Thousands of Slovaks rallied to mark the first anniversary of the killing of an investigative reporter and his fiancee on Thursday and to protest what they see as a lack of government action against the sleaze he wrote about.

Crowds gathered in the capital and in dozens of towns at rallies organized by “For a Decent Slovakia” — a group of students and NGOs, who said in a statement that they demanded a proper investigation of the murders and a trustworthy government.

“If we want to move forward, we have to know the names of those who ordered this monstrous murder,” organizers said. There were no official turnout estimates but the crowds were smaller than last year’s string of protests that ousted then prime minister Robert Fico after a decade in power and led to a government shakeup.

The changes disappointed many, however, because no snap elections were held and the same three-party coalition has stayed in power. The next vote is due in 2020.

Fico remains chairman of the ruling Smer party and is seen as driving policy behind the scenes, often launching attacks against the media. “You are the biggest criminals, you have caused this country the biggest damage,” Fico told journalists days before the anniversary.

Journalist Jan Kuciak, 27, was shot along with his fiancee in what prosecutors say was a contract killing.

The last article he worked on looked at Italian businessmen in Slovakia with suspected mafia links. He reported that one of the businessman, who has since been extradited to Italy on drug smuggling charges, had business connections with two Slovaks who later worked in Fico’s office.

Fico has denied any wrongdoing and has also blamed the Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist George Soros for his fall.

Police arrested four people in September, including a woman identified only by her initials AZ, who was charged with ordering the murder. Media have identified her as Alena Zsuzsova. She has denied any wrongdoing.

She was never a subject of any of Kuciak’s reporting but Slovak media have reported that she had business ties to the politically connected businessman Marian Kocner, currently held in custody on charges of forgery.

Months before his murder, Kuciak told the police that Kocner had threatened to start collecting information on him and his family. The police did not press any charges.

Kocner has denied any links to the murder.

More than 400 journalists have signed an open letter, pledging to finish Kuciak’s work and demanding government transparency.

“We learnt there are people in the police, prosecutor’s office and government who do not want to protect journalists, instead protecting those who are the subjects of our stories,” it said.

Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini on Thursday urged Slovaks to come together on the anniversary. “Investigation of the murders is one of this government’s priorities. I wish that the murders did not divide our society anymore.”
…

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Thursday confirmed that its diplomats have not been granted access to detained U.S. national Michael Calvey a week after the founder of the Baring Vostok investment fund group was detained in the Russian capital.

Just hours before the embassy announcement, Russian state prosecutors formally indicted the investor.

The U.S. Embassy said in a statement it had asked multiple times to visit Calvey but had not received permission, which it said flouted consular rules between the two countries.

“We insist on access now,” the statement said.

On Wednesday, the head of a U.S.-Russian trade organization told VOA that Calvey, who had already been held in a Moscow pre-trial detention center for six days, had been meeting with his lawyers but had not yet had consular access.

“I’ve spoken to [Calvey’s] colleagues, but not him, since the detention,” U.S. national Alexis O. Rodzianko, president of the Moscow-based American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, told VOA on Tuesday.

Rodzianko, who had just left discussions about Calvey’s detention with various Russian, U.S., and European members of Moscow’s financial community, said, “I understand [Calvey] has met with his lawyers. I understand that he has not yet had consular contact — that’s as of lunchtime today.”

According to terms of the Vienna Convention, consular access must be provided within a 72-hour window from the time of arrest, meaning that a member of the U.S. government should have visited Calvey by now.

On Wednesday, a State Department spokesman declined to confirm Rodzianko’s assertion, citing privacy concerns, but seemed to indicate that the U.S. Embassy was still seeking access to the businessman.

“We are aware that a U.S. citizen was arrested on Feb. 14, 2019, in Russia,” said the spokesperson, who spoke on condition of not being identified. “The U.S. Embassy in Moscow is aware of the case and will be following it closely, and will provide all appropriate consular assistance. We have no higher priority than the protection of U.S. citizens abroad.”

Calvey is the second American to face prosecution in Russia since late December, when Paul Whelan, a former Marine, was jailed on accusations of spying. Russia announced Whelan’s detention on Dec. 31, some 24 hours after his arrest.

Whelan’s family sharply criticized Russia’s handling of the announcement, noting that security officials divulged his arrest hours into the start of New Year’s Eve, which in Russia marks the start of a weeklong national holiday. Delaying the announcement, they said, drastically decreased Whelan’s chances of securing access to legal and consular resources within the mandated 72-hour window.

The U.S. ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman Jr., was finally permitted to meet with Whelan six days after the arrest.

Fraud indictment

Calvey has been charged with fraud stemming from a protracted dispute with shareholders of Vostochny Bank, of which Baring Vostok owns 52.5 percent. He was detained along with five others, including three Baring Vostok employees, according to the Russian state news agency, RIA Novosty.

A coalition of lobby groups representing European businesses active in Russia has issued a joint statement expressing concerns about the arrest of Calvey and his colleagues.

“The detention of Baring Vostok’s top management has sent shock waves through the country’s business community and can potentially seriously damage the investment climate and attractiveness of Russia for foreign direct investments,” it said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to make a passing reference to Calvey’s case during his annual State of the Nation address to the federal assembly on Wednesday.

“Good faith business shouldn’t feel threatened by the law or constantly feel the risk of criminal or even administrative punishment,” Putin said.

If convicted, Calvey faces up to 10 years in a Moscow prison.

 
…

Protesters backing Catalonia’s secession from Spain clashed with police and blocked major roads and train tracks across the northeastern region on Thursday during a strike called to protest the trial of a dozen separatist leaders.

Regional police say they made four arrests when they met resistance trying to clear groups of protesters who had stopped traffic. The regional emergency service said that 22 people had been treated for minor injuries.

Twelve officers were also injured in the clashes, according to police. Protesters threw rocks at police lines and burned tires on some highways.

Regional transportation authorities said the disruptions affected main thoroughfares in Barcelona and half a dozen major highways and railway tracks elsewhere in Catalonia.

The general strike was organized by small unions of pro-independence workers and students. On paper, they were demanding improved social policies, including a 35-hour work week and a higher minimum wage, but the protesters carried pro-secession flags and chanted slogans for the release of the 12 separatists currently on trial in the Madrid-based Supreme Court.

The main unions in Catalonia did not back the strike, which appeared to have a limited impact on businesses.

In Barcelona, students in favor of secession held a mid-day march attended by 13,000 people according to the city’s urban police. The pro-secession grassroots group ANC — whose protest slogan is “self-determination is not a crime” — was planning a separate march later Thursday.

The Spanish government says regions cannot independently secede, according to the Constitution.

The trial into the roles played by the 12 separatists in Catalonia’s failed 2017 secession attempt is in its second week. On Thursday, former Catalan government member Santi Vila, ANC’s ex-president Jordi Sanchez and fellow activist Jordi Cuixart were scheduled to testify at the court. The trial is expected to last at least three months.

Election results and polls indicate that Catalonia’s 7.5 million residents are divided down the middle over the secession issue.

 
…

Pope Francis’s groundbreaking sex abuse summit coincides with an explosive movie and separate book released in France this week — one on a pedophilia scandal roiling the French church; the other on homosexuality in the priesthood.

Francois Ozon’s “Grace à Dieu” — or “By the Grace of God” — got the go-ahead just hours before its release on Wednesday, despite efforts to block it in court. The movie is based on a real scandal still rocking the French Catholic church. It involves priest Bernard Preynat, accused of molesting dozens of boys during the 1980s and ‘90s.

The archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, is currently on trial on charges of failing to act against the accusations, which he denies. Preynat has confessed to molesting boy scouts, and is also due to go on trial later this year.

The movie has already grabbed a top award at Berlin’s international film festival. Its release here comes at a crucial moment for the Vatican, where senior bishops are meeting for a four-day summit on sexual abuse in the church.

Here in France, Ozon’s movie is drawing praise, including from members of the Catholic hierarchy, who were invited to its preview.

Vincent Neymon, spokesman for the French Bishops’ Conference, told French TV the movie was excellent in terms of portraying the victims, although less so when it came to clerics. He called it “a building block in the fight against pedophilia.”

Ozon’s depiction is not black and white — a reality he acknowledged in an interview on French radio. When he met the real-life protagonists, he said, he realized everyone was a victim to a certain extent. “Only now, is the church coming to terms with the seriousness of sexual abuse,” he said.

Francois Devaux, head of victims’ group La Parole Libérée and who is portrayed in the movie, told French TV he hopes the church finally takes action on a scandal that has tainted the institution for centuries.

Meanwhile, a controversial book on homosexuality in the church hit stores on Thursday. “In the Closet of the Vatican” is reportedly based on hundreds of interviews, and exposes a gay sub-culture and duplicity allegedly rife in the Catholic hierarchy.

In interviews, gay author Frederic Martel describes a so-called silent majority in the church, where he claims members are protecting their sexual status by pretending to be homophobic. The book has drawn criticism, however, and some believe it may undermine efforts to gain acceptance of homosexuality within the church.

 
…

The French government will adopt an international organization’s definition of anti-Semitism and propose a law to reduce hate speech from being circulated online, French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday.

Macron, speaking at the annual dinner of a Jewish organization, said France and other parts of Europe have seen in recent years “a resurgence of anti-Semitism that is probably unprecedented since World War II.”

Macron said applying the working definition of anti-Semitism drawn up by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance would help guide police forces, magistrates and teachers in their daily work.

Since the intergovernmental organization approved the wording in 2016, some critics of Israel have said it could be used suppress Palestinian rights activists. The definition states anti-Semitism can take the form of “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

Macron said he thinks that view is correct.

“Anti-Zionism is one of the modern forms of anti-Semitism,” the French leader said in Paris at the dinner of Jewish umbrella organization CRIF. “Behind the negation of Israel’s existence, what is hiding is the hatred of Jews.”

Macron mentioned anti-Semitism based on “radical Islamism” as a rampant ideology in France’s multi-ethnic, poor neighborhoods.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his appreciation at France’s adoption of the international definition of anti-Semitism, in a phone call with the French leader ahead of the speech, Netanyahu’s office said.

Social media

Macron also said his party would introduce legislation in parliament in May to force social media to withdraw hate speech posted online and use all available means to identify the authors “as quickly as possible.”

He especially denounced Twitter as waiting days, sometimes weeks, to remove hate content and to help authorities so a judicial investigation can be led. At the same time, he praised Facebook’s decision last year to allow the presence of French regulators inside the company to help improving practices combating online hate speech.

Anti-Semitism

Macron’s speech came a day after thousands of people attended rallies across France to decry an uptick in anti-Semitic acts in recent months. On Tuesday morning, about 80 gravestones spray-painted with swastikas were discovered in a cemetery in a small village of eastern France.

Macron observed a moment of silence Tuesday with parliament leaders at the Holocaust museum in Paris.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said Wednesday that a man has been arrested over a torrent of hate speech directed at Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut during a Saturday march by yellow vest protesters. The insults included words like “Zionist!” and “Go back to Tel Aviv!” and “We are France!”

The man was taken into custody Tuesday evening after a police inquiry was opened into a suspected public insult based on origin, ethnicity, nation, race or religion.

The government last week reported a rise in incidents of anti-Semitism last year: 541 registered incidents, up 74 percent from the 311 registered in 2017.

In other incidents this month, swastika graffiti was found on street portraits of Simone Veil, a survivor of Nazi death camps and a European Parliament president who died in 2017, the word “Juden” was painted on the window of a bagel restaurant in Paris and two trees planted at a memorial honoring a young Jewish man tortured to death in 2006 were vandalized.

“That’s our failure,” Macron said. “The time has come to act.”
…

In the study of his home outside Washington, former priest Tom Doyle searched a shelf packed with books to find the thick report that led him to walk away from the priesthood and become an advocate for victims of sexual abuse by clergymen.

The 1985 report was one of the first exposes in a sexual abuse scandal that has plagued the Catholic Church. Pope Francis has called senior bishops to meet for four days starting Thursday to discuss how to tackle the worsening crisis.

Doyle, who lost his job soon after the report was made public and eventually decided to leave the priesthood, is deeply skeptical that anything of substance will come of this week’s meeting.

“They’re going to pray and they’re going to meditate. But it’s totally useless,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to have something like this in 2019. These men should know right out of the gate that if you have a priest who’s raping children, you don’t allow them to continue.”

The meeting comes after a year in which fresh revelations about abuse of children and cover-up has shaken the church globally and tested the pope’s authority. Predatory priests were often moved from parish to parish rather than expelled or criminally prosecuted as bishops covered up the abuse.

Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, 67, a professor at Catholic University, said that U.S. bishops have already taken decisive steps to keep children from being abused. In 2002, after decades of abuse in the Boston area became public, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) passed a charter including requirements to report allegations of abuse of minors to police and to remove abusive priests or deacons after a single offense.

“The bishops of the United States are following zero tolerance,” said Rossetti, who helped draft the charter. “If you molested a minor at any time in your life, you’re not going to be a priest in this country. Period.”

Rossetti said the pope and the bishops should use the Vatican meeting to push for similar reforms in other countries where the problem of abuse is still coming to light.

But the U.S. policy “still left the bishops off the hook,” said David Lorenz, a director at Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. He called the pope’s summit “a publicity stunt.”

Recalling how he was abused at age 16 by a priest at an all-boys high school in Kentucky, Lorenz said the church and bishops with secrets of their own will continue to cover up abuse.

“It’s the secrecy. It’s the silence. It’s because I was silent for so long,” Lorenz, now 60, said, welling up. “They rely on that.”
…

The head organizer of the Vatican’s sex abuse summit has met with an Irish activist who is seeking to draw attention to another issue the Vatican has long sought to keep quiet: the plight of children of priests. 

Archbishop Charles Scicluna, for years the Vatican’s sex crimes investigator, met Tuesday with Vincent Doyle, the child of a priest. Through his advocacy and self-help group Coping International, Doyle has sought to compel Catholic leaders to acknowledge the issue of priests’ children and the psychological and emotional impact the church’s enforced secrecy has on them and their mothers. 

In a statement, Scicluna said the issue needed to be addressed and the children of priests acknowledged.  

“Each case should be tackled and handled on its own merits,” said the statement Scicluna gave Doyle, who shared it Wednesday with The Associated Press. “The interest of the child should be paramount.”  

Staying in priesthood

Notably, the statement did not say the priest should leave the priesthood to take care of his child as a layman — the common default response by church superiors. 

This week the Vatican acknowledged publicly to The New York Times that it has internal guidelines on how to handle such cases. 

Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti confirmed that the guidelines’ fundamental principle is looking out for the best interests of the child. As such, he said, the guidelines “ordinarily ask for the priest to present his request to be dispensed from the obligations of the clerical state, and as a lay person, assume his responsibilities as a father, dedicating himself exclusively to his child.” 

Doyle is pressing for that default position to change, arguing that it often is not in the best interests of the child for his father to be fired. 

Doyle also notes that these children are born under a wide range of circumstances, with some the result of sexual abuse by priests against girls and women. 

In an interview Wednesday, Doyle said he met this week with the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, and walked into the Congregation for Clergy and secured a meeting with the department undersecretary, Monsignor Andrea Ripa. 

Doyle said all agreed on the need for case-by-case approach to the issue of priest’s children. The Irish Catholic Church hierarchy has taken the lead on addressing the issue with a child-focused set of guidelines published in 2017. 

“This is important, as it eliminates the default expectations that he [the priest] has to leave,” Doyle said. He said he was heartened by all his meetings and that the Catholic officials were compassionate and understood the pain he conveyed to them. 

Newspaper series

Doyle has been campaigning to help eliminate the stigma children of priests often face, and educate the church about the problems they can suffer as a result of the secrecy imposed on them and the absentee fathers they may never know. Those problems, which can include depression, anxiety and other mental health issues, were the subject of a 2017 series in The Boston Globe. 

There are no figures about the number of children fathered by Catholic priests. But there are about 450,000 Catholic priests in the world and the Catholic Church forbids artificial contraception and abortion. While eastern rite Catholic priests can be married before ordination, Roman Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy. 

Scicluna is one of four key organizers of Pope Francis’ clergy sex abuse summit, which opens Thursday but is not expected to address the issue of priests’ children. 
…

British Prime Minister Theresa May makes another trip to Brussels on Wednesday, hoping European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker may prove more yielding than of late to salvage her Brexit deal.

With Britain set to jolt out of the world’s biggest trading bloc in 37 days unless May can either persuade the British parliament or the European Union to budge, officials were cautious on the chances of a breakthrough.

The key sticking point is the so-called backstop, an insurance policy to prevent the return of extensive checks on the sensitive border between EU member Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland.

May agreed on the protocol with EU leaders in November but then saw it roundly rejected last month by U.K. lawmakers who said the government’s legal advice that it could tie Britain to EU rules indefinitely made the backstop unacceptable.

She has promised parliament to rework the treaty to try to put a time limit on the protocol or give Britain some other way of getting out of an arrangement which her critics say would leave the country “trapped” by the EU.

A spokesman for May called the Brussels trip “significant” as part of a process of engagement to try to agree on the changes her government says parliament needs to pass the deal.

But an aide for Juncker quoted the Commission president as saying on Tuesday evening: “I have great respect for Theresa May for her courage and her assertiveness. We will have friendly talk tomorrow but I don’t expect a breakthrough.”

EU sources aired frustration with Britain’s stance on Brexit, saying Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay brought no new proposals to the table when he was last in Brussels on Monday for talks with the bloc’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier.

On Tuesday, the EU responded to U.K. demands again: “The EU 27 will not reopen the withdrawal agreement; we cannot accept a time limit to the backstop or a unilateral exit clause,” said Margaritis Schinas, a spokesman for Juncker. “We are listening and working with the UK government … for an orderly withdrawal of the UK from the EU on March 29.”

May’s spokesman again said it was the prime minister’s intention to persuade the EU to reopen the divorce deal.

“There is a process of engagement going on. Tomorrow is obviously a significant meeting between the prime minister and President Juncker as part of that process,” he said.

Legal advice

Barclay and Britain’s Attorney General Geoffrey Cox are also due back in Brussels midweek and want to discuss “legal text” with Barnier that would give Britain enough assurances over the backstop, British sources said.

It is Cox’s advice that the backstop as it stands is indefinite, which May is  trying to see changed by obtaining new legally binding EU commitments.

May needs to convince eurosceptics in her Conservative Party that the backstop will not keep Britain indefinitely tied to the EU, but also that she is still considering a compromise idea agreed between Brexit supporters and pro-EU lawmakers.

May’s spokesman said the Commission had engaged with the ideas put forward in the so-called “Malthouse Compromise” but raised concerns about “their viability to resolve the backstop.”

The EU says the alternative technological arrangements it proposes to replace the backstop do not exist for now and so cannot be a guarantee that no border controls would return to Ireland.

Barnier told Barclay the EU could hence not agree to this proposal as it would mean not applying the bloc’s law on its own border.

Eurosceptic lawmakers said Malthouse was “alive and kicking” after meeting May on Tuesday.

May has until Feb. 27 to secure EU concessions on the backstop or face another series of Brexit votes in the House of Commons, where lawmakers want changes to the withdrawal deal.

EU and U.K. sources said London could accept other guarantees on the backstop and the bloc is proposing turning the assurances and clarifications it has already given Britain on the issue in December and January into legally binding documents.
…

The European Commission will take action against Poland if its government is harassing judges for consulting the European Court of Justice on the legality of Polish reforms, Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans said Tuesday.

Timmermans, responsible in the Commission for making sure European Union countries observe the rule of law, was responding to a letter from Poland’s biggest judge association Iustitia, which asked him to act.

Iustitia urged Timmermans to sue the euroskeptic Polish government over the harassment of judges who question the legality of the government’s judicial reforms by asking the opinion of the ECJ.

“Every Polish judge is also a European judge, so no one should interfere with the right of a judge to pose questions to the European Court of Justice,” Timmermans told reporters on entering a meeting of EU ministers who were to discuss Poland’s observance of the rule of law.

“If that is becoming something of a structural matter, if judges are being faced with disciplinary measures because they ask questions to the court in Luxembourg, then of course the Commission will have to act,” he said, without elaborating.

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has been in conflict with the Commission over its handling of Polish courts since the start of 2016. Most EU countries back the Commission.

“The combined effect of the legislative changes could put at risk the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers in Poland,” German Minister for Europe Michael Roth and French Minister for European Affairs Nathalie Loiseau said in a joint statement at a ministerial meeting with Timmermans.

“In this context, the amendments made so far by the Polish authorities are not sufficient,” they said, according to delegation officials.

Procedure

Worried about the government flouting basic democratic standards in the country of 38 million people, the Commission has launched an unprecedented procedure on whether Poland is observing the rule of law, which serves mainly as a means of political pressure.

The procedure could lead to the loss of voting power in the EU for a government that does not observe the rule of law.

“Sadly, not much has changed and some things even have worsened,” Timmermans said.

The EU has launched a similar procedure against Hungary, where the authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orban is raising concern in other EU countries. Brussels has also warned Romania to stop its push for influence over the judicial system.

Iustitia, grouping one-third of all Polish judges, wrote to Timmermans to act against repressive disciplinary steps against judges by the National Council of Judiciary, which, under changes made by the government, is now appointed by politicians from the ruling PiS parliamentary majority.

“The proceedings are usually initiated against judges who are active in the field of defending the rule of law, among others by educational actions, meetings with citizens, international activity,” Iustitia head Krystian Markiewicz wrote in the letter to Timmermans, seen by Reuters. “Therefore I appeal for referring Poland to the Court of Justice of the European Union in connection with the regulations concerning the disciplinary proceedings against judges.”
…

Environmentalists urged EU policymakers on Tuesday to take a tougher stance on air pollution from coal power plants in the Western Balkans, blaming the fumes for 3,900 deaths across Europe each year.

The 16 Communist-era plants with 8 gigawatts (GW) capacity emitted the same amount of sulphur dioxide in 2016 as 250 coal-fired plants with 30 times more capacity in the rest of the European Union, five environmentalist groups said in a report.

Lignite, the most polluting coal, is widely available in the region, providing a cheap energy resource and the major source of energy for Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro.

The countries are members of the Energy Community, which had a commitment to implement EU rules to curb pollution by 2018.

But investments in new power plants or technology to cut emissions have largely been delayed, the report said.

“Air pollution knows no borders and is still an invisible killer in Europe,” said Vlatka Matkovic Puljic, senior health and energy officer at HEAL and the report’s lead author.

“It is high time that EU policymakers step up efforts to clean up the air and decarbonize the power sector,” she said.

The report said the West Balkan power plants caused pollution across the EU and beyond that caused health care costs of up to 11.5 billion euros ($13.02 billion) a year.

The region plans to add 2.7 GW of new coal plant capacity in the next decade, mainly financed by Chinese banks, the report said, adding that most plants would not meet the EU’s pollution control rules.

Governments in the region say they need to expand coal power generation to meet rising demand and ensure energy security and say that new coal plants would emit less greenhouse gases.

The report called for stricter rules to be imposed on the Energy Community and said the European Commission should make meeting those regulations a requirement for joining the EU.

For now, the countries in the Energy Community do not face any penalties if targets are not met.

“Rather than investing in yet more outdated coal power plants, Western Balkan leaders need to … increase the share of sustainable forms of renewable energy,” said Ioana Ciuta, Energy Coordinator at CEE Bankwatch, one of the five groups behind the report.
…

British-born Sumaiyyah Wakil was sixteen-years-old when she sneaked away to war-torn Syria, flying first to Bulgaria, then Turkey, to join the Islamic State terror group. Once in IS’s de facto capital Raqqa, she bragged, according to British court documents, about watching the public stoning of a woman, describing the killing as “so cool.”

But now her family say the British authorities should repatriate her when she re-emerges, likely soon, from IS territory as well as other British teenagers who joined the militants. Wakil’s parents and the families of IS recruits argue their offspring were manipulated by jihadist recruiters and were too young to know what they were doing when they went off to Syria.

The predicament of surviving young foreign IS recruits — especially of the women, most of whom left like Wakil as schoolgirls without family approval or prior parental knowledge — has sparked a ferocious moral, political and legal debate in Britain, as well as other European states, about whether they should be re-admitted to their birth countries, even helped to return and given a second chance. 

Opinion polls suggest most Britons don’t think they deserve the right to return. 

In Britain, the debate was triggered in earnest last week with the discovery by reporter Anthony Loyd of a pregnant nineteen-year-old British woman in a Kurdish-managed refugee camp in northeast Syria. Shamima Begum, who gave birth to her third child Sunday, joined the militant group in 2015 at the age of 15, slipping off with two school-friends, all from east London. 

One of the girls died in an airstrike in 2016; the other, Amira Abase, is still in IS territory. At least 900 Britons, an estimated 145 of them women and 50 minors, joined IS. In total an estimated 5000 Europeans joined the militant group, although some analysts say the figure is likely higher. 

Britain, like other European countries, has been reluctant to repatriate IS recruits, whether male fighters or so-called ‘jihadi brides’ as well as their children. A small number have been assisted to return to their countries of origin, but hundreds are awaiting political or legal resolution of their cases as their appeals for repatriation have largely been ignored by alarmed European governments, seeing them as security risks who betrayed their countries.

U.S. officials have been urging European governments, for more than a year,to take back surviving recruits — and prosecute them. Otherwise they will slip away, they say, from refugee and detention facilities in northeast Syria and pose a greater threat once unsupervised. On Saturday, a frustrated President Donald Trump urged the Europeans to take charge of their rogue citizens, saying the alternative is the Kurds will have to free them.

European officials say most can’t be put on trial because of the difficulty in collecting hard evidence against them for individual wrongdoing, and they worry their presence will over-tax already strained security services. More than 900 foreign jihadists and 3200 wives and children are being held by the Kurds.

Begum, whose two previous children died from malnutrition and sickness, says she wants to return to Britain, mainly because she’s worried about her baby’s health. “I think a lot of people should have, like, sympathy towards me for everything I’ve been through,” she said in a recent interview. 

But she has expressed no remorse over joining IS nor disavowed the group’s ideology.In an interview with Sky News she claimed she was “just a housewife” during her time in IS’s self-styled caliphate, where she married a young Dutch jihadist shortly after arriving. 

And asked whether she was aware of the IS beheadings and executions, she answered matter-of-factly that she’d been “okay with it.” She said: “Yeah, I knew about those things and I was okay with it. Because, you know, I started becoming religious just before I left. From what I heard, Islamically that is all allowed.” In an interview with the BBC she said the 2017 terror attack on the Ariana Grande concert, in which 22 died, was justified retaliation.

Her lack of contrition has prompted public outrage with detractors saying she displays a breathtaking sense of entitlement. Her family, though, says she is brainwashed. 

Muhammad Rahman, her brother-in-law, whose married to an older sister, told reporters: “I can understand why many people in Britain do not want Shamima to be allowed back into the country after what she has done…but she went as a fifteen-year-old and I don’t know a 15-year-old can make such a decision with any responsibility. She was a minor when she left and she surely has been brainwashed.” 

Some radicalization experts have long argued that young Westerners were cleverly groomed by recruiters, in much the same way pedophiles target prey with tailored, manipulative narratives to up a false sense of kinship. In conversations with this correspondent, Mia Bloom, a security studies professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and recognized radicalization expert, highlighted, as the caliphate unfolded, how IS groomers were skillful at exploiting the vulnerabilities and confusion of disoriented Western teenagers already struggling with identity issues.

Bloom said IS matched recruiters with potential recruits in terms of age, nationality and gender. The marketing narratives would shift depending on the target’s vulnerabilities — from arguments about equality and inclusion to offers of friendship and the promise of belonging. For some, there’d be the lure of utopian adventure. Others would be manipulated by recruiters emphasizing their obligations to Islam. 

Manipulated or not, commentator Janice Turner, a columnist with The Times, says while the youth of some of the IS recruits should be taken into account, she questions, “at what point does a young person stop being a gullible victim, malleable clay moulded by older minds and dangerous ideology, and become responsible for his or her deeds?”

In Begum’s east London neighborhood of Bethnal Green there are mixed feelings, with some locals saying she might have been manipulated into going, but her lack of remorse now is alarming and suggests she remains a radicalized menace. The plight of the children of IS recruits is what pulls at most heart strings and even those adamant that the recruits should stay away, say the children can’t be left to their fates.

On the legal front, there have been calls for treason laws to be applied against IS recruits, including jihadi brides, but those laws may not be appropriate, say legal scholars. The country’s interior minister, Sajid Javid, reflected British anger last week by saying Begum and other recruits shouldn’t be readmitted, but he has had to concede he can’t block them permanently from re-entry. He could issue temporary orders excluding them from re-admission for up to two years, say some legal scholars, but would face court challenges.

Other ministers have also acknowledged their alarm, but say they can’t make people stateless, although they’re unlikely to arrange physically the return of the recruits. Returnees would be monitored, would have to enter de-radicalization programs and their children most likely would be placed in care of or with foster families, at least temporarily, say British officials. 
…

Pressure is growing on the European Union to formally back Venezuela’s opposition, after three EU lawmakers were refused entry to the country — accused of having conspiratorial aims.’ The diplomatic snub has triggered calls for Brussels to take a stronger stand against the government of disputed President Nicholas Maduro. The U.S. and many allies have recognized the opposition leader, Juan Guaido, as president, after accusations of vote rigging in last year’s election. Henry Ridgwell reports.
…

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the resurgence of anti-Semitism is a central problem for Jewish communities. Netanyahu spoke Monday, a day before the planned summit with leaders of central European countries in Jerusalem. The planned summit of four nations known as the Visegrad Group — Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — was supposed to take place Tuesday. But Poland withdrew from the meeting. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
…

Pope Francis has lifted the suspension imposed in 1983 on Nicaraguan priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal, the Vatican’s ambassador to Nicaragua said in a statement Monday.

Nuncio Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag said in a statement that Francis removed the canonical censures following a request from the 94-year-old Cardenal, who has been hospitalized for more than a week.

Pope John Paul II suspended Cardenal from his priestly duties because he had become culture minister in the leftist Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega after the rebels toppled dictator Anastasio Somoza.

John Paul II said that priests could not assume political posts and he was irked by a movement of pro-revolutionary priests such as Cardenal accused of ignoring instructions from the more conservative hierarchy and of mixing leftist ideology into theology.

John Paul II famously criticized Cardenal publicly at Managua’s international airport during a visit in 1983. In a widely circulated photograph, Cardenal knelt and reached to kiss the pope’s hand, but John Paul pulled his hand back and pointed his finger at Cardenal.

“Father Cardenal has been suspended from exercising the ministry for 35 years due to his political militancy,” the nuncio’s statement said. “The priest accepted the canonical punishment that was imposed on him and followed it without performing any pastoral activity. Furthermore, he had abandoned many years ago all political commitments.”

Cardenal’s personal assistant Luz Marina Acosta said he was in delicate, but stable condition in a local hospital, where Sommertag joined him in celebrating Mass on Sunday.

 “It was very moving and the father was very happy,” she said.

Cardenal, like many priests in Latin America in the 1960s, felt the pull of the leftist liberation theology that focused on ministering to the poor and liberating the oppressed.

Years after the revolution, however, he was among several Sandinista leaders who distanced themselves from Ortega.

He was easily identifiable in his signature black beret and loose white peasant shirts.

Among Cardenal’s works are “Epigrams” and “Zero Hour.” He has been nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature since 2005.

The same suspension was imposed on Cardenal’s brother Fernando, who served as the Sandinista education minister and Miguel D’Escoto who was that government’s foreign minister. However, those priests had their suspensions lifted years ago.
…

Nearly a week after Russia’s lower house of parliament approved a preliminary measure aimed at safeguarding internet operations in case of a foreign cyber attack, Kremlin critics and some lawmakers seem to agree the entire enterprise is beyond the country’s technological capabilities.

The bill, which proposes the creation of “Runet,” a domestic network that would be designed to function independently of the global internet, has drawn comparisons to China’s “great firewall.”

Russian state-run media say the legislation was drafted in response to tensions with Western nations that accuse Moscow of perpetrating cyberattacks via social media platforms to wreak havoc in foreign elections.

Critics, however, call the legislation a Kremlin ploy to control domestic cyber-infrastructure, all part of a broader campaign to expand censorship and blunt online political mobilization campaigns.

The bill calls for Russian web traffic and data to be rerouted through points controlled by the state and for the creation of a domestic Domain Name System that would allow the internet to continue functioning in Russia even if it is cut off from foreign infrastructure.

During last week’s first reading, the proposed law sparked exasperation from some minority lawmakers who feared it would trigger a dysfunctional “internet Brexit,” whole others questioned how Russia would build the technical infrastructure required to support the legal provisions. By Brexit, they were drawing comparisons to Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.

No IT experts among MPs

“How many of you are IT experts here, raise your hand. One? Then how can we vote for a bill we don’t understand?” said Valery Gartung, a lawmaker with the Kremlin-loyal Just Russia party.

“Russia doesn’t manufacture any IT hardware except cables; maybe some people should hang themselves on them,” said MP Sergei Ivanov of the nationalist LDPR, President Vladimir Putin’s former chief of staff.

One of the bill’s authors is Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer and one of the key suspects in the 2006 murder of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in Britain. Lugovoi dismissed the critics, emphasizing the massive cyber threat he says the U.S. poses.

“This isn’t kindergarten!” he shouted at the reading. “All of the websites in Syria” have been turned off by the U.S. before.

In a 2014 interview with Wired magazine, U.S. surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged that the National Security Agency accidentally cut off Syria’s internet while attempting to infiltrate it in 2012.

Concern about US cyber aggression

Andrei Soldatov, who co-authored The Red Web, a history of internet surveillance in Russia, said concern about U.S. cyber aggression is just the latest pretext for political censorship campaigns that can be traced to the Soviet era.

“Look at the text of the legislation,” he said. “Censorship and filtering is an essential part of it. It calls for new equipment to be installed with all internet service providers” that alters or impedes traffic flows and filters content. “This has nothing to do with protection against the U.S.; I don’t buy this explanation that it’s all about protecting the Russian internet users or the Russian internet against possible U.S. aggression.”

“The government is now mostly concerned with one thing: the mobilizing capability of the internet,” he said, explaining that Kremlin-led efforts to gain control of the internet since Russia’s historic 2012 street protests have scored preciously few successes. “So they actually want to strip in the internet of this capability.” During Soviet times, he said, the idea was to seal the country completely in order to stop the spread of uncensored information.

“But today, even with the filtering we have now, if you want to get access to some sensitive information on the internet, you can get it quite easily,” he said. “The idea is to prevent social platforms and the internet as a whole from being used by political activists to start unrest.”

Although an isolated Russian net will compromise prospects for international digital commerce, Soldatov said officials aren’t likely concerned, as the country’s nearly decade-long “climate of internet uncertainty” has already forced some Russia IT companies to flee the market.

Kremlin officials long ago decided to put security before commerce, Soldatov said.

“Two years ago, Putin signed a new draft of the information security doctrine. And if you check the text, you can see the main idea there is that Russian telecommunication and IT companies should check first with Russian security services before introducing new technologies, he said. “So it’s clear that security comes first and technological progress comes second, and that’s not good for business. It means that you first have to go to the FSB and ask them whether they’re happy with this or that new technology.”

Internet freedom

Asked if it will be possible for free speech and internet freedom advocates to circumvent impending restrictions, Soldatov voiced optimism.

“Yes, absolutely. It’s already clear that this kind of system would have gaps. The system would be quite porous, because we are talking about the internet itself, and it’s a technology that by definition was designed to find a way for traffic to go,” he said.

“And this is the case for many countries, like in China, [where] entire communities of activists could find a way,” he added. “The problem is for the rest. So you sort of see an internet divided, with, say, 70 percent or 80 percent of people who live in a situation they accept, and then you have some activists who would find a way, and that’s what might happen.”

In an interview with Riga-based Meduza news outlet, Stanislav Shakirov of the digital censorship watchdog “Roskomsvoboda” said Russia, unlike China, lacks the domestic investment infrastructure to develop its own tech startups, a fact that would be likely to doom the commercial prospects for an independent Russian internet.

“Not only are Russian internet users accustomed to having their pick of Western online services, but Russia’s domestic market isn’t big enough to sustain competition in isolation, and its unfriendly business climate remains a major hindrance,” he said.

But Ekho Moskvy radio anchor Alexander Plushev, who has reported on internet freedom issues in Russia for years, says supporters of the bills aren’t concerned with security, commerce or censorship.

“I think it’s just corruption, just to get money, to build their own independent network,” he said, explaining that it is primarily Russian government contractors who stand to profit from a privatized Russian internet. “That’s the main reason for this law.”

(Some information is from AFP.)
…

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is not saying whether or not he nominated Donald Trump for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, but the question may be moot: the U.S. president has been put forward by others for the prestigious award.

During a White House news conference on Friday, Trump said the Japanese premier had given him “the most beautiful copy” of a five-page nomination letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Since then Abe has declined to say whether he had done so.

Regardless, Trump has already been nominated by two Norwegian lawmakers.

“We have nominated him of course for the positive developments on the Korean Peninsula,” Per-Willy Amundsen, who was Justice Minister in Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s Cabinet in 2016-2018, told Reuters.

“It has been a very difficult situation and the tensions have since lowered and a lot of it is due to Trump’s unconventional diplomatic style,” he added.

Amundsen, who is a member of the rightwing Progress Party, wrote a letter to the award committee together with his parliamentary colleague Christian Tybring-Gjedde, he said.

The letter was submitted in June, immediately after a summit Trump held in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Unaimed at easing tensions and tackling Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.

Tybring-Gjedde, who sits on the Norwegian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, also confirmed the joint nomination of Trump when contacted by Reuters.

“A possible award would of course depend on the talks leading to a credible disarmament deal,” he said.

A wide range of people can nominate for the Nobel Peace Prize, including members of parliaments and governments, heads of state, university professors of history, social sciences or law and past Nobel Peace Prize laureates, among others.

The deadline for nominations for the 2019 prize, which will be announced on Oct. 11., was Jan. 31.

The five-strong Norwegian Nobel Committee, which decides who wins the award, does not comment on nominations, keeping secret for 50 years the names of nominators and unsuccessful nominees.

Still, it did say earlier this month that 304 candidates were nominated for this year’s prize, of which 219 are individuals and 85 are organizations.

Last year’s prize was jointly awarded to Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege and Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad.

 
…

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki canceled his plans to attend a meeting of central European leaders in Israel starting Monday amid new tensions over how Polish behavior during the Holocaust is remembered and characterized.

Morawiecki informed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s of his decision by phone Sunday, Michal Dworczyk, who heads the prime minister’s chancellery, said. Poland’s foreign minister, Jacek Czaputowicz, plans to attend instead, he said.

It “is a signal that the historical truth is a fundamental issue for Poland, and the defense of the good name of Poland is and always will be decisive,” Deputy Foreign Minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek explained.

Netanyahu said Thursday during a Middle East conference hosted by the United States and Poland that “Poles cooperated with the Nazis” – wording suggesting that some Poles participated in killing Jews during the German occupation of Poland.

He was initially quoted by some Israeli media outlets as saying not “Poles” but “The Poles” cooperated, phrasing which could be taken as blaming the entire Polish nation.

Netanyahu’s office said he was misquoted. The Polish government summoned the Israeli ambassador on Friday and later said it was not satisfied with the explanation of the Israeli leader being quoted incorrectly.

Netanyahu was supposed to meet with the leaders of the four central European countries known as the Visegrad Group — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — during the two-day meeting in Israel.

This incident follows a major spat that Warsaw and Jerusalem had last year over a new Polish law that makes it illegal to blame the Polish nation for collaboration in the Holocaust.

At the height of the crisis, Morawiecki at one point equated Polish perpetrators of the Holocaust to supposed “Jewish perpetrators.”

Now, with general and European elections later this year, Morawiecki bowed out of the Jerusalem trip because he “has to think about the far-right and anti-Semitic electorate,” said Tomasz Lis, the editor of the Polish edition of Newsweek and a critic of the government.

Germany occupied Poland in 1939, annexing part of it to Germany and directly governing the rest. Unlike other countries occupied by Germany, Poland did not have a collaborationist government.

The prewar Polish government and military fled into exile, and an underground resistance army fought the Nazis inside the country and tried to warn a deaf world about the Holocaust. Thousands of Poles also risked their own lives to help Jews.

Because of that history, Poles find references to Polish “collaboration” to be unfair and hurtful.

However, individual Poles did take part in killing Jews during and after the war. Many Holocaust survivors and their relatives carry painful memories of persecution at Polish hands. In Israel, there has been anger at what many there perceive to be Polish attempts today to whitewash that history.

The dispute last sparked an explosion of anti-Semitic hate speech in Poland, and there were signs of another spike in recent days.

 
…

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has rebuked European allies for their stance on Iran and Venezuela, in a speech Saturday at the Munich Security Conference in Germany. As Henry Ridgwell reports from the conference, the United States brought its largest delegation in decades and called on Europe to apply economic pressure on Iran to give the Iranian people peace and security.
…

French prosecutors have opened an investigation Sunday into anti-Semitic comments made by Yellow Vest protesters against a renowned philosopher and intellectual a day earlier.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said Sunday an investigation was launched into “public insult based on origin, ethnicity, nationality, race or religion,” the Associated Press reported. A video broadcast on multiple French news channels shows peple hurling insults such as “dirty Zionists” and “France is ours” at Alain Finkielkraut.

Finkielkraut, 69, told French media that he had approached the protesters, who have held demonstrations in Paris for 14 consecutive Saturdays, out of curiosity. Finkielkraut had initially supported the movement, but called the protests “grotesque” after Saturday’s incident.

French president Emmanuel Macron was among a wide range of politicians who denounced the comments.

“The anti-Semitic insults he has been subjected to are the absolute negation of who we are and what makes us a great nation. We will not tolerate them,” Macron said on Twitter.

The protesters gained their nickname from the fluorescent vests they wear while marching, which are safety vests French drivers are required to keep in their cars.

Protests around the country began November 17 against a planned fuel tax increase. The demonstrations have transformed into protests largely against  Macron’s liberal economic reform policies. Macron made tax and salary concessions in December, but protests have continued.

Saturday’s insults came amid reports of a stark increase in anti-Jewish offenses, which police estimate are up 74 percent from last year.

Fourteen political parties, including Macron’s ruling La Republique en Marche, have called for symbolic gatherings next Tuesday to rally against anti-Semitism.
…

Far-right lawmakers are set to be elected to Spain’s parliament for the first time in nearly four decades, two opinion polls showed Saturday, forecasting that no single party would get a majority in a snap election on April 28. 

Spain’s Socialists, who have been in power since June with a minority government, are set to gain more seats than any other party but fall well short of a majority, the surveys showed. 

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called the early election on Friday after Catalan pro-independence parties who had previously backed him joined opposition parties in defeating his 2019 budget bill this week. 

The far-right party Vox would win up to 46 seats out of 350, according to a GESOP poll published by the El Periodico newspaper, while the GAD3 polling firm for the La Vanguardia newspaper forecast 16 seats. 

Vox is a newcomer on the Spanish political scene, and pollsters had underestimated its score in a regional election in Andalusia in December, where the anti-immigration party won 12 seats. 

Memories of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who died in 1975, meant Spain had long been been immune to the growing popularity of far-right parties in much of Europe. 

The polls show a fragmented political landscape in which the political identity of the next government is yet unclear. 

Sanchez’s Socialist Party would win 115 to 117 seats in the election, according to the GESOP poll. The conservative Popular Party would get 75 to 77 seats. 

With such an outcome, one of the two main parties would need the support of at least another party to secure a majority. 

The center-right Ciudadanos would win 44 to 47 seats, in a tight race with Vox to be the third-largest party. 

The polls were the first published since elections were called.
…

British regional airline Flybmi has gone into administration and canceled all flights immediately, the company said in a statement Saturday, blaming Brexit uncertainty as one of the reasons for its collapse. 

A spokesperson for British Midland Regional Ltd. said the company had made the decision because of increased fuel and carbon costs and of uncertainty arising from Britain’s plans to leave the European Union on March 29. 

The airline, based in the English East Midlands, operates 17 planes flying to 25 European cities. It employs 376 people in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Belgium. 

“We sincerely regret that this course of action has become the only option open to us, but the challenges, particularly those created by Brexit, have proven to be insurmountable,” the company said. 

Spikes in fuel and carbon costs had undermined efforts to move the airline into profit. 

It added: “Current trading and future prospects have also been seriously affected by the uncertainty created by the Brexit process, which has led to our inability to secure valuable flying contracts in Europe and lack of confidence around bmi’s ability to continue flying between destinations in Europe.” 

The airline, which said it carried 522,000 passengers on 29,000 flights in 2018, advised customers with bookings to contact their bank or payment card issuer to obtain refunds. 
…

China on Saturday rejected German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s appeal to join a Cold War-era arms control treaty that the United States accuses Russia of breaching, saying it would place unfair limits on the Chinese military. 

Fearing a nuclear arms race between China, Russia and the United States after the collapse of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the United States is withdrawing from, Merkel made her call for a global treaty. 

“Disarmament is something that concerns us all and we would of course be glad if such talks were held not just between the United States, Europe and Russia but also with China,” Merkel told the Munich Security Conference. 

Russia and the United States are the signatories to the 1987 INF Treaty that bans land-based missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometres (300-3,400 miles) and which U.S. President Donald Trump started the six-month withdrawal from this month, blaming Russian violations. 

Moscow denies any wrongdoing, but the United States and its NATO allies want Russia to destroy its 9M729 nuclear-capable cruise missile system, which Washington says could allow Russia to strike Europe with almost no warning. 

Merkel’s suggestion of involving China in a negotiation is seen by European NATO diplomats as a potential way out of the impasse because a new treaty could address American concerns about a growing military threat from China and Russia. 

China ‘doesn’t pose a threat’

But China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi, who spoke on a panel in Munich, said that Chinese missiles were defensive. 

“China develops its capabilities strictly according to its defensive needs and doesn’t pose a threat to anybody else. So we are opposed to the multilateralization of the INF,” he said. 

China’s stated ambition is to modernize its People’s Liberation Army by 2035, improve its air force and push into new technologies including very high-speed cruise missiles and artificial intelligence. 

Its defense budget grew nearly 6 percent between 2017 and 2018, according to the London-based International Institute for Security Studies (IISS). 

Retired Chinese Gen. Yao Yunzhu told delegates a new arms control agreement would work only if it included sea- and air-launched missiles, as well as land, because most of China’s military technology is ground-based and the country would not want to put itself at a disadvantage. 

Cheaper to build, more mobile and easier to hide, ground-based rocket launchers are an attractive option to China as it develops its armed forces, experts say, whereas the United States operates more costly sea-based systems to comply with the INF. 

“China is traditionally a land power and the Chinese military is a ground force,” Yao said. 

“If China is to enter into these kinds of negotiations, I think it ought to be more comprehensive to include not only land-based but also air- and sea-based strike capabilities … and that would be hugely complicated,” she said. 
…

The Vatican said Saturday that Pope Francis has defrocked disgraced former U.S. cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

In July of last year, Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals following allegations he had sexually abused minor and adult seminarians over a period of decades.

The Vatican said in a statement that in January 2019 it had found McCarrick guilty of “. . . solicitation in the Sacrament of Confession and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power.” (The Sixth Commandment says ‘Thou shall not commit adultery’ and is one of the Ten Commandments the Bible says were given by God.  The Commandments are fundamental to Judaism and Christianity.)

McCarrick appealed the decision expelling him from the priesthood, but it was upheld and McCarrick was notified of the decision Friday. .

The Vatican statement said its decision “is definitive and admits of no further recourse or appeal.”

McCarrick had been a highly respected and longtime ambassador of the Catholic Church was was a confident of popes and U.S. presidents.

The 88-year-old McCarrick was ordained a priest in 1958.  His appointments included:  auxiliary bishop of New York, bishop of Metuchen, archbishop of Newark, and archbishop of Washington.  

In 2001, McCarrick became a cardinal.
…

A Russian court has decided to prolong the detention of American investor Michael Calvey, founder of Baring Vostok Capital Partners, a Moscow-based private equity group.

Late Friday the court moved to extend Calvey’s arrest for at least 72 hours and called for a second hearing Saturday.

Four other defendants in the case have been ordered to remain in pretrial custody for two months.

A spokeswoman for the Moscow district court Friday announced that Calvey had been detained along with other members of the firm Thursday on suspicion of stealing $37.5 million (2.5 billion rubles), a charge that carries of a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

Private equity group partner

Calvey, 51, is a senior partner who founded Baring Vostok in 1994. According to the firm’s website, the private equity group holds more than $3.5 billion in committed capital and is a controlling shareholder in Russia’s Vostochny Bank, which focuses on Siberian and Far Eastern markets.

A statement on the Baring Vostok website said the company “believes that the detention of its employees and the charges that have been brought are a result of a conflict with shareholders of Vostochniy [sic] Bank. We have full confidence in the legality of our employees’ actions and will vigorously defend their rights. Baring Vostok’s activities in the Russian Federation are fully compliant with all applicable laws.”

Before launching Baring Vostok, Calvey worked for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and for Salomon Brothers. Since arriving in Moscow in the mid-1990s, he’s become a prominent and highly visible member of Moscow investment community. He is a board member of the Washington-based Atlantic Council.

​Pleas from investment community 

The announcement of Calvey’s detention sent shockwaves through the international investment community, prompting numerous pleas for his immediate release.

Herman Gref, head of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest state bank, issued a statement calling Calvey a “decent, honest man,” while Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s $10 billion sovereign wealth fund and a close contact of Russian President Vladimir Putin, described Calvey as “committed to the highest ethical standards accepted in the investment community.”

Kremlin officials Friday said Putin wasn’t aware of the charges being brought against Calvey.

“We are aware that a U.S. citizen was arrested on February 14, 2019, in Russia, a State Department spokesperson said Friday. “We have no higher priority than the protection of U.S. citizens abroad. Due to privacy considerations, we do not have any additional information at this time.”

Calvey is the third Westerner to face prosecution in Russia since Dec. 31, when American citizen Paul Whelan, a former Marine, was jailed on accusations of spying. Last week a Russian court sentenced Dennis Christensen, a Danish adherent of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion, to six years in prison for “organizing the activity of an extremist organization.”

Although Russia has jailed foreign investors who were vocal opponents of the Kremlin, Calvey has no such record of public political opinions.

Russia is “a do-it-yourself market,” Calvey told The Washington Post in 2011. “You can’t rely on outside service providers.”

In that interview, Calvey said his group operates with 20 investors, four full-time lawyers and three government relations managers, along with a host of accountants and administrative support. At that time, all 10 of his partners were Russian nationals.

“International firms aren’t equipped for Russia,” he told the Post. “And they usually have a low tolerance threshold for uncertainty and no sense of humor for Russian surprises,” which he described as surprise audits, seizure of assets for back taxes, and sudden, sometimes seemingly arbitrary, business license reviews.

‘The final straw’

Vocal Kremlin critic and Hermitage Capital co-founder Bill Browder was denied entry into Russian in 2005 after his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, began investigating governmental misconduct and corruption in response to suspicious tax evasion charges brought against Hermitage by Russia’s Interior Ministry.

Magnitsky died under suspicious circumstances in Russian custody in 2009.

“The arrest of Mike Calvey in Moscow should be the final straw that Russia is an entirely corrupt and [uninvestable] country,” Browder said in a tweet Friday. “Of all the people I knew in Moscow, Mike played by their rules, kept his head down and never criticized the government.”

Pete Cobus is VOA’s acting Moscow correspondent. State Department correspondent Nike Ching contributed reporting from Washington. Some information is from Reuters.
…

Disgraced former U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been expelled from the Roman Catholic priesthood following allegations against him, including sexual abuse of minors, the Vatican said Saturday.

McCarrick, who in July became the first Roman Catholic prelate in nearly 100 years to lose the title of cardinal, has now become the highest profile church figure to be dismissed from the priesthood in modern times.

The defrocking was announced ahead of next week’s meeting at the Vatican between the heads of national Catholic churches to discuss the global sexual abuse crisis.

McCarrick had appealed the decision, but it was upheld and Pope Francis said no further appeal would be allowed.

The allegations against McCarrick date back decades when he was still rising to the top of the U.S. church hierarchy.

McCarrick, who became a power-broker as Archbishop of Washington, D.C., from 2001 to 2006, is living in seclusion in a remote friary in Kansas.

He has responded publicly to only one of the allegations, saying he has “absolutely no recollection” of an alleged case of sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy more than 50 years ago.
…

Spain will elect its third government in less than four years after Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s fragile socialist government acknowledged Friday its support had evaporated and called an early general election.

Sanchez’s eight-month-old administration met its end after failing to get parliament’s approval for its 2019 budget proposal earlier this week, adding to the political uncertainty that has dogged Spain in recent years.

“Between doing nothing and continuing without a budget, or giving the chance for Spaniards to speak, Spain should continue looking ahead,” Sanchez said in a televised appearance from the Moncloa Palace, the seat of government, after an urgent Cabinet meeting.

The ballot will take place on April 28. It is expected to highlight the increasingly fragmented political landscape that has denied the European Union country a stable government in recent elections.

The 46-year-old prime minister ousted his conservative predecessor Mariano Rajoy last June, when he won a no-confidence vote triggered by a damaging corruption conviction affecting Rajoy’s Popular Party.

But the simple majority of Socialists, anti-austerity parties and regional nationalists that united against Rajoy crumbled in the past week after Sanchez broke off talks with the Catalan separatists over their demands for the independence of their prosperous northeastern region.

Sanchez saw the Catalan separatists join opposition lawmakers to vote down his spending plans, including social problems he had hoped would boost his party’s popularity.

Sanchez had the shortest term in power for any prime minister since Spain transitioned to democracy four decades ago.

Without mentioning Catalonia directly, Sanchez said he remained committed to dialogue with the country’s regions as long as their demands fell “within the constitution and the law,” which don’t allow a region to secede. He blamed the conservatives for not supporting his Catalan negotiations.

Popular Party leader Pablo Casado celebrated what he called the “defeat” of the Socialists, attacking Sanchez for yielding to some of the Catalan separatists’ demands.

“We will be deciding [in this election] if Spain wants to remain as a hostage of the parties that want to destroy it,” or welcome the leadership of the conservatives, Casado said.

Catalonia’s regional government spokeswoman, Elsa Artadi, retorted that “Spain will be ungovernable as long as it doesn’t confront the Catalan problem.”

Opinion polls indicate the April vote isn’t likely to produce a clear winner, a shift from the traditional bipartisan results that dominated Spanish politics for decades.

Although Sanchez’s Socialists appear to be ahead, their two main opponents — the Popular Party and the center-right Ciudadanos (Citizens) — could repeat their recent coalition in the southern Andalusia region, where they unseated the Socialists with the help of the far-right Vox party.

Vox last year scored the far-right’s first significant gain in post-dictatorship Spain, and surveys predict it could grab seats in the national parliament for the first time.

Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, vowed to use the election to “reconquer” the future, a term that refers back to how Spanish Catholic kings defeated Muslim rulers in 15th-century Spain.

Meanwhile, the Socialists are unlikely to be able to form a new government even if they come to a coalition deal with the anti-establishment Podemos [We Can] party, so a third partner will likely be needed.

Sanchez’s options are limited. On the right, a deal with the Citizens party seemed off the table, as its leader Albert Rivera has vetoed any possible agreement with a Socialist party led by Sanchez himself.

And the prospect of Catalan nationalists joining any ensuing coalition is remote, both in the light of the recent failed talks and the ongoing trial of a dozen Catalan politicians and activists for their roles in an independence bid two years ago.

“The Socialists don’t want an election marked by Catalonia because the issue creates internal division, but right-wing parties will use it as a weapon,” said Antonio Barroso of the Teneo consulting firm.

He said polls have erred in recent elections and that clever campaigning could swing the vote significantly.

“The only certainty … is that fragmentation is Spain’s new political reality,” he said.
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Sitting in her living room, 65-year-old Tatyana Rybalchenko goes through a stack of black-and-white photos from more than 30 years ago. In one of them, she is dressed in a nurse’s coat and smiles sheepishly at the camera; in another, she shares a laugh with soldiers on a road with a mountain ridge behind them.

The pictures don’t show the hardships that Rybalchenko and 20,000 Soviet women like her went through as civilian support staff during the Soviet Union’s 1979-1989 invasion of Afghanistan. Although they did not serve in combat roles, they still experienced the horrors of war.

As Russia on Friday marked the 30th anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the memories are still fresh for the nurses, clerks and shopkeepers, predominantly young, single women who were thrust into the bloody conflict.

Rybalchenko enlisted on a whim. In 1986, she was 33, working in a dead-end nursing job in Kyiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, and was going through a breakup. One day, she joined a colleague who went to a military recruitment office. The recruiter turned to Rybalchenko and asked if she would like to work abroad — in Afghanistan.

She recalls that she was fed up with her life in Kyiv, “so I told him: ‘I’d go anywhere, even to hell!’ And this is where he sent me.”

Family and friends tried to talk her out of it, telling her that Afghanistan is where “the bodies are coming from.” But it was too late: She had signed the contract.

At least 15,000 Soviet troops were killed in the fighting that began as an effort to prop up a communist ally and soon became a grinding campaign against a U.S.-backed insurgency. Moscow sent more than 600,000 to a war that traumatized many young men and women and fed a popular discontent that became one factor leading to the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.

Rybalchenko, who worked as a nurse at a military hospital in Gardez, was stunned by the many casualties — men missing limbs or riddled with shrapnel. But there was so much work that she found herself shutting off her emotions.

“At the end, I did not feel anything anymore. I was like a stone,” Rybalchenko said, shedding her normally perky persona.

Friendships helped, and she befriended a young reconnaissance officer, Vladimir Vshivtsev.

He once confided to her that he was not afraid of losing a limb, but he would not be able to live with an injury to his eyes. She recalled him saying “if I lose eyesight, I’ll do everything to put an end to it.”

In November 1987, the hospital was inundated with casualties from a Soviet offensive to open the road between Gardez and the stronghold of Khost, near the Pakistani border.

One of the wounded was Vshivtsev, and Rybalchenko saw him being wheeled into the ward with bandages wrapped around his head. She unwrapped the dressing and gasped when she saw the gaping wound on his face: “The eyes were not there.”

She persuaded her superior to let her accompany him to a bigger hospital in Kabul as part of a suicide watch. She stayed friends with Vshivtsev, and he later became a leading activist in the Russian Society for the Blind. Decades later, he briefly served in the Russian parliament.

Raising awareness

Alla Smolina was 30 when she joined the Soviet military prosecutor’s office in Jalalabad near the Pakistani border in 1985. It wasn’t until 20 years later that Smolina started having nightmares about the war.

“The shelling, running away from bullets and mines whizzing above me — I was literally scared of my own pillow,” she said.

She put her memories on paper and contacted other women who were there, telling the stories of those who endured the hardships of war but who are largely absent from the male-dominated narratives.

She is trying to raise awareness of the role the Soviet women played in Afghanistan, believing they have been unfairly portrayed or not even mentioned in fiction and nonfiction written mostly by men.

The deaths of Soviet women who held civilian jobs in Afghanistan are not part of the official toll, and Smolina has written about 56 women who lost their lives. Some died when a plane was shot down by the Afghan mujahedeen, one was killed when a drunken soldier threw a grenade into her room, and one woman was slain after being raped by a soldier.

In an era when the concept of sexual harassment was largely unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, the women in the war in Afghanistan — usually young and unmarried — often started a relationship to avoid unwanted attention from other soldiers.

“Because if a woman has someone, the whole brigade won’t harass you like a pack of wolves,” Rybalchenko said. “Sometimes it was reciprocal, sometimes there was no choice.”

She said she found boyfriends to “protect” her.

Denied war benefits

While the war grew unpopular at home, Soviet troops and support staff in Afghanistan mostly focused on survival rather than politics. While Afghans largely saw Moscow’s involvement as a hostile foreign intervention, the Soviets thought they were doing the right thing.

“We really believed that we were helping the oppressed Afghan nation, especially because we saw with our own eyes all the kindergartens and schools that the Soviet people were building there,” Smolina said.

After Rybalchenko came home, she could hardly get out of bed for the first three months, one of thousands with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

When she asked officials about benefits for veterans and other personnel in Afghanistan, she faced hostility and insults. She said one told her: “How do I know what you were actually up to over there?”

In 2006, Russian lawmakers decided that civilians who worked in Afghanistan were not entitled to war benefits. Women have campaigned unsuccessfully to reinstate them.

Rybalchenko eventually got an apartment from the government, worked in physiotherapy and now lives in retirement in Moscow, where her passion for interior decorating is reflected by the exotic bamboo-forest wallpaper in her home.

Smolina, who lives in Sweden, is wary of disclosing all the details about her own Afghan experiences after facing a backlash from other veterans about her publications.

“Our society is not ready yet to hear the truth. There is still a lingering effect from the harsh Soviet past,” she said. “In Soviet society, you were not supposed to speak out.”
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Pressure is mounting on the British government to decide whether it will repatriate — and prosecute when possible — dozens of the Islamic State group’s surviving British-born recruits, currently held by U.S.-led Kurdish forces in northeast Syria.

Britain, like other European countries, has been reluctant to take back IS recruits, whether male fighters or so-called jihadi brides as well as their children. A small number have been repatriated to their countries of origin, but hundreds are awaiting political or legal resolution of their cases as their appeals for help have largely been ignored.

The discovery this week in a refugee camp of a pregnant 19-year-old British woman who joined the militant group along with two girlfriends in 2015 has reignited a furious debate in Britain about what to do with surviving IS recruits, especially those who joined when still teenagers.

Public pleas for repatriation of male fighters, as well as IS brides languishing in overcrowded refugee and detention camps in northern Syria, weren’t helped this week by the defiance of Shamima Begum, who is nine months’ pregnant with her third child. She was a schoolgirl when she sneaked off from her home in east London and joined IS in Syria. She and two friends married IS fighters, in her case a Dutchman who converted to Islam.

She expressed no remorse in an interview with The Times newspaper for joining IS, telling a reporter, “I don’t regret coming here.” She said the sight of a severed head of a captured fighter that had been discarded by a jihadist “didn’t faze me at all.” The pregnant teenager did speak of the deaths from malnutrition and illness of her first two children, saying she fled to the Kurds hoping to be returned to Britain for the sake of her still-to-be-born child so her infant can receive proper medical care in Britain’s national health service.

“I’ll do anything required just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child,” she said. She said IS deserved to be defeated. “There was so much oppression and corruption that I don’t think they [IS] deserved victory.”

Her family, along with the relatives of her friend Amira Abase, have called on the British government to allow both of them back, saying they represent no threat and should be forgiven for their youthful errors. They say they were groomed by IS and too young to be held responsible. Kadiza Sultana, the third girl, was killed in an airstrike in 2016.

“I have no doubt the government should let them back in and teach them, so they learn from their mistakes,” said the father of Amira Abase. She is believed still to be with IS forces. Begum’s elder sister, Renu, told a British broadcaster she hoped her sibling would be allowed back to Britain. She added that her sister is “pregnant and vulnerable,” adding “it’s important we get her … home as soon as possible.”

Warning from Britain

There’s little public sympathy for the girls’ plight, however, and Begum’s interview has prompted a media firestorm. In a poll by Britain’s Sky News, 76 percent of respondents said the girls should be barred from returning.

Britain’s security minister, Ben Wallace, has said the government won’t help with Begum’s repatriation, although as a British citizen she has the right to return.

But he warned in a statement, “Everyone who returns from taking part in the conflict in Syria or Iraq must expect to be investigated by the police to determine if they have committed criminal offenses, and to ensure that they do not pose a threat to our national security. There are a range of terrorism offenses where individuals can be convicted for crimes committed overseas and we can also use Temporary Exclusion Orders to control an individual’s return to the U.K.”

London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan has said that Begum should not be allowed back into Britain, if the security services believe she poses a risk to national security.

But the reporter who interviewed her, Anthony Loyd, said he believes Begum is an “indoctrinated jihadi bride” and urged against “judging her too harshly.”

In December, a Belgian judge issued an order for the repatriation of half a dozen children and a pair of Belgian mothers, both IS recruits, from a Kurdish-controlled camp in northeast Syria. The women, Tatiana Wielandt and Bouchra Abouallal, both in their mid-20s, are being held in the al-Hol camp, one of several housing about 584 jihadi brides and 1,250 children, the offspring of IS fathers, most of them foreign fighters.

​US  position

Meanwhile, U.S. officials are now threatening to transport British IS fighters detained by the Kurds to the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay for prosecution before military commissions. Washington is especially keen to prosecute two alleged members of the so-called “Beatles” terror gang, Londoners El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, for their suspected participation in the torture and beheadings of Western journalists and aid workers, including American reporters James Foley and Steve Sotloff. 

An estimated 800 captured IS foreign fighters are being held by the Kurds. Officials from France, Britain, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have said for more than a year that they are highly reluctant to accept the repatriation of IS foreign fighters or their wives, despite appeals by the Kurds and the Trump administration to do so. U.S. officials fear the fighters will be able to slip away, if they are not returned to their home countries.

European officials say they represent security risks and that there would be technical and legal difficulties in prosecuting them. Repatriated foreign fighters and their wives would try to use the courts for propaganda purposes, if prosecutions were mounted, they fear. Official British figures show that only one in 10 British IS fighters who managed to return home has been prosecuted. Most have been required to join rehabilitation programs.
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The European Union will give Ireland some leeway to establish new border arrangements with Northern Ireland in case of a no-deal Brexit, sources in the bloc’s political hub Brussels said.

But they said Dublin would soon have to come up with a plan to ensure the integrity of the EU’s single market or face checks on its own goods coming into the rest of the bloc.

“Ireland can get transition periods or some temporary opt-outs on the border in the worst-case scenario,” a senior EU diplomat said.

“But soon enough it will have to face up to the fact that either there is a border on the island or a border between Ireland and the rest of the EU,” the person added.

EU diplomats and officials dealing with Brexit admit it is impossible to set up full border controls overnight as should theoretically be the case if the United Kingdom leaves the bloc without a divorce settlement on March 29.

The issue of a “hard border” on the island of Ireland has hung over Brexit negotiations from the start and is threatening to sink the divorce deal put together over months of painstaking EU-U.K. talks as the British parliament opposes the Irish “backstop” part of it.

The “backstop” is meant as a last resort, a way to prevent full-blown border controls on goods crossing between EU-state Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland.

But without a U.K.-EU free trade deal, yet to be negotiated, that would tie the latter to the bloc’s trade rules — anathema to hardline pro-Brexit supporters in Britain and British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Northern Irish allies who say it would weaken the province’s links with the rest of the country.

Many in Britain, Ireland and the rest of the EU also fear the return of border checks could reignite violence and make checkpoints a target.

In 1998, Britain and Ireland made the Good Friday Agreement to end 30 years of sectarian violence over whether Northern Ireland should remain British or join the Irish Republic. With both states in the EU, checks along the 500-km (300-mile) land border ended.

“The Irish-Irish border is a European border. The Brexit issue is not a bilateral question between the Republic of Ireland and the U.K. It’s a European issue,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said after talks with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in Brussels this month.

Asked to comment on the matter in the Irish parliament Thursday, Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said: “Deal or no deal, there is an obligation on the Irish and British governments, and the EU to try and work together to find a way of avoiding physical border infrastructure on this island.”

Hard choice

But an EU official familiar with the bloc’s preparations for a no-deal Brexit said: “In a no-deal scenario, Ireland would have to choose between setting up a physical border with Northern Ireland and de facto leaving the single market.

“If there is no physical border, the customs checks would have to take place on all goods coming from Ireland.”

The EU has made a point of publishing contingency plans for areas from transport to social benefits to university exchanges as the risk of an abrupt split grows. But it has kept silent on the Irish border.

Varadkar’s stark warning last month that the army may have to be deployed to the border “if things go very wrong” highlighted the risks.

The threat that Ireland could lose at least some access to the EU market is not lost on Varadkar who in Brussels spoke of Dublin’s readiness to protect the bloc’s common economic area.

“It’s core to our economic and industrial strategy, core to our prosperity,” he said standing side-by-side with Juncker, promising Ireland would not become a “back door” to the EU.

But while Ireland is promising the EU it would implement border checks, Varadkar also said: “We are making no preparations, no plans for physical infrastructure on the border.”

EU and Irish sources say the only way to ensure customs controls while avoiding border infrastructure is the backstop.

It envisages that many checks would be carried out away from the actual frontier — in market places or production sites.

“It is not possible to erect a border. It’s just impossible and a different solution needs to be found,” said a second EU official dealing with Brexit. “The backstop is our template. It is a solution that is ready and it works.”
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The European Parliament urged Saudi Arabia on Thursday to abolish its male guardianship system, under which women have to seek permission from their guardian on issues such as getting married, saying it and other rules reduce women to second-class citizens.

Parliamentarians also expressed concern over “government web services” that allow male guardians to track women when they cross borders. A Saudi application called Absher notifies men when women travel.

Although male guardianship has been chipped away at over the years it remains in force. Under the system, every Saudi women is assigned a male relative — often a father or husband but sometimes an uncle, brother or even a son — whose approval is needed if she is to marry, obtain a passport and travel abroad. In their resolution, approved by more than two thirds of the assembly, EU lawmakers urged the Saudi government to immediately abolish the system.

Current rules in the kingdom effectively make women “second-class citizens,” the document said. EU states should continue pressuring Riyadh on improving women conditions and human rights, lawmakers said.

Resolutions by the parliament are not binding but can influence decisions made by EU governments and EU institutions. The resolution passed a day after the EU executive commission added Saudi Arabia to its blacklist of countries that pose a threat because of lax controls on money laundering and terrorism financing.

The bloc’s relations with Saudi Arabia have cooled since the murder of Washington-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate on October 2.

Despite reforms introduced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that have reduced discrimination, such as the lifting of the driving ban for women, lawmakers said “the Saudi political and social system remains discriminatory.”

They urged the release from Saudi prisons of women’s rights defenders, including some who were arrested after campaigning to end the ban on women driving.

Lawmakers also called for an immediate moratorium on the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, where it is still applied to punish non-violent offenses, such as drug smuggling, treason, adultery and apostasy, they said.

The EU parliament passed a resolution in October urging an international investigation into Khashoggi’s killing and called on EU states to stop the sale of weapons to the kingdom.
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