The international community is watching in anticipation as Donald Trump, five months into his presidency, holds his first meeting with the man seen as his rival for the title of “most powerful leader” on the planet, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Their formal bilateral discussion late Friday is overshadowing the two-day gathering in Hamburg, Germany, of heads of state of the world’s 20 strongest economies.

The meeting is fraught with symbolism as Trump, still new to the world of international diplomacy, sits down with Putin, who came to power in what amounted to a Kremlin palace coup 17 years ago, and has a reputation for keeping negotiating partners off balance.

Students of Washington-Moscow relations point to striking parallels between the scheduled Hamburg talks and another great-power meeting 56 years earlier.

Berlin Wall followed JFK’s summit

“In June 1961, five months after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, [Soviet leader] Nikita Khrushchev proposed a summit in Vienna,” said William Courtney, adjunct senior fellow at the Rand Corporation, who served as the first U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan following the breakup of the Soviet Union.

“JFK’s advisers advised against it because it wasn’t well prepared, but Kennedy decided to go ahead anyway. He admitted later that Khrushchev ‘beat the hell’ out of him. Two months later the Berlin Wall began to rise,” Courtney told VOA. “Now did JFK’s weak performance in the summit have anything to do with the timing of building the Berlin Wall? We’ll never know.”

On the eve of the Hamburg meeting, Trump signaled his intent to speak to Putin about Russia’s behavior in Eastern Europe and other world hotspots.

“We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere and its support for hostile regimes, including Syria and Iran,” Trump said Thursday in the Polish capital, which he visited before flying to Hamburg.

At a joint news conference in Warsaw with Polish President Andrzej Duda, Trump was less forthcoming about another sensitive issue: whether Russia interfered in last November’s presidential election.

“I think it was Russia, but I think it was probably other people and/or countries,” Trump said. “Nobody really knows for sure.”

Trump aides have said he might bring up the election-meddling issue, but is not likely to dwell on it.

“That’s a difficult conversation to have in your first face-to-face, and Russia knows this,” said Lauren Goodrich, senior Eurasia analyst at the Stratfor geopolitical intelligence group in Texas.

‘Master strategist’ Putin vs. ‘unpredictable’ Trump

While Trump is the relative neophyte going into Friday’s meeting, Goodrich said Putin is wary of his American counterpart, who often is unpredictable in an international setting.

“Putin is a master strategist. He outplays the majority of his opponents the majority of the time. He’s well rehearsed and practiced for every single scenario,” Goodrich said. “The problem is, I’ve never seen him come up against a counterpart as unpredictable as Trump, so I think that may throw Putin off his game a little bit.”

For Putin, simply being seen on the world stage alongside a U.S. president will be considered a success, Goodrich added. After being frozen out during the final years of the Obama presidency, Putin knows that a picture of him and Trump sitting together in friendship will send an important message to countries on Russia’s border — both friends and foes.

“It’s enough that Russia can shape its messaging with its border lands that, ‘Look, at least the United States and Russia are talking again, so we’re going to be able to figure out the world. The United States is not talking to you about the world; they’re talking to us about the world,'” Goodrich said. “That’s really important to Russia among its border lands, to show that it’s on the same par as the United States on kind of shaping the world, instead of the U.S. working within those border lands outside Russian influence.”

‘Tremendous pressure’ on Putin

The Stratfor analyst said comparing the Hamburg meeting to the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit may be excessive, for one critical reason: Putin is desperate for a win on the world stage to ease massive headaches at home.

“Putin is under tremendous pressure. He has so many domestic problems that he has to find some way of relieving the pressure outside Russia, because at home it’s becoming very dangerous for him and his system,” Goodrich said.

Historian Dan Mahaffee points to another big difference between the 1961 Vienna summit and the Putin-Trump conversation, for which a relatively brief time has been allotted.

More than half a century ago, “it was a different Cold War environment,” said Mahaffee, who is policy director at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. “It was a time of a divided Berlin, the threat of nuclear war between superpowers, and trying to lower the temperature to avoid imminent conflict.”

Mahaffee mused that Kennedy had less difficulty going into his meeting with Khrushchev than Trump has had in the midst of exaggerated media speculation ahead of his face-to-face meeting with Putin. In contrast to intense attention in Washington devoted to the investigation of Russia’s attempts to influence last November’s U.S. election, the historian said with a chuckle that for Kennedy, “it was [Chicago Mayor] Richard J. Daley, not Khrushchev, who helped him win the 1960 election.”
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France is confiscating weapons from roughly 100 people on a watchlist of potential Islamist militants, the interior minister said on Thursday, two weeks after state prosecutors said an assailant inspired by Islamic State had been a gun-club member.

Minister Gerard Collomb was speaking ahead of a parliamentary vote to extend emergency search-and-arrest powers given to police after Islamist gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people in Paris in November 2015.

“We traced about a hundred … We’re sizing up the situation and taking the weapons away,” he told TV channel CNews, adding that police had foiled seven attacks in France this year alone.

The issue of weapons came to light last month when public prosecutors confirmed that a 31-year-old man, who died after ramming his car into a police convoy in Paris, had joined a gun

sports club to train as a jihadist fighter.

He had built up a large weapons arsenal and renewed his gun permit, despite being on an intelligence services list of people who appear to have been radicalized and could commit attacks.

Prosecutors said the man had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State militant group, whose bases in Syria and Iraq are being bombed by jets from a coalition of countries including France.

They say he appears to have been killed by the thick orange fumes that billowed out of his vehicle after he hit the police van on the Champs Elysees avenue.

The government of President Emmanuel Macron is proposing legislation to replace the system of emergency rule in November, including changes making it easier for officials vetting gun permit requests to cross-check against watchlists of would-be militants.

More than 230 people have been killed in France by Islamist assailants in the past two and a half years.

In the most recent operation, police arrested a man in northern France this week and four more were arrested in Brussels in a Belgian-led counter-terrorism swoop.
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Belgian authorities are looking for more suspects after they raided a half-dozen sites and charged two men with terror-related offenses, but they insist they have no information that an extremist attack was imminent.

Federal magistrate Eric Van der Sypt said Thursday that even though they keep investigating the case, “to say that there would be a new attack, that is more than a bridge too far.”

“We have no material element whatsoever to assume that a new attack would be planned,” Van der Sypt said in a telephone interview.

Prosecutors said the investigation was not linked to past extremist attacks in Paris and Brussels.

Van der Sypt refused to elaborate how many suspects authorities are still looking for. “In investigations like this you are always looking for people,” he said.
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Europe has made a dangerous turn on the Mediterranean Sea as it looks to Libya for help in slowing the number of migrants attempting to reach the continent in flimsy boats, Amnesty International said in a report released Thursday. The organization called the European Union’s strategy of training the Libyan coast guard to rescue migrants “reckless.”

By turning to Libya, a country in chaos that is the jumping-off point for the hazardous journey, the EU has created “A Perfect Storm” — the title of Amnesty’s report — that could hammer often-desperate migrants with a double vengeance. They face the risk of dying at sea or grave human rights abuses once they are returned to Libya and trapped there, the human rights group said.

More than 2,000 migrants to Europe have died at sea so far this year while more than 73,380 have reached Italy, the report said, citing figures from Italy’s Interior Ministry. By year’s end, the number of arrivals is expected to match or exceed the 181,400 who made it in 2016, which was more than in the two previous years, the report said.

EU looks to Libya

The European Union has been casting about for ways to deal with the crisis, notably looking to Libya, which has two rival governments, for help preventing departures. The EU is focusing in particular on equipping and training the Libyan coast guard and Navy to conduct sea rescues and to lead the fight against smuggling and trafficking networks.

Amnesty said it was “deeply problematic” to unconditionally fund and train Libya, where human rights are lacking and the coast guard has been known for violence and even smuggling.

The group cited an August incident off Libya’s coast in which attackers shot at a Doctors Without Borders rescue boat. A U.N panel of experts on Libya later confirmed that two officers from a coast guard faction were involved.

In May, the Libyan coast guard intervened in a search-and-rescue operation another non-governmental organization was performing. The coast guard officers threatened migrants with weapons, took command of their wooden boat and took it back to Libya, Amnesty reported.

“The current situation with the Libyan coast guard is absolutely outrageous,” Iverna McGowan, who leads Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office, said in an interview in Brussels. “It is unconscionable that the EU … would allow certain rescue operations that we know are inadequate and trust that with people’s lives.”

The worst may go unseen, McGowan said. “People who are disembarked in Libya are going back to unlawful detention centers where they are facing torture, rape and other unthinkable abuses,” she said.

Keep NGOs involved 

The report argues that NGOs need to continue participating in migrant rescues even though Amnesty says responsibility for the task rests with governments. It makes no mention of the recent threat by an overwhelmed Italy to prohibit some NGOs from bringing migrants to ports in southern Italy.

Amnesty said a “multicountry humanitarian operation” under control of Italy is urgently needed and that use of Libyan resources should be conditional on certain limitations, including no rescue operations outside territorial waters and the transfer of all rescued migrants to EU or other appropriate vessels.

Amnesty is not alone in its concern about relying on Libya to ease the European migrant crisis.

The search-and-rescue director for Save the Children, Rob MacGillivray, said in a statement that rescued migrants have recounted horrors from Libya, including claims of sexual assaults, sales to others for work and whippings and electrical shocks in detention centers.

“Simply pushing desperate people back to Libya, which many describe as hell, is not a solution,” he said.

Precarious conditions

EU Migration Commissioner Dimitri Avramopoulos conceded at a recent news conference in Paris that the EU is drawing on a country in “very precarious conditions.”

The European Union executive Wednesday beseeched member states to step up their efforts and show goodwill in helping Italy and Greece cope with the surge in migrants crossing the Mediterranean.

EU Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said, to the applause of legislators at the European Parliament, that “it would already make a world of difference in Europe if every single member state would live up to their commitments to show solidarity.”

The EU made commitments to ease the migrant pressure on Italy and Greece by having other member states take in some of the refugees who have made the dangerous Mediterranean crossing, but several countries in eastern and central Europe have shown little or no appetite for doing so.
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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will make his first official visit to Ukraine next week after accompanying President Donald Trump at the G-20 summit, the State Department said in a statement Wednesday.

Tillerson will meet with Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko and “young reformers” from both the government and civil society on July 9.

“The Secretary will reaffirm America’s commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, while encouraging the government of Ukraine to continue implementing reforms that will strengthen Ukraine’s economic, political, and military resilience,” the statement said.

President Trump hosted his Ukrainian counterpart at the White House last month, after which the U.S. Department of Treasury announced additional sanctions against Russia, pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, and individuals and companies associated with them.

The increased sanctions were in response to continued Russian support for pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.
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Rifts are widening in Theresa May’s Cabinet over Brexit with two rival schools of thoughts emerging, one favoring a sharp break with the European Union and the other, led by the ruling Conservatives’ increasingly influential Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, wanting closer ties with the European bloc.

The mounting tensions are emerging as surveys suggest British voters are becoming more skittish over Brexit, possibly a reflection of increasingly bad news about the British economy, which is the worst performing major economy.

According to a YouGov poll, 60 percent of Britons believe trade with Europe should take priority in the departure negotiations with the bloc, rather than immigration issues, thought to be a key driver of the Brexit vote a year ago.

Rising public concern about post-Brexit economic prospects comes amid signs that Britain will need to improve the skills of its own workers rapidly or make better use of robots in manufacturing and assembly plants, as it could be faced with a crippling skills shortage.

The consultancy firm Deloitte found in a survey last week that 47 percent of highly skilled workers from other European countries are thinking of leaving. It warned that if they do, there will be a serious implications for employers.

“Overseas workers, especially those from the EU, tell us they are more likely to leave the UK than before,” said David Sproul of Deloitte.

The split within the upper echelons of the ruling Conservatives over Brexit has gotten sharper since last month’s inconclusive elections that left May weakened and her party remaining in government thanks to a voting deal she made with 10 Northern Ireland lawmakers to give her a slight working majority in the House of Commons.

Few analysts believe May will see out the year before she has to step down and is replaced. The battle is playing out in public with key ministers taking swipes at each other over how Britain should leave the European Union, adding to the sense of a government in disarray.

Hammond has warned that “petty politics” must not be allowed to “interfere with economic logic”, while the minister charged with overseeing Brexit negotiations with Brussels, David Davis, has remained firm that Britain should leave by March 2019 both the single market and customs union. It could remain in both, if London agreed to pay into the EU budget and accept the principle of free movement of labor.

The stark division within the party was illustrated Tuesday when a 2010 video surfaced of Conservative lawmaker Steve Baker speaking to a Libertarian Alliance gathering. Baker, a junior minister and a member of Davis’s Brexit negotiating team, branded the European Union as an “obstacle” to world peace and “incompatible” with a free society. He argued it should be “wholly torn down.”

That is not the position of most Conservative lawmakers, but reflective of a hard-core minority who are propping up May, fearful that if she goes Hammond would probably be the most likely to replace her.

Moderate backbench Conservative lawmakers have been reaching out to opposite numbers in the Labour and Liberal Democrat ranks to try to plot a parliamentary way forward to block a so-called hard Brexit and to fashion one that would allow Britain to retain membership of the Single Market and Customs Union. They are not being helped by Labour’s hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is presiding over a party almost as divided as the Conservatives over Brexit.

Labour’s position isn’t clear, it campaigned last month as a Brexit party that wants to withdraw Britain from the Single Market, doing so because it feared desertion by working-class voters angry over the large number of immigrants working in the country. Corbyn has talked since about wanting a jobs-focused Brexit, but has punished 49 Labour lawmakers who ignored him last week and supported a rebel amendment calling for Britain to stay in the single market and customs union.

European officials say with the incoherence underlining British politics they are becoming increasingly fearful that Brexit negotiations will collapse, leaving Britain exiting Europe with no trade deal.

They aren’t the only ones worried. This week the director of the Leave campaign during last year’s referendum, expressed grave doubts about Brexit. In a Twitter exchange Dominic Cummings said he feared a debacle in the EU negotiations and admitted the referendum had been a “dumb idea.” Leaving the European Union could be an error, he said.
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The leader of Turkey’s main opposition party has pledged to continue his campaign for justice in the face of government accusations of supporting terrorism.  

The head of Turkey’s main opposition Republican Peoples Party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is leading thousands of people on a 450-kilometer justice march, from the capital, Ankara, to the country’s largest city, Istanbul.

The march is in response to a year-long crackdown following last July’s failed coup attempt.  The crackdown has resulted in more than 100,000 people losing their jobs and more than 60,000 jailed.  

Kilicdaroglu, who is leading a 25-day justice march from Ankara to Istanbul, told VOA the protest was triggered by the jailing of fellow parliamentary deputy and close ally Enis Berberoglu for 25 years on charges of releasing state secrets.

He says the introduction of the State of Emergency decree was a civil coup.  All the negative outcomes of this civilian coup came one after the other, he said.  Adding MPs (members of parliament) and journalist were arrested and academics were dismissed from their positions.

He says Berberoglu’s arrest became the moment when the water over spilled the glass and his party made the decision to march.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government have repeatedly condemned the march, saying it supports terrorism and coup plotters.  

Despite the criticism, the numbers joining the march continue to grow, with around 10,000 marching with Kilicdarolgu.  He expects those numbers will grow by the time the march concludes Sunday in Istanbul.  But Kilicdaroglu promised the march is only the beginning and civil protest will not end.

He says the struggle will continue with all possible effort and within democracy and using all the force the party has in parliament and outside parliament.

Amid rising political tensions over the march, a heavy police presence has been deployed to protect demonstrators, particularly Kilicdarolgu.

Police say they have detained six people linked to Islamic State who were planning to carry out an attack on the march.  Kilicdaroglu said he and marchers have faced threats and provocations.  

The march is due to end Sunday at the prison where Berberoglu is serving his prison sentence.
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The U.S. government has long warned that Russian organized crime posed a threat to democratic institutions, including “criminally linked oligarchs” who might collude with the Russian government to undermine business competition.

Those concerns, ever present if not necessarily always top priorities, are front and center once more.

A special counsel investigation is drawing attention to Russian efforts to meddle in democratic processes, the type of skulduggery that in the past has relied on hired hackers and outside criminals. It’s not clear how much the probe by former FBI Director Robert Mueller will center on the criminal underbelly of Moscow, but he’s already picked some lawyers with experience fighting organized crime. And as the team looks for any financial entanglements of Trump associates and relationships with Russian officials, its focus could land again on the intertwining of Russia’s criminal operatives and its intelligence services.

Russian organized crime has manifested itself over the decades in more conventional forms of money laundering, credit card fraud and black market sales. Justice Department prosecutors have repeatedly racked up convictions for those offenses.

Espionage plus greed

In recent years, though, the bond between Russian intelligence agencies and criminal networks has been especially alarming to American law enforcement officials, blending motives of espionage with more old-fashioned greed. In March, for instance, two hired hackers were charged along with two officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service in a cyberattack on Yahoo Inc. in 2013.

It’s too early to know how Russian criminal networks might fit into the election meddling investigation, but central to the probe are devastating breaches of Democratic email accounts, including those of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. U.S. authorities have blamed those hacks on Russian intelligence services working to discredit Clinton and help Trump — but have said the overall effort involved third-party intermediaries and paid internet trolls.

Former law enforcement officials say Russian organized crime has been a concern for at least a couple of decades, though not necessarily the most pressing demand given finite resources and budget constraints. The threat is diffuse and complex, and Russia’s historic lack of cooperation has complicated efforts to apprehend suspects. And the responsibility for combating the problem often falls across different divisions of the FBI and the Justice Department, depending on whether it’s a criminal or national security offense — a sometimes blurry boundary.

‘Very dangerous’

“It’s not an easy thing to kind of grasp or understand, but it’s very dangerous to our country because they have so many different aspects, unlike a traditional cartel,” said Robert Anderson, a retired FBI executive assistant director who worked counterintelligence cases and oversaw the criminal and cyber branch.

“You have to know where to look, which makes it more complicated,” he added. “And you have to understand what you’re looking for.”

Federal prosecutors continue to bring traditional organized crime cases, such as one last month in New York charging 33 members and associates of a Russian crime syndicate in a racketeering and extortion scheme that officials say involved cargo shipment thefts and efforts to defraud casinos. But there’s a heightened awareness about more sophisticated cyberthreats that commingle the interests of the government and of criminals.

“An organized criminal group matures in what they do,” said retired FBI Assistant Director Ron Hosko. “What they once did here through extortion, some of these groups are now doing through cyberattack vectors.”

Within the Justice Department, it’s been apparent since the collapse of the Soviet Union that crime from that territory could affect national security in Europe and the U.S.

A 2001 report from the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice, a research arm, called America “the land of opportunity for unloading criminal goods and laundering dirty money.” It said crime groups in the region were establishing ties to drug trafficking networks, and that “criminally linked oligarchs” might work with the government to undermine competition in gas, oil and other strategic networks.

Three months later came the September 11 attacks, and the FBI, then under Mueller’s leadership, and other agencies left no doubt that terrorism was the most important priority.

“I recall talking to the racketeering guys after that and them saying, ‘Forget any focus now on organized crime,’ ” said James Finckenauer, an author of the report.

Besides cyberthreats, Justice Department officials in recent years have worried about the effect of unchecked international corruption, creating a kleptocracy initiative to recover money plundered by government leaders for their own purposes.

Yanukovych regime

In 2014, then-Attorney General Eric Holder pledged the Justice Department’s commitment to recouping large sums believed to have been stolen during the regime of the Russia-backed government of Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president chased from power that year.

That effort led to an FBI focus on Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman who did political consulting work on behalf of Yanukovych’s political party and who remains under scrutiny now.

But those same foreign links have also made cases hard to prove in court.

In many instances, foreign criminal hackers or those sponsored by foreign governments — including China, Iran and Russia — have remained out of reach of American authorities. In some cases, judges have chastised U.S. authorities for prosecutorial overreach in going after international targets.

A San Francisco federal judge, for instance, in 2015 dismissed an indictment involving two Ukrainian nationals who’d been accused of trying to bribe an official at a U.N. agency responsible for creating standards for machine-readable international passports.

The judge said he couldn’t understand how the government could apply a foreign bribery law to conduct that had no direct connection to the U.S.
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As police step up patrols and protesters set up camp in Hamburg, Germany, no one is expecting an easy weekend when U.S. President Donald Trump joins other heads of the world’s 20 leading economies.

Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are on a collision course on issues of climate and trade, but counterterrorism efforts, recent North Korean missile tests and Chinese steel dumping could bring them together.

Merkel pledges to work toward consensus on wider issues, but foresees no miracles in her relations with the U.S. administration.

“I do not think we will have unified positions on all issues at the end, but it is sensible and honest to talk to each other on all issues of international diplomacy,” Merkel told reporters ahead of the summit.

WATCH: Preview of G-20 meeting

President Trump said he has “bold” plans to impose steep tariffs or quotas on steel imports, the latest and perhaps most serious of threats to protect U.S. industry, and part of his America First strategy, one that has G-20 partners feeling nervous.

“What he is doing is he is throwing all kinds of cards up in the air — NAFTA, critique of climate change — because he actually wants a bit of a zero base policy,” said Tim Evans, a political economist at Middlesex University. “I think at the end of the day he probably, of course, wants free trade in the win-win sense, but what he is trying to expose is perhaps some of the hypocrisy of countries like China who talk the talk of openness but do not always deliver. So there is going to be a real clash of the titans at this summit.”

Shock talk brings results

After threatening to not stand by NATO allies unless they pay their share of defense, members pledged to boost their contributions. Trump said he would rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, and now he has a deal with Mexico on sugar exports.

The U.S. leader’s target now is China and its cheap steel exports that are blamed for killing jobs not only in the United States, but in Britain and other G-20 states, including Germany.

Chinese officials are closely watching the direction of U.S. policy and have called on Washington to exercise caution.

Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord has stoked the anger of demonstrators in Hamburg as well as concern among Merkel and some other G-20 leaders, but analysts say the threat of cheap Chinese steel imports could be a common cause, and take precedence.

“Many of the G-20 members are experiencing exactly the same kinds of economic forces and constraints the U.S. is facing,” Shanker Singham, director of economic policy and prosperity studies at the Legatum Institute in London, told VOA. “So for example, in the U.K., the steel mills in Port Talbot and Redcar were closed because of, really, overcapacity of supply by the China steel sector. That is not very much different from what has been going on in Ohio and Pennsylvania. So I think this actually has the opportunity or a chance to get a lot of support.”

Wait-and-see approach

G-20 leaders, while nervous, are waiting to see what Trump actually does before taking any action, and all indications are that they are not rushing to adopt protectionist measures.

Global Trade Alert, a group that monitors protectionism, this week reported a drop in the number of such measures adopted by G-20 members in the last several months compared with the same period last year.

“The Trump administration has said a lot about ‘America First’ and fair trade and so forth, but they haven’t actually done that much so far,” said Singham. “G-20 members will be looking at ‘What do you really mean by this policy?’ in order to determine what their response to that policy will be.”

None of the major issues is likely to be resolved, but analysts say more clarity may emerge, given who the players are.

“The landscape that we see looming in Hamburg is one of showmanship,” said Evans. ”We have a lot of unpredictability because we have a lot of very charismatic, very outspoken leaders — people like [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan from Turkey, [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi from India, Vladimir Putin from Russia and of course President Trump. These people know how to play to global audiences.”
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A Washington lawyer’s simultaneous representation of President Donald Trump and a jailed American pastor in Turkey doesn’t pose an ethical issue as long as his work for one doesn’t undermine the other, legal experts say.

Jay Sekulow, founder and chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), had been representing Andrew Brunson for months when he went to the White House to lobby Trump to press Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about the case. He began representing Trump soon afterward.

Brunson, a native of North Carolina who has lived in Turkey with wife, Norine, for 23 years, were arrested for alleged immigration violations in early October. She was released 13 days later, while his charges have been upgraded to supporting terrorism.

Gene Kapp, media director for ACLJ, which focuses on conservative issues, told VOA that Sekulow is representing Trump in his personal capacity and has been representing Brunson in his ACLJ role.

“His work as a member of the president’s legal team is not connected to his work at the ACLJ and the ongoing efforts to get Pastor Brunson released,” Kapp said, adding that Sekulow does not charge Brunson.

On his radio show on May 19, Sekulow said he met with the president and others at the White House “for over an hour” the day before, his second visit in two weeks.

“I anticipate there will be a release soon,” Sekulow said, adding that his group was working with Congress, the State Department and White House.

Gulen connection alleged

A column four days later in Takvim, a pro-government Turkish newspaper, suggested that Brunson was an American spy who had been working with Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher who Ankara claims masterminded a coup attempt last July 15, and supporting the PKK, a banned Kurdish militant group. Kapp called the allegations bogus.

U.S. relations with Turkey have soured recently over a number of issues, including Turkey’s unsuccessful efforts to get the U.S. to hand over Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania, and Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian rule.

There has been no obvious recent movement in Brunson’s case. Turkish media have suggested that he is being held as leverage for Gulen’s extradition.

“Andrew is extremely discouraged and really really needs your prayers!” Norine said in a May 27 post on the couple’s Facebook page.

Kapp said the ACLJ is continuing to do everything it can, in the U.S. and Turkey, to obtain the pastor’s release.

“We are very concerned about his health,” Kapp said. “He is being held in a cell built for eight people but houses 22.”

Brunson’s case has drawn attention in Congress, too. In February, a bipartisan letter from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, signed by 78 lawmakers, called for Brunson’s unconditional release.

William Hodes, a legal ethics expert and professor of law emeritus at Indiana University, said he didn’t see Sekulow’s representation of Trump and Brunson as an ethical problem.

“This lawyer’s two clients are not adverse to each other, and it is hard to see how one client would fear that his confidences would be leaked to the other to the first client’s detriment,” Hodes said.

Communication advised

But Hodes added it’s possible that Brunson could become irked if he felt Trump wasn’t doing enough or working quickly enough, while Trump might have diplomatic reasons to go slowly.

“Lawyers have a lot of different clients with lots of different interests, but lawyers do have to avoid a conflict of interest between the clients,” said Richard Painter, who served as former President George W. Bush’s White House ethics czar.

In this instance, Sekulow needs to talk to both clients and make sure they don’t object to his dual representation, and ensure that the work he’s doing for one doesn’t undermine his representation of the other, said Painter, who teaches law at the University of Minnesota.

A June 7 article in The Washington Post said Sekulow has built a powerful charity empire leading a team of ACLJ attorneys who jump into high-profile court cases over such issues as religious liberty and abortion rights. It said Sekulow’s family or their companies received nearly $230 million in charitable donations in 2011-15.
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In the southwestern part of Germany, the mountain ranges are crisscrossed with subterranean rivers that have left the area honeycombed with ancient limestone caves. This area is rich in human history and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, is considering declaring the caves a World Heritage Site. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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French President Emmanuel Macron says the European Union has lost its way amid bureaucracy and needs a new generation of leaders to put it back on track. In a major speech at Versailles Monday, Macron also called for a radical overhaul of the country’s government, which he wants reduced by one third. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports his message received mixed reactions.
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Italy says the number of migrants arriving on its shores during the first half of this year rose nearly 20 percent above the levels reached by the same date in 2016.

Interior ministry officials in Rome said that, as of Monday, 85,183 migrants have landed from the Mediterranean Sea, nearly 14,000 more people than at the same time in 2016.

Many of the arriving migrants were rescued by coast guard patrol boats and other vessels after their flimsy crafts began taking on water. Another 2,000 migrants have died this year attempting to make the trip from North Africa.

Before the final migration totals were disclosed, Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said that unless the European Union does more to help alleviate the surge of migrants to Italy, the influx will feed “hostile reactions in our society.”

Italy appeals to all of Europe

Speaking in Rome, he said: “The whole of Italy has mobilized to deal with the flows of migrants in the central Mediterranean and asks the EU for engagement, which is necessary if Europe wants to stay faithful to its own principles, own history, own civilization.”

Italy threatened last week to close its ports to migrant rescue boats in order to force the vessels to go to other Mediterranean countries, and pleaded with other countries to take in the refugees. On Monday, however, refugees were still landing freely.

France, Germany and the EU’s migration commissioner pledged they would give more support to Italy in handling the influx of migrants, but made no direct reference to the Italian government’s appeal to other European countries to allow rescue boats to dock at their ports.

The French and German interior ministers and the EU’s migration chief agreed to bolster training and funding for the coast guard in Libya, where migrants pay people-smugglers to carry them across the sea, and also to relocate asylum seekers more quickly.

Do aid groups make problem worse?

The bigger European states also said they would draw up a “code of conduct” for aid groups working in the Mediterranean, who supply boats that pick up many of the refugees unable to reach Italy unaided. Many people in Italy contend the nongovernmental aid groups are, in effect, aiding the human smugglers and allowing the trade to continue.

The U.N. refugee agency said Italy cannot continue absorbing tens of thousands of migrants, and called on European countries to show more solidarity with Rome.

“It is unrealistic to think that Italy should have the responsibility to disembark everyone,” said UNHCR special envoy for the central Mediterranean Vincent Cochetel. “This is not sustainable; this is not tenable. So we need to have other countries joining Italy and sharing that responsibility.”

The flood of migrants who see Italy as their main gateway to Europe and a recent stretch of good weather and calm seas has pushed the number of arriving migrants to more than 10,000 in a week. The travelers’ sea voyages begin in Libya, but they originate from many places: across sub-Saharan Africa, from the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Syria and Bangladesh.

Migrants must declare their nationality when they arrive in Italy. Around 15 percent of all migrants this year have been from Nigeria; 12 percent are from Bangladesh, 10 percent from Guinea and 9 percent from Ivory Coast.

 
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