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New York — Google fired 28 employees following a disruptive sit-down protest over the tech giant's contract with the Israeli government, a Google spokesperson said Thursday. The Tuesday demonstration was organized by the group "No Tech for Apartheid," which has long opposed "Project Nimbus," Google's joint $1.2 billion contract with Amazon to provide cloud services to the government of Israel. Video of the demonstration showed police arresting Google workers in Sunnyvale, California, in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's, according to a post by the advocacy group on X, formerly Twitter. Kurian's office was occupied for 10 hours, the advocacy group said. Workers held signs including "Googlers against Genocide," a reference to accusations surrounding Israel's attacks on Gaza. "No Tech for Apartheid," which also held protests in New York and Seattle, pointed to an April 12 Time magazine article reporting a draft contract of Google billing the Israeli Ministry of Defense more than $1 million for consulting services. A "small number" of employees "disrupted" a few Google locations, but the protests are "part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don't work at Google," a Google spokesperson said. "After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety," the Google spokesperson said. "We have so far concluded individual investigations that resulted in the termination of employment for 28 employees, and will continue to investigate and take action as needed." Israel is one of "numerous" governments for which Google provides cloud computing services, the Google spokesperson said. "This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services," the Google spokesperson said.

Nyon, Switzerland — Barcelona was fined $26,600 by UEFA on Thursday for Nazi salutes and monkey gestures by fans at a Champions League game against Paris Saint-Germain last week. UEFA, the governing body of soccer in Europe, said the proven charge of "racist behavior" followed images circulating of misconduct by some fans at Parc des Princes on April 10. UEFA also deferred a one-game ban on selling tickets to Barcelona fans for an away game in the Champions League next season for a probationary period of one year. Barcelona also was ordered to compensate PSG for damage to seats by fans and pay additional fines totaling $7,500. Barcelona won 3-2 in Paris in the first leg of the quarterfinals but was eliminated Tuesday after losing 4-1 in the home leg. World soccer body FIFA is set to launch a new drive against racism next month at its annual congress meeting, being held in Bangkok, Thailand.

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Taipei, Taiwan — A new report by a team of Tibet-focused cybersecurity analysts details how hackers with links to the Chinese government are using cyber espionage tactics to target members of the Tibetan government-in-exile and the office of the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. “Spyware-as-a-Service," which was released Thursday, uses information from an enormous data leak in February from Chinese cybersecurity firm I-Soon. According to the report, hackers have been targeting the mobile phones of officials from the Central Tibetan Administration, or CTA, since 2018 and the large amount of information Chinese hackers have collected could pose significant security risks to them and those in their social networks. That targeting, “represents a significant shift in the tactics used by threat actors, signaling an adaptation to modern communication methods and an understanding of the increasing reliance on mobile devices for both personal and professional activities,” the report said. Tibet-focused research network Turquoise Roof published the report. The February data dump was a treasure trove of information about China’s cyber espionage and other activities. Leaked documents revealed that private firm I-Soon's clients include the Chinese police, China’s Ministry of Public Security, and the People’s Liberation Army. The leaked information also detailed tools and tactics used by the organization and connections among hacking groups in China.  'Tip of an iceberg' These new findings provide a glimpse into “the sprawling cyber espionage apparatus” that China has used to target ethnic minorities over the last few decades, says Greg Walton, senior investigator at U.K.-based security consulting firm Secdev Group.   “While the revelation is only the tip of an iceberg, it’s a very revealing one,” said Walton, who is the report’s author. “The findings help us learn more about the opaque system [that the Chinese authorities] have been using to target the West,” he told VOA by phone. One leaked white paper described in the report focused on how I-Soon used compromised e-mail inboxes of exiled Tibetan authorities to demonstrate how their system can satisfy the demand of China’s intelligence agencies to “mine through substantial volumes of intercepted email data.”  “The platform is engineered to facilitate investigations into an individual’s ‘interpersonal network’ and to intricately map the social networks of targeted individuals,” the report wrote.  Walton said the white paper offers rare insight into the “capabilities of the Chinese party-state.”  “[Since] we know that I-Soon has been selling their services to Chinese intelligence agencies, including the public security bureau in Tibet, we make the point in the report that the harvested social network analysis from the exiles’ inboxes could be sold to the authorities in Tibet,” he told VOA.  In his view, Chinese authorities could incorporate “the web of personal and professional connections” identified from the compromised e-mail inboxes of exiled Tibetan officials into the big data policing platform that they use to crack down on the local community in Tibet.  “The platform is instrumental in a campaign that criminalizes even moderate cultural, religious expressions, language rights advocacy and surfaces links to exile Tibetan networks,” Walton said.  In response to the report’s findings, the Chinese Embassy in Washington said Beijing has “always firmly opposed and cracked down on all forms of cyber hacking” according to law.  The accusation from the report “is a complete reversal of black and white,” Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy, told VOA in a written response.  A long history of threats from Chinese cyber espionage The CTA and the Tibetan diaspora community have been targets of Chinese cyber espionage for more than a decade. In 2008, an extensive cyber operation called “GhostNet,” which is connected to a specialized division of the People’s Liberation Army, caused serious problems across the Tibetan community.  Between November 2018 and May 2019, some senior members of Tibetan groups received malicious links in tailored WhatsApp text exchanges with operators disguised as NGO workers and other fake personas, according to research conducted by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. According to Turquoise Roof’s report, the escalation of cyber operations against the CTA by China’s military and intelligence services is “in step with” the exiled Tibetan government’s increased investment in its digital presence and reliance on digital systems for interacting with the diaspora community. Some Tibetan organizations have been conducting training to enhance their resilience against Chinese cyberattacks.  “The Tibet Action Institute provides tech assistance to exiled Tibetan organizations and they often teach us about the security measures we can adopt to prevent our accounts or digital devices from being hacked,” Ngawang Lungtok, a researcher at the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, told VOA by phone.  The CTA has also been focusing on upgrading its technical capacity and offering orientations to all Tibetan officials in recent years. “The Tibetan Computer Resource Center offers training and workshops regularly,” Tenzin Lekshay, the spokesperson of the CTA, told VOA in a written response.  Walton adds that the CTA even sent people to the United States for specialized training.  “The CTA has some good people trained in the U.S. and is now in the position to help tackle risks extended from Chinese cyberattacks,” he said.  The report says the I-Soon leak offers significant insight into the Chinese authorities’ use of AI-driven surveillance systems to “enforce political controls” within and beyond its border. It also showcases Beijing’s efforts to “refine its espionage capabilities” by using novel intelligence tactics against vulnerable populations like the Tibetans before global deployment.  Considering the impact of cyber espionage on the Tibetans, Walton said he believes investing in the protection of vulnerable populations from digital transnational repression “is an example of” aligning traditional security with human rights advocacy. 

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

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Islamabad — A survey released Thursday revealed that over the past seven months, nearly 250,000 children have returned to Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan with almost nothing, and they urgently need food, shelter and access to education. The study by Save the Children said that more than 520,000 Afghans have returned home since September 2023 after Pakistan asked all undocumented foreigners to leave the country or face deportation. Nearly half of all the returnees are children. Despite attending school in Pakistan, 65% of the children now back in Afghanistan are not enrolled in school. The majority, 85%, told the surveyors they did not have the necessary documents to register and enroll in school.  The survey did not say how many girls were among the children questioned as they also have to deal with the Taliban government’s ban on teenage girls’ education beyond the sixth grade.  'Crisis levels of hunger' The study found that 99% of the families that returned and the communities hosting them in Afghanistan do not have sufficient food to last one to two months.  “About three-quarters of returnees and families in host communities reduced portion sizes or restricted the food consumption of adults so small children could eat on at least two days in the previous week,” said Save the Children in its study.  According to the findings of the survey, almost 40% of returnees and host families had to borrow food or depend on relatives and friends at least three days a week. Out of the number of respondents in total, 13% of returnees and 9% of host families had to rely on others for food every day. It highlighted the dire conditions facing returnees in Afghanistan, where almost 8 million children “are facing crisis levels of hunger” due to years of conflict and multiple recent natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and ongoing drought.  'Already overstretched resources' The United Nations estimates that close to 16 million Afghans in the country face severe food insecurity at crisis and emergency levels. “Families are returning to Afghanistan with virtually nothing,” said Arshad Malik, country director for Save the Children. “The return of so many people is creating an additional strain on already overstretched resources,” he said.  Malik said that the crisis-hit country is struggling to cope with the pressure of displacement. In addition to the returns from Pakistan, he added nearly 600,000 Afghans arrived from neighboring Iran last year. “Afghanistan is also now home to the second largest number of internally displaced people in the world – or roughly 1 in 7 people.” He noted that many undocumented Afghan children were born in Pakistan, and Afghanistan is not the place they call home.  No basic necessities A 15-year-old girl living with her grandfather after returning with her mother and three siblings told the surveyors that the family sold everything before leaving Pakistan. Her name was not mentioned to protect her identity.  “We need shelter, living essentials, winter clothing, shoes, blankets, food and medicine. Afghanistan is very cold for us, and it is challenging because we do not have winter clothing,” said the girl. The survey showed that nearly one in six families lives in tents and most returnees have little or no means of supporting themselves, with nearly half of them saying there were no jobs available in Afghanistan. Economic and humanitarian conditions have deteriorated in the country since the fundamentalist Taliban returned to power nearly three years ago. They have imposed sweeping restrictions on women’s access to education, employment, and public life.  The curbs on women’s rights and other controversial policies have deterred the international community from formally recognizing the Taliban government and resuming much-needed development assistance to Afghanistan. Humanitarian aid is still being provided to the country through the U.N. and other foreign non-governmental organizations.

A gold mine in Zimbabwe has turned its former dumpsite into a solar station, generating all the energy it needs for operations at the mine and releasing excess energy into the national grid. Located in Zimbabwe’s southwestern Bubi district, some 500 kilometers from the capital, the project has drawn praise from environmentalists. Columbus Mavhunga has more.

Denver, Colo. — Hours after she escaped the Columbine High School shooting, 14-year-old Missy Mendo slept between her parents in bed, still wearing the shoes she had on when she fled her math class. She wanted to be ready to run. Twenty-five years later, and with Mendo now a mother herself, the trauma from that horrific day remains close on her heels.  It caught up to her when 60 people were shot dead in 2017 at a country music festival in Las Vegas, a city she had visited a lot while working in the casino industry. Then again in 2022, when 19 students and two teachers were shot and killed in Uvalde, Texas.  Mendo had been filling out her daughter's pre-kindergarten application when news of the elementary school shooting broke. She read a few lines of a news story about Uvalde, then put her head down and cried.  "It felt like nothing changed," she recalls thinking.  In the quarter-century since two gunmen at Columbine shot and killed 12 fellow students and a teacher in suburban Denver — an attack that played out on live television and ushered in the modern era of school shootings — the traumas of that day have continued to shadow Mendo and others who were there.  Some needed years to view themselves as Columbine survivors since they were not physically wounded. Yet things like fireworks could still trigger disturbing memories. The aftershocks — often unacknowledged in the years before mental health struggles were more widely recognized — led to some survivors suffering insomnia, dropping out of school, or disengaging from their spouses or families.  Survivors and other members of the community plan to attend a candlelight vigil on the steps of the state's capitol Friday night, the eve of the shooting's anniversary.  April is particularly hard for Mendo, 39, whose "brain turns to mashed potatoes" each year. She shows up at dentist appointments early, misplaces her keys, forgets to close the refrigerator door.  She leans on therapy and the understanding of an expanding group of shooting survivors she has met through The Rebels Project, a support group founded by other Columbine survivors following a 2012 shooting when a gunman killed 12 people at a movie theater in the nearby suburb of Aurora. Mendo started seeing a therapist after her child's first birthday, at the urging of fellow survivor moms.  After she broke down over Uvalde, Mendo, a single parent, said she talked to her mom, took a walk to get some fresh air, then finished her daughter's pre-kindergarten application.  "Was I afraid of her going into the public school system? Absolutely," Mendo said of her daughter. "I wanted her to have as normal of a life as possible."  Researchers who've studied the long-term effects of gun violence in schools have quantified protracted struggles among survivors, including long-term academic effects like absenteeism and reduced college enrollment, and lower earnings later in life.  "Just counting lives lost is kind of an incorrect way to capture the full cost of these tragedies," said Maya Rossin-Slater, an associate professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine's Department of Health Policy.  Mass killings have recurred with numbing frequency in the years since Columbine, with almost 600 attacks in which four or more people have died, not including the perpetrator, since 2006, according to data compiled by The Associated Press.  More than 80% of the 3,045 victims in those attacks were killed by a firearm.  Nationwide hundreds of thousands of people have been exposed to school shootings that are often not mass-casualty events but still traumatic, Rossin-Slater said. The impacts can last a lifetime, she added, resulting in "kind of a persistent, reduced potential" for survivors.  Those who were present at Columbine say the years since have given them time to learn more about what happened to them and how to cope with it.  Heather Martin, now 42, was a Columbine senior in 1999. In college, she began crying during a fire drill, realizing later that a fire alarm had gone off for three hours when she and 60 other students hid in a barricaded office during the high school shooting. She couldn't return to that class and was marked absent each time, and says she failed it after refusing to write a final paper on school violence, despite telling her professor of her experience at Columbine.  It took 10 years for her to see herself as a survivor, after she was invited back with the rest of the class of 1999 for an anniversary event. She saw fellow classmates having similar struggles and almost immediately decided to go back to college to become a teacher.  Martin, a co-founder of The Rebels Project, named after Columbine's mascot, said 25 years has given her time to struggle and figure out how to work out of those struggles.  "I just know myself so well now and know how I respond to things and what might activate me and how I can bounce back and be OK. And most importantly I think I can recognize when I am not OK and when I do need to seek help," she said.  Kiki Leyba, a first-year teacher at Columbine in 1999, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder soon after the shooting. He felt a strong sense of commitment to return to the school, where he threw himself into his work. But he continued to have panic attacks.  To help him cope, he had sleeping pills and some Xanax for anxiety, Leyba said. One therapist recommended chamomile tea.  Things got harder for him after the 2002 graduation of Mendo's class, the last cohort of students who lived through the shooting since they had been through so much together.  By 2005, after years of not taking care of himself and suffering from lack of sleep, Leyba said he would often check out from family life, sleeping in on the weekends and turning into a "blob on the couch." Finally, his wife Kallie enrolled him in a one-week trauma treatment program, arranging for him to take the time off from work without telling him.  "Thankfully that really gave me a kind of a foothold ... to do the work to climb out of that," said Leyba, who said breathing exercises, journaling, meditation and anti-depressants have helped him.  Like Mendo and Martin, he has traveled around the country to work with survivors of shootings.  "That worst day has transformed into something I can offer to others," said Leyba, who is in Washington, D.C. this week meeting with officials about gun violence and promoting a new film about his trauma journey.  Mendo still lives in the area, and her 5-year-old daughter attends school near Columbine. When her daughter's school locked down last year as police swarmed the neighborhood during a hostage situation, Mendo recalled worrying things like: What if my child is in danger? What if there is another school shooting like Columbine?  When Mendo picked up her daughter, she seemed a little scared, and she hugged her mom a little tighter. Mendo breathed deeply to stay calm, a technique she had learned in therapy, and put on a brave face.  "If I was putting down some fear, she would pick it up," she said. "I didn't want that for her." 

Islamabad — Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi will visit Pakistan as scheduled next week despite increasing tension in the Middle East in the wake of Tehran's aerial attack on Israel, Pakistan's foreign minister said Thursday. Ishaq Dar said Raisi will arrive in the capital, Islamabad, on April 22 on an official three-day visit. Dar provided no further details, but the visit seems to be part of efforts by the two sides to mend ties which had briefly been strained in January, when Tehran and Islamabad carried out tit-for-tat strikes targeting militants accused of attacking each other's security forces. But the two sides soon agreed to work together to improve security cooperation. The visit was announced days after Iran launched unprecedented air strikes on Israel after a suspected Israeli strike in Syria killed two Iranian generals in an Iranian consular building. Pakistan is among the countries that has no diplomatic relations with Israel because of the lingering issue of Palestinian statehood. Dar said Pakistan wants the issue to be settled according to U.N. resolutions.

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BERLIN — Two German-Russian men have been arrested in Germany on suspicion of espionage, one of them accused of agreeing to carry out attacks on potential targets including U.S. military facilities in hopes of sabotaging aid for Ukraine, prosecutors said Thursday. The two, identified only as Dieter S. and Alexander J. in line with German privacy rules, were arrested Wednesday in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth, federal prosecutors said. Prosecutors allege Dieter S. had been discussing possible acts of sabotage in Germany with a person linked to Russian intelligence since October, and that the main aim was to undermine military support given by Germany to Ukraine. The suspect declared himself willing to carry out bombing and arson attacks on infrastructure used by the military and industrial sites in Germany, prosecutors said in a statement. They added that he gathered information on potential targets, including U.S. military facilities. Alexander J. allegedly helped him to do so starting in March at the latest, while Dieter S. scouted out some of the sites, took photos and videos of military goods and passed the information to his intelligence contact. A judge on Wednesday ordered Dieter S. kept in custody pending a possible indictment, and Alexander J. was ordered held on Thursday. Dieter S. also faces separate accusations of belonging to an armed unit of pro-Russian separatist forces in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine between December 2014 and September 2016. Germany has become the second-biggest supplier of weapons to Ukraine after the United States since Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. The U.S. has a large military presence in Germany, including in Bavaria. Prosecutors did not name any specific locations in the suspects' sights. German news agency dpa and magazine Der Spiegel reported, without citing sources, that the locations allegedly snooped on include the U.S. Grafenwoehr military base. Germany's top security official, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, said Russia's ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. She vowed that Germany will continue to thwart any such Russian threats. "We will continue to give Ukraine massive support and will not let ourselves be intimidated," she said. Faeser wouldn't comment on details of the investigation. She said that Germany has increased its security measures since Russia sent its troops into Ukraine in 2022 and will keep evaluating them. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he couldn't comment on the reported arrests, saying that he doesn't have "any information on this matter." European officials have recently warned of Russia-linked interference networks trying to undermine European support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.