ІНСАЙДЕР УКРАЇНА

Thousands of people have taken to Twitter to say “enough” to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, opposing his bid to run for re-election on June 24.

“Tamam” – which roughly translate as “that’s enough” – became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter on Tuesday hours after Erdogan, who has been in power for the past 15 years, said he would step aside “if my people say ‘that’s enough.’”

More than 480,000 tweets with the word “tamam” were posted by the late afternoon. (Check here for a current count – VOA)

Three of Erdogan’s rivals – Meral Aksener, Muharrem Ince and Temel Karamollaoglu – also joined the fray.

Erdogan called snap presidential and parliamentary elections a year and a half before schedule. The elections will usher in a new executive presidential system that increases the powers of the president.
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Army wife Angela Ricketts was soaking in a bubble bath in her Colorado home, leafing through a memoir, when a message appeared on her iPhone:

“Dear Angela!” it said. “Bloody Valentine’s Day!”

“We know everything about you, your husband and your children,” the Facebook message continued, claiming that the hackers operating under the flag of Islamic State militants had penetrated her computer and her phone. “We’re much closer than you can even imagine.”

Ricketts was one of five military wives who received death threats from the self-styled CyberCaliphate on the morning of Feb. 10, 2015. The warnings led to days of anguished media coverage of Islamic State militants’ online reach.

Except it wasn’t IS

The Associated Press has found evidence that the women were targeted not by jihadists but by the same Russian hacking group that intervened in the American election and exposed the emails of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta.

The false flag is a case study in the difficulty of assigning blame in a world where hackers routinely borrow one another’s identities to throw investigators off track. The operation also parallels the online disinformation campaign by Russian trolls in the months leading up to the U.S. election in 2016.

Links between CyberCaliphate and the Russian hackers — typically nicknamed Fancy Bear or APT28 — have been documented previously. On both sides of the Atlantic, the consensus is that the two groups are closely related.

But that consensus never filtered through to the women involved, many of whom were convinced they had been targeted by Islamic State sympathizers right up until the AP contacted them.

“Never in a million years did I think that it was the Russians,” said Ricketts, an author and advocate for veterans and military families. She called the revelation “mind blowing.”

“It feels so hilarious and insidious at the same time.”

`Completely new ground’

As Ricketts scrambled out of the tub to show the threat to her husband, nearly identical messages reached Lori Volkman, a deputy prosecutor based in Oregon who had won fame as a blogger after her husband deployed to the Middle East; Ashley Broadway-Mack, based in the Washington, D.C., area and head of an association for gay and lesbian military family members; and Amy Bushatz, an Alaska-based journalist who covers spouse and family issues for Military.com.

Liz Snell, the wife of a U.S. Marine, was at her husband’s retirement ceremony in California when her phone rang. The Twitter account of her charity, Military Spouses of Strength, had been hacked. It was broadcasting public threats not only to herself and the other spouses, but also to their families and then-first lady Michelle Obama.

Snell flew home to Michigan from the ceremony, took her children and checked into a Comfort Inn for two nights.

“Any time somebody threatens your family, Mama Bear comes out,” she said.

The women determined they had all received the same threats. They were also all quoted in a CNN piece about the hacking of a military Twitter feed by CyberCaliphate only a few weeks earlier. In it, they had struck a defiant tone. After they received the threats, they suspected that CyberCaliphate singled them out for retaliation.

The women refused to be intimidated.

“Fear is exactly what — at the time — we perceived ISIS wanted from military families,” said Volkman, using another term for the Islamic State group.

Volkman was quoted in half a dozen media outlets; Bushatz wrote an article describing what happened; Ricketts, interviewed as part of a Fox News segment devoted to the menace of radical Islam, told TV host Greta Van Susteren that the nature of the threat was changing.

“Military families are prepared to deal with violence that’s directed toward our soldiers,” she said. “But having it directed toward us is just complete new ground.”

`We might be surprised’

A few weeks after the spouses were threatened, on April 9, 2015, the signal of French broadcaster TV5 Monde went dead.

The station’s network of routers and switches had been knocked out and its internal messaging system disabled. Pasted across the station’s website and Facebook page was the keffiyeh-clad logo of CyberCaliphate.

The cyberattack shocked France, coming on the heels of jihadist massacres at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket that left 17 dead. French leaders decried what they saw as another blow to the country’s media. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said evidence suggested the broadcaster was the victim of an act of terror.

But Guillaume Poupard, the chief of France’s cybersecurity agency, pointedly declined to endorse the minister’s comments when quizzed about them the day after the hack.

“We should be very prudent about the origin of the attack,” he told French radio. “We might be surprised.”

Government experts poring over the station’s stricken servers eventually vindicated Poupard’s caution, finding evidence they said pointed not to the Middle East but to Moscow.

Speaking to the AP last year, Poupard said the attack “resembles a lot what we call collectively APT28.”

Russian officials in Washington and in Moscow did not respond to questions seeking comment. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied masterminding hacks against Western targets.

‘The media played right into it’

Proof that the military wives were targeted by Russian hackers is laid out in a digital hit list provided to the AP by the cybersecurity company Secureworks last year. The AP has previously used the list of 4,700 Gmail addresses to outline the group’s espionage campaign against journalists, defense contractors and U.S. officials. More recent AP research has found that Fancy Bear, which Secureworks dubs “Iron Twilight,” was actively trying to break into the military wives’ mailboxes around the time that CyberCaliphate struck.

Lee Foster, a manager with cybersecurity company FireEye, said the repeated overlap between Russian hackers and CyberCaliphate made it all but certain that the groups were linked.

“Just think of your basic probabilities,” he said.

CyberCaliphate faded from view after the TV5 Monde hack, but the over-the-top threats issued by the gang of make-believe militants found an echo in the anti-Muslim sentiment whipped up by the St. Petersburg troll farm — an organization whose operations were laid bare by a U.S. special prosecutor’s indictment earlier this year.

The trolls — Russian employees paid to seed American social media with disinformation — often hyped the threat of Islamic State militants to the United States. A few months before CyberCaliphate first won attention by hijacking various media organizations’ Twitter accounts, for example, the trolls were spreading false rumors about an Islamic State attack in Louisiana and a counterfeit video appearing to show an American soldier firing into a Quran .

The AP has found no link between CyberCaliphate and the St. Petersburg trolls, but their aims appeared to be the same: keep tension at a boil and radical Islam in the headlines.

By that measure, CyberCaliphate’s targeting of media outlets like TV5 Monde and the military spouses succeeded handily.

Ricketts, the author, said that by planting threats with some of the most vocal members of the military community, CyberCaliphate guaranteed maximum press coverage.

“Not only did we play right into their hands by freaking out, but the media played right into it,” she said. “We reacted in a way that was probably exactly what they were hoping for.”
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Hundreds of rebels left the last major besieged opposition enclave in Syria on Monday, with thousands more expected to follow, responding to months of pressure by a Russian-backed government offensive, the army, rebels and residents said.

A first convoy of buses with hundreds of rebels and their families, accompanied by Russian military police, departed from the city of Rastan, starting a weeklong evacuation from towns and villages in an enclave between the cities of Homs and Hama.

Rebels representing several major Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions capitulated to a Russian-imposed deal after marathon talks with Russian generals May 2 in Dar al Kabira town in the northern Homs countryside.

The deal forced them to hand in heavy weapons and gave those rebels not ready to make peace with the army the option of leaving with light arms to rebel-held areas in northern Syria.

Draft dodgers would have a six-month reprieve.

Russia exerted pressure by pounding the main towns of the enclave, where over 300,000 inhabitants live, in an escalation that killed and wounded dozens, rebels and residents said.

The Russians closed a border crossing near a key road to prevent civilians fleeing, to raise pressure on mainstream rebels to accept the terms, rebels and residents said.

Fears that Russia and its Syrian ally would unleash an even tougher push, on the scale that ended rebel control of Aleppo in 2016 and eastern Ghouta last month, prompted the capitulation to spare civilian lives, residents and civilian negotiators said.

“They left rebels with no option after bombing civilians and giving them no choice either to submit or obliterate their areas and make civilians pay the price,” Abul Aziz al Barazi, one of the civilian opposition negotiators, told Reuters.

Bombing

The war has been going President Bashar al-Assad’s way since Russia intervened on his side in 2015. From holding less than a fifth of Syria in 2015, Assad has recovered to control the largest chunk of the country with Russian and Iranian help.

A major bombing campaign that began last February ended the last remaining pockets of opposition resistance in the eastern Ghouta, the biggest enclave around the capital, that had for years withstood a siege and successive army onslaughts.

The fall of the once-heavily defended Ghouta demoralized rebels in other areas further east of the capital closer to the Iraqi border and in a southern Damascus pocket.

Now the only besieged area left is a small enclave in southern Damascus, where a few hundred Islamic State militants are making a last stand as aerial strikes devastate the once-teeming major Palestinian camp of Yarmouk, Syria’s largest, and nearby Hajar al Aswad town.

The last batch of rebels in the remaining south Damascus pockets, which includes the towns of Babila, Yalda and Beit Sahem, are expected to leave this week.

Fear of revenge

The Homs and Hama rebel enclave deal leaves the mainly Sunni civilians unprotected, leaving many residents there afraid of revenge by militias from surrounding Alawite villages.

Accordingly, rebels in the enclave say that under the agreement they have gained assurances that the Russian military police would spread out and man checkpoints around the enclave for a renewable six-month period. The rebels see the move as a guarantee against the entry of paramilitary pro-Assad militias.

While Syria’s conflict is in part a proxy struggle among great powers, it also has a sectarian element pitting the mainly Sunni-led rebels against the minority Alawite community to which Assad’s family belongs.

In the latest deal and in other areas, many have opted to stay and make peace with the army rather than leave their homes for an uncertain future in refugee camps in northern Syria.

The opposition accuse the authorities of pushing demographic changes that uproot Sunnis. The authorities deny this and say many civilians were held hostage by forces they call terrorists.
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The court examining war crimes against ethnic Serbs in Kosovo said on Monday it has appointed a new chief prosecutor, who will pick up the court’s efforts to issue its first indictments, three years after it was established.

The court said U.S. prosecutor Jack Smith will succeed fellow American David Schwendiman, who stepped down March 31, a setback for the court, which politicians in Kosovo have long tried to abolish.

The Specialist Chamber was set up in The Hague in 2015 to handle cases of alleged crimes by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas during the 1998-99 war that led to the country’s secession from Serbia.

The court has yet to hear any cases. Its prosecutors and judges are foreign, but it was established under Kosovan law and comes under Pristina’s jurisdiction. Kosovo lawmakers only this year gave up an attempt to repeal the law that created it.

Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, nearly a decade after a NATO bombing campaign drove out Serbian troops.

NATO launched the action in response to attacks by Serbian forces against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority during a two-year counter-insurgency war against the KLA.

Crimes committed by Serbian forces were punished by a Yugoslavia tribunal that closed in December last year, but incidents carried out by the KLA were mostly not covered.
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The ruling Czech ANO party expects a deal on a coalition with the Social Democrats (CSSD) by Friday, ANO chairman and Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on Monday.

The ANO won elections last October but fell short of a parliamentary majority and since then most parties have refused to cooperate with it because Babis faces fraud charges. An ANO minority cabinet lost a vote of confidence in January and has since ruled as a caretaker.

“[The agenda] is in the final stages, I believe it will be absolutely clear by Friday and then we will only wait for the (CSSD) referendum,” Babis told reporters after the meeting.

He referred to an internal vote among CSSD members, which the party leadership may launch as soon as Friday. The result is expected in early June. Babis said he planned to have a confidence vote in the parliament by the end of June.

Neither Babis, nor Social Democratic chairman Jan Hamacek would comment on specific items on the new government’s agenda such as a special tax on banks the Social Democrats want or steeper progression of income tax for the highest earners.

Notes from previous meetings of the ANO and CSSD seen by Reuters showed that the ANO would reject both ideas. CSSD chairman Hamacek said that the agreement should be acceptable to his party colleagues.

“Speaking for myself, the text which we have, is acceptable … all problems are solved. I regard the coalition agreement as solved,” he said.

The parties also agreed that if all CSSD ministers resigned, the whole government would follow suit, Hamacek said.

The leaders declined to comment on the other key CSSD demand: that Babis resign if found guilty in an investigation into charges of illegally tapping EU subsidies. He denies the police charges and the case is yet to go to trial.

If the agreement holds, the two parties would still need a support from a third party, the Communists, to win a confidence vote. It would be the first participation of the Communists on power, however indirect, since their  totalitarian rule fell during the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Their limited role, with no cabinet seats, would not bring the kind of policy changes that have sparked conflict between the EU and Hungary and Poland. But it would still anger many Czechs who suffered under their rule.

ANO has also cooperated with the far-right, anti-EU and anti-NATO SPD party in parliament, even considering leaning on it for support for a minority government. That helped the SPD to fill the post of the deputy speaker and chair some committees.

The Social Democrats have demanded SPD officials be ousted from these positions to prevent the ANO seeking support from the anti-Islam party in case of coalition squabbles. Both Babis and Hamacek declined to comment.
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Britain’s Foreign Secretary is set to lobby the Trump administration to remain a party to the 2015 agreement struck between Iran and world powers to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Boris Johnson is meeting Monday with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and National Security Adviser John Bolton with Iran as one of the top agenda items, according to Johnson’s office.

“The UK, U.S., and European partners are also united in our effort to tackle the kind of Iranian behavior that makes the Middle East region less secure – its cyber activities, its support for groups like Hezbollah, and its dangerous missile program, which is arming Houthi militias in Yemen,” Johnson said ahead of his visit.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been a frequent critic of what he calls a flawed deal, and has until May 12 to decide whether to renew sanctions waivers linked to the agreement. Trump wants added limitations on Iran’s ballistic missile program and objects to the so-called sunset clauses in the nuclear deal that let certain provisions expire after a certain amount of time.

Britain, China, France, Russia, Germany and the United States negotiated the agreement with Iran amid allegations Iran was working to develop nuclear weapons. Iran repeatedly denied that was the case, and has further asserted that it has every right to its ballistic missile program for defense.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Sunday that if the United States does withdraw from the nuclear deal, “you will soon see that they will regret it like never before in history.”

Britain’s Ambassador to the U.S. Kim Darroch said in an interview Sunday with CBS that Johnson and Trump spoke about the nuclear deal in a phone call Saturday and that the president had likely not yet made a final decision.

“It’s not a perfect deal, no deal is ever perfect, and the president is rightly concerned about Iran’s regional activities, which are malign and damaging to security and stability,” Darroch said.

He added that Britain prefers the United States remain part of the agreement, but that as long as Iran remains in compliance, Britain “wants to stick with it.”
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Sunday to launch a new offensive against Kurdish militants along the country’s borders with Syria and Iraq.

Turkey has conducted two previous operations aimed at Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, militants Ankara considers an extension of Kurdish fighters the Turkish government has been clashing with for three decades for control of southeastern Turkey.

In an address to thousands of supporters in Istanbul in advance of June’s snap election, Erdogan said, “We will not give up on constricting terrorist organizations. In the new period, Turkey will add new ones to the Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch operations in order to clear its borders.”

He added, “We shattered the terror corridor being formed on our southern border with these operations. Our soldiers, who lastly wrote an epic in Afrin, are ready for new missions. The operations will continue until not one terrorist is left.”

Erdogan called for the June 24 election more than a year ahead of the planned vote, which analysts say was designed to capitalize on nationalist sentiment running in favor of the successful military operation in the Syrian border town of Afrin.

With the election, Turkey is transforming its governing system to an executive presidency, abolishing the position of prime minister and vesting the ruling power in the presidency.

Erdogan said that with the presidential and parliamentary votes, Turkey would “take the stage as a global power.”

 
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High school students in Germany have gathered tens of thousands of signatures in an online petition to complain about an “unfair” final English exam, saying the test was much harder than in previous years.

By Sunday, the students from the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg had gathered almost 36,000 signatures — even though only 33,500 people took last month’s statewide exam.

They complained that text excerpts from American author Henry Roth’s 1934 novel “Call it Sleep” were too difficult and obscure to analyze and asked for the grading to be more lenient this year.

The final high school exams in Germany — called the Abitur — are a rite of passage that all students who want to enter university have to pass.

Only those with excellent grades and test scores will get into the most coveted university programs, with medicine among the hardest. But other subjects like engineering or language studies also offer only a limited amount of places.

Many German students, parents and teachers have been stressed out for months over the Abitur. Often schools will cancel all regular classes for younger students during the tests so the Abitur students won’t be disturbed.

The online petition has created such uproar that even state governor Winfried Kretschmann weighed in, though he showed only limited compassion.

“There’s no right to a simple Abitur,” he told the frustrated teenagers. “You wish for it, but you don’t have a right to it.”

At the same time Kretschmann admitted that his own English skills were too weak to actually judge whether the disputed text had been overly difficult, the German news agency dpa reported.

Students said the passage from Roth’s novel that they had to analyze — a metaphorical description of the Statue of Liberty — was difficult to understand because of its “unknown vocabulary.” They also complained the questions they had to answer were not asked precisely.

They quoted some of the text’s most difficult sentences to illustrate their point: “Against the luminous sky the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light — he blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty.”

The state’s education ministry responded by asking external experts to evaluate the exam — who then concluded its level was appropriate. Educational authorities also noted that students in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania had to analyze the same passage and did not complain about it.

That has not stopped the number of signatures online from growing, as younger and out-of state students sign the petition in a show of solidarity.

“I was struggling like all the others, even though I spent a year abroad in America!” Aimee Schaefer wrote in the comment section of the petition. “You would think that I can understand everything by now, but I had to look up a lot of vocabulary… whoever compiled this exam must really hate us Abitur students.”

 
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Polish rescue workers on Sunday found the body of 38-year-old coal miner, the first fatality after an earthquake hit a coal mine in southern Poland.

Three other miners have been missing some 900 meters (2,950 feet) below ground since Saturday morning at the mine in the town of Jastrzebie-Zdroj, close to Poland’s border with the Czech Republic. One of them has been located but was not rescued yet, a mining official said Sunday.

The head of the Jastrzebie Coal Company, Daniel Ozon, said the latest miner pulled out of the Zofiowka mine was pronounced dead after he had been trapped under some metal. He had worked for the company for 10 years.

More than 200 workers were involved in the rescue operation. Ozon said emergency workers were pumping air into the affected area to lower the level of methane gas before they can safely move ahead.

After the quake hit, four miners were rescued quickly but seven others went missing. Two of the missing were later found alive and have been hospitalized.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who came to Jastrzebie Zdroj on Saturday night, visited the hospitalized miners and met with their families. President Andrzej Duda was on his way to the town.

Authorities have launched an investigation into the accident.

Poland’s State Mining Authority said the temblor had a magnitude of 3.4, while the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre pegged it at 4.3. TVN24 said the quake was also felt on the surface and shook some houses.

Coal mining is a major industry in Poland. Coal remains the main source of energy and heating in the country but Poland is taking some steps to shift toward renewable, cleaner sources of energy. The Main Statistical Office said some 65.8 million metric tons (58.7 million tonnes) of coal were extracted last year in Poland, some 4.8 million tons less than in 2016.

Still many of Poland’s mines are dangerous, with methane gas that has led to a number of deadly explosions and cave-ins. So far this year, five miners including Sunday’s casualty have been killed at different mines, according to the State Mining Authority.

In 2016, eight miners were killed in a cave-in at the Rudna mine in Polkowice and methane explosions killed five miners at the Myslowice-Wesola mine in 2014.

 
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Nearly a year ago, an investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller was tasked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with exploring any links or coordination between the Russian government and “individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” and, additionally, “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,” according to the appointment order.

Since the order was issued on May 17, 2017, the investigation has grown into a multipronged effort that has resulted in criminal proceedings against 19 people — five U.S. nationals, 13 Russians and one Dutch national — and three Russian organizations.

Here are four areas of the investigation:

​Trump campaign officials’ business deals involving Russia

Perhaps the most visible results of the investigation so far are the indictments of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner, Paul Gates.

On Oct. 30, 2017, Manafort and Gates surrendered to FBI agents to face charges they conspired to launder money, failed to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts, acted as unregistered agents of foreign principal, and made false statements, including statements under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. The charges were related to consulting work they did for pro-Russian businesspeople in Ukraine. Gates has pleaded guilty, while Manafort maintains his innocence.

CNN has reported that the FBI is looking for suspicious ties between Trump and Russia in financial records related to the Trump Organization (the collective name of a group of some 500 business entities owned solely or principally by President Trump), Trump himself, his family members, and his campaign associates.

Transactions under investigation include Russian purchases of Trump apartments, a New York City development with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $30 million more than its appraised value.

​Russian campaign contacts

In addition, the probe is looking at contacts between Russian government officials and Trump campaign officials.

George Papadopoulos, a former Trump foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty Oct. 5, 2017, to making false statements to FBI agents about contacts he had with agents of the Russian government while working for the Trump campaign in 2016. He is cooperating with Mueller’s investigators.

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Dec. 1, 2017, to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about contacts and communications with Russia’s then-ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Kislyak returned to Russia in August 2017 and now serves in the Russian legislature.

On Feb. 16, 2018, Mueller issued indictments for 13 Russian citizens and three Russian entities regarding campaign contacts, plus released new charges against Manafort and Gates on February 22.

Russian attempts to influence US voters through cyberspace

In January 2017, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded “with high confidence” that the Russian government interfered with the U.S. election by hacking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, campaign chairman for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The hackers then forwarded the contents of the emails to WikiLeaks.

NBC has reported Mueller is assembling a case against Russians who carried out the hacking and leaking of private information “designed to hurt Democrats in the 2016 election.” NBC said potential charges include violations of statutes on conspiracy, election law, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Beyond the targeted hacking, Mueller’s team is investigating at least one Russia-based “troll farm” — a group or organization intentionally posting inflammatory comments on social media to disrupt an online community — known as the Internet Research Agency.

In February, a federal grand jury issued indictments for 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities, alleging they pretended to be Americans online, creating posts that were meant to “sow discord” within the American political system and “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.” The eight-count indictment charges that by early to mid-2016, the defendants were using their online identities to support Trump’s candidacy and disparage his challenger, Clinton.

The indictment also alleges the defendants encouraged minorities not to vote, or to vote for a third-party candidate.

On Dec. 14, 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported Mueller had requested that data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica turn over the emails of any of its employees who worked on the Trump campaign.

In 2018, Cambridge Analytica was found to have inappropriately acquired the personal information of more than 50 million Facebook users while working on Trump’s presidential campaign. Having also done work for a pro-Brexit campaign in Britain, the company is now the subject of investigations in both countries.

Cambridge Analytica announced Wednesday it was filing for bankruptcy and shutting down.

​Obstruction of justice

A fourth prong of the special counsel investigation is whether the Trump administration obstructed justice with requests to federal law enforcement agencies to state that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Part of that investigation centers on whether the firing of FBI Director James Comey in May 2017 amounted to obstruction of justice, after, according to Comey, Trump tried and failed to get Comey to swear to the president a vow of loyalty and to end an investigation of former National Security Adviser Flynn, who was fired in February 2017.

The Mueller team has Comey’s personal notes on his interactions with the president while head of the FBI, but a federal judge has denied multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to make the notes public.

Meanwhile, Comey has released his own version of what took place between him and the president in a memoir released last month titled, A Higher Loyalty. The volume of preorders drove the book to No. 1 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list, four weeks before its April 17 release.
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Iran’s president said Sunday if the U.S. withdraws from the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that Washington would regret the decision.

Hassan Rouhani said in a televised address, “If the United States leaves the nuclear agreement, you will soon see that they will regret it like never before in history.

“We have plans to resist any decision by Trump on the nuclear accord,” Rouhani said in a speech carried live by state television, Reuters reported.

“Orders have been issued to our atomic energy organization … and to the economic sector to confront America’s plots against our country,” Rouhani told a rally in northeast Iran.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will decide by May 12 whether Washington will remain an adherent to the nuclear agreement.

He has said he will pull out of the pact if amendments are not made, including a proposal to limit Iran’s ballistic missile program, which Iran has maintained is a defensive deterrent.

Iran’s foreign minister said Thursday Iran will not renegotiate a 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers.

“We will neither outsource our security nor will we renegotiate or add onto a deal we have already implemented in good faith,’’ Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on YouTube.

Meanwhile, a foreign policy adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned last week Iran would withdraw from the deal if Trump follows through on his threat to pull out of the accord.

Ali Akbar Velayati said on Iran’s state television website, “If the United States withdraws from the nuclear deal, then we will not stay in it.”

Velayati warned against any attempts to renegotiate in exchange for sanctions relief, saying, “Iran accepts the nuclear agreement as it has been prepared and will not accept adding or removing anything.”

The three European countries that signed the agreement, Britain, France and Germany, have repeatedly tried to persuade Trump not to withdraw.

China and Russia also signed the deal. All of the signatory countries are members of the United Nations Security Council.
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Russian’s most widely known opposition leader Alexei Navalny, along with hundreds of his supporters, were detained Saturday as street demonstrations unfolded in Moscow and 90 other Russian cities to protest Vladimir Putin’s inauguration for a fourth presidential term.

Within minutes of Navalny arriving at the protest in central Moscow, he was arrested along with his ally Nikolai Lyaskin. The independent monitoring group OVD-Info estimated more than 350 people had been detained nationwide by police, who dubbed the protests “unsanctioned.”
 

In the hours before his appearance, Navalny — barred from running in April’s presidential race — stayed at a secret location to avoid being detained before he managed to reach the protest held in Pushkinskaya Square. He was dragged off by his arms and legs to a van by five policemen as protesters chanted, “Russia without Putin” and “Down with the Tsar.”

A nationalist youth movement organized a counterprotest in Moscow, attempting to block Navalny’s supporters from gaining access to Pushkinskaya Square.

Although observers expect the anti-Putin protests to be on a smaller scale than in 2012, the Kremlin appears to be planning a more low-key inauguration than previous ones and Putin is likely not to venture beyond the Kremlin complex.  

Navalny, who has been repeatedly detained over the years for organizing anti-Kremlin protests, urged supporters all week with online messages to protest Saturday, saying “If you think that he’s not our tsar, take to the streets of your cities. We will force the authorities, made up of swindlers and thieves, to reckon with the millions of citizens who did not vote for Putin.”

One activist told a crowd in the city of Khabarovsk, “Putin has already been on his throne for 18 years! We’ve ended up in a dead end over these 18 years. I don’t want to put up with this!”

In St. Petersburg, anti-Putin protesters were prevented from reaching the city’s central square.
 

In Yekaterinburg in the Urals, 1,500 kilometers from Moscow, local reporters estimated that about 1,000 people turned out to protest. There also were reports of protests in Siberian towns. Monitors reported that police arrested about 150 people in Krasnoyarsk, in eastern Siberia, and another 75 in Yakutsk.

In the March election, Putin, who has been either president or prime minister since 1999, won against seven weak challengers with almost 77 percent of the vote. It was the largest margin by any post-Soviet Russian leader, which the Kremlin argues demonstrates his “father-of-the-nation” status and his clear mandate to govern.

One of Putin’s challengers, however, described the voting as a “filthy election.”

International observers criticized the poll, saying there had been no real choice in the election and complained of widespread allegations of ballot rigging amid reports of hundreds of ballot violations at polling stations across the country. Russian election officials described the violations as “minor,” but said they were investigating.

Despite Putin’s overwhelming election win, Monday’s inauguration ceremony will be a simpler affair than his previous three swearing-ins. The Russian TV station Dozhd reported Saturday that Putin will forgo driving in a presidential motorcade through central Moscow, avoiding the awkward scenes in 2012, when the capital’s streets appeared almost empty.

During Monday’s inauguration, Putin will stay within the Kremlin’s grounds, taking his oath of office in the Andreyevsky Hall. He is due to step outside the hall to thank party volunteers who worked on his election campaign.

In an effort presumably to head off Saturday’s protests, Russian police raided the homes of Navalny’s supporters on Friday and detained dozen.

“Activist Ilya Gantvarg was detained in St. Petersburg last [Friday] night,” said an Open Russian Foundation press release reported by Interfax.
 

The Open Russia document also says one of its own members, Viktor Chirikov, was detained in the city of Krasnodar, and that an employee of Navalny’s staff was detained in her own backyard in Krasnoyarsk.

“She was taken to a court right from home … tentatively [to be charged] in connection with the May 5 action,” the group said.

In a recent interview with VOA’s Russian Service, Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, had warned that a crackdown was imminent. “The authorities have been and continue to be afraid of protests. They are trying everything they can — threats, warnings, promises to shatter [the opposition] — it’s always the same,” he said.

“Politically speaking, they just can’t afford to have a large-scale protests in Moscow,” he said.

Navalny’s regional headquarters in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg were raided early Friday. Police confiscated promotional materials to be used at Saturday’s rally.

According to a report by Radio Free Europe, a Navalny organizer in the southern city of Volgograd Tweeted that local students were “forced to sign papers acknowledging that they could face serious consequences, including expulsion, if they take part in the rally.”

Navalny, who organized massive street protests to coincide with Putin’s 2012 reelection, was barred from the presidential ballot due to a conviction on financial-crimes charges he contends were fabricated.

VOA Russian Service’s Yulia Savchenko contributed to this article.

 
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Russians angered by the impending inauguration of Vladimir Putin to a new term as president protested Saturday in scores of cities across the country – and police responded by reportedly arresting more than 1,600 of them.

Among those arrested was protest organizer Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner who is Putin’s most prominent foe.

Police seized Navalny by the arms and legs and carried the thrashing activist from Moscow’s Pushkin Square, where thousands were gathered for an unauthorized protest.

Police also used batons against protesters who chanted “Putin is a thief!” and “Russia will be free!”

Demonstrations under the slogan “He is not our czar” took place throughout the country, from Yakutsk in the far northeast to St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad on the fringes of Europe.

The protests demonstrated that Navalny’s opposition, although considered beleaguered by Russian officials and largely ignored by state-controlled television, has sizeable support in much of the country.

“I think that Putin isn’t worthy of leading this country. He has been doing it for 18 years and has done nothing good for it,” said Moscow demonstrator Dmitry Nikitenko. “He should leave for good.”

OVD-Info, an organization that monitors political repression, said late Saturday that at least 1,607 people had been detained at demonstrations in 20 Russian cities. It said 704 were arrested in Moscow alone, and another 229 in St. Petersburg.

Moscow police said about 300 people were detained in the capital, state news agencies said, and there was no official countrywide tally.

“Let my son go!” Iraida Nikolaeva screamed, running after police in Moscow when they detained her son. “He did not do anything! Are you a human or not? Do you live in Russia or not?”

Navalny was to be charged with disobeying police, an offense that carries a sentence of up to 15 days, news reports said, though when he would face a judge was not immediately clear. Navalny has served several multi-week stretches in jail on similar charges.

In St. Petersburg, police blocked off a stretch of Nevsky Prospekt as a crowd of about 1,000 marched along the renowned avenue. Video showed some demonstrators being detained.

Putin is to be inaugurated for a new six-year term on Monday after winning re-election in March with 77 percent of the vote. Navalny had hoped to challenge him on the ballot but was blocked because of a felony conviction in a case that supporters regard as falsified in order to marginalize him.

Navalny has called nationwide demonstrations several times in the past year, and their turnout has rattled the Kremlin.

Saturday’s protests attracted crowds of hundreds in cities that are far remote from Moscow, challenging authorities’ contention that Navalny and other opposition figures appeal only to a small, largely urban elite.
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The U.S. Navy is reinforcing its presence in the Atlantic Ocean with the resurrection of a naval command in response to increasing assertiveness by Russia’s military.   

The Pentagon announced Friday the Navy was re-establishing the 2nd Fleet, almost seven years after it was disbanded for cost-savings and organizational reasons.

“This is a dynamic response to the dynamic security environment,” Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson told reporters aboard the carrier George H. W. Bush. “So as we’ve seen this great power competition emerge, the Atlantic Ocean is as dynamic a theater as any and particular the North Atlantic.”

The 2nd Fleet, which will be based in the mid-Atlantic waterfront city of Norfolk, Virginia and begin operations on July 1, was disbanded in 2011. Since then, there has been a sharp increase in Russian naval activity in the North Atlantic and in the Arctic. Russia has also become more assertive in conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, resulting in escalating tensions between Washington and Moscow.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon announced a new national defense strategy that prioritizes Russia and China. It was the latest sign of shifting priorities after more than 15 years of fighting terrorism.

The Pentagon also said Friday it has offered to host a proposed NATO Joint Force Command at its naval base in Norfolk. A new logistics command is expected to be located in Germany.

A blueprint of the plan was approved by NATO defense ministers at a February meeting, as part of a larger effort to protect the security of sea lanes and communication lines between Europe and North America.
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Russian police have detained supporters of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, raiding their homes and detaining them on the streets of various Russian cities ahead of Saturday protests against President Vladimir Putin, whose new term starts Monday.

“Activist Ilya Gantvarg was detained in St. Petersburg last night,” said an Open Russia Foundation press release reported by Interfax. “Ilya is an active participant in the actions held by Alexei Navalny’s staff.”

The Open Russia document also says one of its own members, Viktor Chirikov, was detained in Krasnodar, and that an employee of Navalny’s staff was detained in her own backyard in Krasnoyarsk.

“She was taken to a court right from home … tentatively [to be charged] in connection with the May 5 action,” the group said.

Navalny’s supporters have planned 90 anti-Putin rallies around the country Saturday, some of which have not been approved.

Crackdown warning

In a recent interview with VOA’s Russian service, Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, warned that a crackdown was imminent.

“The authorities have been and continue to be afraid of protests,” he said. “They are trying everything they can — threats, warnings, promises to shatter [the opposition] — it’s always the same.”

While at least one smaller protest has been sanctioned, Volkov said it was approved largely to project the appearance of direct democracy in action.

“They’ll approve and coordinate one protest, something that looks moderately decent,” he said, explaining that the one demonstration usually occurs in a secure part of Moscow or St. Petersburg. Smaller cities are more tightly regulated so it doesn’t “seem like protests are being dispersed throughout the country.”

“It’s typical of this fascist police state,” he added, explaining that no grass-roots protests have been approved in major cities for at least three years. “Politically speaking, they just can’t afford to have a large-scale protest in Moscow.

“I think it’s very likely there will be more arrests,” he said. “This is part of their routine when it comes to threatening everyone, to try to lower the number of protesters. They do that before every protest — May 5th is no exception.”

Navalny office raided

Navalny, who branded Saturday’s protest “He’s Not Our Tsar,” saw his regional headquarters in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg raided early Friday. Police confiscated promotional materials for Saturday’s rally.

According to a report by Radio Free Europe, a Navalny organizer in the southern city of Volgograd tweeted that local students were “forced to sign papers acknowledging that they could face serious consequences, including expulsion, if they take part in the rally.”

Supporters were also detained in Cheboksary, Kemerovo, Tambov and Ryazan.

All detainees are to face charges of violating regulations for holding public gatherings.

Putin, who has been president or prime minister since 1999, is to be sworn in to a new six-year presidential term on Monday after winning a March 18 election that opponents said was marred by fraud and international observers said gave voters no real choice.

Navalny, who organized massive street protests to coincide with Putin’s 2012 re-election, was barred from the presidential ballot because of a conviction on financial crimes charges he contends were fabricated.

Some information in this report came from RFE.
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The United Nations will launch a screening system to prevent former employees guilty of sexual misconduct from finding new jobs with its agencies or other charities, a senior official said Friday, part of an effort to address its #MeToo issue.

The tool will be an electronic registry of information to be available across the U.N.’s vast international reach and eventually to other groups, said Jan Beagle, U.N. under-secretary-general for management, following a high-level meeting in London.

Prominent U.N. bodies including the World Food Program (WFP) and refugee agency (UNHCR) fired several staff last year amid concerns raised that sexual misconduct was going unreported in a culture of silence and impunity at U.N. offices worldwide.

The wider aid sector was rocked by reports that some staff at Oxfam, one of the biggest disaster relief charities, paid for sex during a relief mission after a 2010 earthquake.

And in February, a high-level official at the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF resigned over inappropriate behavior toward women in his previous role as head of Save the Children UK.

Plans for the U.N. screening tool to register workers found guilty of sexual misconduct were announced at the gathering of its agency heads in London this week.

“[It] is a screening tool so that when we have confirmed perpetrators of sexual harassment in the system, we can ensure that they are not able to move around,” Beagle told Reuters on the sidelines of the meeting.

Beagle said groundwork for the system, which will be managed by the secretariat, is complete and it was expected to be fully operational by the summer.

“In due course when we have some experience with it, we would like to extend it to other partners,” Beagle said, referring to aid agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other groups.

#MeToo campaign

The plans come amid the #MeToo campaign, in which women around the world have taken to social media to share their experiences with sexual harassment and abuse. It was sparked by accusations made last year against Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last year appointed Beagle to lead a special task force to address the issue.

At the London meeting, U.N. agencies also discussed setting up 24-hour help lines for workers, agreed on a common definition of harassment and were told to hire more specialized investigators, preferably women, to speed up probes, said Beagle.

“Most of our investigators are specialized in things like fraud, which is a different type of skill,” she said. The secretariat has already started the recruiting process, she added.

An exclusive survey by Reuters in February found more than 120 staff from leading global charities were fired or lost their jobs in 2017 over sexual misconduct.
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Turkey’s opposition parties have selected their candidates to challenge President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in next month’s snap election.

The main opposition CHP picked veteran deputy chairman Muharrem Ince, a fiery critic of Erdogan.

Addressing party supporters in Ankara, Ince removed his party badge, replacing it with one of a Turkish flag.

“I will be the president of 80 million, of rightists and leftists, of Alevis [an Islamic sect] and Sunnis, of Turks and Kurds,” he said. “I will be an impartial president.”

The 54-year-old former physics teacher is seen as a shrewd choice by CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Ince has built a reputation of having a common touch.

He is also social media savvy, being only second to Erdogan in Twitter followers. The announcement of his candidacy saw #İNCEdenDemokrasiGelecek (Democracy will come with İnce) becoming the second global trending topic, after #StarWarsDay.

In a sign of what possibly lies ahead, Erdogan supporters were quick to distribute across social media a photograph of Ince drinking a beer with his family, allegedly during the Islamic Holy fasting month of Ramadan.

Unbeaten in 15 years of elections, Erdogan, a devout Muslim, routinely portrays Ince’s pro-secular CHP as anti-religious. Turkey is an overwhelmingly conservative country, and the presidential elections will take place during Ramadan.

But in a move to reach conservative voters, Ince pledged to hold meetings every night at 1:30 a.m. to coincide with the time that fasters rise to eat before sunrise.

Political observers claim if Ince is to have any chance of success, he will need to make inroads into Erdogan’s normally loyal conservative religious base.

Critics claim the CHP should have chosen a nonpartisan, conservative candidate.

“With a presidential candidate that has zero appeal outside its own 25-percent usual voter base, Turkey’s main opposition CHP has shown once again that it has no vision to win elections,” tweeted Mustafa Akyol, a conservative writer on Turkish politics.

But the CHP has taken steps to reach out to religious voters. In a groundbreaking move ahead of parliamentary elections due to be held simultaneously with presidential polls, the CHP formed an electoral pact with the Islamist Sa’adet Party as part of a four-way party alliance.

Temel Karamollaoglu

Sa’adet’s leader, Temel Karamollaoglu, has also declared himself a presidential candidate. With Sa’adet outside parliament, Karamollaoglu needs to secure 100,000 nominations. In a goodwill gesture, the CHP leader, Kilicdaroglu, has called on his members to support Karamollaoglu’s nomination.

Securing Karamollaoglu’s backing in a presidential runoff is seen as offering Ince his best chance of luring away conservative voters from Erdogan.

Kurdish vote

But the potential kingmaker is Turkey’s Kurdish voter base, which accounts for around 20 percent of the electorate.

Friday the pro-Kurdish HDP, Turkey’s second-largest opposition party, announced its imprisoned former leader Selahattin Demirtas as its candidate. The declaration was made in simultaneous events in Istanbul and Diyarbakir, the main city in Turkey’s predominately Kurdish southeast.

“The dignified stance of millions whose hearts beat with mine against all pressure has proven that a [prison] cell that can fit 6 million people has not been built yet. I have tried to represent the values of freedom, democracy, equality, and justice here in your name,” Demirtas declared in a statement read by HDP leader Pervin Buldan to supporters in Diyarbakir.

Demirtas is facing more than 100 years in jail on terrorism charges under Turkey’s emergency rule, introduced after the failed 2016 coup.

Even though he is in jail, he can still run in presidential elections under the election laws  — until convicted. Demirtas has a court hearing on June 8, when prosecutors are expected to press for a verdict.

Analysts say because other opposition parties have excluded the HDP from an electoral alliance in parliamentary elections, the exclusion of Demirtas from the presidential elections could lead to calls for a boycott by HDP voters.

“Kurds and Kurdish HDP are openly excluded from the [electoral] alliance,” political scientist Cengiz Aktar said. “By doing so, frankly, the opposition actually tells everybody their stance towards the Kurds is little different from the AKP.”

The CHP voted in favor of lifting Demirtas’s parliamentary immunity, opening the door to his prosecution and jailing. But Ince was among a number of dissident deputies that voted against the move — a stance praised among HDP supporters.

With the HDP having around 10 percent of the vote, their support, analysts say, is vital for any candidate seeking to defeat Erdogan, who remains the clear front-runner.

But observers say with the opposition parties all fielding strong candidates, Erdogan for the first time, faces challenges from across the political spectrum.

“Erdogan is facing the prospect of a complex electoral map, something he has not faced before. It will be more challenging,” said political analyst Atilla Yesilada, of Global Source Partners.
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The ruling party of Armenia indicated it will support the opposition leader’s bid to become prime minister in a parliamentary vote scheduled for May 8. The decision follows weeks of protests that culminated in blockades and strikes this week. The opposition called a halt to the demonstrations Thursday as all sides negotiated a political solution. The protests erupted last month after the former prime minister was accused of manipulating the constitution to cling to power. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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