Reuters World News - US Gaza veto, Lockbit hack and Chinese fast fashion

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

The US has again vetoed a draft UN Security Council resolution for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The Lockbit cybercrime gang is hacked by a rare international law enforcement operation. Chinese fast fashion giants Shein and Temu are snapping up all the space on cargo planes. Plus, Nikki Haley says she’s staying in the race after Saturday’s primary and Pakistan may soon have a government. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, the U.S. again vetoes a UN Security Council resolution on Gaza. Authorities hack one of the world's most notorious ransomware gangs. And Chinese fast fashion reigns supreme in the battle over air cargo space. It's Wednesday, February 21st. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. Every weekday. I'm Kim Vinal in London. And I'm Christopher Waljasper in Chicago.

The U.S. has again vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. It's the third U.S. veto of a draft resolution since October 7th. Michelle Nichols was watching the vote in the UN's New York headquarters. So the main reason that the U.S. gave for vetoing the resolution on Tuesday was that it demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, but it did not connect it to the release of hostages. Whereas the US draft resolution connects the two. It asks the Security Council to support a temporary ceasefire in Gaza as soon as is practicable based on the formula of all hostages being released. So they want to link the two. Now that seems like such a small difference. Why does the US find that?

distinction so meaningful? So the US argues that this resolution had it been adopted could have jeopardized the talks between the US, Egypt, Israel and Qatar, which are aiming to try and broker a pause in the war and the release of the hostages. The US ambassador told the Security Council today that demanding an immediate unconditional ceasefire without an agreement requiring Hamas to release the hostages would not bring about a durable peace. She said that instead it could extend the fighting between Hamas and Israel. Is there any indication the U.S. is moving its position in regards to a U.N. resolution?

So in the U.S. draft that they have put forward, they are using for the first time the phrase temporary ceasefire. Until now, they've sort of been a bit averse to using the word ceasefire in any U.N. action. They preferred to say things like extended pauses in fight. But President Joe Biden used the phrase temporary ceasefire last week. So this draft resolution echoes that language. We don't anoint kings in this country. We have elections.

Republican candidate Nikki Haley has no intention of dropping out after Saturday's primary in her home state of South Carolina. In a speech on Tuesday, Haley instead promising to press ahead against frontrunner Donald Trump. He's gotten more of. unstable and unhinged. Meanwhile, a group of 18 Republican lawmakers is urging President Biden to deactivate his campaign's TikTok account, citing national security concerns. The Biden campaign joined TikTok earlier this month as a part of an effort to court younger voters. Two major political parties in Pakistan say they've agreed to form a coalition government, keeping the party of Imran Khan out of power. The agreement between the Pakistan People's Party and the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz

ends days of uncertainty after elections produced a hung parliament. A father of a young girl worried she won't get the surgery she needs at a sole hospital. Hospitals are canceling procedures after thousands of trainee doctors joined a protest walkout over government plans to admit more students to med. medical school. It's time now for markets with Carmel Krimmins and Carmel. Everyone is on 10 to hooks waiting for Nvidia's quarterly results. That's right, Kim, and may I just say welcome back to the Northern Hemisphere. Thank you, thank you, glad to be back. So you're right, those results from Nvidia will be the most influential in a long while. The chipmaker has replaced

Tesla as Wall Street's most traded stock by value. It's the poster child of the AI boom and it's expected to report a more than threefold surge in revenues. But that may actually disappoint some investors. Why would it disappoint them? So they've got used to Nvidia beating expectations and its stock has already gained nearly 50% this year. So if Nvidia warns that US curbs on selling its chips to China are hurting its business,

or that it's not able to sort out supply shortages, then that could see this rally falter. The LockBit ransomware gang is one of the world's most notorious group of cybercriminals. It's targeted more than 2,000 victims, demanding hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the Department of Justice. Now, a joint operation between Britain's national crime agency and the FBI has struck at its heart, taking control of the very websites used by LockBit to bring it down. James Pearson is our European cybersecurity correspondent in London.

So, James, how did these agencies hack the hackers? They're being quite coy about how exactly they got into LockBit's systems, but it's very clear that they got in there and they've done something quite extraordinary, which is to take over LockBits' dark web leak site where it posts details and data about its victims that it holds to ransom. And they've completely taken it over and started posting data about the group itself, which is a kind of hack the hacker's move we haven't really seen before. So tell me about that. They're not just filing charges. They're not just arresting people, they're actually sort of publicly outing this group.

What's the thought process there? I think they're trying to completely destroy the credibility of this group. LockBitt has been a pretty massive operator in the ransomware space. Now, what's unusual here is that Britain's national crime agency alongside the FBI, Europol, and a coalition of about 10 other international police agencies have seized control of that website and actually turned it on the hackers themselves. They're publishing data from within the hacker's systems that shows that they have control of it.

And in the next couple of days, we're expecting them to perhaps start revealing some identities of the people behind it. So it's quite an unprecedented move. They're really launching more like a sci-op, taking it back to the hackers. It's a combination, I think, of perhaps some covert operations and then this kind of more overt kind of psychological play back against them. How's Lockbitt responding? You know, this world, this sort of underbelly of cybercrime is full of lots of egos, and

it's quite hard to take what some of these people say. literally, or at least we should take what they say with a bit of caution. However, Loppet has said that the FBI and the NCA hackers, I should say, use an exploit in the PhP programming language to compromise their servers. And they're also saying that the servers which didn't use PHP have been unaffected. However, when I put that to the NCA, they make clear that the core part of their network has been completely seized. So does this operation mean that we might see fewer instances of these ransomware

attacks? So according to law enforcement, Lockbert held about a 25% market share of these kinds of ransomware operations. So logically, we should potentially see a downturn in some ransomware operations, at least in the short run, although Lopit itself operated on an affiliate model. And there's nothing to stop those affiliates from working with a new ransomware gang once one appears. The rapid rise of Chinese fast fashion companies like Shien and Timo is causing big problems for other industries. Why? They're gobbling up all this spare space on cargo planes. Casey Hall is a consumer retail reporter in Shanghai. Casey, put this into context for us. How much space are we talking about?

The numbers are pretty staggering, to be honest with you. I mean, the estimates that we have is that Timu ships around 4,000 tons a day. Sheehan ships about 5,000 tons and Alibaba ships around 1,000 tons. TikTok shop, it already ships 800 tons. So that equates to around 108 B-T triple-7 freighters a day. So the difference with these e-commerce platforms is that they have since the beginning relied quite heavily on air freight. The design, actually, of these cross-border platforms is built on people being able to order directly on a website and have their package shipped from China directly to them, whether they're in the US or Europe or wherever. One of the reasons the companies does this is so that they don't have to import stuff

in bulk into Western markets. And then they don't have to pay a lot of the same import and customs duties that they would if they imported a whole bunch of stuff. How is this affecting other industries? Well, it makes things very difficult for other sectors that are seeking space on cargo planes right now. And it's coming at a time where shipping capacity has really been squeezed by attacks in the Red Sea, attacks on ships by Huthi rebels.

So that means that a lot of companies have been looking to try and switch to air freight as a potential stopgap to try and get some urgent good to Europe. Those companies are finding now that it's really, really difficult to get any space because it's been booked up by these cross-border e-commerce platforms. That's it for today's episode of Reuters World News. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. To make sure you know what's going on in the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.