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THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — European Union agencies are launching a year-long operation to crack down on fraud targeting the bloc’s multibillion-euro COVID-19 pandemic recovery fund, EU police agency Europol announced Friday.

Operation Sentinel will coordinate the fight against fraud, tax evasion, excise fraud, corruption, embezzlement, misappropriation and money laundering and and boost the exchange of information and intelligence.

It involves the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, EU judicial cooperation agency Eurojust, the European Anti-Fraud Office and 19 member states and comes as nations begin unlocking funds for projects that are intended to put Europe on more solid economic footing while also making it greener and more digitally advanced.

Europol has repeatedly warned about organized crime gangs seeking to cash in on the global pandemic in ways ranging from selling counterfeit COVID-19 tests to hacking computers as employees work from home. Now, as billions of euros are poured into economic recovery plans, the EU is ratcheting up its vigilance.

“Recent experience from the evolution of the criminal landscape during the COVID-19 pandemic suggests these efforts will attract criminal groups active in the European Union and beyond,” Europol said in a statement. “Criminals have shown themselves to be quick in adapting to the pandemic and its impact, and they are using every opportunity to maximize illegal profits.”

Europol’s Executive Director Catherine de Bolle said that criminal threats to pandemic recovery funds are “a direct threat to the financial well-being of the European Union and its people. Operation Sentinel will strengthen our joint response to fraud and protect the reconstruction of our communities.”

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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

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BEIJING (AP) — Shortly ahead of sending a new three-person crew to its space station, China on Friday renewed its commitment to international cooperation in the peaceful use of space.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said sending humans into space was a “common cause of mankind,” and China would “continue to extend the depth and breadth of international cooperation and exchanges” in crewed spaceflight and “make positive contributions to the exploration of the mysteries of the universe.”

China is to send two men and one woman to spend six months aboard the Tianhe core module of its space station, with liftoff from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northwestern China scheduled for shortly after midnight Saturday.

It will be China’s longest crewed space mission, a new milestone for a program that has advanced rapidly in recent years.

China was excluded from the International Space Station largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese program’s secretive nature and close military ties, prompting it to launch two experimental modules before starting on the permanent station.

U.S. law requires congressional approval for contact between the American and Chinese space programs, but China is cooperating with space experts from countries including France, Sweden, Russia and Italy. Chinese officials say they look forward to hosting astronauts from other countries aboard the space station once it becomes fully functional.

The Shenzhou-13 spaceship carrying the three astronauts will be launched by a Long March-2F rocket. Hours later, it is expected to dock with the Tianhe module, beginning the mission that will continue the work of the initial crew, who conducted two spacewalks and deployed a 10-meter (33-foot) mechanical arm before returning from their 90-day stay in mid-September.

The new crew has two veterans of space travel. Pilot Zhai Zhigang, 55, performed China’s first spacewalk. Wang Yaping, 41, and the only woman on the mission, carried out experiments and led a science class in real-time while traveling on one of China’s earlier experimental space stations. The third, Ye Guangfu, 41, has undergone training with the European Space Agency and will be traveling into space for the first time.

The crew’s scheduled activities include up to three spacewalks to install equipment in preparation for expanding the station, assessing living conditions in the module and conducting experiments in space medicine and other fields.

China’s military-run space program plans to send multiple crews to the station over the next two years to make it fully functional. Shenzhou-13 will be the fifth mission, including trips without crews to deliver supplies.

When completed with the addition of two more modules — named Mengtian and Wentian — the station will weigh about 66 tons, a fraction of the size of the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and will weigh around 450 tons when completed. The two additional modules are due to be launched before the end of next year during the stay of the yet-to-be-named Shenzhou-14 crew.

China has launched seven crewed missions with a total of 14 astronauts aboard since 2003, when it became only the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to put a person in space on its own. Two Chinese astronauts have flown twice.

Along with its crewed missions, China has expanded its work on lunar and Mars exploration, including placing a rover on the little-explored far side of the Moon and returning lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.

China this year also landed its Tianwen-1 space probe on Mars, whose accompanying Zhurong rover has been exploring for evidence of life on the red planet.

Other programs call for collecting soil from an asteroid and bring back additional lunar samples. China has also expressed an aspiration to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for such projects. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under development.

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QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Customers of Ecuador’s largest bank continued to experience service disruptions on Friday following a cyberattack on the institution several days earlier.

Long lines formed outside Pichincha bank branches and thousands of customers took their complaints to social media. People reported being unable to access services offered by the bank(s online and mobile app. ATMs worked somewhat regularly and branches remained open.

The bank in a statement Monday acknowledged that it had “identified a cybersecurity incident in our systems that has partially disabled our services.”

Its largest shareholder, Fidel Egas, tweeted that “We are doing the impossible. They want to blame us for something in which we are the victims.”

The government’s Superintendency of Banks sent a delegation to the bank’s headquarters to monitor the problems and solutions.

That bank has about 1.5 million clients and some $1.5 billion in its portfolio.

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Three months after creation of a commission to identify cybersecurity risks in state government, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has yet to appoint any members. A state lawmaker said Friday that vulnerabilities exposed on a state website prove the need for just such a panel of experts.

Democratic state Rep. Ashley Aune, of Kansas City, helped write the section of Senate Bill 49 that created the Missouri Cybersecurity Commission. Parson, a Republican, signed the bill into law in mid-July.

“In light of the events that have transpired this week, I believe the governor cannot wait any longer to appoint members to this commission so it may do the critical work of identifying and rectifying gaps in Missouri’s cyberinfrastructure,” Aune said in a news release.

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist uncovered a security flaw on a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s web application that allowed the public to search teacher certifications and credentials. The newspaper found that the Social Security numbers of perhaps 100,000 teachers and other school officials from around the state were in the HTML source code of the pages involved.

The Post-Dispatch alerted the department on Tuesday and the agency removed the pages. The Post-Dispatch said it gave the state time to fix the problem before publishing a story on Thursday.

But Parson on Thursday announced a criminal investigation, alleging the newspaper journalist was “acting against a state agency to compromise teachers’ personal information in an attempt to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet. We will not let this crime against Missouri teachers go unpunished.”

Aune accused Parson of a “smear campaign” against the Post-Dispatch journalist when it was Parson’s administration that stored the private information and left it unprotected.

“This fiasco perfectly illustrates why Missouri needs to get serious about confronting 21st century cyberthreats,” Aune said.

An email message left Friday with Parson’s spokeswoman was not immediately returned. But during his news conference Thursday, Parson said the state is “working to strengthen our security to prevent this incident from happening again. The state is owning its part, and we are addressing areas in which we need to do better than we have done before.”

Ian Caso, publisher of the Post-Dispatch, said in a statement that the newspaper stands by the story and the reporter, who he said “did everything right.”

Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on computer crime law, said the fact that the Post-Dispatch journalist looked at the HTML source code is not a crime.

“The Supreme Court has recently said the federal computer hacking law calls for a ‘gates up’ versus ‘gates down’ inquiry,” Kerr said. “And when you post information in source code on your website, on pages the public is supposed to access, that gate is ‘up.’”

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AP reporter Summer Ballentine in Columbia, Missouri, contributed to this report.

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Amazon’s audiobook service Audible and phone apps for reading the holy books of Islam and Christianity have disappeared from the Apple store in mainland China, the latest examples of the impact of the country’s tightened rules for internet firms.

Audible said Friday that it removed its app from the Apple store in mainland China last month “due to permit requirements.”

The makers of apps for reading and listening to the Quran and Bible say their apps have also been removed from Apple’s China-based store at the government’s request.

Apple didn’t return requests for comment Friday. A spokesperson for China’s embassy in the U.S. declined to speak about specific app removals but said the Chinese government has “always encouraged and supported the development of the Internet.”

“At the same time, the development of the Internet in China must also comply with Chinese laws and regulations,” said an emailed statement from Liu Pengyu.

China’s government has long sought to control the flow of information online, but is increasingly stepping up its enforcement of the internet sector in other ways, making it hard to determine the causes for a particular app’s removal.

Chinese regulators this year have sought to strengthen data privacy restrictions and limit how much time children can play video games. They are also exerting greater control over the algorithms used by tech firms to personalize and recommend content.

The popular U.S. language-learning app Duolingo disappeared from Apple’s China store over the summer, as have many video game apps. What appears to link Audible with the religious apps is that all were recently notified of permit requirements for published content.

Pakistan Data Management Services, which makes the Quran Majeed app, said it is awaiting more information from China’s internet authority about how it can be restored. The app has nearly 1 million users in China and about 40 million worldwide, said the Karachi-based company.

Those who had already downloaded the app can still use it, said Hasan Shafiq Ahmed, the company’s head of growth and relationships.

“We are looking to figure out what documentation is needed to get approval from Chinese authorities so the app can be restored,” he said in an email.

The maker of a Bible app said it removed it from the Apple store in China after learning from Apple’s App Store review process that it needed special permission to distribute an app with “book or magazine content.” Olive Tree Bible Software, based in Spokane, Washington, said it’s now reviewing the requirements to obtain the necessary permit “with the hope that we can restore our app to China’s App Store and continue to distribute the Bible worldwide.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned Apple’s actions, saying the company was enabling China’s religious persecution of Muslims and others.

“This decision must be reversed,” said a statement from CAIR’s national deputy director, Edward Ahmed Mitchell. “If American corporations don’t grow a spine and stand up to China right now, they risk spending the next century subservient to the whims of a fascist superpower.”

The removals were first detected this week by watchdog website AppleCensorship, which monitors Apple’s app store to detect when apps have been blocked, especially in China and other countries with authoritarian governments.

This week, Microsoft said that it would shut down its main LinkedIn service in China later this year, citing a “significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.”

Unlike LinkedIn, which has been offering a specialized Chinese service since 2014, Amazon-owned Audible said it does not have a dedicated service for customers in China.

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