UN Myanmar envoy visits ruined city after violence

Myanmar Buddhist monks comfort refugees, following the ethnic unrest between Buddhists and Muslims, as they visit a monastery along with Vijay Nambiar, unseen, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s special adviser on Myanmar, in Meikhtila, about 550 kilometers (340 miles) north of Yangon, Myanmar, Sunday, March 24, 2013. The top UN envoy to Myanmar toured a central city Sunday destroyed in the country's worst explosion of Buddhist-Muslim violence this year, calling on the government to punish those responsible for a tragedy that left dozens of corpses piled in the streets, some of them charred beyond recognition. (AP Photo/Khin Maung Win)

Muslim refugees take relief foods from private donors at a stadium in Meikhtila, about 550 kilometers (340 miles) north of Yangon, Myanmar, Sunday, March 24, 2013. The top UN envoy to Myanmar toured a central city Sunday destroyed in the country's worst explosion of Buddhist-Muslim violence this year, calling on the government to punish those responsible for a tragedy that left dozens of corpses piled in the streets, some of them charred beyond recognition. (AP Photo/Khin Maung Win)

MEIKHTILA, Myanmar (AP) — The top UN envoy to Myanmar on Sunday toured a central city destroyed in the country's worst explosion of Buddhist-Muslim violence this year, calling on thegovernment to punish those responsible for a tragedy that left dozens of corpses piled in the streets, some of them charred beyond recognition.

Vijay Nambiar, the U.N. secretary-general's special adviser on Myanmar, also visited some of the nearly 10,000 people driven from their homes after sectarian unrest shook the city ofMeikhtilafor several days this week. Most of the displaced are minority Muslims, who appeared to have suffered the brunt of the violence as armed Buddhist mobs roamed city.

Nambiar said he was encouraged to learn that some individuals in both communities had bravely helped each other and that religious leaders were now advocating peace. He said the people he spoke to believe the violence "was the work of outsiders," but he gave no details.

"There is a certain degree of fear and anxiety among the people, but there is no hatred," Nambiar said after visiting both groups on Sunday and promising the United Nations would provide as much help as it can to get the city back on its feet. "They feel a sense of community and that it is a very good thing because they have worked together and lived together."

But he added: "It is important to catch the perpetrators. It is important that they be caught and punished."

Nambiar's visit came one day after the army took control of the city to enforce a tense calm after President Thein Sein ordered a state of emergency here.

Late Saturday, the government put the death toll in the violence at 32, according to state television, which reported that bodies had been found as authorities began cleaning up the area.

The bloodshed marked the first sectarian unrest to spread into Myanmar's heartland since two similar episodes rocked western Rakhine state last year. It is the latest challenge to efforts to reform the Southeast Asian country after the long-ruling military ceded power two years ago to a civiliangovernment led by retired army officers.

There are concerns the violence could spread, and the bloodshed has raised questions about the government's failure to rein in anti-Muslim sentiment in a predominantly Buddhist country where even monks have armed themselves and taken advantage of newfound freedoms to stage anti-Muslim rallies.

In Meikthila, at least five mosques were set ablaze from Wednesday to Friday. The majority of homes and shops burned in the city also belonged to Muslims, and most of the displaced are Muslim.

During his trip, Nambiar visited some of the thousands of Muslim residents at a city stadium, where they have huddled since fleeing their homes. He later visited around 100 Buddhists at a local monastery who have also been displaced.

No new violence was reported overnight, but residents remained anxious.

"The city is calm and some shops have reopened, but many still live in fear. Some still dare not return to their homes," said Win Htein, an opposition lawmaker from the city.

Myanma Ahlin, a state-run newspaper, carried a statement from Buddhist, Muslim, Christian and Hindu leaders expressing sorrow for the loss of life and property and calling on Buddhist monks to help ease tensions.

"We would like to call upon the government to provide sufficient security and to protect the displaced people and to investigate and take legal measures as urgently as possible," the statement said.

Muslims, who make up about 30 percent of Meikhtila's 100,000 inhabitants, have stayed off the streets since their shops and homes were burned and Buddhist mobs armed with machetes and swords began roaming the city.

Little appeared to be left of some palm tree-lined neighborhoods, where the legs of victims could be seen poking out from smoldering masses of twisted debris and ash. Broken glass, charred cars and motorcycles and overturned tables littered roads beside rows of burned-out homes and shops, evidence of the widespread chaos that swept the town.

The struggle to contain the violence has proven another major challenge to Thein Sein's reformist administration, which has faced an upsurge in fighting with ethnic Kachin rebels in the north and major protests at a northern copper mine where angry residents — emboldened by promises of freedom of expression — have come out to denounce land grabbing.

The devastation was reminiscent of last year's clashes between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Muslim Rohingya that left hundreds of people dead and more than 100,000 displaced — almost all of them Muslim. The Rohingya are widely perceived as illegal migrants and foreigners from Bangladesh; the Muslim population of Meikhtila is believed to be mostly of Indian origin.

Chaos began Wednesday after an argument broke out between a Muslim gold shop owner and his Buddhist customers. Once news spread that a Muslim man had killed a Buddhist monk, Buddhist mobs rampaged through a Muslim neighborhood and the situation quickly spiraled out of control.

Residents and activists said the police did little to stop the rioters or reacted too slowly, allowing the violence to escalate.

Occasional isolated violence involving Myanmar's majority Buddhist and minority Muslim communities has occurred for decades, even under the authoritarian military governments that ruled the country from 1962 to 2011.

Experts: NKorea training teams of 'cyber warriors'

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Investigators have yet to pinpoint the culprit behind a synchronized cyberattack in South Korea last week. But in Seoul, the focus remains fixed on North Korea, where South Korean security experts say Pyongyang has been training a team of computer-savvy "cyber warriors" as cyberspace becomes a fertile battleground in the standoff between the two Koreas.

Malware shut down 32,000 computers and servers at three major South Korean TV networks and three banks last Wednesday, disrupting communications and banking businesses, officials said. The investigation into who planted the malware could take weeks or even months.

South Korean investigators have produced no proof yet that North Korea was behind the cyberattack, and on Friday said the malware was traced to a Seoul computer. But South Korea has pointed the finger at Pyongyang in six cyberattacks since 2009, even creating a cyber security command center in Seoul to protect the Internet-dependent country from hackers from the North.

It may seem unlikely that impoverished North Korea, with one of the most restrictive Internet policies in the world, would have the ability to threaten affluent South Korea, a country considered a global leader in telecommunications. The average yearly income in North Korea was just $1,190 per person in 2011 — just a fraction of the average yearly income of $22,200 for South Koreans that same year, according to the Bank of Korea in Seoul.

But over the past several years, North Korea has poured money and resources into science and technology. In December, scientists succeeded in launching a satellite into space aboard a long-range rocket from its own soil. And in February, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, its third.

"IT" has become a buzzword in North Korea, which has developed its own operating system called Red Star. The regime also encouraged a passion for gadgets among its elite, introducing a Chinese-made tablet computer for the North Korean market. Teams of developers came up with software for everything from composing music to learning how to cook.

But South Korea and the U.S. believe North Korea also has thousands of hackers trained by the state to carry its warfare into cyberspace, and that their cyber offensive skills are as good as or better than their counterparts in China and South Korea.

"The newest addition to the North Korean asymmetric arsenal is a growing cyber warfare capability," James Thurman, commander of the U.S. forces in South Korea, told U.S. legislators in March 2012. "North Korea employs sophisticated computer hackers trained to launch cyber-infiltration and cyber-attacks" against South Korea and the U.S.

In 2010, Won Sei-hoon, then chief of South Korea's National Intelligence Service, put the number of professional hackers in North Korea's cyber warfare unit at 1,000.

North Korean students are recruited to the nation's top science schools to become "cyber warriors," said Kim Heung-kwang, who said he trained future hackers at a university in the industrial North Korean city of Hamhung for two decades before defecting in 2003. He said future hackers also are sent to study abroad in China and Russia.

In 2009, then-leader Kim Jong Il ordered Pyongyang's "cyber command" expanded to 3,000 hackers, he said, citing a North Korean government document that he said he obtained that year. The veracity of the document could not be independently confirmed.

Kim Heung-kwang, who has lived in Seoul since 2004, speculated that more have been recruited since then, and said some are based in China to infiltrate networks abroad.

What is clear is that "North Korea has a capacity to send malware to personal computers, servers or networks and to launch DDOS-type attacks," he said. "Their targets are the United States and South Korea."

Expanding its warfare into cyberspace by developing malicious computer codes is cheaper and faster for North Korean than building nuclear devices or other weapons of mass destructions. The online world allows for anonymity because it is easy to fabricate IP addresses and destroy the evidence leading back to the hackers, according to C. Matthew Curtin, founder of Interhack Corp.

Thurman said cyberattacks are "ideal" for North Korea because they can take place relatively anonymously. He said cyberattacks have been waged against military, governmental, educational and commercial institutions.

North Korean officials have not acknowledged allegations that computer experts are trained as hackers, and have refuted many of the cyberattack accusations. Pyongyang has not commented on the most recent widespread attack in South Korea.

In June 2012, a seven-month investigation into a hacking incident that disabled news production system at the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo led to North Korea's government telecommunications center, South Korean officials said.

In South Korea, the economy, commerce and every aspect of daily life is deeply dependent on the Internet, making it ripe grounds for a disruptive cyberattack.

In North Korea, in contrast, is just now getting online. Businesses are starting to use online banking services and debit cards have grown in popularity. But only a sliver of the population has access to the global Internet, meaning an Internet outage last week — which Pyongyang blamed on hackers from Seoul and Washington — had little bearing on most North Koreans.

"North Korea has nothing to lose in a cyber battle," said Kim Seeongjoo, a professor at Seoul-based Korea University's Department of Cyber Defense. "Even if North Korea turns out to be the attacker behind the broadcasters' hacking, there is no target for South Korean retaliation."

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New US-EU talks threatened by agriculture spats

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama used Washington's grandest stage — the State of the Union speech — to announce negotiations with Europe aimed at creating the world's largest free trade agreement. Just weeks later, there are signs that old agriculture disputes could be deal-killers.

European Union leaders don't want the negotiations to include discussions on their restrictions ongenetically modified crops and other regulations that keep U.S. farm products out of Europe. But Obama says it's hard to imagine an agreement that doesn't address those issues. Powerful U.S. agricultural lobbies will do their best to make sure Congress rejects any pact that fails to address the restrictions.

"Any free trade agreement that doesn't cover agriculture is in trouble," said Cathleen Enright, executive vice president at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which promotes biotechnology, including genetically modified products.

That would threaten the dream of a behemoth free trade deal between the world's two largest trading partners that together account for more than half of the world economy. It would lower tariffs and remove other trade barriers for most industries. Some analysts say the deal could boost each economy by more than a half-percentage point annually and significantly lower the cost of goods and services for consumers.

Agricultural issues have long bedeviled attempts to expand free trade across the Atlantic and have led each side to file complaints against the other before the World Trade Organization, an arbitrator in trade disputes. While the U.S. protests EU restrictions, Europeans want the U.S. to reduce agricultural subsidies.

Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, have been a core part of the dispute. Agricultural scientists change the genetic makeup of agricultural products to improve their quality and boost production. In Europe, there is widespread public opposition to GMOs. The EU argues that the risks of altering the genetic pool are unknown. It has strict rules and imposes a heavy burden of proof before such crops can be grown or imported in the EU.

U.S. companies say that genetically modified products have been proved safe by scientific studies and are being excluded based on irrational fears. They accuse Europe of trying to help their own farmers by keeping out American products.

While they have little expectation that the EU would end the restrictions, they say it would be a victory if it clarified what it describes as opaque rules and also set timelines for considering products. Regulators now take what they call a precautionary approach, declining approval of products until they can be more certain of their safety.

But any move to water down the regulations could provoke a backlash in Europe.

"My reading of the mood in Europe around genetically modified crops is that it's extremely negative," said Paul DeGrauwe, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics. "It's going to be very difficult."

Indeed, the top EU trade negotiator, Commissioner Karel De Gucht, seemed to rule out a compromise in remarks this month: "A future deal will not change the existing legislation. Let me repeat: no change."

The U.S. and the EU have similarly intractable disagreements on what the two sides call sanitary issues in meats. U.S. poultry products are restricted in the EU because U.S. companies use chlorine to sanitize the meat. Pork is also restricted because U.S. farmers use a feed additive that makes pigs leaner. The two sides partially resolved disputes over U.S. beef after an agreement that U.S. farmers would restrict hormones in cows intended for the European market.

Some European officials say the agricultural differences should be discussed after a major trade dealis completed. This month, French President Francois Hollande called for excluding sensitive issues, including the sanitary standards, from the talks. In the past, France has been among the most adamant of the European countries about protecting agricultural interests.

Obama, in a talk with his export council this month, suggested this could be a deal-breaker.

"There are certain countries whose agricultural sector is very strong, who tended to block at critical junctures the kinds of broad-based trade agreements that would make it a good deal for us," he said. "If one of the areas where we've got the greatest comparative advantage is cordoned off from an overall trade deal, it's very hard to get something going."

Powerful U.S. agricultural groups could probably block a trade deal from winning approval in Congress. In interviews, representatives of many of these groups said they would oppose a deal that didn't address the regulatory differences.

Robert Thompson, an academic at Johns Hopkins University and a former economist for the Agriculture Department, said that the agricultural issues could easily upend the talks.

"I'm not expecting an agreement to emerge any time soon," he said. "I'm thinking years."

Of course, the rhetoric at the beginning of talks might not preclude compromise in the end. In his talk with the export council, Obama expressed optimism. He noted that austerity measures in response to the debt crisis in the EU have caused European countries to look to a free trade deal as a rare opportunity to boost the economy and improve competitiveness.

"I think they are hungrier for a deal than they have been in the past," he said.

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Melvin reported from Brussels.

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Follow Desmond Butler on Twitter at http://twitter.com/desmondbutler

Storm could dump up to 8 inches of snow in Midwest

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A major weekend storm could give new meaning to March Madness for the thousands of fans in Kansas City for the men's college basketball tournament, blanketing northern areas of the nation's heartland in up to a foot of snow and bringing downpours and possibly, tornadoes, to parts of the South.

Forecasters said Friday that the storm expected to come down from the Rocky Mountains could dump 8 or more inches of snow on Kansas City and could also blanket Indianapolis, Omaha, Neb., and Springfield, Ill. More snow is expected to hit parts of the Northeast early next week, and the cold air may stick around for even longer.

"Baseball season's about to start. Let's hope this is it," said John Hart, a meteorologist with Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

Farther south, tornadoes are possible in Louisiana and Mississippi as the storm system moves east, while strong winds and low humidity levels could lead to forest fires and wildfires in parts of New Mexico and west Texas.

The new system could pose headaches in winter-weary Kansas City over the Palm Sunday weekend because of the thousands of people in town for the college basketball tournament at the Sprint Center. But a spokesman for Kansas City's public works department said it has more than enough resources to handle whatever the new storm brings.

"We are ahead of the game," spokesman Sean Demory said. "We have more than $1 million left in our snow budget, 17,000 tons of salt, and our crews are set for 24-hour activity on arterials and at least 12 hours a day on residential streets."

After two mild winters, this will be the third major snowstorm in about a month for the Midwest. Weather Service meteorologist Chris Bowman in Pleasant Hill, Mo., said this weekend's storm will be similar to one in late February that brought white-out conditions, dumped more than a foot of snow in some areas, and forced the cancellation of several flights in and out of Kansas City International Airport.

"We're going to have a pretty major late winter-early spring snowstorm," Bowman said. "Right now, with the models trickling in, my preliminary thinking is a good swath of 8 to 12 inches of snow will fall along the I-70 corridor."

He said Kansas City will get rain Saturday afternoon, then snow in the early evening that will likely continue until around noon on Sunday.

Only last week, some areas enjoyed record high temperatures in the 80s for a March 15 that seemed to signal the end of a winter that saved its worst for last, with two major snowstorms in late February.

"It's fairly rare to get this powerful of a system this late in the year with the potential to drop that much snowfall," Bowman said.

Weather Service meteorologist Vanessa Pearce in Wichita, Kan., said the storm system will start moving into northwest Kansas on Friday night and march eastward on Saturday. The state's highest predicted snowfall is expected along the Colorado border, where a foot or more could fall.

Goodland is expected to get 12 inches of snow in northwest Kansas, while Wichita was expecting 2 to 5 inches and Topeka was forecast to get about 6 inches, she said.

The storm will start with rain before turning entirely to snow, accompanied by strong winds that could hamper visibility and create some drifting, Pearce said.

"A rain or snow mix could create a little bit of a challenge and hazardous driving potential," she said. "But for the most part, it's going to be just snow once major precipitation gets to some of those areas."

Pearce said Wichita has had 24.5 inches of snow since Jan. 1, more than 10 inches above normal, while Topeka has seen about 7 inches more than normal. In northwest Kansas, the nearly 28 inches so far this winter is about normal, but the additional foot expected on Saturday will push that well above average, she said.

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