ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Country holds day of mourning after collapse of clothing factory in Dhaka that has killed at least 160 people. Rescuers in Bangladesh have continued to hunt for survivors in a collapsed building as the death toll rose to 161 and criticism mounted of foreign firms that source cheap clothes from the country. More than 1,000 people were injured when the site housing five garment factories on the outskirts of Dhaka imploded on Wednesday, allegedly after managers ignored workers' warnings that the building had become unstable. Flags flew at half-mast on Thursday as the shell-shocked country declared a day of mourning for the victims of the nation's worst factory disaster, which highlighted anew safety concerns in Bangladesh's vital garment industry. Army Brigadier General Mohammed Siddiqul Alam Shikder said many people are still trapped in the building, which housed a number of garment factories employing hundreds of people. Workers had warned a day earlier that large cracks...

China leads the world in computer espionage, according to an annual report that monitors the state of global cyber threats. Ninety-six percent of cyber espionage cases targeting intellectual property and business trade secrets were attributed to “threat actors in China,” while the remaining four percent were unknown, according to the “ 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report ," which is issued by Verizon, a large U.S. telecom firm. “This may mean that other threat groups perform their activities with greater stealth and subterfuge,” read the report. “But it could also mean that China is, in fact, the most active source of national and industrial espionage in the world today.” While the numbers certainly seem clear, some security experts caution not to draw too many conclusions from the report. “Verizon doesn't explain how they determine that an event is state-sponsored, nor how they distinguish between legitimate attacks originating from China and those which use compromis...

BEIJING (AFP) - Chinese authorities accused 'terrorists' in China's far west of setting a trap to kill policemen, state media said Thursday, after a US-based rights group dismissed terrorism claims. Twenty-one people were killed in violence in west China's Xinjiang region on Tuesday, local government officials said, adding that six members of the ethnic Uighur minority shot dead in the clashes were suspected of terrorist plotting. "The terrorists may have set a trap," the state-run Global Times daily quoted local officials as saying, adding that knife-wielding men ambushed police after luring them to a house in Barchuk county, in the region's west. Fifteen police and 'social workers' were killed in the incident, including 10 from the Uighur minority, China's Foreign Ministry said. Uighurs are mostly Muslim and see Xinjiang as their homeland. Xinjiang, a region about twice the size of Turkey, is home to around nine million ethnic Uighurs, many o...

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Gunmen took control of the Iraqi town of Sulaiman Bek on Wednesday after fighting with security forces, part of a bloody two days of violence that killed 128 people and wounded 269, officials said. Most of the casualties -- 102 dead and 195 wounded -- came from clashes and attacks involving security forces, protesters and their supporters, which have sent tensions in Iraq soaring. The violence, which began with clashes on Tuesday at a protest site in northern Iraq after security forces moved in, is the deadliest so far linked to demonstrations that erupted in Sunni Muslim areas of the Shiite-majority country more than four months ago. The Sunni protesters have called for the resignation of Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and railed against the alleged targeting of their community by the authorities. On Wednesday, five soldiers and seven gunmen were killed and 63 people, including 20 soldiers, wounded in fighting in the Sulaiman Bek area in Salaheddin province, nort...