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Deadly protests mar Venezuela ballot as voters snub Maduro assembly

Flames erupt as clashes break out near security forces members (R) while the Constituent Assembly election is being carried out in Caracas, Venezuela,

By Alexandra Ulmer and Anggy Polanco

CARACAS/SAN CRISTOBAL, Venezuela, (Reuters) – Deadly protests rocked Venezuela on Sunday as voters broadly boycotted an election for a constitutional super-body that unpopular leftist President Nicolas Maduro vowed would begin a “new era of combat” in the crisis-stricken nation.

Anti-Maduro activists wearing hoods or masks erected barricades on roads, and scuffles broke out with security forces who moved in quickly to disperse demonstrators who denounced the election as a naked power grab by the president.

Authorities said 10 people were killed in the confrontations, which made Sunday one of the deadliest days since massive protests started in early April.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro show his ballot as casts his vote at a polling station during the Constituent Assembly election in Caracas, Venezuela July 30, 2017. Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS

Maduro, widely disliked for overseeing an unraveling of Venezuela’s economy, has promised the assembly will bring peace by way of a new constitution after four months of opposition protests in which more than 120 people have been killed.

Opposition parties sat out the election, saying it was rigged to increase Maduro’s powers, a view shared by countries including Spain, Canada, Colombia and the United States.

The Trump administration is considering imposing U.S. sanctions on Venezuela’s vital oil sector in response to Sunday’s election, U.S. officials said.

Potential U.S. sanctions on sales of light crude to Venezuela’s oil company PDVSA would hamper its already weak refining network.

Caracas was largely shut down, streets were deserted and polling stations were mostly empty, dealing a blow to the legitimacy of the vote. A bomb exploded in the capital and wounded seven police officers in what could be the spread of more aggressive tactics.

Critics say the assembly will allow Maduro to dissolve the opposition-run Congress, delay future elections and rewrite electoral rules to prevent the socialists from being voted out of power. The opposition vowed to hold protests again on Monday and to keep pressuring Maduro’s cash-strapped government until he’s forced from office.

“Even if they win today, this won’t last long,” said opposition supporter Berta Hernandez, a 60-year-old doctor in a wealthier Caracas district. “I’ll continue on the streets because, not long from now, this will come to an end.”

Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader narrowly elected in 2013, dismisses criticism of the assembly as right-wing propaganda aimed at sabotaging the brand of socialism created by his mentor and predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez.

“The ’emperor’ Donald Trump wanted to halt the Venezuelan people’s right to vote,” said Maduro as he rapidly voted at 6 a.m. in a low-income area of Caracas that has turned on the government.

“A new era of combat will begin. We’re going all out with this constituent assembly,” he said.

But with polls showing some 70 percent of Venezuelans oppose the vote, the country’s 2.8 million state employees are under huge pressure to participate – with some two dozen sources telling Reuters they were being threatened with dismissal. Workers were being blasted with text messages and phone calls asking them to vote and report back after doing so.

The opposition estimated participation was at around a paltry 12 percent, but warned the government was gearing up to announce some 8.5 million people had voted.

‘SLAP MADURO’

Fueling anger against Maduro is an unprecedented economic meltdown in the country of some 30 million people, which was once a magnet for European migrants thanks to an oil boom that was the envy of Latin America.

However, nearly two decades of heavy currency and price controls have asphyxiated business. Venezuelans have seen their purchasing power shredded by the world’s highest inflation rate.

Millions of Venezuelans now struggle to eat three times a day due to shortages of products as basic as rice and flour.

“Sometimes I take bread from my mouth and give it to my two kids,” said pharmacy employee Trina Sanchez, 28, as she waited for a bus to work. “This is a farce. I want to slap Maduro.”

To show the massive scale of public anger, the opposition organized an unofficial referendum over Maduro’s plan earlier this month.

More than 7 million voters overwhelmingly rejected the constituent assembly and voted in favor of early elections.

The opposition’s bid last year to hold a recall referendum against Maduro was rejected, regional elections have been postponed and the president has repeatedly ignored Congress.

BOMB BLAST

In Sunday’s gravest incident, a bomb went off as a group of police officers on motorbikes sped past Caracas’ Altamira Plaza, an opposition stronghold. The state prosecutor’s office said seven officers were wounded and four motorbikes incinerated.

Clashes were also reported in the volatile Andean state of Tachira, whose capital is San Cristobal, where witnesses told Reuters an unidentified group of men had showed up at two separate street protests and shot at demonstrators.

Fatalities over the weekend included two teenagers and a candidate to the assembly killed during a robbery in the jungle state of Bolivar. The state’s Socialist Party governor, Francisco Rangel, said the death was a “political hit job” and blamed it on the opposition.

Supporters of “Chavismo,” the movement founded by Chavez, Maduro’s more charismatic predecessor who enjoyed high oil prices for much of his mandate, said they wanted to halt the unrest.

“The (opposition) wants deaths and roadblocks and the government wants peace,” said Olga Blanco, 50, voting for candidates to the assembly at a school in Caracas.

The assembly is due to sit within 72 hours of results being certified, with government loyalists such as powerful Socialist Party No. 2 Diosdado Cabello and Maduro’s wife and son expected to win seats.

(Additional reporting by Andreina Aponte, Girish Gupta, Corina Pons, Jaczo Gomez, Hugh Bronstein and Carlos Garcia in Caracas, Maria Ramirez in Puerto Ordaz, Mircely Guanipa in Punto Fijo, Francisco Aguilar in Barinas, Matt Spetalnick and Marianna Parraga in Houston; Writing by Brian Ellsworth, Girish Gupta and Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Daniel Flynn, Sandra Maler and Paul Tait)

British hospitals, Spanish firms among targets of huge cyberattack

An ambulance waits outside the emergency department at St Thomas' Hospital in central London, Britain May 12, 2017. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth

By Costas Pitas and Carlos Ruano

LONDON/MADRID (Reuters) – A huge cyberattack brought disruption to Britain’s health system on Friday and infected many Spanish companies with malicious software, and security researchers said a dozen other countries may be affected.

Hospitals and doctors’ surgeries in parts of England were forced to turn away patients and cancel appointments. People in affected areas were being advised to seek medical care only in emergencies.

“We are experiencing a major IT disruption and there are delays at all of our hospitals,” said the Barts Health group, which manages major London hospitals. Routine appointments had been canceled and ambulances were being diverted to neighboring hospitals.

Telecommunications giant Telefonica was among the targets in Spain, though it said the attack was limited to some computers on an internal network and had not affected clients or services.

Authorities in both countries said the attack was conducted using ‘ransomware’ – malicious software that infects machines, locks them up by encrypting data and demands a ransom to restore access. They identified the type of malware as ‘Wanna Cry’, also known as ‘Wanna Decryptor’.

A Telefonica spokesman said a window appeared on screens of infected computers that demanded payment with the digital currency bitcoin in order to regain access to files.

In Spain, the attacks did not disrupt the provision of services or networks operations of the victims, the government said in a statement. Still, the news prompted security teams at large financial services firms and businesses around the world to review their plans for defending against ransomware attacks, according to executives with private cyber security firms.

A spokeswoman for Portugal Telecom said: “We were the target of an attack, like what is happening in all of Europe, a large scale-attack, but none of our services were affected.”

British based cyber researcher Chris Doman of AlienVault said the ransomware “looks to be targeting a wide range of countries”, with preliminary evidence of infections from 14 countries so far, also including Russia, Indonesia and Ukraine.

PM BRIEFED

A spokesman for British Prime Minister Theresa May said she was being kept informed of the incident, which came less than four weeks before a parliamentary election in which national security and the management of the state-run National Health Service (NHS) are important campaign themes.

Authorities in Britain have been braced for possible cyberattacks in the run-up to the vote, as happened during last year’s U.S. election and on the eve of this month’s presidential vote in France.

But those attacks – blamed on Russia, which has repeatedly denied them – followed a entirely different modus operandi involving penetrating the accounts of individuals and political organizations and then releasing hacked material online.

The full extent of Friday’s disruption in Britain remained unclear.

“This attack was not specifically targeted at the NHS and is affecting organizations from across a range of sectors,” NHS Digital, the computer arm of the health service, said in a statement.

Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, part of the GCHQ spy agency, said it was aware of a cyber incident and was working with NHS Digital and the police to investigate.

A reporter from the Health Service Journal said the attack had affected X-ray imaging systems, pathology test results, phone systems and patient administration systems.

Although cyber extortion cases have been rising for several years, they have to date affected small-to-mid sized organizations, disrupting services provided by hospitals, police departments, public transportation systems and utilities in the United States and Europe.

“Seeing a large telco like Telefonica get hit is going to get everybody worried. Now ransomware is affecting larger companies with more sophisticated security operations,” Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer with cyber security firm Veracode, said.

The news is also likely to embolden cyber extortionists when selecting targets, Chris Camacho, chief strategy officer with cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint, said.

“Now that the cyber criminals know they can hit the big guys, they will start to target big corporations. And some of them may not be well prepared for such attacks,” Camacho said.

In Spain, some big firms took pre-emptive steps to thwart ransomware attacks following a warning from Spain’s National Cryptology Centre of “a massive ransomware attack.”

Iberdrola and Gas Natural, along with Vodafone’s unit in Spain, asked staff to turn off computers or cut off internet access in case they had been compromised, representatives from the firms said.

It was not immediately clear how many Spanish organizations had been compromised by the attacks, if any critical services had been interrupted or whether victims had paid cyber criminals to regain access to their networks.

(Additional reporting by Jim Finkle, Eric Auchard, Jose Rodriguez, Alistair Smout, Kate Holton, Andy Bruce, Michael Holden and David Milliken; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Ralph Boulton)

Spanish lettuce shortage likely to continue into March, say farmers

By Emma Pinedo and Francisco Bonilla

LOS ALCAZARES, Spain (Reuters) – A shortage of iceberg lettuce is likely to continue into March, Spanish farmers say, because freak weather conditions in the south of the country early in the agricultural year prevented the planting of seedlings to replace ruined crops.

The southern region of Murcia, where most Spanish lettuce grown for export is cultivated, suffered the worst floods in two decades followed by its first snow storm in over 30 years in December and January.

“This has been extraordinary, it’s not normal to have so many problems at once,” said Jose Antonio Canovas, a farmer and salesman in Murcia for Kernel Export, which grows, packages and delivers a range of vegetables from cauliflower to broccoli.

The ruined harvest and subsequent shortage of produce has led some British supermarkets like Tesco <TSCO.L> and Sainsbury <SBRY.L> to ration iceberg lettuces to three per visit. The limited supply follows a shortage of courgettes in Britain and supplies of broccoli and aubergines have also been affected.

Vegetable production in the European Union has fallen to 60 percent of normal levels in recent weeks due to bad weather affecting producers across the Mediterranean, from Greece to Spain, Spanish exporters say. Spain accounts for around half of EU vegetable exports.

Not only did floods and snow ruin crops, leaving lettuces ready for harvest withered and battered in the fields, but the bad weather prevented the planting of polytunnel-grown seedlings which meant more delays to the next harvest of Spain’s biggest fruit and vegetable export after tomatoes.

“We have notified our customers that there may be production delays in March because the planting of seedlings has been delayed and in the rush to supply the market some crops were picked ahead of time,” said Fernando Gomez, general manager of The Murcian Federation of Producers and Exporters of Fruit and Vegetables (Proexport).

The production of lettuces, one of the most badly affected crops, has fallen by up to a third in the peak winter months of production when Spain harvests over 100,000 tonnes of the 700,000 tonnes it exports annually.

Production is likely to return to normal by the end of March or the beginning of April, Proexport’s Gomez said.

Many farmers in the area do not insure their crops. In a sector with very slim profit margins of between 1.5 and 4 percent, profit relies on big volumes. Higher prices have not made up for the losses farmers have suffered.

Alongside the hit from ruined crops, the hiring of specialized labor to work the flooded and frozen fields has also eaten into profit margins at farms.

(Writing by Sonya Dowsett; Editing by Angus Berwick and Adrian Croft)

Spain arrests two accused of connections to Islamist militants

MADRID (Reuters) – Spanish police have arrested two people in Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta accused of connections with Islamist militants, the Interior Ministry said on Friday.

The two detained had been through a long radicalization process and formed part of a group which was thought to be at an advanced stage of preparation for potential attacks, it said.

Police, searching six locations in relation to the arrests, found one gun and three non-firing weapons, the ministry said, though it did not elaborate.

Police had unearthed at least one automatic weapon wrapped in a plastic sheet on wasteland near the locations being investigated, a Reuters witness said.

Spanish police have arrested 180 people accused of connections to Islamist militant groups since raising the country-wide security alert to one below the highest level in 2015.

(Reporting by Paul Day; Editing by Toby Chopra and Hugh Lawson)

The three wise men parade Madrid’s streets amid tightened security

MADRID (Reuters) – The three biblical wise men paraded through Madrid’s streets amid tight security on Thursday, the eve of Epiphany, which celebrates the day they are said to have visited the infant Christ with gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar, accompanied by hundreds of eclectic floats, handed out sweets to the thousands of children lining the Spanish capital’s main boulevard.

Madrid’s authorities deployed 800 police officers, some heavily armed, erected concrete barriers to block access to streets and curbed the movement of trucks after the December attack in Berlin on a Christmas market.

A Tunisian man killed 12 people in the Dec. 19 attack when he plowed a truck into a row of market stalls, leading other European capitals to ramp up security.

The Day of the Kings on Jan. 6 is a bigger day than Christmas for many in Spain. Children often wait until then to open their presents said to have been brought by the wise men and not Santa Claus, the traditional gift-giver elsewhere.

Every Spanish city and most towns hold parades featuring the kings, wearing robes, crowns and billowing beards, and Madrid’s is one of the largest.

In Catalonia controversy has been focused on the attempt by pro-independence organizations to politicize the parade in Vic, a town around 70 kilometers north of Barcelona, with the distribution of lanterns bearing the “estelada” flag, usually used by Catalan separatists.

(Reporting By Jesús Aguado; Editing by Angus Berwick and Richard Lough)

About 220 Migrants storm border in Spanish enclave Ceuta

A Spanish Red Cross worker aids African migrants after they crossed a border fence between Morocco and Spain's north African enclave of Ceuta

MADRID (Reuters) – About 220 African migrants forced their way through a barbed wire fence into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta on Monday, clashing with Spanish police who tried to prevent them from crossing the border with Morocco.

Thirty-two migrants were treated in hospital for minor injuries after pushing their way through two gates just before 2 a.m. ET, while three Spanish policemen also needed medical attention, the government said.

Several migrants collapsed from exhaustion after crossing into Spanish territory, Reuters photographs showed. Their legal status in Spain has yet to be determined, and police were searching for some who fled into hills inside the territory, it said.

Spain’s two enclaves in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla, have been favored entry points into Europe for African migrants, who either climb over their border fences or swim along their coastlines.

After thousands crossed over in 2014 and 2015, Spain stepped up security, partly funded by European authorities, and passed a law enabling its border police to refuse refugees the opportunity to apply for asylum.

Since then Libya has become a more common departure point for African migrants, most from sub-Saharan countries, who attempt the crossing to Italy in rickety boats that often break down or sink. More 3,740 migrant deaths have been recorded this year in the central Mediterranean, most along that route.

(Reporting by Sarah White and Rodrigo de Miguel, editing by John Stonestreet)

Spanish officials seize 20K military uniforms from alleged ISIS suppliers

Police in Spain have neutralized a “very active and effective business network” that allegedly supplied a variety of materials to terrorist groups, the country’s interior ministry said Thursday.

A counterterrorism investigation last month led to the arrest of seven people who are accused of providing “logistical and financial support” to the Islamic State and the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, the ministry announced in a news release. Authorities also confiscated about 20,000 uniforms and other accessories that could have been used “to equip an army that would be perfectly prepared for combat” out of three shipping containers in Valencia and Algeciras.

The ministry said the containers were tied to the business network, and had been labeled as carrying “second-hand clothes” so as not to arouse suspicion from customs officials. However, authorities discovered bundles of uniforms hidden among other clothing inside the containers.

The now-neutralized network helped provide a constant supply of weapons, military equipment and other technological supplies to areas controlled by the Islamic State, the ministry said.

Heat Wave Baking Europe

A heat wave has been baking Europe over the last week setting record high temperatures from Spain to England.

Meteorologists across the continent were reporting temperatures well over 100 degrees fahrenheit including southern France where the daytime highs are expected to top 105 degrees through the rest of the week.

“We have a lot of heat-wave days ahead of us,” MeteoFrance forecaster Francois Gourand told the Associated Press.

Heat in France was causing problems for the power grid, as 120,000 homes in the town of Vannes were left without power on Wednesday.

An all time high temperature for the UK in July was recorded on the first day of the month as London’s Heathrow Airport reported a high of 98.6 degrees.

The heat wave is striking the country at the start of the Wimbledon tennis championships and officials say it’s officially the hottest players have had to compete in the tournament’s history since it began in 1877. The heat was so intense a ball boy collapsed from the heat and had to be taken out on a stretcher.

While the heat bothered some residents, others took it in stride.

“I’m loving it. I can’t complain,” university student Maggie Cloud told the AP. “We pay so much money to go abroad to holidays, and now we have the weather here. It’s cheaper.”

March Against Abortion In Spain Draws Thousands

A march in Spain against abortion drew tens of thousands of people into the capital city of Madrid.

“Yes to life! No to abortion!” the tens of thousands of marchers chanted outside the headquarters of the Popular Party, the controlling party in the nation.

The leaders of the march wanted to get the message through to the ruling party that they will lose tens of thousands of voters if they allow abortions in the country to increase or back off on their vows to restrict the process in the country.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy abandoned efforts to completely ban abortion because his party could not reach a consensus.

“As president of the government I have taken the most sensible decision,” he said. “We can’t have a law that will be changed when another government comes in.”

The march’s leaders used evidence from around the world to prove restrictions that were opposed by members of the ruling party had no merit. One such example came from former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Coop.

“Protection of the life of the mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. In my 36 years of pediatric surgery, I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother’s life,” Koop stated. “If toward the end of the pregnancy complications arise that threaten the mother’s health, the doctor will induce labor or perform a Caesarean section. His intention is to save the life of both the mother and the baby. The baby’s life is never willfully destroyed because the mother’s life is in danger.”

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