”

Markham went into greater detail on the hack and its ramifications. “It has now emerged that DigiNotar had not noticed the full extent of the compromise,” said Markham in a Saturday post to his personal blog. “The attackers had managed to hide the traces of the misissuance — perhaps by corrupting log files.”

Because the Google certificate that prompted DigiNotar to acknowledge the intrusion was obtained before most of the others, Markham speculated that there had actually been two separate attacks, perhaps by different groups.

“It is at least possible (but entirely speculative) that an initial competent attacker has had access to [DigiNotar’s] systems for an unknown amount of time, and a second attacker gained access more recently and their less-subtle, bull-in-a-china shop approach in issuing the [hundreds of] certificates triggered the alarms,” he said.

Last week, Helsinki-based antivirus company F-Secure said it had found signs that DigiNotar’s network had been compromised as early as May 2009.

Mozilla will update Firefox 6 and Firefox 3.6 on Tuesday to permanently block all DigiNotar-issued certificates, including those used by the Dutch government.

On Saturday Google updated Chrome to do the same.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

www.computerworld.com, 4 September 2011

September 5, 2011