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1 C2BRNE DIARY – April 2019 www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com 2 C2BRNE DIARY – April 2019 C2BRNE DIARY– 2019© April 2019 Website: www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com Editor-in-Chief BrigGEN (ret) Ioannis Galatas MD, MA, MC (Army) PhD cand Consultant in Allergy & Clinical Immunology Medical/Hospital CBRNE Planner & Instructor Senior Asymmetric Threats Analyst Manager, CBRN Knowledge Center @ International CBRNE Institute (BE) Athens, Greece Contact e-mail: [email protected] Editorial Team ⚫ Bellanca Giada, MD, MSc (Italy) ⚫ Hopmeier Michael, BSc/MSc MechEngin (USA) ⚫ Kiourktsoglou George, BSc, Dipl, MSc, MBA, PhD (cand) (UK) ⚫ Photiou Steve, MD, MSc EmDisaster (Italy) ⚫ Tarlow Peter, PhD Sociol (USA) Advertise with us! CBRNE-Terrorism Newsletter is published on-line monthly and distributed free of charge. ⚫ Sponsors of the International CBRNE Institute can advertise for free. ⚫ CBRNE related companies can advertise for free. PUBLISHER Mendor Editions S.A. 3 Selinountos Street 14231 Nea Ionia Athens, Greece Tel: +30 210 2723094/-5 Fax: +30 210 2723698 Contact e-mail: Valia Kalantzi [email protected] DISCLAIMER: The CBRNE-Terrorism Newsletter® is a free online publication for the fellow civilian/military First Responders worldwide. The Newsletter is a collection of papers/articles related to the stated thematology. Relevant sources/authors are included and all info provided herein is from open Internet sources. Opinions and comments from the Editor, the Editorial group or the authors publishing in the Newsletter do not necessarily represent those of the Publisher or the International CBRNE Institute. www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com 3 C2BRNE DIARY – April 2019 C2BRNE DIARY is: 1. Read by First Responders in more than 80 countries around the globe; 2. Distributed free to more than 700 institutions, organizations, state agencies, think tanks, defense companies, institutions and universities. www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com 4 C2BRNE DIARY – April 2019 www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com 5 C2BRNE DIARY – April 2019 Editorial Brig Gen (ret’d) Ioannis Galatas, MD, MA, MC Editor-in-Chief C2BRNE Diary Dear Colleagues, April will be remembered for two incidents – the Notre Dame mega fire in Paris and the terrorism barrage in Sri Lanka that led to a bloodshed, perhaps the biggest after 9/11. Churches and luxury hotels were attacked in a Mumbai style only this time not in a single city but in different locations within the country. These two unfortunate incidents shade anything else happened during the fourth month of 2019: Uncertainty for the post-ISIS era. Saudi Arabia completed the building of its first nuclear power plant (according to Bloomberg). Big emphasis on hacking against the medical sector – I worry about this a lot; hospitals are the last frontiers before death: no functioning hospitals equals fewer chances to survive. Two unique drone proposals – one from Parrot with a thermal camera included in the price and one from Fotokite producing a kite-type drone for first responders. Again the big question: what will happen if the sea rises a few meters? Do we have a Plan B or is it too exotic to deal with now? Who decides when something is a terrorist incident? That is an easy one! The media of course! UN calls for repatriation of ISIS wives! Please do not forget the benefits and a studio with a view! In progress: BuChE as an anti-nerve agent solution – eagerly waiting. Late discovery (by me): Skin cream protects against vesicants! Include it in your CBRN field pack! Cyanide scare in Japanese businesses – in powder form, towards the 2020 Olympic Games… Measles on the rise almost worldwide; and so is the anti-vaccination movement. One more time we conclude that the human brain is capable of excellence and immense stupidity. The famous BioWatch is succeeded by the new BioDetection-21. Doomed to fail is another opportunity to spend money on a project that cannot overcome childhood diseases, A strange story about the mold Candida auris that is slowly spreading around the globe. Private company and academia decided to collaborate to synthesize a vaccine against plague. Keep on the good work. The Editor is very proud to participate in a training course to be held at the Defense CBRN Center in Vught, The Netherlands. It is a great training environment providing realistic CBRN training along with theoretical training and excellent hospitality services. More in the May issue along with photos! An ambitious project is about to begin in Qatar. The Qatar CBRN Academy is step-by-step approach its final stage and soon will be ready to provide courses to the civilian sector on all aspects related to CBRN threats and countermeasures. Academy’s website will also be ready by May – its URL will be announced in May’s issue as well. The core of training will be very simple but equally important: survival of first responders in order to be able to save contaminated victims. The Editor is very proud to take part in this effort and transfuse with expertise, experience and specialized knowledge to those in the first line of duty! The Editor-in-Chief www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com 6 C2BRNE DIARY – April 2019 Notre-Dame, Ravaged by Fire, Faces a New Threat: Rain Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/world/europe/notre-dame-fire-protect.html Apr 23 — With rain expected in Paris later this week, workers at Notre-Dame cathedral on Tuesday scrambled to protect the building’s interior, scaling the walls with ropes to put in place giant tarpaulin coverings, the cathedral’s chief architect said. A catastrophic fire last week destroyed the cathedral’s attic and the lead roof, creating gaping holes in the immense vaulted ceiling, and leaving the building’s interior perilously exposed. On Tuesday, a team of workers specialized in using ropes at great heights — “mountaineers” as they are called in French — labored to install the tarps. “We are working as fast as we can,” said the architect, Philippe Villeneuve, adding that the work was expected to be finished by Wednesday. The mountaineers are “used to working in perilous conditions,” he added. “They know this kind of work.” Before putting up the tarp, the workers had to install prefabricated metal beams on which to suspend it. The job is dangerous not just because of the cathedral’s height, but also because the fire left the building unstable: No one can be certain which parts might crumble as a result of the extreme heat to which it was subjected. Investigators from the Paris prosecutor’s office are still trying to determine the cause of the fire. After interviewing dozens of workers, witnesses, security guards and construction company officials, investigators think it may have been caused by a short circuit linked to the restoration work that was underway when the fire broke out, perhaps connected to the wiring of the elevators that had been installed in the scaffolding, according to French news media reports www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com 7 C2BRNE DIARY – April 2019 All ISIS Has Left Is Money. Lots of It! Source: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2019/03/all-isis-has-left-money-lots-it/155784/ Mar 25—If you’re looking to transfer money funds. Thus, cash can travel across borders here, there’s a chance you will be directed to without any inquiry into who is sending or Abu Shawkat. He works out of a small office in receiving it, or its purpose. a working-class suburb of the Lebanese capital, In the case of neighboring Syria, U.S.- and but won’t give you its exact location. Instead, British-funded projects have sent millions of he’ll direct you to a nearby alleyway, and dollars into the country using whether he shows up depends on whether he the hawala system, humanitarian organizations likes the look of you. use it to pay staff, and Syrians working abroad Abu Shawkat—not his real name—is part of depend on it to get money to the hawala system, which is often used to impoverished relatives. transfer cash between places where the banking But Abu Shawkat runs the hawala equivalent of system has broken down or is too expensive for a mom-and-pop store: One of the giants of the some to access. If he agrees to do business, industry, which analysts believe owns a network you’ll set a password and he will take your cash, of money-services businesses and has moved then provide you with the contact information of millions of dollars a week, is the a hawala broker in the city where your money is Islamic State. headed. Anyone who offers that specific Even as U.S.-backed forces wrest password to that particular broker will get the back the Islamic State’s last strip of www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com 8 C2BRNE DIARY – April 2019 territory in Syria, the United States and its allies individual fields, the Treasury official added that are nowhere close to bringing down the terrorist a key source of the group’s income is the organization’s economic empire. The group extortion of oil-supply lines across the region. remains a financial powerhouse: It still has The Islamic State is also still sitting on the access to hundreds of millions of dollars, massive windfall that it built up during the height according to experts’ estimates, and can rely on of its power. “What we know is that they a battle-tested playbook to keep money flowing accumulated large amounts of cash and other into its coffers. That continued wealth has real assets,” said Howard Shatz, a senior economist risks, threatening to help it retain the allegiance at the Rand Corporation and co-author of of a committed core of loyalists and wreak havoc several studies on the Islamic State’s finances.