Israel’s support of next Monday’s independence referendum by Iraqi Kurds is threatening to strain recently restored diplomatic relations with Turkey. Ankara has been condemning the planned vote, warning of severe consequences for the region.

Israel has a long tradition of seeing the region’s Kurds as a buffer from both Arab and Iranian threats; but with Turkey having its own restive Kurdish minority, Israel’s support of the vote has drawn strong condemnation in Turkey. 

Aydin Selcen, a former senior Turkish diplomat who served widely in the region, says the response by Ankara and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been restrained.

“In the government media, there are many articles saying, look, Israel is behind Iraqi Kurdistan’s independence. But what has to be followed is the practical reaction from Ankara, not what the government media reports. I also did not see anything coming from Erdogan’s mouth putting Israel on the target for this issue,” Selcen said.

Israel and Turkey only recently restored diplomatic ties after rapprochement efforts following the 2010 killing by Israeli commandos of 10 Turks trying to break Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza. But Turkish suspicions over Israel’s relations with the region’s Kurds were further heightened this month when former senior Israeli general Yair Golan declared the Kurdish rebel group the PKK, which has been fighting the Turkish state for decades, is not a terrorist organization. Washington and the European Union have designated the PKK as a terrorist group.

The comment triggered a strong reaction in Ankara; but former Turkish diplomat Selcen says a swift response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demonstrates that both sides are committed to working together, despite differences.

“Mr. Netanyahu made a very attentive statement underlying for Israel the PKK is a terrorist organization, but an independent Kurdish state is in the interests of the region; Israel needs this alliance as Turkey needs it for different reasons, but they both need it. And that’s how they managed to repair the relations. And with Israel there are some tensions, but the two sides manage to go on now with the newfound, let’s say friendship and relations, they are not going to sever the diplomatic ties, like before over the issue of Kurdistan,” Selcen said.

Analysts warn if Israel backs its support of the Kurds with action, it will likely further strain relations with Ankara, whatever their wider mutual interests.
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French labor unions staged fresh protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s contested labor law reforms Thursday — a day before he adopts them by executive order.

The nationwide action backed by the powerful, hard-left CGT trade union, saw protesters take to the streets in the second round of public opposition to the long-touted reforms that will give more power to employers to hire and fire workers. Macron says that’s needed to power the stagnant French economy and boost jobs.

In cities across the country, demonstrators waved anti-capitalist placards and angry personal messages against Macron, whose popularity has recently taken a hit.

In Paris, demonstrators brandishing posters reading “The state ruins the people” marched past the posh La Rotonde restaurant where Macron was branded arrogant for prematurely celebrating his victory in the first round of the elections before he had won the presidency.

The latest protests come a week after hundreds of thousands of protesters — half a million, according to the unions — took to the streets in the first major challenge to Macron’s fledgling presidency.

Macron is waving away the opposition and his government is pressing ahead with the labor reforms, backed by a robust majority in parliament.

 
…

The lack of a unified approach by world governments to paying kidnap ransoms is putting the lives of citizens of all nationalities at greater risk and providing terror groups with a big source of finance, warns a new report from British analyst group the Royal United Services Institute.

The authors call for a global, rigorously applied and scrupulously monitored commitment to prevent any concessions to terrorist organizations.

A series of high profile kidnappings by Islamic State in Syria highlighted the lack of a unified global response. Among them was American filmmaker James Foley, held for nearly two years alongside other hostages, until he was murdered in August 2014.

“There are cases where a number of individuals are taken hostage, so in the James Foley case, tragically, and other cases in West Africa, where you have mixed nationalities.  And those that pay ransoms are freed earlier, multimillion-dollar ransoms that allow the terrorist groups to perpetuate their work.  And those that do not pay ransoms are kept for extended periods of time until it becomes politically expedient to murder them,” explains report author Tom Keatinge of RUSI.

He adds that terrorists often will abuse hostages whose governments refuse to negotiate, in order to raise the pressure on countries that do.

France is among the countries accused of paying ransoms.  In December 2014, then President Francois Hollande waited on the tarmac of a military airport outside Paris to welcome home hostage Serge Lazarevic, who had been kidnapped in Mali by al-Qaida militants.  He is one of several French hostages to have been released.

Choosing ‘right to life’

While Hollande consistently denied his government paid ransoms, the evidence suggests otherwise, says Keatinge.

“There are a number of countries, Italy is another one, where hostages have come home.  And the country has chosen the immediate right to life of their citizen over adhering to an internationally-agreed ban not to finance terrorist organizations.”

Ransoms are a major source of criminal financing in Colombia.  Guerrilla fighters belonging to the rebel National Liberation Army, known as the ELN, have kidnapped dozens of people.  In a rare interview this month, the group’s commander “Yernson” spoke about the key role that kidnapping plays.

“It’s a difficult economic situation; that’s why we have hostages.  We could say, ‘No, we won’t kidnap anyone else,’ but how would we finance our struggle? How would we finance our work?  We live off of the ‘ransom tax’ and kidnappings,” he told a Reuters journalist.

Specialist private sector companies, usually backed by insurance policies, are brought in to negotiate in such cases.  They often secure a release for a fraction of the ransom demand, says Keatinge.

“In places like Mexico, South America, where kidnapping is almost an industry for money raising for criminal groups, that’s where these private sector companies have proven to be very effective.  In the [Niger] delta in Nigeria, releasing people who have been taken hostage from oil companies, that’s another place they have been very effective.”

Currently, the ban on terrorist financing precludes the use of private sector resolutions in terrorist hostage situations.  Keatinge argues reversing this policy would lower kidnappers’ ransom expectations and potentially throttle a major source of terrorist financing.
…

World leaders meeting at the United Nations on Wednesday launched a half-billion dollar effort to end violence against women and girls, a crime suffered by one in three in their lifetimes.

The effort will fund anti-violence programs that promote prevention, bolster government policies and provide women and girls with improved access to services, organizers said.

It will take particular aim at human trafficking, femicide and family violence, they said.

A third of all women experience violence at some point in their lives, and that figure is twice as high in some countries, according to the United Nations.

“Gender-based violence is the most dehumanizing form of gender oppression. It exists in every society, in every country rich and poor, in every religion and in every culture,” Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, head of U.N. Women, said as the United Nations held its annual General Assembly.

“If there was anything that was ever universal, it is gender inequality and the violence that it breeds against women,” she said.

In other forms of violence, more than 700 million women worldwide were married before they were 18, and at least 200 million women and girls have undergone female genital mutilation in 30 countries, according to U.N. figures.

The initiative of 500 million Euros (US$595 million) was launched by the U.N. and the European Union, which is its main contributor, organizers said.

“The initiative has great power,” said Ashley Judd, a Hollywood actress and goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) who participated in Wednesday’s announcement.

“There are already so many effective, research-based, data-driven programs,” Judd told the Thomson Reuters Foundation ahead of the announcement. “Financing for existing programs is a beautiful thing.

“It also makes an incredibly powerful statement to show that the world is increasingly cohesive around stopping gender-based violence,” she said.
…

Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi returned to frontline Italian politics over the weekend, staking his claim to lead a resurgent center-right into national elections that are expected early next year.

At exactly the same moment, Berlusconi’s outspoken ally, Matteo Salvini, was addressing his Northern League party and laying down his own marker to become the next prime minister.

“Salvini Premier” read a sign stuck to the lectern.

In reality, neither man looks likely to head the next government if they pull off an election victory, and possible alternative candidates are already emerging.

“There is an apparent power struggle going on between Berlusconi and Salvini, but it will not get out of hand. They know a violent clash would be suicidal with voters,” said Piero Ignazi, politics professor at Bologna University.

“The truth is both men will remain head of their respective parties, but they won’t be the next prime minister,” he said.

This would open the way for a consensus candidate who would have to bridge the huge divergences between the three main rightist parties – from the fierce anti-EU agenda put forward by both the Northern League and Brothers of Italy to the pro-European vision embraced by Berlusconi on Sunday.

Latest opinion polls show this trio of long-standing allies are pulling ahead in the polls and predicted to win a combined 35 percent of the vote, with the anti-migrant Northern League just ahead of Berlusconi’ Forza Italia on some 15 percent.

By contrast, the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and ruling center-left Democratic Party (PD) are seen on around 28 percent apiece. The 5-Star has ruled out any coalition alliances and the center-left pool of votes is shrinking as various leftist parties engage in ferocious infighting.

Court appeal

Under the current electoral system no party or bloc looks like winning enough seats to govern alone. However, political analysts say the wind is filling the center-right’s sails after years of adverse conditions, giving it pre-election momentum.

Berlusconi ignominiously resigned from power in 2011 during a sovereign debt crisis. Mired in sex scandals and legal woes, he was subsequently expelled from the Senate and banned from running for office due to a 2013 tax fraud conviction.

Open heart surgery last year left most analysts writing his political obituary. But not for the first time, the media tycoon, now 81, bounced back and has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to overturn the ban on seeking election.

A hearing is scheduled for November, but a verdict is unlikely to come for several months, meaning he almost certainly will not be able to stand in the next national ballot, which is due by May 2018 and widely expected to be held in March.

“Despite his age, Berlusconi would love to be prime minister again. It would be his last hurrah. But realistically speaking, it is not about to happen,” said a Forza Italia official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Significantly, Berlusconi made his political comeback speech at an event organized by Forza Italia stalwart Antonio Tajani, the president of the European Parliament. Party sources said Tajani was in pole position to be Berlusconi’s surrogate.

Compromise

While Berlusconi’s name abroad evokes memories of “bunga bunga” sex parties and wisecracks, Tajani is a much less colorful character, whose pro-European instincts would make him a reassuring figure for international markets.

Those very same instincts would pose a problem for Berlusconi’s hardline allies, who have regularly denounced the European Union and have called for Italy to quit the euro.

“The leader of the center-right needs to be chosen through a clear process, perhaps a primary,” Giorgia Meloni, the head of Brothers of Italy, told Sky Italia television on Sunday.

“I imagine that whatever grassroots method you decide, Tajani will not win out,” she said.

Brothers of Italy is a small, nationalist party, which is anti-migrant and anti-euro. It tries to differentiate itself from the League by saying it focuses on the whole country, not just the wealthy north.

Buoyed by the League’s strong poll numbers, Salvini says the leader of the party which wins the most votes next year should automatically be the prime ministerial candidate.

But Berlusconi, a four-times premier, has ruled out handing over the baton of power to Salvini, who has embraced Europe’s far-right and endorsed France’s National Front.

“We created the center-right in Italy and we have always been its leader, laying out and fulfilling its program,” Berlusconi said on Sunday. The two men have not spoken for months, saying they are in no hurry to discuss strategy.

Political analysts have speculated that the pro-business Forza Italia might find it easier to create a government of national unity with former prime minister Matteo Renzi’s PD party rather than the populist Northern League.

Forza Italia loyalists reject this notion.

“We ruled with the Northern League for years in national government and we are ruling with them now in the regions and it is going well,” said Forza Italia lawmaker Deborah Bergamini.

One such regional coalition is in Liguria, headed by Forza Italia’s Giovanni Toti. He attended both the Forza Italia and Northern League rallies at the weekend and is due to take part in a Brothers of Italy meeting this weekend.

“Toti has been carefully building bridges between the three parties and would be a natural choice to head any national coalition,” Bologna University’s Ignazi said.
…

Ukraine could have a new Supreme Court installed by next month as part of judicial reforms aimed at rooting out corruption, Ukraine’s Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko said Tuesday.

“I think from October the new Supreme Court will start working,” Petrenko told Reuters in an interview at the Concordia Annual Summit in New York. “The next challenge for us is to establish new appeal courts throughout the country, and to take in new judges in the regional courts.”

Petrenko added that reforms within appeal and regional courts could be in place within the next four years. Other government reforms began in 2014, after a popular uprising driven partly by public anger over endemic corruption.

Ukraine is still dealing with nagging allegations of graft, and Transparency International ranked it a poor 131st out of 176 countries in the World Ranking of Corruption Perception in a report this year.

The selection process for new Supreme Court judges has been questioned by figures including British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who cited concerns in July that Ukrainian government reforms were faltering.

Not ideal, but ‘very good’

Petrenko addressed criticism surrounding the selection, saying that while there are no ideal processes, “this one is very good.”

“We have a democratic society, and all the time there are people who will criticize the process,” he said.

Ukraine currently is the recipient of an aid-for-reforms program from the International Monetary Fund.

So far, the IMF has given the country $8.4 billion, helping it recover from a two-year recession following the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and the outbreak of a Russian-backed insurgency in its industrial east.

Under the $17.5 billion program, the IMF wants Ukraine to set up a special court to focus on tackling corruption.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Friday said he hoped an anti-corruption chamber would be created next month, but expressed doubt that an independent court as envisaged by the IMF could be set up before 2019.
…

Russia will abide by a European Court of Human Rights ruling requiring it to pay nearly 3 million euros ($3.6 million) in damages for the 2004 Beslan school siege, the Interfax news agency reported Tuesday, citing the Russian justice ministry.

Russia used excessive force to storm a school in the small southern Russian town seized by Islamist militants in 2004, causing a high number of hostages to be killed, the court ruled in April.

The three-day drama began when Islamist militants took more than 1,000 people hostages on the first day of the school year and called for independence for the majority-Muslim region of Chechnya.

More than 330 hostages died, including at least 180 children, when the siege ended in a gunbattle. It was the bloodiest incident of its kind in modern Russian history.

The case for damages was brought by 409 Russian nationals who either were taken hostage or injured in the incident, or were family members of those taken hostage, killed or injured, the European Court of Human Rights statement said in April.

On Tuesday, the court said in a press release that its Grand Chamber Panel had rejected a Russian government request to refer the case and said its ruling was final.

“No other actions are being contemplated by the participants in this process,” the Russian justice ministry said in comments carried by Interfax.

In its April ruling, the court said the heavy-handed way Russian forces stormed the school had “contributed to the casualties among the hostages.”

It also ruled that authorities had failed to take reasonable preventive measures, despite knowing militants were planning to attack an educational institution.
…

The first of hundreds of Catalan mayors summoned to answer questions on why they have backed a banned Oct. 1 referendum on independence from Spain appeared before the state prosecutor on Tuesday amid cheers and chants from supporters.

The first three mayors to declare exercised their right to remain silent, the Association of Municipalities for Independence (AMI) said.

Years of separatist feeling in the industrial northeastern region will come to a head in less than two weeks as the fiercely pro-independence regional government calls a referendum on splitting from Spain.

Madrid has declared the referendum illegal and the Constitutional Court has suspended the vote that was approved by the regional government earlier this month.

So far, 745 of 948 municipal leaders have said they will provide venues for the referendum.

“Voting is not a crime,” said Marc Solsona, mayor of the town of Mollerussa, one of nearly 750 mayors facing charges of civil disobedience, abuse of office and misuse of public funds, as he left the state prosecutor’s office in Barcelona.

“I’m just the mayor and I have to serve my people. I am committed to the people being able to vote on Oct. 1 in accordance with the law passed by the Catalan parliament and what happens to me is not important,” he said.

Solsona smiled, kissed and gripped hands with dozens of clapping supporters gathered outside the state prosecutor’s office as he entered to chants of “You are not alone.”

“We consider ourselves privileged to have a mayor who represents the townspeople above any other interests — political or financial,” said 63-year-old pensioner Angel Tena, who had traveled to Barcelona to support the mayor.

Separately, police continued their search for ballot boxes, voting papers and campaign leaflets on Wednesday, raiding the offices of Spain’s biggest private delivery company Unipost in the Catalan city of Terrassa, Spanish media reported.

Neither the police nor the Interior Ministry could confirm the raid, but footage showed dozens of people gathered outside the company’s offices chanting “Out with the occupying forces,” handing out voting papers and laying carnations on police cars.

Unipost confirmed the raid without giving further details.

Although polls show less than half of Catalonia’s 5.5 million voters want self-rule, most in the wealthy northeastern region want the chance to vote on the issue.
…

FIFA president Gianni Infantino wants the next edition of the Women’s World Cup to draw a billion TV viewers across the world.

Infantino, who attended the official launch of the tournament that will be organized in France in 2019, said on Tuesday that the previous edition in Canada in 2015 was watched by 750 million viewers.

Speaking alongside French federation president Noel Le Graet and French Sports Minister Laura Flessel, Infantino said “our goal is to reach one billion in France in 2019.”

The tournament, which will run from June 7 to July 7, will gather 24 teams in six groups.

France will kick off the event at Parc des Princes in Paris, with the semifinals and finals in Lyon.

“It will be magnificent,” Infantino said. “France is a great football nation for both men and women.”

 
…

A towering monument to Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the prolific assault rifle that bears his name, has been unveiled in Moscow.

Kalashnikov died in 2013 at age 94 in the city of Izhevsk where he lived. He has received accolades as the creator of the AK-47 assault rifle, the world’s most popular firearm. An estimated 100 million guns are spread worldwide.

Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky said at the monument’s opening Tuesday that the Kalashnikov rifle has become “Russia’s cultural brand.”

The monument in downtown Moscow shows Kalashnikov cradling his rifle.

Kalashnikov, born into a peasant family in Siberia, began brooding about a new rifle design after being wounded in a 1941 battle against Nazi forces, and finalized it in 1947.
…

Officials are calling for increased police patrols and new laws to punish perpetrators after a spate of rapes around Italy.

After two new cases emerged Tuesday, Rome mayor Virginia Raggi declared it has been “a black September for Italy.”

In Rome, a German woman reported being raped, robbed and bound in the swank Villa Borghese park overnight.

And in Catania, police on Tuesday arrested a man who allegedly raped a doctor to whom he had gone for medical help.

The attacks followed a case in Florence where two American students said two carabinieri officers raped them after offering them a ride home from a disco in their patrol car. And in August, a Polish tourist was raped and her partner beaten during a beach attack in Rimini.

 
…

Alphabet unit Google has offered to display rival comparison shopping sites via an auction as part of an EU compliance order following a landmark fine for favoring its own service, four people familiar with

the matter said on Monday.

The proposal, submitted to the European Commission on August 29 following a record 2.4-billion-euro ($2.87 billion) penalty, would allow competitors to bid for any spot in its shopping section known as Product Listing Ads, the people said.

Three years ago, the world’s most popular internet search engine made a similar offer in an attempt to settle a long-running investigation by the European Commission and stave off a fine. The offer was ultimately rejected following negative feedback from rivals and discord within the EU executive.

Under this earlier proposal, Google had reserved the first two places for its own ads. The new offer would also see Google set a floor price with its own bids minus operating costs. The company has sought feedback from competitors.

The offer does not address the issues set out by EU competition regulators, the people said. The Commission had ordered Google to treat rivals and its own service equally.

“This is worse than the commitments,” one of the people said, declining to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The Commission was not immediately available for comment.

Google did not respond to a request for comment. Google has until September 28 to stop its anti-competitive practices or its parent company Alphabet could be fined up to 5 percent of its average daily worldwide turnover.
…

The four American college students attacked with acid at a Marseille train station have forgiven their assailant, who reportedly suffers from a mental illness, a university spokesman said Monday.

The four women, on a study-abroad year, have all said they intend to remain in Europe to continue their studies, the spokesman for Boston College, the private Jesuit school they attend, told The Associated Press.

The women “have stated their intention to remain in Europe for their studies and have offered forgiveness to the woman who attacked them, an individual who police say suffers from mental illness,” said Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn.

The four were attacked Sunday morning at the Saint Charles train station in the southern French city. A 41-year-old woman has been taken into custody by police in the case.

Two of the students had asked for prayers for their assailant in Facebook posts late Sunday.

One of the women, Michelle Krug, said she was one of two who got hit in the eye with “a weak solution of hydrochloric acid.” She asked friends to “please consider thinking about/praying for our attacker” so she can receive help.

“Mental illness is not a choice and should not be villainized,” Krug wrote, adding she planned to continue her “incredible opportunity” to study in France.
…

Canada-born designer Erdem Moralioglu has turned the Old Selfridges Hotel into a glamorous speakeasy for his London Fashion Week show.

With classics “Stormy Monday” and “My Funny Valentine” playing, the fashion house named Erdem on Monday displayed glamorous, full-length evening gowns with full-length gloves and sparkly accessories.

Many had floral themes and remarkable detailing, adding to the show’s exuberance and opulence.

While many designers are showing more and more skin, Erdem opts for a subtle celebration of feminine beauty. There were some sheer and lacy outfits, but most were more modest, with either high necklines or sweetheart ones.

The effect was entrancing. Nostalgia was in the air – the program featured a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II meeting Duke Ellington in 1958.

London Fashion week continues later Monday with Christopher Kane, and others.
…

At least eight people were killed and dozens more injured when a violent storm hit western Romania on Sunday.  

The storm, bearing winds of 100 kilometers an hour, also caused property destruction in neighboring Serbia, and in Croatia.

Road and rail traffic in parts of Romania was halted by fallen trees and dozens of towns and villages were left without power.

“We can’t fight the weather,” Romanian Prime Minister Mihai Tudose told Antena3 TV. “The entire medical sector is focused on the injured.”

He said the government would help support the communities hit by the storm.

Romania’s national weather agency issued warnings of strong winds and rainstorms for western areas of the country.

Emergency responders urged people to take shelter indoors, unplug household appliances and park in areas not close to trees or power lines.

The storm followed several days of high temperatures.  Temperatures were above 30 degrees Celsius on Sunday.
…

Ana Brnabic, Serbia’s first openly gay prime minister, joined several hundred activists at a gay-pride march in Belgrade on Sunday.

Brnabic, who is also the first woman in top-level job, said she is working “one step at a time” toward building a more tolerant society.

Serbian riot police cordoned off the city center with metal fences early Sunday to prevent possible clashes with extremist groups opposed to the gathering. Similar events have been marred by violent clashes in the conservative country.

 “The government is here for all citizens and will secure the respect of rights for all citizens,” Brnabic told reporters. “We want to send a signal that diversity makes our society stronger, that together we can do more.”

Members of Serbia’s embattled LGBT community face widespread harassment and violence from extremists. Violence marred the country’s first gay pride march in 2001, and more than 100 people were injured during a similar event in 2010 when police clashed with right-wing groups and soccer hooligans. Several pride events were banned before marches resumed in 2014.

Brnabic, who was elected in June, has tried to shift the focus away from her sexual orientation, asking “Why does it matter?”

Serbia is on track to join the European Union, but the EU has asked the country to improve minority rights, including for the LGBT community.

The marchers Sunday said they hoped Brnabic will bring about legislative changes for same-sex couples.
…

One of President Vladimir Putin’s top allies said on Sunday she saw no logic in deploying U.N. peacekeepers along the border between Russia and Ukraine, something Kyiv and Washington favor.

Putin this month suggested armed U.N. peacekeepers be deployed to eastern Ukraine to help protect ceasefire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and to help end a conflict between Ukrainian troops and Russia-backed separatists, which has killed more than 10,000 people since 2014.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called the proposal “interesting,” while Kurt Volker, the U.S. envoy to Ukraine peace talks, says the suggestion gives negotiators more ideas with which to seek a resolution to the conflict. But differences about where the peacekeepers would operate risk sinking the plan.

Putin originally said the peacekeepers could be deployed along the line of contact between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists, but later said they could also be deployed in other areas where OSCE inspectors work.

Washington and Kyiv also want peacekeepers to be deployed along those parts of Ukraine’s border with Russia which Kyiv does not control.

However, Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Russian upper house of parliament and a close Putin ally, said on Sunday Moscow strongly objected to that idea.

“I don’t see any logic in such a proposal,” Matviyenko, visiting Turkmenistan, told reporters, the Interfax news agency reported. “Those who would like to surround the residents of the self-proclaimed republics of Donbas [parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions] with barbed wire or to simply destroy these people … will not succeed.”
…

The investigation into Russian influence on the US elections has renewed attention to the Russian ban on US adoptions, a response to American sanctions about five years ago. Donald Trump Jr. said that was the topic when he met with a Russian lawyer during his father’s election campaign. As Svetlana Prudovskaya of VOA’s Russian service reports, the adoption ban has affected families and children in both countries.
…

A senior NATO official says there’s reason to be concerned about the large-scale Zapad 2017 military maneuvers being conducted now by Russia and Belarus, since they could be seen as “a serious preparation for big war.”

General Petr Pavel, head of NATO’s Military Committee, told the Associated Press in an interview Saturday that NATO is increasing efforts to re-establish the military-to-military communications with Russia to avoid any “unintended consequences of potential incidents during the exercise.”

The defense chiefs of NATO member countries were holding their annual conference this year in the Albanian capital of Tirana to discuss fighting terrorism, the situation in the Western Balkans and the new U.S. strategy on Afghanistan.

The Zapad war games, being conducted this year mostly in Belarus, run until September 20 and reportedly involve 5,500 Russian and 7,200 Belarusian troops.

‘Not aimed at NATO’

Despite assurances from Moscow that “NATO is not considered as an enemy” and that “the exercise is not aimed at NATO,” Pavel said Russians have not been transparent about the facts of the exercises. He says the number of troops in the exercises — which the Russians say is about 12,700 — could actually be between 70,000 to 100,000.

“All together, what we see is a serious preparation for big war,” he told The Associated Press. “When we only look at the exercise that is presented by Russia, there should be no worry. But when we look at the big picture, we have to be worried, because Russia was not transparent.”

Two weeks ago, Pavel met with the head of the Russian military’s General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov.

The Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, General Curtis Scaparrotti, had a phone call with Gerasimov at the beginning of Zapad 17. Pavel said it was “mainly focused on transparency and risk reduction and avoidance of unintended consequences of potential incidents.”

“We have a high concentration of troops in the Baltics. We have a high concentration of troops in the Black Sea, and potential for an incident may be quite high because of a human mistake, because of a technology failure,” said Pavel. “We have to be sure that such an unintended incident will not escalate into conflict.”

The Military Committee offers consensus-based advice on how the alliance can best meet global security challenges.

Western Balkans

Stability and security in the Western Balkan countries was also discussed during the conference. Pavel said trouble in the region could come from radicalism, organized crime, migration, economic problems or the “malign influence from Russia.”

“We do not compete with Russia for the Western Balkans. We are primarily focused on the Balkans being stable and secure,” he said.

He also added there was no plan for reducing troops in Kosovo or setting a time length for their presence.

About 4,500 troops from 31 countries have been deployed in Kosovo since June 1999, after NATO’s 78-day air campaign to stop a deadly Serbian crackdown against ethnic Albanian separatists. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but Serbia has not recognized it.
…

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said he is prepared to intervene militarily if a referendum held by the nation’s Kurdish population results in violence.

Speaking to the Associated Press Saturday, Abadi said the Kurdish vote on independence is “a dangerous escalation” that will invite violations of Iraqi sovereignty.

Abadi also told an Iraqi news agency that the Kurds would be “playing with fire” by continuing with plans for the referendum, which is scheduled for September 25 in the three governorates that make up the Kurdish autonomous region. The vote is also expected to be held in areas controlled by Kurds but claimed by the Baghdad government.

Turkey warns of ‘grave mistake’

On Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim warned that the Iraqi Kurdish plan to hold an independence referendum was a “grave mistake.”

Iraqi Kurdistan regional President Masoud Barzani is backing the referendum.

Turkey, which borders the Iraqi Kurdish region, has strong ties with Barzani, but Ankara has been stepping up its pressure to call off the vote.

“There are 10 days left. Therefore, I want to repeat our friendly call to Masoud Barzani: Correct this mistake while there is still time,” Yildirim said Friday to supporters.

The warning was followed by Ankara’s first direct threat.

“We don’t want to impose sanctions, but, if we arrive at that point, there are steps that have been already planned that Turkey can take,” Yildirim added.

The warning came days after the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, told the Kurds that they would “pay a price for the vote.”

Ankara fears secession

Ankara, with its own restive Kurdish minority, in an area that mainly borders Iraqi Kurdistan, fears an independent Kurdish state could fuel similar secessionist demands. Those fears are heightened by the suspicion that Syrian Kurds on the Turkish border harbor the same independence ambitions.

Turkish fears of the referendum have created rare common ground across the country’s deep political divide. 

“Balkanization of the Middle East would bring instability,” warned Ceyda Karan, a columnist with the Turkish opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper. “Borders are not drawn fairly in many parts of the world. The question of where to find fairness in redrawing them is unknown.”

WATCH: Iraqi Kurds Prepare for Independence Vote, Despite Opposition

​US: keep focus on IS

The United States has voiced strong opposition to the independence vote.

On Friday the White House released a statement saying the United States “does not support” the Kurdish plan to hold a referendum, and that the plan “is distracting from efforts to defeat ISIS and stabilize the liberated areas.” Further, it says, “holding the referendum in disputed areas is particularly provocative and destabilizing.”

The Trump administration is calling on the Kurds to cancel the referendum and instead engage in “serious and sustained dialogue with Baghdad,” which the U.S. has offered to facilitate.

Iran has also registered its opposition to the referendum, but Turkey arguably has the most leverage on the Iraqi Kurds. The Habur border gate on Turkey’s frontier with Iraq is the main trade route to the outside world for Iraqi Kurdistan, while an oil pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan provides a financial lifeline.

Sanctions possible

Sanctions could prove to be a double-edged sword.

“Habur does not only mean gate to Iraqi Kurdistan,” points out former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen, who set up Turkey’s consulate in Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital of Irbil.

“Habur means gate to Iraq and in today’s terms means gate to the Middle East as all border gates are closed with Syria. There is the oil pipeline; Iraqi Kurdistan oil, including Kirkuk oil, is being marketed to global markets through Ceyhan. That is a win, win for Ankara,” Selcen added.

Financial considerations are not the only factors that Ankara has to consider.

“Ankara is against [the referendum], but on the other hand, Barzani is the best ally in the region. I think they are not that vocal when it comes to the referendum,” said political scientist Cengiz Aktar.

Barzani in the past decade has developed a close relationship with Ankara, one built not only on lucrative trade but also on security cooperation.

Barzani has provided assistance to Ankara in Turkey’s war against the Kurdish rebel group PKK, which is waging a decades-long insurgency for greater minority rights in Turkey and has bases in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Turkish election politics could further restrict Ankara’s room to maneuver.

The Iraqi Kurdish independence referendum threatens to complicate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-election bid in 2019.

“I understand Mr. Erdogan is trying to balance the traditional Kurdish vote that goes with [Erdogan’s] AK Party and [Turkish] nationalists,” said former diplomat Selcen, who is now a regional analyst.

The Kurdish vote in Turkey traditionally accounts for about 10 percent of Erdogan’s support, votes that could be crucial in what is predicted to be a closely fought presidential election.

Selcen suggests the solution to the political conundrum posed by the Iraqi Kurdish independence vote to Erdogan’s own ambitions could be to simply do nothing. 

“I think in today’s system in Turkey, one should only follow closely what Mr. Erdogan says, and, knowing his usual style and usual rhetoric, I find Mr. Erdogan’s position much milder and more moderate. I will speculate that following September 25, the day of the referendum, it will be business as usual between Ankara and Irbil.”

Dorian Jones contributed to this report from Istanbul.
…

Would a 15-year-old girl be married off by her parents in violation of the law? Would another girl, who looks even younger, get justice after an alleged statutory rape at the hands of an older man?

In their impoverished communities in Uganda, the answers hinged on the fact that one girl had a birth certificate and the other didn’t. Police foiled the planned marriage after locating paperwork that proved the first girl was not 18 as her parents claimed. The other girl could not prove she was under the age of consent; her aunt, who’s also her guardian, has struggled to press charges against the builder who seduced and impregnated her.

“The police were asking me many questions about proof of the girl’s birth date. How old she is? Where she goes to school,” said the aunt, Percy Namirembe, sitting in her tin-roofed shantytown home in Masaka near the shores of Lake Victoria in south-central Uganda. “I don’t have evidence showing the victim is not yet 18.”

As Namirembe spoke, in a room decorated with a collage of Christ and the Madonna, her niece sat beside her, her belly swollen and a vacant stare on her face.

In the developed world, birth certificates are often a bureaucratic certainty. However, across vast swaths of Africa and South Asia, tens of millions of children never get them, with potentially dire consequences in regard to education, health care, job prospects and legal rights. Young people without IDs are vulnerable to being coerced into early marriage, military service or the labor market before the legal age. In adulthood, they may struggle to assert their right to vote, inherit property or obtain a passport.

“They could end up invisible,” said Joanne Dunn, a child protection specialist with UNICEF.

With the encouragement of UNICEF and various non-governmental organizations, many of the worst-affected countries have been striving to improve their birth registration rates. In Uganda, volunteers go house to house in targeted villages, looking for unregistered children. Many babies are born at home, with grandmothers acting as midwives, so they miss out on the registration procedures that are being modernized at hospitals and health centers.

By UNICEF’s latest count, in 2013, the births of about 230 million children under age 5 – 35 percent of the world’s total – had never been recorded. Later this year, UNICEF plans to release a new report showing that the figure has dropped to below 30 percent due to progress in countries ranging from Vietnam and Nepal to Uganda, Mali and Ivory Coast.

India is the biggest success story. It accounted for 71 million of the unregistered children in UNICEF’s 2013 report – more than half of all the Indian children in that age range. Thanks to concerted nationwide efforts, UNICEF says the number of unregistered children has dropped to 23 million – about 20 percent of all children under age 5.

Uganda is a potential success story as well, though very much a work in progress. UNICEF child protection officer Augustine Wassago estimates that the country’s registration rate for children under 5 is now about 60 percent, up from 30 percent in 2011.

While obtaining a birth certificate is routine for most parents in the West, it may not be a priority for African parents who worry about keeping a newborn alive and fed. Many parents wait several years, often until their children are ready for school exams, to tackle the paperwork.

Maria Nanyonga, who raises pigs and goats in Masaka, says lack of birth registration caused her to miss out on tuition subsidies for some of the seven nieces and nephews she is raising.

“I tried my best to get the children’s certificates, but I didn’t even know where to start,” she said. “I didn’t know when they were born, and the officials needed that.”

Even now, two years after losing out on the financial aid, Nanyonga is uncertain about the children’s ages.

“I can only guess,” she said. “I think the oldest is 10 and the youngest is 5.”

Henry Segawa, a census worker in the Rakai administrative district, is among those who’ve been trained to do the registration outreach. Their efforts have been buttressed by public awareness campaigns; radio talk show hosts and priests have been encouraged to spread the word.

“When you go to a home, you explain the benefits of birth registration, and people have been responding well,” Segawa said.

On one of his forays, Segawa was on hand in a remote village as a midwife delivered a baby at a decaying health center with a leaky roof, no running water and outhouse walls smeared with excrement.

Upon hearing the newborn’s piercing bawls, Segawa strode toward the birth register to record the newborn’s details.

The baby, Ben Ssekalunga, was the ninth child in his family, said his grandmother, Mauda Byarugaba.

“I want this baby to be her last one,” she said of her daughter. “Nine children are too many.”

Birth registration plays a pivotal role in Uganda’s efforts to enforce laws setting 18 as the minimum age for marriage.

Child marriage remains widespread, due largely to parents hoping to get a dowry from their daughters’ suitors. In the rare cases where the police are alerted, investigators face an uphill task pressing charges if they cannot prove, with a birth certificate or other official document, that the girl is a minor.

But in the recent case in Rakai, police detective Deborah Atwebembeire was able to prevail in a surprise raid on a wedding party because the bride-to-be’s birth certificate proved she was 15.

“When we reached there, I heard one man say, ‘Ah, but the police have come. Let me hope the girl is not young,'” Atwebembeire recalled.

The girls’ parents claimed she was born in March 1999, which would have made her old enough to consent. Yet only months before, the girl’s parents had told birth registration officials she was born in October 2001.

The wedding was called off, and the parents spent a night in jail.

“We achieved our objective, which was to stop the wedding,” Atwebembeire said.

The girl, Asimart Nakabanda, had dropped out of school before the planned marriage. “The man is out of my mind now. I don’t want him anymore,” she said. “I want to go back to school and study.”

The birth registration campaign in Uganda dates back only about five years and there’s still uncertainty as to whether the government will invest sufficient funds to expand and sustain it.

In India, by contrast, the major progress in birth registration results from a decades-long initiative. Public health workers, midwives, teachers and village councilors in remote areas have all been empowered to report births. In areas with internet connectivity, online registration has helped boost overall coverage.

Chhitaranjan Khaitan, an official with the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, said 15 of the country’s 29 states had reported a 100 percent birth registration rate, and seven more states surpassed 90 percent. Many states have successfully linked registration to a nationwide effort to provide every Indian citizen with an identification number.

An added motivation is India’s effort to stem its skewed gender ratio, due largely to families’ preference for sons. By requiring health workers and village officials to register all births, authorities hope fewer newborn girls will be killed by their families.

Pradeep Verma, a 28-year-old car mechanic in the village of Gram Mohdi in the central state of Chhattisgarh, was thrilled to obtain his daughter’s birth certificate earlier this year.

“It was the first thing I did after my daughter was born,” Verma said. “My parents did not register my birth. It was not considered important or necessary in those days.”

Verma has had repeated problems with proving his identity, particularly in getting a government ration card that entitled him to cheap rice and sugar.

“I know how difficult it has been to get an official identity document or enroll in government welfare programs, since I have no proof of birth,” said Verma, who dropped out of school in 10th grade. “My daughter will not have to face such hassles.”

Verma’s state of Chhattisgarh was recording just 55 percent of births in 2011. Amitabha Panda, the state’s top statistician, said reasons included lack of registration centers, outdated data collection methods and wariness of extending outreach to areas where Maoist rebels held sway.

In 2013, with help from UNICEF, the state government launched a campaign using street theater, graffiti and notices distributed at markets to get the word out. Today, the state says it registers virtually every birth.

The West African nation of Mali is another success story. It’s now reporting a birth registration rate of 87 percent – one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa – despite a long-running conflict involving Islamic extremists.

Michelle Trombley, a UNICEF child protection officer in Mali, admires the parents and local officials who persisted with registration efforts even when their communities in the north were occupied by rebels.

“They were so dedicated to having children registered, they would smuggle in the official registration books,” she said. “People were literally putting their lives at risk.”

For all of the progress, huge challenges remain for UNICEF and its partners to attain their goal of near-universal registration by 2030.

In Somalia, wracked by famine and civil war, the most recent registration rate documented by UNICEF, based on data from 2006, was 3 percent – the lowest of any nation.

In Myanmar, the overall registration rate has surpassed 70 percent, but is much lower in the western state of Rakhine, base of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority. Human rights agencies say many thousands of Rohingya children there have no birth certificates because of discriminatory policies.

More broadly, there’s the massive problem of children without birth certificates or other identification who make up a significant portion of the millions of displaced people around the world, fleeing war, famine, persecution and poverty.

In Lebanon, tens of thousands of Syrian children have been born to refugee parents in recent years without being registered by any government. The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, has pushed Lebanese authorities to ease barriers to registration, such as requirements to present certain identity documents.

Major efforts to register refugee children also are under way in Thailand and Ethiopia.

Monika Sandvik-Nylund, a senior child protection adviser with UNHCR, said birth registration can be crucial to enabling refugee children to return to their home countries or to reunite after being separated from their parents.

There are no comprehensive statistics on the extent of such separations, but Claudia Cappa, author of the upcoming UNICEF report, says they can be heartbreaking for a parent.

“How can you claim your child if you don’t have proof he or she really existed?” she said. “Imagine how devastating this might be to a mother.”
…

It was a Friday in June, a short workday before a public holiday weekend in Ukraine, and cybersecurity expert Victor Zhora had left the capital, Kyiv, and was in the western city of Lviv when he got the first in a torrent of phone calls from frantic clients.

His clients’ networks were being crippled by ransomware known as Petya, a malicious software that locks up infected computers and data. But this ransomware was a variant of an older one and wasn’t designed to extort money — the goal of the virus’ designers was massive disruption to Ukraine’s economy.

“I decided not to switch on my computer and just used my phone and iPad as a precaution,” he said. “I didn’t want my laptop to be contaminated by the virus and to lose my data,” he said.

​Virus spread like wildfire

The Petya virus, targeting Microsoft Windows-based systems, spread like wildfire across Europe and, to a lesser extent, America, affecting hundreds of large and small firms in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Britain.

While many Europeans saw the June cyberattack as just another wild disruption caused by anonymous hackers, it was identified quickly by experts, like the 37-year-old Zhora, as another targeted assault on Ukraine. Most likely launched by Russia, it was timed to infect the country’s networks on the eve of Ukraine’s Constitution Day.

The cyberattack started through a software update for an accounting program that businesses use when working with Ukrainian government agencies, according to the head of Ukraine’s cyberpolice, Sergey Demedyuk. In an interview with VOA in his office in the western suburbs of Kyiv, Demedyuk said, “every year cyberattacks are growing in number.”

“Sometimes when targeting a particular government agency or official, they mount complex attacks, first using some disguising action, like a denial-of-service attack, and only then launch their main attack aiming, for example, at capturing data,” he said.

Ukraine’s 360-member cyberpolice department was formed in 2015. The department is stretched, having not only to investigate cybercrime by nonstate actors but also, along with a counterpart unit in the state security agency, defend the country from cyberattacks by state actors. Demedyuk admits it is a cat-and-mouse game searching for viruses and Trojan horses that might have been planted months ago.

​Cybersecurity summit

On Wednesday, the director of U.S. National Intelligence, Dan Coats, told a cybersecurity summit in Washington that digital threats are mounting against the West, and he singled out Russia as a major culprit, saying Moscow “has clearly assumed an ever more aggressive cyber posture.”

“We have not experienced — yet — a catastrophic attack. But I think everyone in this room is aware of the ever-growing threat to our national security,” Coats added.

And many of the digital weapons the West may face are being refined and developed by Russian-directed hackers in the cyberwar being waged against Ukraine, said Zhora and other cybersecurity experts.

“They are using Ukraine as a testing laboratory,” said Zhora, a director of InfoSafe, a cybersecurity company that advises private sector clients and Ukrainian government agencies.

​Eye of the digital storm

Since the 2014 ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine has been in the eye of a sustained and systematic digital storm of big and small cyberattacks with practically every sector of the country impacted, including media, finance, transportation, military, politics and energy. Sometimes, the intrusions are highly tailored; other times, more indiscriminate attacks like Petya are launched at Ukraine.

Russian officials deny they are waging cyber warfare against Ukraine. Zhora, like many cybersecurity experts, acknowledges it is difficult, if not impossible most times, to trace cyberattacks back to their source.

“Attribution is the most difficult thing. When you are dealing with professional hackers it is hard to track and to find real evidence of where it has come from,” he said. “But we know only one country is the likely culprit. We only really have one enemy that wants to destroy Ukrainian democracy and independence,” he added.

Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, has been less restrained in pointing the finger of blame. Last December, he said there had been 6,500 cyberattacks on 36 Ukrainian targets in the previous two months alone. Investigations, he said, point to the “direct or indirect involvement of [the] secret services of Russia, which have unleashed a cyberwar against our country.”

Ukraine’s cyberpolice head agrees. Demedyuk says his officers have been able to track attacks, especially denial-of-service intrusions, back to “Russian special services, tracking them to their own facilities and their own IP addresses.” But the original source of more complex intrusions, he said, are much harder to identify, with the hackers disguising themselves by using servers around the world, including in Asia and China.

​Digital weapons refined

Digital intrusions have seen data deleted and networks crippled with real life consequences. And digital weapons are being refined often with the knowledge gained from each intrusion.

Zhora cites as an example of this evolution the difference between two large cyberattacks on the country’s electricity grid, the first in December 2015 and the second at the end of last year, which cut off energy to hundreds of thousands of people for several hours.

With the first attack the hackers used malware to gain access to the networks and then shut the system down manually. 

“They sent an email and when someone opened it, the payload was downloaded and later it spread across the network and they used the path created for the hackers to get to the administrator’s work station and then in a live session switched off the subsystems overseeing electricity distribution,” he said.

But with the 2016 attack no live session was necessary.

“They used a malware which opened the doors automatically by decoding specific protocols and there was no human interaction. I think they got a lot of information in the first attack about the utility companies’ networks and they used the knowledge to write the malware for the second intrusion,” he said.

Digital threats to US

In his speech midweek in Washington, Coats specifically cited possible digital threats to America’s critical infrastructure, including electrical grids and other utilities, saying it is of rising concern. 

“It doesn’t take much effort to imagine the consequences of an attack that knocks out power in Boston in February or power in Phoenix in July,” he said.

After the second cyberattack on Ukraine’s electrical grid, a group of American government and private sector energy officials was dispatched to Kyiv, where they spent a month exploring what happened, according to Ukrainian officials.

One lesson the visitors drew was that it would be much harder in the U.S. to switch the grid back on after an intrusion. The Ukrainians were able to get the electricity moving again by visiting each substation and turning the system on again manually, an option apparently more challenging in the U.S., where grid systems are even more automated.

“Virtual attacks are every bit as dangerous as military ones — we are living on a battlefield,” Zhora said.
…

British police say they have made an arrest in connection with Friday’s rush-hour bomb attack on a London subway train.

Authorities say the 18-year-old man was arrested in the port area of Dover Saturday morning. Dover is a major ferry port for travel between Britain and France.  A police statement called the arrest “significant.”

Earlier Saturday London Transport authorities said they have re-opened the Parsons Green station where the bomb on a train partially detonated.

Images of the bomb posted on social media appear to show a bucket on fire that had been placed inside a plastic bag close to a railcar door.

Prime Minister Theresa May said after the attack that the country’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Center decided to raise the country’s threat level to critical, meaning that a further attack may be imminent.

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the assault. The terrorist group, however, has a history of claiming responsibility for attacks the group may not be connected with.

Shortly after the attack, armed police descended into the Parsons Green station.

May said the public may see more armed police on the streets and the transport network. The prime minister also said members of the military will begin aiding police, providing security at some sites not accessible to the public.

The National Health Service said late Friday that 21 people who were in the subway car at the time of the explosion were being treated at hospitals, while eight other people had been discharged.

The blast was the fifth major terrorist attack in Britain this year.

WATCH: Police Manhunt Following Terror Attack on London Underground

President Trump weighs in

U.S. President Donald Trump called Prime Minister May on Friday to convey his sympathies, the office of the White House press secretary said in a statement.

The statement said President Trump “pledged to continue close collaboration with the United Kingdom to stop attacks worldwide targeting innocent civilians and to combat extremism.”

Earlier, the British prime minister admonished Trump for his initial reaction to the attack. Trump had tweeted, “Another attack in London by a loser terrorist. These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!”

May responded to the tweet, telling the BBC, “I never think it’s helpful for anybody to speculate on what is an ongoing investigation.”

​Police, intelligence agency work together

London police said their investigation into Friday’s attack is being supported by MI-5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency.

British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson appealed for calm and said it was important not to speculate.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan said the British capital “will never be intimidated or defeated by terrorism.”
…

A suicide car bombing of a NATO convoy in southern Afghanistan has killed at least one Romanian soldier and has injured two more.

The Romanian Defense Ministry confirmed the casualties, and a local government spokesman told VOA that Friday’s attack occurred close to the airbase in Kandahar, the provincial capital.

Fazal Bari Biryali said the suicide bomber rammed his explosives-packed car into the foreign military convoy, which was on a routine patrol in the area.

A Taliban spokesman swiftly took credit for the blast, claiming it destroyed a military vehicle and killed seven “foreign invaders.” The insurgent group often makes casualty claims that later turn out to be untrue.

“We remind you [NATO] once again your soldiers will keep getting killed here and our sacred jihad will continue with the same vigor as long as you have a single soldier here,” a statement sent to reporters quoted Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, who speaks for insurgent operations in southern Afghanistan.

NATO’s Resolute Support (RS) mission said in a statement: “A small number of RS service members were wounded today when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device targeted their patrol in Kandahar. The service members were taken to a medical facility at the Kandahar airfield for treatment.”

Taliban insurgents routinely have targeted Afghan security forces, but their attacks on foreign troops appear to have intensified since U.S. President Donald Trump announced his “new strategy” for Afghanistan aiming to break the military stalemate with the Taliban.

A suicide bomber earlier this week near the U.S.-run Bagram military airbase, north of Kabul, wounded several American soldiers.

Last week, a bomber riding a motorbike blew himself up near U.S. forces at an entrance to the facility and officials said it caused a “small number of casualties.”

 
…

Turkey, Russia and Iran agreed Friday to a deal that will see the countries work together to police a de-escalation zone in Syria’s Idlib province for the next six months, according to a joint statement issued by the three countries following talks in Kazakhstan.

The three nations also agreed to set up a coordination center to monitor the implementation of other de-escalation zones around Syria during the latest round of peace talks in Astana.

According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, observers from all three countries will be stationed at “control and observation” points within the de-escalation zones.

“The observer forces’ main task will be to prevent conflicts between the regime and the opposition and to monitor possible violations of the cease-fire,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

While the three nations agreed to set up the de-escalation zones, the details about how to enforce the safe zones are still being worked out, Russia’s representative at Syrian peace talks, Alexander Lavrentiev, told Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

He said the “mechanism and concrete locations [of a deployed force in Idlib] will be discussed,” according to RIA Novosti.

According to Lavrentyev, Turkey, Russia and Iran all will send about 500 observers to Idlib, with the Russian contingent consisting of military policemen.

Idlib, which borders Turkey, was captured in 2015 by an alliance of jihadists and rebels.

Representatives from both the Syrian government and the rebel groups attended the Astana talks.

 
…

At least 18 people were injured, many with burns, following a blast early Friday on a packed rush-hour commuter train in London. Police are treating the event as a terrorism incident.
…

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged China to cut oil exports to North Korea to force Pyongyang to rein in its nuclear weapons program during his visit to London on Thursday.

Tillerson’s trip to Britain comes days after the United Nations Security Council imposed new sanctions on North Korea. He said he had hoped for stronger measures from the U.N., and urged Beijing to use its leverage.

“I am hopeful that China, as a great country, as a world power, will decide on their own and will take it upon themselves to use that very powerful tool of oil supply to persuade North Korea to reconsider its current path toward weapons development, reconsider its approach to dialogue and negotiations in the future,” he told reporters following meetings with his British and French counterparts.

Tillerson also had strong words for Iran, which he said was “clearly in default” of its expectations over the nuclear agreement. Britain supports the deal, but the United States accuses Tehran of breaching the terms.

“We must take into account the totality of Iranian threats — not just Iran’s nuclear capabilities, that is one piece of our posture toward Iran,” Tillerson told reporters.

Alongside his British hosts, Tillerson attended a summit on Libya with the country’s U.N. special representative, and delegations from France, the United Arab Emirates, Italy and Egypt.

He said the United Nations has Washington’s full backing in seeking a political settlement.

“What we don’t want to see happen is Libya becoming a place to birth additional terrorist organizations, or provide opportunities for ISIS to re-emerge in a different part of the world. We are all committed to helping the Libyans find a Libyan solution that will lead to their future,” Tillerson said. ISIS is an acronym for Islamic State.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson expressed hope that elections could be held in Libya within a year.

“It’s very important, however, that you don’t do it too fast, and that you get the political groundwork done first. There has to be a constitution, there has to be an accepted basis for those elections to take place,” Johnson said.

Islamic State

There are growing fears, though, that the Islamic State terror group is making a comeback after being ousted in December from its stronghold city of Sirte, Libya.

Militias are exploiting the standoff between the internationally recognized Tripoli-based government and its rival administration in the east, said Riccardo Fabiani of the Eurasia Group.

“Those militiamen and jihadis that were part of the group were going to reform at some point somewhere, and to mount new attacks. So this is not something that is going to disappear overnight and will continue to be there as long as there is insecurity and instability in Libya,” Fabiani said.

Rohingya Muslims

Tillerson also was questioned on U.S. support for the Myanmar government in the wake of the attacks on ethnic Rohingya Muslims. He said the military should take the blame.

“This violence must stop. This persecution must stop. It’s been characterized by many as ethnic cleansing — that must stop,” Tillerson said. “And we need to support [Myanmar State Counselor] Aung San Suu Kyi and her leadership. But also be very clear and unequivocal to the military power-sharing government that this is unacceptable.”

In closing remarks, Tillerson said Britain faced challenges over Brexit, but reiterated that the United States would be a steadfast ally.

Analysts said Britain is keen to underline its ambitions of remaining a global player after its exit from the European Union. London sees its relationship with the United States as key to that goal.
…

The Catalonian government on Thursday launched its official campaign for an independence referendum, which Madrid has declared illegal, buoyed by the support of the capital Barcelona.

Crowds filled a bull ring in the northeastern city of Tarragona, applauding and shouting “We will vote!” as regional president Carles Puigdemont arrived to rally support for the October 1 vote.

In a boost for the credibility of the referendum, the mayor of Barcelona said earlier on Thursday that the vote would go ahead in the city, having previously expressed concern that civil servants involved may lose their jobs.

A town hall spokesman was unable to comment further or explain how civil servants could be protected.

Puigdemont himself is facing criminal charges of misuse of public money, disobedience and abuse of office for organizing the referendum, and prosecutors have summoned hundreds of the region’s mayors for questioning.

Police raided a newspaper office and a printing press last week, looking for signs of preparation, and the regional court has ordered Civil Guard agents to shut down web pages providing information about the referendum.

Regional home affairs councillor Joaquim Forn said there was a bigger than usual presence of national police in Catalonia.

“They are moving throughout the region. They must be looking for ballot boxes,” he told RAC1 radio.

A majority of Catalonia’s 5.5 million voters want to have their say on the northeastern region’s relationship with Spain, but the independence cause has lost support in recent years and surveys indicate less than 50 percent of the population would choose full self-rule.
…

In a Croatian port sits a boat built to carry bananas from Africa to Italy, that laid mines for Nazi Germany and was sunk by Allied planes before it was salvaged as the personal yacht of a globe-trotting communist leader.

Josip Broz Tito and the state he led – Yugoslavia – have long passed into history, and the boat, the Galeb (Seagull), was left to rust in a corner of Rijeka’s once mighty docks.

Now, with Rijeka readying to become European Capital of Culture in 2020, city authorities have secured European Union money to restore the 117-meter (384-feet) boat as a museum, just as debate in Croatia rages over the life and deeds of the man who graced the pink mattress in the front port-side cabin.

If the Galeb was a symbol of Tito’s prestige on the world stage – a communist leader welcome in ports West as well as East – its restoration is part of Croatia’s own tortured process of reconciliation with its 20th century history.

Villain to some, hero to others

To conservatives in Croatia, Tito – who was born in what is today Croatia to a Croat father and Slovene mother – was a totalitarian dictator: to look fondly on him means to be nostalgic for a shared federal state that denied Croats their own until they forged one in a 1991-95 war.

Liberals, however, recall his guerrilla fight against the Nazis and the relative freedom and prosperity of Yugoslavs compared to those who lived in the Soviet Union or in its shadow.

They see in the disdain of conservatives a thinly veiled fondness for the World War II Croatian state that collaborated with the Nazis but was snuffed out with Tito’s Partisan victory – sentiment that has gained a foothold in mainstream Croatian

politics in recent years.

It is a tug-of-war over history and identity that was encapsulated this month in the renaming by Zagreb’s city council of the capital’s Marshal Tito Square to Republic of Croatia square.

Days later, the government ordered the removal of a plaque near the site of a World War II concentration camp that bore a notorious slogan associated with the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia.

“We live in a time when history is being reinvented retroactively,” said Ivan Sarar, who as head of culture at Rijeka’s city council is in charge of its 2020 makeover.

“It’s interesting that just by undertaking this [restoration] we have already been declared revisionists,” he told Reuters.

‘Quasi-cultural exhibitionism’

After years of false-starts, work on restoring the Galeb is imminent – “a mammoth, multi-million-euro task to recreate the 1950s chic of Tito’s floating palace, host to over 100 heads of state and some of Hollywood’s finest.

Some of the furniture remains – in Tito’s cabin, his turquoise-tiled bathroom and the adjacent salon with doors that open to the deck. But the ship itself is little more than a rotting hull.

The Galeb was the stage for Tito’s major contribution to history, said Sarar, a showcase for the non-aligned movement he helped found in answer to the East-West polarization of the Cold War.

But Sarar stressed: “We won’t be soft on anyone.”

He noted Tito’s cosy ties with dictators around the world, the exodus of Italian residents of Rijeka when he took the city as part of Yugoslavia, and his denial of democracy during 35 years of one-man rule until his death in 1980. Yugoslavia fell apart in war a decade later and some 135,000 people were killed.

It was Tito’s seizure of Rijeka and the Istrian peninsula that cemented his status in this part of Croatia as a liberator.

Dozens of streets in Istria still bear his name, as do others in the Balkans – most notably in Serbia, once the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

Conservatives, however, struck a blow with the renaming of Zagreb’s Marshal Tito Square, part of a deal struck by the mayor to secure his majority in the city assembly.

The man behind the initiative, leading right-wing politician Zlatko Hasanbegovic, told Reuters that while Tito was “undeniably a significant historical figure,” so were Napoleon, Stalin and Lenin.

“In all countries, streets and squares bear the names of those who embody the values with which the entire nation identifies itself,” he said, describing the restoration of the Galeb as part of an attempt to revive the cult of Tito.

“Those insisting on it should ask themselves how the tens of thousands of victims of Yugoslav communism look on that kind of quasi-cultural exhibitionism.”

In Rijeka, Sarar denied planning any kind of homage to Tito.

“We want to create a place for dialogue, away from the current situation of extreme black, white and red truths that lead nowhere,” he said. “It’s bound to be difficult.”
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Migrant children, especially those who became separated from their parents, are at risk of abuse, exploitation and trafficking, according to a United Nations report. While discrimination against migrants who travel through the Mediterranean is widespread, children and young people are the most vulnerable. Findings by UNICEF and the International Organization for Migration show that children from sub-Saharan Africa are targeted for abuse more than any other group. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
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