ІНСАЙДЕР УКРАЇНА

Russia is not giving up on efforts to destabilize Afghanistan and drive divisions between the United States and its coalition partners, according to the outgoing commander of U.S. forces in the country.

The commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan and of Operation Resolute Support, General John Nicholson, is scheduled to step down Sunday after serving in the position for more than two years.

But before relinquishing command, he took time to cast doubts on Russia’s intentions in the region, despite recent overtures from Moscow to help the Taliban reconcile with the Afghan government.

“We know that Russia is attempting to undercut our military gains and years of military progress in Afghanistan, and make partners question Afghanistan’s stability,” Nicholson said in an email to Voice of America, following on questions from his August 22 briefing with Pentagon reporters.

“It is no secret that Russia seeks any opportunity it can find to drive a wedge between the United States and our Central Asian partners, including Afghanistan,” Nicholson added.

Aid to Taliban

U.S. and Afghan officials have previously accused Russia of meddling in Afghanistan by providing Taliban insurgents with both weapons and training.

Moscow has rejected the allegations, saying it has only political ties with the Taliban. Still, Russia has faced growing suspicion from the U.S. and its allies, who say the Kremlin has been increasingly working to expand its influence in Afghanistan and beyond.

Most recently, the U.S. and Russia have been competing over efforts to kick-start peace negotiations between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

Russia was set to host both parties, along with the U.S. and other countries, for talks starting September 4, but was forced to postpone after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani declined the invitation.

The U.S. also has been hoping for talks between the government and the Taliban.

“We talk about an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned reconciliation process,” U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis said during a briefing with reporters this past week. “We believe that the best way to get there is to ensure Taliban recognizes they can’t win on the battlefield, they must negotiate.”

But while U.S. officials have touted what they see are signs of progress, including increased support for a peace process from various sectors of the Afghan population, the government’s recent cease-fire offer to the Taliban appears to have fallen on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials have been angered by what they see as Russian efforts to derail peace and stabilization efforts with disinformation campaigns.

​Charges repeated

Just over a week ago, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova raised concerns about “unidentified” helicopters flying missions in support of fighters for the Islamic State terror group, also known as IS-Khorasan or IS-K, in the northern Sar-e-Pul province, suggesting the U.S. and NATO might be responsible.

“Who is arming the terrorists and secretly creating their bases?” she asked. “Why is this happening if NATO command is effectively in control of Afghanistan’s airspace?”

Pentagon officials rejected the suggestion of U.S. or NATO involvement as “completely untrue,” noting it was not the first time Moscow had levied such charges.

“As they [Russia] perpetuate false narratives about ISIS-K, the United States and the Afghan Special Security Forces eliminated the Jowzjan ISIS-K enclave and are killing ISIS-K leaders and fighters in Nangarhar,” Nicholson said in his statement to VOA.

Still, the outgoing commander said he held out hope Russia could play a constructive role. 

“We have shared interests with Russia in Afghanistan — peace, counterterrorism and counternarcotics,” Nicholson said. “We hope to see Russia support Afghanistan and the NATO-led coalition in these areas going forward.”

VOA’s Ayaz Gul contributed to this report.
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No one knows what will happen in the next 48 hours in Chemnitz, the Saxon town which this week saw the worst rioting in Germany in three decades, with mobs of far-right supporters and soccer hooligans overwhelming local police and beating anyone in the streets who appeared to be a foreigner while flashing illegal Nazi salutes.

Federal authorities and neighboring German states have sent police reinforcements to Saxony to confront any repeat of the violence seen on Monday, when more than 6,000 anti-migrant protesters rallied to vent their fury at the stabbing of a 35-year-old German man, Daniel Hillig, during a brawl with a pair of asylum-seekers from Syria and Iraq.

The stabbing came at the end of a street festival celebrating the 875th anniversary of Chemnitz, a declining industrial town of drab Communist-era apartment blocks with a population of 250,000.

With four anti-migrant rallies scheduled for Saturday alone — one organized by Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party that last year became the largest opposition faction in the German parliament, the Bundestag, as well as counterprotests planned by left wing groups — police are preparing for the worst.

So, too, are many store owners and the 20,000 migrants who live in Chemnitz, nestled in the foothills of the Ore Mountains, which during the Communist era was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Migrants contacted on social media say they fear for the worst.

“I won’t be going outside today [Saturday],” said Farid, a 46-year-old Moroccan who asked that his full name not be published. “And neither will my wife nor daughters,” he said.

“Will we ever be safe again?” he asked. Like many other migrants, what shocked him the most was spotting neighbors among the rioters screaming for foreigners to go home. “I wasn’t born here but my two daughters were — this is their home,” he added. He says the rioting this week, the pitched street battles between overwhelmed local police and the protesters and the hunting down of foreigners for beatings, have convinced him that a tipping point may have been reached in Chemnitz and Saxony — and “possibly in Germany as well.”

Simmering tensions

He’s not alone in harboring such a fear.

Alara, a 36-year-old Turkish woman, says she, too, has been shocked by the participation in the violent anti-migrant protests of middle-class German “neighbors and co-workers.” “I thought they were my friends,” she laments.

In the middle of the week, a shocked German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her fear that far right rioting, along with Hitler salutes that are banned in the country, and the confidence protesters demonstrated in flaunting their affection for a dark German past, represented a threat to the very underpinnings of the post-Second World War state.

“There is video footage of chases, rioting and hatred on the street. And that has nothing to do with our constitutional state,” she said. Tensions over migrants have roiled German politics since 2015, when Merkel announced an open-door policy for war refugees from the Middle East that saw more than 1.2 million admitted.  

Merkel’s controversial immigration policy fueled the rise of the AfD. The group’s electoral performance in last year’s elections, in which it seized nearly 100 seats in the Bundestag, marked a startling new phase in the party’s progress from the fringe of German politics closer to the center of power in Berlin. For far right opponents, the AfD’s election success, built on menacing social media propaganda playing on fears of Islam and Muslim criminality and on foreigners in general, represented a door opening on a German past they thought long buried.

The anti-migrant violence this week in Chemnitz — and the threat of more to come — is prompting questions about whether that door is opening even wider in Germany.

Well organized

Aside from the participation of “ordinary” locals, officials acknowledge they also were taken aback by the speed with which the anti-migrant protesters were reinforced, as well as the level of organization and coordination displayed by a variety of far right groups, including AfD, Pegida and the National Democratic Party. These groups glorify the Third Reich and have averted efforts by the government to ban it.

Saxony’s interior minister, Roland Woller, told media this week that known soccer hooligan groups with strong ties to the far right — and some with solidarity links to Russian fan-clubs and martial arts groups —  helped to mobilize people from across Germany and transport them to join the street battle.

German officials blame orchestrated “fake news” peddled by far right groups on social media sites for helping to stoke the rioting that broke out Monday. “We have to acknowledge that mobilization on the internet was stronger than in the past,” said Michael Kretschmer, the state prime minister of Saxony. The trouble was fueled partially by false claims that the stabbed man had intervened to protect a woman from being raped by asylum-seekers.

The showdown in Chemnitz could continue well into next week. A concert is planned for Monday by a left-wing band. But it is the planned Saturday night marches that now have the focus. In a statement announcing its march, the AfD called Daniel Hillig “the next, avoidable victim of an irresponsible government policy that accepts the multiple deaths of natives with icy coldness.”

“The cartel media have tried to make Chemnitz, the city of the victims, into a city of the perpetrators,” the AfD statement said.

AfD senses a huge opportunity in Chemnitz, say analysts, and is determined to stoke Germany’s political divisions over migration and national identity, hoping the agitation will translate into greater electoral gains in the future.  

 
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Poland says it lost more than 5 million citizens and over $54 billion dollars (46.6 billion euros) worth of assets under the Nazi German occupation of the country during World War II.

A parliamentary commission announced the numbers as part of the current Polish government’s declared intent to seek damages from Germany.

Poland spent decades under Soviet domination after the war and wasn’t able to seek damages independently. However, Germany is making payments to Polish survivors of Nazi atrocities.

Preliminary calculations done for the commission put the number of Polish citizens killed from 1939 to 1945 at 5.1 million, including 90 percent of Poland’s Jewish population.

Losses in cities were estimated to be worth 53 billion zlotys ($14 billion; 12 billion euros). Additional losses in agriculture and transportation infrastructure also were factored in.
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The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) warns asylum seekers and migrants who came ashore on the Greek islands are living in conditions unfit for human habitation. The agency is urging the Greek government to speed up the  transfer of these individuals to the mainland so they can receive proper care.

According to UNHCR, thousands of asylum seekers and migrants who made the perilous journey across the Aegean Sea are forced to live in squalid, overcrowded centers on the Greek islands of Lesbos, Samos, Chios and Kos.

For example, the agency said more than 7,000 asylum-seekers and migrants on Lesbos are crammed into shelters built to accommodate just 2,000 people, one-quarter of them children.

UNHCR spokesman Charlie Yaxley said these conditions are having a devastating impact on peoples’ well-being.

“We are seeing increasing numbers of people including children presenting with mental health problems,” he said. “… We are seeing rising levels of sexual assaults because there is insufficient security in place and the sanitary facilities as well. On recent missions to the islands, staff have commented that the sanitary facilities are essentially unusable in some cases.”

Yaxley noted an average of 114 people are arriving on the islands every day — more than 70 percent are families from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He said the new arrivals are adding to the congestion and deteriorating conditions.

The UNHCR said Greek authorities must do more to overcome bureaucratic delays that are preventing the speedy transfer of people to the mainland. If no ready solution can be found, it said extraordinary measures should be considered, including the use of emergency accommodations, hotels, and other alternative housing facilities.

However, at the request of the Greek government, the UNHCR said it has “exceptionally agreed to continue its support in transport of asylum-seekers to the mainland in September in order to avoid further delays.”
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The official media outlet of Russia-backed separatists in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine confirmed rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko had been killed on Friday.

The Donetsk News Agency said in a statement on its website that Zakharchenko had been killed in an explosion in central Donetsk, citing the rebel leader’s administration.
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Pope Francis was described Thursday by a top aide as ‘serene’ in the face of the unprecedented public skirmishing breaking out among Catholic prelates over an explosive charge that the pontiff knew about sexual misconduct allegations against a U.S. cardinal but chose to ignore them.

The Vatican’s secretary of state said Francis is maintaining his grace despite “bitterness and concern” in the Vatican over the accusation leveled against him by a onetime top Catholic envoy, who has demanded the Pope resign.

The Pope’s accuser, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador and a doctrinal opponent of Francis, has gone into hiding after making his claim last Sunday in a scathing 11-page document that was crafted with the assistance of a well-known Italian journalist and a stalwart critic of the Pope. According to Vigano, Francis ignored misconduct allegations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

The incendiary document, which also warned of a homosexual culture in the church, was leaked to several conservative Catholic newspapers and blogs, all determined foes of Francis. They agreed to publish it on the second and final day of Francis’s trip to Ireland, in a coordinated effort, say Francis loyalists, to cause him maximum damage.

The publication of the letter upended the visit to Ireland, where Pope Francis had hoped to stanch the damage being done to the Holy See by the clerical sex abuse crisis that has roiled the Roman Catholic Church worldwide for decades. Just two weeks before the Ireland trip, the Church was rocked by further clerical abuse allegations with the release of a grand jury report in the U.S. which detailed the abuse of children in six Pennsylvania dioceses over the past seven decades by hundreds of “predator priests.”

In Ireland, Pope Francis met Irish abuse victims and asked for the faithful to forgive the church for its failings. “We ask forgiveness for the times that we did not show [abuse] survivors compassion or the justice they deserve in the search for truth,” he said. And he then added: “We ask forgiveness for members of the Church hierarchy who did not take care of these situations and kept quiet.”

But Vigano says Francis is one of the church leaders who’s colluded in covering up abuse or has been too ready to overlook abuse allegations when leveled against friends and progressive allies. He has also claimed that a tolerant attitude towards homosexuality in the Vatican — even alleging a progressive gay cabal in the upper echelons of the Church — is the root cause of clerical sex abuse. Francis supporters scoff at that charge, noting that clerical sex abuse has been going on for decades and for most of that time traditionalists were in control of the Vatican.

‘Conspiracy of silence’

Midweek Vigano reemerged to give an interview to La Verità newspaper, saying he spoke up out of a sense of duty to the Catholic Church and not because the Pope had passed him over for promotion. “I have never had feelings of vendetta or rancor,” he said, adding that there is a “conspiracy of silence” in the Church “not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia.”

Vigano says Francis was aware of the grave allegations of sexual misconduct against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who’s been accused of abusing young priests and molesting seminarians for decades. Unlike his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, who imposed sanctions on McCarrick, Francis and his circle of advisers chose to rehabilitate the U.S. cardinal, argues Vigano.

The claims are shaking Francis’s five-year papacy.

Amid the swirl of charge and counter-charge between church liberals and conservatives locked in a power struggle, there’s mounting anxiety in the Vatican that traditionalists, opposed to the Pope’s efforts to make the Church more inclusive and less rigid doctrinally, are determined to use the clerical sex abuse scandal to gain politically.

The pope’s supporters say Francis’ doctrinal opponents won’t be satisfied until they have either forced him to resign, or so damaged him that he’s stripped of the authority needed to drive the reforms they’re determined to halt. They say traditionalists have been emboldened by the resignation of Benedict, whose stepping down as leader of the Catholic Church in 2013 made him the first pope to relinquish the office since 1415, setting a modern-day precedent for pontiffs not having to stay in office until they die.

Abuse survivors are also suspicious of the motives of Vigano and the circle of traditionalists supporting him. Despite their own frustrations with Francis at what they see as a failure by his Vatican to take concrete steps to root out corrupt clergy, they worry traditionalists are enlisting homophobia in their campaign against Francis and are not truly focused on the well-being of abuse survivors.

Not a word

Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, one of the Pope’s closest advisers, dismissed Vigano’s attacks, telling La Repubblica newspaper Thursday, “Transforming information of a private nature into a bombshell headline that explodes around the world damaging the faith of many people doesn’t seem to me to be a correct action.” But Maradiaga did not engage with the details of Vigano’s central charge — that the pope ignored misconduct allegations against McCarrick, who last month resigned, becoming the first cardinal to do so since 1927.

Francis, too, has continued to remain silent about McCarrick.

The 81-year-old pope told journalists who accompanied him on his two-day visit to Ireland that he wouldn’t comment. Asked in an impromptu press conference on board his plane on the return to Rome about Vigano’s accusation, the Pope said he left it up to the journalists to judge for themselves. “I won’t say a word about it,” he said.

Vatican analysts say the Holy See appears to be hoping that by ignoring the substance of the claim against Francis, the storm can be ridden out.  But they warn that appears to be a forlorn hope — by shunning the charge, Francis is fueling it and prompting the question, ‘why won’t the pope answer?’ If the claim is inaccurate, “why wouldn’t the pope correct it, just as he has spoken so openly about so many other things?” queried commentator Tim Stanley in a commentary for the London Sunday Telegraph.

Francis’ conservative critics are gearing up to press formally for an answer. In an open letter to his diocese in Tyler, Texas, Bishop Joseph Strickland midweek said: “Let us be clear that they are still allegations, but as your shepherd I find them to be credible.” He says he will agitate for an investigation.

Other prelates are plotting to do so as well, next month in Rome at a synod of bishops to discuss young people and faith.

The Diocese of Dallas in Texas has petitioned the Pope to hold a special synod, or summit, of bishops on the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Progressives started to rally Friday around Francis with prelates from Latin America, the pope’s home continent, as well as Portugal  leading the charge.

Of the accusations, Cardinal António dos Santos Marto, of Fatima, Portugal, told the Observador newspaper, “It’s a campaign organized by ultra-conservatives to mortally wound the pope.”

Marto predicted Francis will be strengthened by the controversy, adding, however, that “in this moment it’s necessary for the entire Church to manifest her support for the pope.” He said Francis may soon switch tactics and address head-on the accusations against him.

Francis also received backing from a top aide to his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Archbishop Georg Ganswein dismissed Vigano’s claim that Benedict had informed Francis of the misconduct allegations against McCarrick. He told Italian newspapers Friday: “It’s all rubbish.”

 
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Iran has remained within the main restrictions on its nuclear activities imposed by a 2015 deal with major powers, a confidential report by the U.N. atomic watchdog indicated Thursday.

In its second quarterly report since President Donald Trump announced in May that the United States would quit the accord and reimpose sanctions, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had stayed within the caps on uranium enrichment levels, enriched uranium stocks and other items.

In its last report in May, the IAEA had said Iran could do more to cooperate with inspectors and thereby “enhance confidence”, but stopped short of saying the Islamic Republic had given it cause for concern. Thursday’s report to member states seen by Reuters contained similar language.

It said the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog was able to carry out all so-called complementary access inspections needed to verify Iran’s compliance with the deal.

“Timely and proactive cooperation by Iran in providing such access facilitates implementation of the Additional Protocol and enhances confidence,” said the report, which was distributed to IAEA member states.

“The production rate [of enriched uranium] is constant. There is no change whatsoever,” a senior diplomat added.

With the United States reimposing its sanctions on Iran that were lifted under the nuclear deal, many diplomats and analysts now doubt that the accord will survive despite European Union efforts to counter some of the effects of Trump’s move.

Sticking to the nuclear accord is not the only way forward for Iran, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Thursday. “Being the party to still honor the deal in deeds & not just words is not Iran’s only option,” he said on Twitter.

​EU action urged

Speaking after the IAEA report was sent to the agency’s member states, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the deal was still holding, despite the U.S. withdrawal.

He urged his fellow ministers, who met in Vienna on Thursday to discuss EU policy on Iran, to do more to protect Tehran from U.S. sanctions, calling for “permanent financial mechanisms that allow Iran to continue to trade.”

The EU implemented a law this month to shield European companies from the impact of U.S. sanctions on Tehran and has approved aid for the Iranian private sector, although large European companies are pulling out of Iran.

Adhering to the deal should bring Iran economic benefits, Zarif said. “If preserving [the accord] is the goal, then there is no escape from mustering the courage to comply with commitment to normalize Iran’s economic relations instead of making extraneous demands,” Zarif wrote on Twitter.

On Wednesday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cast doubt on the ability of EU countries to save the agreement and said Tehran might abandon it.

Khamenei told President Hassan Rouhani not to rely too much on European support as he came under increased pressure at home over his handling of the economy in the face of U.S. sanctions, with key ministers under attack by parliament.

Le Drian, whose country signed the Iran deal along with Britain, Germany, China, Russia and the United States under then-President Barack Obama, said Tehran should be ready to negotiate on its future nuclear plans, its ballistic missile arsenal and its role in wars in Syria and Yemen.

Those issues were not covered by the 2015 deal, and Trump has cited this as a major reason for pulling Washington out of it.

Le Drian said Iran, which says its missiles are only for defense, was arming regional allies with rockets and allowing “ballistic proliferation,” adding: “Iran needs to avoid the temptation to be the [regional] hegemon.”

Iran has ruled out negotiations on its ballistic missiles and broader Middle Eastern role.
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The Taliban urged Afghan soldiers on Thursday to attack Dutch troops serving in the NATO-led Resolute Support mission in retaliation for a contest of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad planned by far-right

politician Geert Wilders.

The Taliban threat was issued shortly before Wilders announced Thursday that he was calling off the contest because it posed too great a threat of provoking violence against innocents.

In a statement, the Taliban’s main spokesman called the contest a blasphemous action and a hostile act by the Netherlands against all Muslims.

Members of the Afghan security forces, “if they truly believe themselves to be Muslims or have any covenant towards Islam, should turn their weapons on Dutch troops” or help Taliban fighters attack them, the statement said.

Around 100 Dutch troops are serving in the 16,000-strong Resolute Support mission to train and advise Afghan forces, according to the Dutch defense ministry. About half of the NATO-led force is made up of Americans.

Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party, which has become the second largest in the Netherlands, announced the competition in June, saying it had the right to hold it under freedom-of-speech laws.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte had said that he didn’t support the planned contest but that he would defend Wilders’ right to hold it.

Images of the Prophet Muhammad are traditionally forbidden in Islam, and caricatures are regarded by most Muslims as deeply offensive.

In 2005, a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet that sparked a wave of protests across the world. Ten years later, Islamist gunmen killed 12 people in an attack on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had published similar caricatures.
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The Trump administration told Russia on Thursday to stop what it said was harassment of international shipping vessels in the Sea of Azov and Kerch Strait aimed at trying to weaken Ukraine’s economy.

“Russia’s actions to impede maritime transit are further examples of its ongoing campaign to undermine and destabilize Ukraine, as well as its disregard for international norms,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement. 

The U.S. accused Russia of delaying commercial ships since April and stopping at least 16 commercial ships from reaching Ukranian ports.

Relations between Russia and Ukraine have deteriorated since Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region and provoked conflict between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko observed Ukraine’s Independence Day last week by announcing that his country had “cut all ties with the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.”

The Kremlin did not immediately respond to the U.S. request. 
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The United States cannot guarantee that it will provide India a waiver from sanctions if it purchases major weapon and defense systems from Russia, a top Pentagon official said on Wednesday, ahead of a high-level dialogue between Washington and New Delhi.

The United States has imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia, under which any country engaged with its defense and intelligence sectors could face secondary U.S. sanctions.

However, a new defense bill gives the president the authority to grant waivers in case of national security interests.

Randall Schriver, the Pentagon’s top Asia official, said there was an “impression that we are going to completely protect the India relationship, insulate India from any fallout from this legislation no matter what they do.” 

Media reports from the region have suggested that India would get a waiver.

“I would say that is a bit misleading. We would still have very significant concerns if India pursued major new platforms and systems (from Russia),” Schriver said at a think tank event.

“I can’t sit here and tell you that they would be exempt, that we would use that waiver, that will be the decision of the president if he is faced with a major new platform and capability that India has acquired from Russia,” he added.

The Indian embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has publicly been a strong proponent of granting India waivers.

The United States is concerned about India’s planned purchase of Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile systems, Schriver said. Russia has said it expects to sign a deal with India later this year on the sale.

On Tuesday, Mattis said the United States was also concerned about Turkey’s purchase of the Russian missile defense system, which cannot be integrated into NATO. Schriver said the United States was willing to talk to India about potential alternatives.

Senior U.S. officials are expected to go to India next week for high level talks, agreed upon by U.S. President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year. 

The meeting was originally planned for April but was postponed after Trump fired Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. Washington put off the meeting for a second time in June.

 
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Germany announced a new agency on Wednesday to fund research on cybersecurity and to end its reliance on digital technologies from the United States, China and other countries.

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told reporters that Germany needed new tools to become a top player in cybersecurity and shore up European security and independence.

“It is our joint goal for Germany to take a leading role in cybersecurity on an international level,” Seehofer told a news conference with Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen. “We have to acknowledge we’re lagging behind, and when one is lagging, one needs completely new approaches.”

The agency is a joint interior and defense ministry project.

Germany, like many other countries, faces a daily barrage of cyberattacks on its government and industry computer networks.

However, the opposition Greens criticized the project. “This agency wouldn’t increase our information technology security, but further endanger it,” said Greens lawmaker Konstantin von Notz.

The agency’s work on offensive capabilities would undermine Germany’s diplomatic efforts to limit the use of cyberweapons internationally, he said. “As a state based on the rule of law, we can only lose a cyberpolitics arms race with states like China, North Korea or Russia,” he added, calling for “scarce resources” to be focused on hardening vulnerable systems.

Germany and other European countries also worry about their dependence on U.S. technologies. This follows revelations in 2012 by U.S. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden of a massive spying network, as well as the U.S. Patriot Act which gave the U.S. government broad powers to compel companies to provide data.

“As a federal government we cannot stand idly by when the use of sensitive technology with high security relevance are controlled by other governments. We must secure and expand such key technologies of our digital infrastructure,” Seehofer said.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Senegal late Wednesday on a three-nation West African visit focusing on economic development and migration.

Merkel is meeting with the presidents of Senegal, Ghana and then Nigeria as she presses for further investment in a region that is a source of many of the migrants who make their perilous way toward Europe.

Migrant arrivals in Europe across the Mediterranean from Africa and Turkey are at their lowest level in five years, but the issue remains sensitive. Merkel, who refused to close Germany’s borders at the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, has toughened her stance recently to salvage her government from a rift over the issue.

Some in Europe hope that investing more in West Africa will help keep people in a region plagued with unemployment, dodgy infrastructure, rising extremism and now the effects of climate change from leaving.

“We must fight illegality but also create legality and conditions for work here on the ground,” Merkel said after meeting with Senegalese President Macky Sall, according to her spokesman Steffen Seibert. “We want to help with the future.”

A day before leaving for Africa, the German leader hosted U2 frontman Bono for a discussion on Africa and its “development opportunities,” the Chancellery said in an Instagram post .

Senegal and Ghana are two of Africa’s fastest-growing economies and among its most stable countries. Both have signed on to the Compact with Africa initiative to promote private investment that Germany launched last year during its presidency of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations.

Nigeria is West Africa’s regional power, Africa’s most populous country and one of the continent’s top oil producers. It is plagued, however, by widespread corruption and security threats that include Boko Haram and Islamic State-linked extremists in the north, violent clashes between herders and farmers in the central region and oil militants in the south.

Merkel on Tuesday spoke with the new leader of another of Africa’s top economies, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, and invited him to visit, his chief of staff Fitsum Arega said on Twitter. Germany is just one of the countries responding with curiosity to the recent reconciliation between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea, with Germany’s development minister visiting the long-reclusive country last week.
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The U.N. human rights chief says threatened U.S. funding cuts wouldn’t be “fatal” for his office, but says he hopes other countries won’t follow suit.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein insisted “the office will continue to survive” even if the U.S. carries out the promise made by U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton in an interview with The Associated Press last week.

Zeid told reporters Wednesday that “clearly what one doesn’t want to see is a whole series of withdrawals and withdrawal of funding.”

Bolton’s pledge that the U.S. will cut funding to the rights office, and the U.N.’s top human rights body was the latest Trump administration salvo against U.N. institutions.

The U.S. is the U.N.’s largest single donor, providing about 22 percent of its budget.

 
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Pope Francis lamented Wednesday how Irish church authorities failed to respond to the crimes of sexual abuse, speaking during his first public appearance at the Vatican after bombshell accusations that he himself covered up for an American cardinal’s misdeeds.

Francis presided over his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square and spoke about his weekend trip to Ireland, where the abuse scandal has devastated the Catholic Church’s credibility.

The final day of the trip was overshadowed by release of a document from a retired Holy See diplomat accusing Vatican authorities, including Francis, of covering up for ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick despite knowing for years that he regularly slept with seminarians.

The author of the document — retired Vatican ambassador to the U.S., Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano — said Francis should resign for his complicity in the McCarrick scandal, which has implicated two decades’ worth of U.S. and Vatican church leaders.

Francis referred Wednesday to the Irish culture of cover-up, but he omitted from his remarks a line in his prepared text noting how he had prayed in Ireland for the Virgin Mary to intervene to give the church strength to “firmly pursue truth and justice” to help victims heal.

U.S. bishops, as well as rank-and-file Catholics, have called for an independent investigation to find out who knew about McCarrick’s abuse and when, and how he was able to rise through the ranks even though it was an open secret that he regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house and into his bed.

Francis last month removed McCarrick as a cardinal and ordered him to live a lifetime of penance and prayer after a U.S. church investigation determined that an allegation he groped a teenage altar boy in the 1970s was credible.

Vigano’s 11-page j’accuse alleges that Francis knew of McCarrick’s penchant for adult seminarians starting in 2013, but rehabilitated him from sanctions that Pope Benedict XVI had allegedly imposed on him in 2009 or 2010. The claims have shaken Francis’ five-year papacy.

There is ample evidence, however, that the Vatican under Benedict and St. John Paul II also covered up the information, and that any reported sanctions Benedict imposed were never enforced since McCarrick travelled widely for the church during those years, including to Rome to meet with Benedict and celebrate Mass with other U.S. bishops at the tomb of St. Peter.

Vigano provided no evidence that Francis had lifted the alleged sanctions, saying only that McCarrick announced after a meeting with the pope that he was going to China.

But he said McCarrick had become a close adviser to Francis, who was seeking to appoint more pastorally-minded bishops to the U.S. church, which he believed had become too ideologically driven by right-wingers.

 
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British officials have been turning to Japan for tips on how to dodge American sanctions on Iran, according to local media.

Britain is already seeking from Washington exemptions from some U.S. sanctions, which are being re-imposed by President Donald Trump because of the U.S. withdrawal earlier this year from a controversial 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. The British are especially keen to maintain banking links with Iran and to import Iranian oil.

According to local media, U.K. officials have been asking their Japanese counterparts how they managed in the past to sidestep some aspects of the pre-2015 sanctions regime, which allowed Tokyo to sign oil deals with Iran as well as insurance contracts without incurring U.S. penalties.

Re-imposed U.S. sanctions penalize any foreign companies that deal with Iran by barring them from doing business in America. That threat has already persuaded more than 50 Western firms to shutter their operations in Iran, including French automakers Renault and Peugeot and the French oil giant Total as well as Germany’s Deutsche Bahn railway company and Deutsche Telekom.

Seeking waivers

British ministers have publicly announced that they are hoping to secure waivers from sanctions for oil imports, tanker insurance and banking. There is particular concern, say British officials, about the position of a gas field 240 miles from Aberdeen which is jointly owned by BP and a subsidiary of Iran’s state-controlled oil company.

According to The Times newspaper, British diplomats and Treasury officials have discussed with their Japanese counterparts what options they may have of evading penalties, if British firms continue to trade with Iran. Britain’s Foreign Office hasn’t commented on the specific claims in report. But in a general statement it says: “We are working with European and other partners, to ensure Iran continues to benefit from sanctions relief through legitimate business, for as long as Iran continues to meet its nuclear commitments under the deal.”

Faltering Iranian economy

On Tuesday, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani was grilled by the country’s lawmakers, who for the first time in his five-year tenure called him before parliament to answer questions about the country’s faltering economy amid the tightening U.S. sanctions.

They asked him about high unemployment, rising food prices and the collapsing value of the Iranian currency. Rouhani, who overcame the opposition of hardliners in the first place to sign the 2015 nuclear deal with the U.S. and other world powers, insisted Iran would overcome the “the anti-Iranian officials in the White House.”

He added: “We are not afraid of America or the economic problems. We will overcome the troubles.” His answers didn’t reassure lawmakers, who voted to reject most of them. Earlier this month the parliament impeached the economy and labor ministers amid growing anger about the economy.

In order to try to keep open financial channels with Tehran and facilitate Iran’s oil exports, the European Union has taken steps to counter renewed U.S. sanctions, including forbidding EU citizens and firms from complying with them.

The European Commission updated a blocking statute on August 7, which bans companies from observing the sanctions — unless expressly authorized by Brussels to do so. It would allow EU firms to recover damages arising from the sanctions. But many companies say they are fearful of losing current or potential business in the U.S.

“Under these conditions it is very difficult,” according to the Director for International Relations at BusinessEurope, a lobby group, Luisa Santos. She says even small and medium-sized businesses which don’t trade with U.S. will face significant challenges because they will need financing from Western banks.

The first round of U.S. nuclear sanctions on Iran officially snapped back into place earlier this month but the more biting sanctions will be re-imposed on November 4 as Washington seeks to pummel the Iranian economy. The first phase U.S. sanctions prohibit any transactions with Iran involving dollars, gold, precious metals, aluminum, steel, commercial passenger aircraft, shipping and Iranian seaports.

Earlier in August, Woody Johnson, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, cautioned there would be trade consequences for Britain, which he described as the closest U.S. ally, unless London breaks with the EU and abides by the re-imposed sanctions on Tehran.

The envoy also delivered a clear ultimatum to British businesses, instructing them to stop trading with Iran or face “serious consequences.”

Trump’s decision in May to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal, signed by his predecessor Barack Obama, in which Tehran agreed to nuclear curbs in return for sanctions relief, paved the way for the restoration of unilateral American economic penalties on Iran.

The U.S. administration blames Iran for fomenting instability in the Middle East and encouraging terrorism. Trump has described the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as a “horrible, one sided” agreement.

U.S. officials say Iran has used the money going into the country after the 2015 deal, when sanctions were eased, not to improve the lives of ordinary Iranians but to increase spending on the military and proxy forces in the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and militants in Yemen.
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President Vladimir Putin hinted on Tuesday he was ready to soften an unpopular proposal to reform the pension system which has pushed his approval rating down to its lowest level in more than four years.

He said he would deliver his views in a public statement on the issue, perhaps as soon as Wednesday, adding he was aware of public unhappiness about the proposed reform and decisions had to be undertaken cautiously.

“I ask you not to forget that our decisions will affect the fates of millions of people and must be fair. One should not act mechanically, formally, but only take a balanced and cautious approach,” Putin said.

Lawmakers, in a preliminary vote in July, backed a government proposal to sharply raise the retirement age, part of a controversial budget package designed to shore up state finances.

Putin, who once promised never to raise the retirement age, had until now been careful to distance himself from the proposed reforms, which envisage raising the retirement age to 65 from 60 for men and to 63 from 55 for women.

Polls show that around 90 percent of the population oppose the proposed reform.

But on Tuesday he told a government meeting in the Siberian city of Omsk that he would soon intervene.

“In the nearest future, maybe even tomorrow, I will formulate my attitude [to the reform] in detail and will make the respective statement.”

Putin said any decision on the pension system had to be balanced and cautious. He said he was aware of the public’s extremely negative reaction to the proposed reform.

“Of course, all this has drawn a predictable reaction, a rather sharp discussion in public,” Putin said, adding that any changes in the pension age must provide a decent standard of living for Russia’s 147 million-strong population.

‘Politically sensitive’

The retirement age proposal is politically sensitive for Putin, who was re-elected in March, because it has prompted a series of protests across Russia since it was announced on June 14, the day Russia played the first match of its soccer World Cup.

According to opinion polls, Putin’s approval ratings have fallen to levels last seen before Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea which provided the Russian leader with a popularity boost.

Putin’s spokesman on Tuesday dismissed speculation that Putin had been pushed into addressing the issue by a drop in his approval ratings, however.

While Putin said authorities could not act “routinely” and “formally” when it came to reforming the pension system, he made clear that some kind of reform was needed though.

“… We need to take into account the current situation in the economy and the labor market, we must understand what the future holds for the country in 10, 20 and even 30 years,” Putin said.

He said he had asked the government to consult with political parties, public organizations and regional administrations to review the legislation before its second reading in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

Lawmakers passed the bill in the first reading in July. To become law, the bill must pass three readings in the State Duma and must then be approved by the upper house and finally signed into law by the president.

 
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Russia has deployed several frigates to the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus, an analysis of shipping traffic showed, part of what a Russian newspaper on Tuesday called Moscow’s largest naval buildup since it entered the Syrian conflict in 2015.

The reinforcement comes as Russia’s ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is believed to be considering an assault on the last big rebel-held enclave, Idlib in the north.

Russia has accused the United States of building up its own forces in the Middle East in preparation for a possible strike on Syrian government forces.

On Saturday, the Admiral Grigorovich and Admiral Essen frigates sailed through Istanbul’s Bosphorus towards the Mediterranean, Reuters pictures showed.

The day before, the Pytlivy frigate and landing ship Nikolai Filchenkov were pictured sailing through the Turkish straits that connect the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. The Vishny Volochek missile corvette passed through earlier this month.

The Izvestia newspaper said Russia had gathered its largest naval presence in the Mediterranean Sea since it intervened in Syria in 2015, turning the tide in Assad’s favor.

The force included 10 vessels, most of them armed with long-range Kalibr cruise missiles, Izvestia wrote, adding that more were on the way, and that two submarines had also been deployed.
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