ІНСАЙДЕР УКРАЇНА

Spain’s Garbine Muguruza has won her first Wimbledon title, defeating American Venus Williams in straight sets Saturday, 7-5, 6-0.

The 10th seeded Williams, 37, had been seeking to become the oldest women’s Grand Slam champion but couldn’t overcome the 14th seeded Muguruza.

Muguruza, who lost in the Wimbledon finals in 2015 to Venus’ sister, Serena, saved two set points in the 10th game of the first set and then won nine straight games to clinch the championship. It is her second Grand Slam title.

Venus Williams was seeking her first Wimbledon title since 2008.  She has won a total of five.
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France’s foreign minister has expressed concern about the deterioration of relations between Qatar and its Arab neighbors and called for sanctions that target Qatari nationals to be lifted.

Jean-Yves Le Drian spoke to reporters after talks with his Qatari counterpart, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, in Doha on Saturday.

A group of nations that includes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt accuses Qatar of supporting terrorism and has given Doha a 13-point list of demands after severing diplomatic ties in early June.

Qatar has said it is willing to negotiate but will not give up its sovereignty.

“France calls for the lifting, as soon as possible, of the measures that affect the populations, in particular binational families, that have been separated, or students,” Le Drian told reporters in Doha after he his meeting with Al-Thani.

Later in the day, Le Drian flew to Jeddah, where he repeated his concerns about the effects of the standoff in a televised press appearance with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir.

Jubeir said any resolution of the worst Gulf crisis in years should come from within the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council.

“We hope to resolve this crisis within the Gulf house, and we hope that wisdom prevails for our brothers in Qatar in order to respond to the demands of the international community — not just of the four countries,” he said.

He reiterated that Qatar should not support terrorist groups and their financing or host their members and should end incitement through the media.

Qatar has repeatedly denied such accusations and rejected demands to close down the Al Jazeera network, as initially requested by the boycotting states.

Le Drian, who will visit the United Arab Emirates and Gulf mediator Kuwait on Sunday, followed in the steps of other world powers in the region, including the United States.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited the region earlier this week but left with little apparent progress in resolving the standoff.

Some information for this report came from Reuters.
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Germany has confirmed that two of its nationals were stabbed to death in an attack at an Egyptian resort hotel.

A German Foreign Ministry statement said “We can now sadly confirm that two German tourists died in the attack at Hurghada.”

Officials say the female tourists were killed Friday when the assailant swam ashore from another Red Sea beach.

Egyptian authorities say the man has been arrested.

A German Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said, “According to what we know, the act was a deliberate attack on foreign tourists – a particularly devious and criminal act that leaves us sad, dismayed and furious.”

Four other people were wounded in the incident.

Hurghada is one of Egypt’s most popular beach resorts, especially with Europeans.

 
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As recently as last year, Rinat Akhmetshin could be seen regularly pedaling through downtown Washington, D.C., nattily dressed, with a pocket square and heavy-framed thick glasses, riding a retro hipster orange bicycle. 

He also showed an affinity for vintage motorcycles, which he parked for two years in the Washington driveway of renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. 

Hersh later gave a public endorsement to a controversial film linked to Akhmetshin that sought to undermine a 2012 U.S. law that infuriated the Kremlin. 

At the center of scandal

Now Akhmetshin, a dual Russian-American citizen who has both denied and bragged about being a former Soviet military intelligence officer, is at the center of a growing scandal reaching high into President Donald Trump’s White House. 

U.S. media reported that he attended a June 9, 2016, meeting with Trump’s son, Donald Jr., accompanying a Russian lawyer who was also seeking to undermine the 2012 law.

Akhmetshin did not respond to an e-mail, text messages, or a voice mail from RFE/RL on July 14. But he told the Associated Press that the lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, gave Trump associates at the meeting information on what she said were funds being illegally funneled to the Democratic National Committee and suggested the information could help the Trump campaign.

“This could be a good issue to expose how the [Democratic National Committee] is accepting bad money,” Akhmetshin was quoted as recalling Veselnitskaya saying.

Decades behind the scenes

Until last year, Akhmetshin’s longtime behind-the-scenes work in and around Washington lobbying circles had escaped wider notice. But his work is substantial, stretching back two decades.

He has been a key figure in past PR campaigns to bolster Kazakh opposition figures, to discredit a Russian member of parliament, to lobby on Azerbaijani politics, and to undermine a Russian-owned mining company that sued another in a Dutch lawsuit. 

It’s not cheap work, as Akhmetshin himself stated in an affidavit as part of a 2015 lawsuit: He said he charged $450 an hour for his services. 

In 1998, Akhmetshin said he founded the Washington office of an organization called the International Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research, to “help expand democracy and the rule of law in Eurasia.” 

In the late 1990s, he organized meetings with journalists, elected officials, and policymakers in Washington for opposition lawmakers from Kazakhstan. Later, he worked to undermine a businessman and diplomat who was divorced from the daughter of Kazakhstan’s longtime president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, and then had a falling out with Nazarbaev.

Accused in smear campaign

In 2011, Akhmetshin was accused of involvement in a smear campaign aimed at maligning a former Russian lawmaker who sought political asylum in the United States. 

The goal, according to court documents, was to persuade U.S. officials to revoke the lawmaker’s asylum status and force him to return to Russia, where he was involved in a dispute with a billionaire businessman over a Moscow hotel project. 

Akhmetshin was not the target of the lawsuit but, according to the complaint, he was enlisted, along with a Washington public relations company and private investigators, to portray the lawmaker as anti-Semitic. 

During the suit, Akhmetshin fought to keep his e-mails from being released to the opposing lawyers.

“Some of my clients are national governments or high ranking officials in those governments,” he said in an Aug. 21, 2012, affidavit. “My government clients have highly sensitive discussions in my emails concerning the location or relocation of American military bases in areas within the former Soviet Union.”

The underlying lawsuit, and a related countersuit, were dismissed in March 2014. 

Hacking accusations

A more recent legal fight concerned a $1 billion dispute over a potash mining operation in central Russia. While the main fight took place in European courts, a sideshow unfolded in U.S. courts beginning in 2014 when Akhmetshin was accused of hacking into the opposing parties’ computers. 

Court papers filed New York State Supreme Court accused Akhmetshin of being a former Soviet military counterintelligence officer who “developed a special expertise in running negative public relations campaigns.” 

In e-mail and in-person interviews with RFE/RL last year, Akhmetshin denied working for Soviet or Russian military intelligence. However, in private conversations and other published reports, he spoke openly about it.

The campaign he was associated with last year focused on the 2012 Magnitsky Act. That law imposed visa bans and other measures against Russian officials involved in the death of Russian whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky and the $230 million tax-fraud scheme he helped uncover.

​The campaign was two-pronged. The first involved the ban on adoptions of Russian children by American parents, which President Vladimir Putin imposed in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act. 

Akhmetshin set up a benign-sounding organization to lobby Congress ostensibly in an effort to restore Russian adoptions. He enlisted former congressmen, and set up meetings with current members, including Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-California), long known for his rosy rhetoric regarding the Kremlin. 

Veselnitskaya said she discussed the adoption issue in her meeting with Donald Trump Jr. 

The second involved organizing а screening at Washington’s Newseum of a Russian director’s film that took a semifictionalized look at Magnitsky’s whistle-blowing and his death. The screening happened June 13, 2016, four days after he joined Veselnitskaya at the meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr.

Veselnitskaya, who also attended the screening, served as a lawyer for a Russian-owned company known as Prevezon that U.S. prosecutors had accused of laundering some of the Magnitsky tax-fraud money. In May 2017, that case was settled on the eve of its trial with Prevezon admitting no wrongdoing and paying $6 million. 

Another Washington public relations firm, along with Akhmetshin, was also connected to the effort to undermine the Magnitsky Act: Fusion GPS, which was behind the so-called Steele dossier, a compilation of damaging information about Donald Trump that was put together by a former British spy. 

In May, Senator Chuck Grassley (Republican-Iowa) asked the Justice Department to investigate both Fusion and Akhmetshin, suggesting that they were unregistered agents of Russian interests. 

Before the screening, Hersh, the renowned investigative reporter, told RFE/RL that he had seen the film a few months earlier at Akhmetshin’s behest. Hersh said he was intrigued enough by it that he agreed to Akhmetshin’s request to host a postscreening discussion free of charge. 

Hersh also told RFE/RL that he knew Akhmetshin through mutual acquaintances and that he had let Akhmetshin park several antique motorcycles in the driveway of his Washington-area home, motorcycles he said Akhmetshin had bought thinking they dated from World War II but in fact they were of German manufacture and had been painted over to look like Soviet motorcycles. 

At the conclusion of the June 13 film screening, as the discussion turned loud and rowdy, Hersh said the film “goes a long way toward deconstructing a myth.” 
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Turkey marks the one-year anniversary Saturday of a defeated military coup.

Since then, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dismissed at least 100,000 civil servants he has characterized as supporters of the aborted coup. The government has arrested another 50,000 people.

Turkish officials have declared July 15 a national holiday of “democracy and unity.”

The Turkish opposition says that Erdogan’s government is moving toward authoritarianism, while the Turkish leader says that the crackdown on rights is necessary to thwart security threats to the ruling government.

Erdogan claims the coup was led by a cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who has been living in self-imposed exile in the United States for nearly two decades. Gulen denies any involvement.

In a statement on the anniversary of the coup, Gulen said the Turkish government’s “treatment of innocent citizens during the past year is dragging Turkey into the category of the countries with the worst record of democracy, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms in the world,” and that the Turkish people “are being rallied en masse around hate messages.”

On Friday, Turkey fired more than 7,000 police officers, government officials and academics.

A government order, published by the official state-run Gazette shows that among those dismissed are 2,303 police, including some high ranking officers, along with more than 300 academics from universities.

The decree also striped 342 retired officers and soldiers from their ranks.

The order was published under a state of emergency imposed after last year’s attempted coup.
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More than four years after it was imposed, Russia’s ban on adoptions by Americans is back in the news, rekindling frustration and sadness among some of those affected by it.

Chuck Johnson, CEO of the National Council for Adoption, worries that any efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to get the ban lifted might now be more complicated because of revelations regarding Donald Trump Jr.

The younger Trump, explaining a meeting last year with a Russian lawyer, initially issued a statement saying the subject was the adoption ban, but later released emails showing his motive was to obtain negative information about Hillary Clinton.

“Because Russia is so much in the news, it’s now made lifting the ban even more awkward and difficult,” Johnson said. “You’d have Democrats and the hawkish Republicans who would see it as further collusion.”

The ban has had “disastrous results” for orphans in Russia, said Johnson, a leading advocate of international adoption.

Signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2012, the ban served as retaliation for a U.S. law targeting alleged Russian human-rights violators. It also reflected resentment over the 60,000 Russian children adopted by Americans in the previous two decades, about 20 of whom died of abuse, neglect or other causes while in the care of their adoptive parents.

Heartache for families

More than 200 U.S. families were in the process of trying to adopt children from Russia when the ban took effect. Many of those children have now been placed in Russian homes; the fate of other children remains unknown to their would-be adoptive families.

That’s the case for a Minneapolis-area couple who adopted a boy from Russia in 2008 and were trying to adopt his biological brother, Nikolai, when the ban was imposed.

The wife, Renee Carlson — who is now divorced and remarried — campaigned relentlessly for an exception to be made for her family. She even traveled to Moscow in early 2014 and made an emotional appeal on Russian television, but the second adoption never went through.

In an email this week, Carlson said she was told by some of her Russian contacts that Nikolai may have been adopted in Russia, but that she has been unable to confirm that.

“The Russian people I met with were just like us as Americans, good people, just perhaps had their hands tied by their administration’s direction,” she wrote. “I respect and understand, as we face similar politics in the U.S.”

High-level talks

Resumption of adoptions from Russia has been a goal of the Trump administration, as it had been for the Obama administration. But there was no movement until Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed in April to include the matter in high-level talks aimed at resolving festering conflicts that have hindered cooperation on broader strategic and security issues.

Those talks, between the third-ranking U.S. diplomat, Tom Shannon, and Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, were suspended by Moscow last month after the Treasury Department hit Russia with new sanctions for its actions in Ukraine. But the State Department now says a new round of talks between Shannon and Ryabkov will take place in Washington on Monday.

Estimates of the number of orphans in Russia vary widely, but the country has been trying to place more of the orphans with Russian families through an expansion of domestic adoption.

A U.S.-based organization, Kidsave, has been assisting in those efforts, arranging for hundreds of orphans to visit Russian families during weekends and holidays with the aim of encouraging the families to consider adoption. According to Kidsave, more than 1,000 children in the Smolensk region found homes outside the orphanages or established long-term connections with mentors.

Tatiana Stafford, who oversees Kidsave’s Russia program, said the adoption ban was unfortunate but didn’t affect the program.

“A lot of families who were in the process of adoption — they suffered, the children suffered,” she said. “But at the same time, it gave momentum to domestic adoption.”

This will be the last full year of Kidsave’s Russia operation. It plans to transfer the program to a Russian nonprofit next year.
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Poland’s most powerful politician insisted Friday that “radical changes” are necessary to heal the nation’s judiciary and vowed to push ahead despite vehement protests from Poland’s opposition and European bodies.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the ruling populist Law and Justice party, was referring at a news conference to new regulations that give lawmakers power over the body that chooses judges and to a draft law that would empower the justice minister to appoint or dismiss Supreme Court justices.

Earlier, the party had put its loyalists on another top court, the Constitutional Tribunal, and took control of state-owned media.

The opposition and some European politicians say these moves snuffed out judicial independence and violated democracy and the rule of law.

Under the euroskeptic party, Poland already is subject to a European Union procedure reviewing the government’s dedication to European values.

Kaczynski, a lawyer, contended that the judiciary sector has not been reformed since communist times, lacks moral principles, is inefficient and needs younger personnel.

“You cannot change that without far-reaching moves, without radical changes,” Kaczynski said. “What we need to do, we will do.”

He insisted the changes were in the public interest and fulfilled the party’s election campaign promises. Law and Justice won the 2015 elections and controls the parliament. It enjoys steady support of above 30 percent of voters. Critics say that is chiefly due to the party’s generous program of social benefits to the poorest.

The head of the Supreme Court, Malgorzata Gersdorf, who was member of the anti-communist Solidarity movement in the 1980s, has protested the proposed changes as going in the wrong direction and has defended the “highest level of professionalism” of the judges.
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A lack of coordination between the European Union and the United States can undermine sanctions against rogue nations, said a new report from the Royal United Services Institute, a British research group.

The report’s authors also called for improved guidance for the private sector in implementing the penalties.

The assessment came as the United States pushes for stricter controls following North Korea’s test earlier this month of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Washington wants new sanctions against both Pyongyang and the foreign firms, most of them Chinese, that it says provide North Korea with an economic lifeline.

“We intend to present these firms with a clear choice. You can do business with us or you can do business with North Korea, but you cannot do business with both,” Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen told reporters Wednesday after presenting a bipartisan bill in Washington.

The fragmented nature of international sanctions, which are enforced separately by the United Nations, U.S. and EU, renders them less effective against Pyongyang, argued report author Emil Dall.

“North Korea relies on a complex network of overseas front companies, shell companies, agents that are acting on behalf of the North Korean regime —  people that are simply not captured on sanctions lists,” he said.

Dall noted recent examples of effective coordination. It has been two years since the so-called P5+1 countries — the United States, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, plus Germany — agreed on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. That agreement saw the EU and U.S. lift some sanctions on Iran in return for limits on Tehran’s nuclear program.

The United States and Europe have also implemented coordinated sanctions against Russian individuals and companies following its forceful takeover of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014.

​The nature of the EU means targets are often able to evade its sanctions over time.

“You’ve got all member states who have to agree unanimously to imposing new sanctions. In the European Union, there is also the prospect of legal challenges in the European courts,” said Dall.

He added that U.S. sanctions are more adaptable as rogue states try to evade the measures.

“The U.S. is able to more rapidly put in place new measures and new designations that counteract that,” he said. “The solution is closer communication both between the U.S. and the EU on sanctions regimes, but it’s also closer communication with the private sector.”

Britain’s pending EU exit, known as Brexit, complicates the picture further. The report said London will be able to move more quickly in imposing and adapting sanctions outside the bloc — but any measures will have less clout without European enforcement.
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President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One that the “media witch hunt” linking his 2016 presidential campaign to Russia was “bad for the country,” because “there’s no collusion, there’s no obstruction, there’s no nothing.”   

Trump accused Democrats of playing “their card too hard on the Russia thing, because people aren’t believing it,” especially in making accusations of treason.

“When they say ‘treason’ — you know what treason is? That’s Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving the atomic bomb [to the Russians], OK?” the president said.

Trump, during a one-hour conversation on his plane as it flew to France, defended face-to-face talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he met last week in Germany, because of mutual interests concerning Syria and other geopolitical issues.  

“If you don’t have dialogue, you have to be fools,” Trump said. “Let’s be the smart people, not the stupid people.”

Question for Putin

Trump said he wanted to ask Putin, at their next meeting, whom the Russian leader really wanted to win last year’s U.S. presidential election, “because I can’t believe that he would have been for me.” Trump contended that his stances on defense and energy policy were more detrimental to Moscow’s interests than those of his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The president, when asked about sanctions in place against Russia and whether he might relax them — despite opposition in Congress to doing that — replied that the United States has “very heavy sanctions on Russia right now. I would not and have never even thought about taking them off.”  

Trump denied that Putin had raised the issue during their discussions at the Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg.

He said he was willing to invite Putin to the White House, but “I don’t think this is the right time. But the answer is, yes, I would.”

Trump’s conversation on the plane was initially deemed to be off the record, but on Thursday in Paris he queried one of the reporters from the flight about why his comments had not been published.

In the exchange with New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, in the office of French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump “asked if I had heard him say it could be on-record,” she recounted in a pool report.

“Your pooler replied truthfully, ‘no’ (co-poolers also were not under the impression it was on-record, since Sarah Huckabee Sanders had declared it off-record),” Haberman wrote.

Excerpts released

After that exchange, Sanders, the primary deputy White House press secretary, told reporters traveling with the president that excerpts of the Air Force One conversation would be released. A transcript, in excess of 3,500 words, was sent to reporters Thursday afternoon, detailing the wide-ranging conversation.

Some of what the president said about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer reflected what the president had said in two interviews Wednesday and at his news conference with Macron on Thursday.

“Honestly, in a world of politics, most people are going to take that meeting,” Trump said, according to the White House transcript.

Both the senior and junior Trumps have been criticized by people on both sides of the political aisle for asserting it is not a problem to accept an offer of derogatory information from a foreign government on a political opponent.

Trump told the reporters on the flight that twice he asked Putin whether the Russian government interfered in last year’s presidential election.

“He said absolutely not, twice,” according to Trump. “What do you do? End up in a fistfight with somebody?”

Trump also had blunt words about U.S. trade deficits with China and South Korea.

“We are being absolutely devastated by bad trade deals,” he said. “We have the worst of all trade deals with China. We have a bad deal with South Korea. We’re just starting negotiations [to modify the free trade agreement] with South Korea.”  

Trade negotiations

Trump also linked trade negotiations to his push to have Beijing increase pressure on Pyongyang because of the fast-developing North Korean ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs.

“In terms of North Korea, our strength is trade [with China],” he said. “You make reciprocal deals, you’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. But before I did that I wanted to give it a good shot.”  

Trump, when queried by a reporter about retaliatory action against Beijing for dumping of Chinese steel onto the U.S. market, replied that “there are two ways — quotas and tariffs. Maybe I’ll do both.”

He also told the journalists that his previous remark about placing solar panels on his proposed border wall with Mexico was no joke.

“We have major companies looking at that,” Trump said. “Look, there’s no better place for solar than the Mexico border — the Southern border. And there is a very good chance we can do a solar wall, which would actually look good.” 

Because of the presence of natural barriers, Trump said, the solar wall would need to span only 700 to 900 miles (1,127 to 1,448 kilometers) to be effective in halting illegal migration.
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Corruption is undermining all efforts to rebuild Ukraine in line with European Union norms, European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said on Thursday, as President Petro Poroshenko vowed to pursue ever-closer integration with the bloc.

Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk were in Kyiv for a 24-hour summit with Poroshenko following the final ratification of a new trade pact that has angered Russia.

“What we are asking … is to increase the fight against corruption, because corruption is undermining all the efforts this great nation is undertaking,” Juncker said at a joint briefing. “We remain very concerned.”

The criticism suggests the EU delegation may have taken a tougher-than-expected line in talks forecast to be largely upbeat after the confirmation on Tuesday of an association agreement for closer political and trade ties.

Seven conditions still in works

Separately, European Commission Vice president Valdis Dombrovskis said Kyiv had a shrinking window to meet 21 conditions to unlock 600 million euros ($684 million) of further financial assistance from the EU, of which seven are outstanding.

These conditions include making sure that a landmark reform forcing officials to declare their assets online is properly implemented, and Kyiv lifting a ban on wood exports.

“What we are emphasizing currently is that we have quite limited time,” Dombrovskis told reporters. “So all the conditions need to be implemented already in October … because the macrofinancial assistance program ends on Jan. 4 next year.”

Reforms lead to investments

The pro-Western government in Kyiv has sought to boost EU relations since the ousting of a Moscow-backed president in 2014, implementing reforms in exchange for billions of dollars in aid and a new visa-free travel deal with the European Union.

But Ukraine’s allies have repeatedly expressed concern that vested interests and corrupt practices remain entrenched, partly due to weak rule of law.

The European Union and the International Monetary Fund, Ukraine’s main financial backer, have called for the creation of a specialized anti-corruption court, but Juncker said a new solution had been agreed at the summit.

“Today we agreed that if Ukraine establishes … a special chamber devoted to this issue, that will be enough,” he said.

EU membership remains far off

Mykhailo Zhernakov, a judicial expert at the non-governmental coalition Reanimation Package of Reforms, said the agreement would be a disappointment to those campaigning for greater accountability.

“There’s no way that a chamber in any court will be as independent as a separate court,” he told Reuters. “It’s not going to help.”

While full EU membership for Ukraine remains far off, Poroshenko stressed that Kyiv hopes to integrate further by joining the customs union and becoming a member of the bloc’s Schengen open-border zone.

“As early as today, it’s important to start developing a roadmap to the realization of our dreams,” he said.

 
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The number of people living in poverty in Italy climbed to its highest level for more than a decade in 2016 despite a modest economic recovery, data showed on Thursday, in a report that could hurt the ruling Democratic Party (PD).

Those living in “absolute poverty” rose to 4.74 million last year, or 7.9 percent of the population, up from 7.6 percent in 2015 and the highest since current records began in 2005, national statistics bureau ISTAT reported.

ISTAT defines absolute poverty as the condition of those who are unable to buy goods and services “essential to avoid grave forms of social exclusion.”

Italy emerged from a long recession in 2014, but the report shows that the slow growth posted since then has done little to help the poorest sectors of society.

Gross domestic product is forecast to rise by around 1.1 percent this year, up from 0.9 percent in 2016, but leaving Italy in its customary position among the eurozone’s most sluggish economies.

The country faces elections next spring, and opposition parties were quick to blame the PD and its leader, Matteo Renzi, for the record poverty levels.

“When a government is unable to provide for people’s basic needs, we can undoubtedly say it has failed,” said Giovanni Barozzino, a senator for the Italian Left party, which split from the PD in 2015, complaining Renzi had dragged it to the right.

In the underdeveloped south of Italy, 9.8 percent of people were living in absolute poverty, compared with 7.3 in central regions including the capital Rome, and 6.7 percent in the wealthier north, including the business capital Milan.

ISTAT said Italians living in “relative poverty,” or those whose disposable income is less than around half the national average, also edged up in 2016 to 8.5 million people, or 14.0 percent of the population.

That compared with 13.7 percent in 2015 and was the highest since current records began in 1997.
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NATO forces in Europe scrambled fighter jets to intercept approaching Russian aircraft close to 800 times last year – almost double the figure from 2014. That’s according to a new report, which calls for a new agreement and improved communication between NATO and Russia to avert potentially dangerous incidents. Henry Ridgwell has more from London.
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A new exhibition in southern Poland shows the brutality of the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz through the artistic work of its inmates. Some of the artworks are being shown publicly for the first time.

The “Face to Face: Art in Auschwitz” exhibition opened last week at the Kamienica Szolayskich (Szolayski Tenement House) of the National Museum in Krakow to mark 70 years of the Auschwitz Museum. The museum’s task is to preserve the site in the southern town of Oswiecim and to educate visitors about it. More than 2 million people visited the museum last year.

The curator of the Krakow exhibit, Agnieszka Sieradzka, said Wednesday it includes clandestine as well as commissioned drawings and paintings by Jews, Poles and other citizens held at Auschwitz during World War II.

“These works help us see Auschwitz as the inmates saw it and experienced it,” Sieradzka told The Associated Press. “We stand face to face with the inmates.”       

The Nazis sometimes ordered talented inmates to make paintings for various purposes. One such painting is a portrait of a Roma woman that pseudo-scientist Josef Mengele experimented on. Mengele ordered portraits like this from inmate painter Dina Gottliebova, a Jewish woman from Czechoslovakia.

The task helped Gottliebova survive. After the war, she traveled to the U.S. and started a family. She died in 2009 in California under the name Dina Babbitt.

Among the clandestine art is the so-called Auschwitz Sketchbook by an unknown author. It has 22 drawings of scenes of beatings, starvation and death. It was found in 1947, hidden in a bottle in the foundation of a barrack at Birkenau, a part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. It is the first time it is being shown to the general public. It is housed at the museum and only shown on request. 

Also being displayed is the original “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Sets You Free) gate top that was stolen and retrieved in 2009 and is now kept under guard at the museum. 

From 1940 to 1945, some 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews but also Poles, Roma and Russians, were killed in the gas chambers or died from starvation, excessive forced labor and disease at Auschwitz, which Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland.
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U.S. President Donald Trump, who in the past has disparaged Paris as an unsafe city because of terrorism, has arrived in the French capital. He will mark the French national holiday, Bastille Day, on Friday after holding counterterrorism talks with President Emmanuel Macron and marking the 100th anniversary of U.S. troops entering World War I.

Air Force One, the presidential jet, lifted off on schedule (at 7:49 p.m. EDT) Wednesday evening from Joint Base Andrews, outside the nation’s capital. First lady Melania Trump is accompanying the president on the trip to France. They arrives just before 9 a.m. local time.

Before departing the U.S., the president gave several interviews at the White House, including an extended conversation with Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, a prominent figure in conservative political and religious circles.

In contrast to reports from U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in last year’s U.S. elections to increase Republican Trump’s chances of victory, the president said he believes Putin had hoped Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would win the race.

According to excerpts of the interview released Wednesday evening by CBN, the president said the Kremlin would have preferred to see Clinton win the White House, because Russian officials thought she would “decimate” the U.S. military once in power.

Watch: Trump Heads for Difficult Encounter in France

Paris ‘out of control’

A year ago Trump described Paris as “so, so, so out of control, so dangerous,” because of terrorists operating there. More recently he suggested that Islamic State attacks in Paris had diminished its standing as a world-class destination.

As he pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 international Paris accord to control greenhouse gas emissions, Trump said he was elected to represent “Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Nevertheless, he subsequently accepted President Macron’s invitation to attend the country’s annual mid-July celebrations.

During his two-day visit, Trump will meet with Macron, whose political fortunes have soared this year. The U.S. president also will lunch with military officials, tour the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte and join in Bastille Day celebrations Friday.

The two leaders are scheduled to meet Thursday before speaking to reporters.

“We will talk about all the issues which are of interest to us both, including those about which we have disagreements when we have them, but also a lot of the issues on which we are working together — the terrorism threat, the crises in Syria and Libya, and a lot of issues which are of interest to us both,” Macron said.

Syria, G-20 follow-up

A senior U.S. official told reporters the White House expects the civil war in Syria and U.S.-French cooperation both there and on other counterterror issues to take up most of the discussion, while there could also be some follow-up to last week’s G-20 summit in Germany.

France is part of the U.S.-led coalition that has been carrying out airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq since late 2014. A large majority of those strikes this year have taken place in Syria, where the militants have their de facto capital in the city of Raqqa.

Trump and Macron are both in their first year in office and have shown policy differences when it comes to international efforts to combat climate change. But they also share certain goals, such as reducing the number of workers in their respective governments.

The senior Trump administration official described the relationship between the presidents as “very positive.”

Bastille Day

On Friday, Trump and his wife, Melania, will attend the annual Bastille Day parade, which will include both French and U.S. military personnel.

“The fact that we participated in such a major way in World War I, side by side with the French, is a clear parallel to what we’re doing today,” the senior administration official said. “We still live in a dangerous world. We still live in a world that has many, many threats.”

A French government spokesman, Christophe Castaner, said, “Sometimes Trump makes decisions we don’t like, such as on climate, but we can deal with it in two ways: we can say, ‘We are not going to talk to you,’ or we can offer you our hand to bring you back into the circle. Macron is symbolically offering Trump his hand.”
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A satirical cover for a political news magazine was all it took to see its editor eventually sentenced to more than two decades in prison.

Cevheri Guven, editor in chief of Turkey’s Nokta magazine, fled while out on bail late last year, smuggling his family out of a country he says is rapidly descending toward all-out dictatorship. He took refuge in Greece, where he applied for political asylum.

Guven is far from alone in feeling the full force of the Turkish government’s wrath against press critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, particularly after last year’s failed coup attempt. About 160 journalists are currently in jail, mostly on terrorism-related charges, while more than 150 media outlets, from broadcasters to newspapers and magazines, have been shut down, leaving thousands unemployed.

Pressure on Turkey’s media is nothing new. Ranked 155th out of 180 countries in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, Turkey fared only marginally worse than it had the previous year, when it was ranked at 151. Some journalists in prison today have been there for years.

“Turkey is the world leader in jailing journalists and has decimated the independent print media and cracked down heavily on news websites and social media,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey director for Human Rights Watch. Most of the journalists now imprisoned “have not yet been convicted of any crime but face trumped-up terrorism charges,” she said.

Rights groups have criticized Turkey for decades for imprisoning journalists. The country has seen at least three coups, in 1960, 1971 and 1980, each leading to regimes that restricted the media in various ways. Guven’s own troubles started with a September 2015 magazine cover, long before last year’s July 15 coup attempt.

But, he says, the coup aftermath, with its state of emergency granting authorities sweeping powers, has plunged the country to new lows.

“There have been [bad times] in Turkey, in the junta years,” Guven said, speaking through a translator from his temporary home in Greece. “But now is the worst time for journalists.”

Some of his colleagues have been released from detention by court order, only to be re-arrested outside the prison gates. Others are held in isolation, and are threatened with life sentences.

“This shows that there is no chance for journalists to be free in Turkey,” he said. Guven himself has been sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for a variety of terrorist-related crimes, including making propaganda for both the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party and Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, two groups that are hostile to each other. Erdogan blames Gulen, a former ally living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, for the coup.

The situation in Turkey, Guven said, “is obviously” going toward a dictatorship.

Erdogan bristles at accusations he is muzzling the press, insisting authorities are simply rooting out criminals.

“When we take a look at the names, we see that they include everyone from murderers to robbers, from child abusers to swindlers. All that’s missing in the list are journalists,” he said in March, referring to lists of imprisoned journalists he says are constantly presented to him by foreign officials.

Asked at the end of last week’s G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, about the media situation, Erdogan again insisted that those arrested had been detained for criminal activity.

“Journalists commit crimes too and when they do the judiciary makes the necessary assessment,” he said. “I want you to know that those you know as being members of the press are mostly people who aided and abetted terror.”

Critical reporting has been all but silenced by the detentions and sackings, which have included the editor and top staff at Turkey’s most respected opposition newspaper, Cumhuriyet.

“The crackdown on the media is not only about censoring critical reporting,” said HRW’s Sinclair-Webb, “but about preventing scrutiny of government policies and of the deeply repressive measures taken under the ongoing state of emergency.”

For Guven, serious problems began with Nokta’s satirical cover in September 2015 depicting a smiling Erdogan taking a selfie in front of a Turkish soldier’s flag-draped coffin. It was strong criticism of the president’s reported comments that soldiers killed fighting Kurdish militants would be happy for their martyrdom.

The result: distribution of the magazine was banned and police raided its offices, accusing its leadership of insulting the president. In May, Guven’s colleague Murat Capan was caught trying to flee to Greece and has been locked up in Turkey, also on a 22.5- year sentence. Greek media said Capan had made it across the Greek border but was pushed back into Turkey, where authorities detained him. The Greek government denies pushing back asylum seekers.

Activists say the media crackdown has fostered a climate of fear in which self-censorship has increased among the remaining journalists.

“The fact that there are journalists in jail is not the only proof of the lack of press freedoms in Turkey. The censorship and self-censorship imposed on media organs also remove press freedoms,” Gokhan Durmus, head of the Turkish Journalists’ Syndicate, said in a speech on May 3, World Press Freedom Day. “In our country, which is governed under a state of emergency, journalism is being destroyed. They are trying to create a media with one voice, a Turkey with one voice.”

The purge has affected almost every sector of Turkey’s professional classes, from the judiciary and military to academia, hospitals, kindergartens, businesses and diplomats. Human rights activists, including members of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have been among the latest wave of detentions.

Anyone deemed to be linked to Gulen’s network of schools, charities and businesses has fallen under suspicion. About 150,000 people have been detained, one-third of them formally arrested; more than 100,000 have been fired, sometimes for links as tenuous as using a particular bank.

 
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Italy’s plan to reduce the risk of a jihadi-inspired attack is pinned in small part on Mimoun El Hachmi, an imam who bikes to the prison here every week and exhorts Muslim inmates not to stray from life’s “right path” or hate people who aren’t Muslim.

Seven inmates — three Moroccans, three Tunisians and a Somali — left their cells at Terni Penitentiary on an early summer day to listen as the Moroccan-born imam led prayers and delivered a sermon. Sunlight from a high barred window streamed through Mimoun’s gauzy, off-white robe.

“If I am praying, I am not cooking up ideas to harm others on the outside,” a 35-year-old Tunisian inmate said, sitting cross-legged in the small, beige-tiled room that was converted into the prison’s Mosque of Peace.

None of the inmates would give their names, and prison rules precluded asking why they were serving time.

So far spared the attacks that have stunned France, Belgium, Britain and Germany, Italy has relied mostly on arresting and deporting suspected extremists to try to keep the country safe. But the Italian government has come to embrace prevention, too, especially in the prisons it doesn’t want to become training grounds for potential extremists.

Preaching pluralism

Inviting in imams who have been vetted to make sure they espouse “moderate views” is a tactic now being employed in Italian prisons to counter radicalization among inmates. In February, the government signed a recruiting agreement with the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy, which professes to foster Islamic “pluralism.”

When preaching to inmates, “we stress that we are Italians of Muslim faith, Europeans of Muslim faith … We are 100 percent citizens with rights and duties,” UCOII president Izzeddin Elzir said.

Italy’s second generation of Muslim immigrants is just coming of age now. For the most part, the nation lacks neighborhoods with heavy concentrations of Muslim residents. But Muslims make up a disproportionate share of the population in Italy’s prisons.

More than a third of all inmates in Italian penitentiaries are foreigners, and 42 percent of those come from the majority Muslim countries of Morocco, Albania and Tunisia, according to a 2017 report by inmate advocacy group Antigone.

The advocacy group counted 411 chaplains, but only 47 imams working in Italy’s 200 prisons. Prison system officials worry that if imams don’t make regular visits, inmates might be more vulnerable to the influence of those who are already radicalized.

“It’s not so much those (inmates) who preach, but those who submit to this proselytizing” who are considered at risk, Terni Penitentiary Superintendent Natascia Bastianelli said.

Justice Ministry Undersecretary Gennaro Migliore stressed in an interview that of about 11,000 Italian prison inmates from predominantly Muslim countries, “those who could be potentially radicalized, or already radicalized don’t exceed 400” inmates.

So far, 13 UCOII imams have started preaching in eight prisons after being screened by interior ministry officials. Government officials and the organization plan to evaluate the strategy’s effectiveness as a de-radicalization tool this fall.

Wakeup call

If Italy needed a wakeup call, it came with the morning news two days before Christmas.

Before dawn, officers in Milan confronted and killed a young Tunisian suspected of driving the truck that plowed through shoppers at a Berlin Christmas market that week, killing 12. Anis Amri is believed to have become radicalized during the 3 years he spent in Italian prisons for his role in a riot at a migrant center.

In a separate case, authorities accused a Tunisian inmate with alleged links to extremist groups of recruiting fellow Muslims at an Italian prison, and attacking inmates who resented his extremist propaganda.

Terni police commander Fabio Gallo said learning that Amri had spent time in Italian prisons spurred him and other prison officials to sharpen their skills at recognizing an inmate who is becoming radicalized.

About 20 percent of the penitentiary’s personnel have taken courses to make them aware of possible signs, such as preaching to other inmates or exulting at television news coverage about extremist attacks in Europe, Gallo said.

But he stressed that it’s often difficult to realize which words or gestures might be worrisome signals, especially for staff who don’t understand Arabic. And inmates are catching on to what tips prison personnel off, Gallo said.

“Nobody has a long beard” anymore, the commander said.

Vetting imams may not prove to be a straightforward process either.

“Where do you set the bar? Is it OK if someone is saying Western society is decadent, but at the same time condemns ISIS?” asked Lorenzo Vidino, an Islamism expert, using an alternative abbreviation for IS.

Former anti-terrorism magistrate Stefano Dambruoso, who is now a lawmaker in Italy, endorses careful screening of who will be preaching to men and women behind bars. He thinks it’s essential “they have been trained in schools, in environments respectful of the founding principles of our Constitution.”

Yet Dambruoso also expresses concern about the imams invited into prisons “turning into some kind of secret eye, or a spy for the institutions.” 

On the day when Mimoun was at Terni Penitentiary, 46 of the 109 foreigners in the medium-security section were from northern Africa. The imam delivered his sermon in Arabic, sprinkled with Italian and French phrases.

He said he teaches his followers to “respect Italians, respect neighbors, your colleagues, your cellmates.”

One of the inmates who came to pray in the mosque said that “if you respect religion, our religion, you won’t commit” extremist attacks.

After the seven were accompanied back to their cells, Mimoun told of how an inmate once confided in him that he “hated Italians.” 

“I showed him in the Quran where it says you cannot hate others of different religions,” the imam said.
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