The Balkans have become embroiled in a trade war over agricultural health checks after Croatia raised import fees on some farm products by around 220 percent, triggering countermeasures by Serbia and threats from others.

Last month European Union-member Croatia raised its fees for phytosanitary controls — agricultural checks for pests and viruses — on fruits and vegetables at its borders to 2,000 kuna ($319) from 90 kuna.

It cited compliance with EU standards and protection of its consumers.

But ministers from EU candidates Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro, as well as from fellow EU aspirant Bosnia, said the move violated their respective pre-accession agreements with the bloc under which they were guaranteed equal access to markets.

“These measures are absolutely protectionist in an economic sense. They are populist in political sense and cannot be justified, They are [not] in the spirit of good neighborly relations,” Serbian Economy Minister Rasim Ljajic told reporters after meeting his Balkan counterparts in Sarajevo.

The ministers from the four countries called on Croatia to withdraw its decision and invited the European Commission to get involved to solve an issue they said violated the free trade principles.

They also asked for an urgent meeting with the Croatian agriculture minister. However, until the issue has been resolved, each country will take counter-measures it considered adequate to protect its own economic interests, they said.

Economic War in Sight?

Ljajic said that Serbia has already stepped up phytosanitary controls on all organic produce from Croatia and will increase them further. This means that goods, including meat and dairy products, could be held up at borders from 15-30 days.

“Our goal is not to wage any kind of economic war but to protect our economic interests and the free flow of goods,” he said.

Macedonia and Montenegro said they would file complaints to the World Trade Organization, of which they are members, and seek mechanisms through the body for compensation from Croatia, which raised import fees at a peak of the high season for export of fruits and vegetables from their countries.

Besides discriminating against importers on its own market, Croatia is also making exports to the EU more difficult and expensive because it is vital entry point for imports to the EU from the Balkans, the ministers said.

Commenting on the explanation from Croatia that their move was not aimed against the neighbors but against all non-EU members, Bosnia’s Foreign Trade Minister Mirko Sarovic said: “Croatia does not import raspberries from Trinidad and Tobago but from Serbia and Bosnia.” He said that Bosnia was considering an “adequate response” but declined to elaborate.

Most countries in the region import more than they export to Croatia. Only Serbia operates a trade surplus with its neighbor, with exports in  2016 reaching 116 million euros ($137 million) versus imports worth 79 million euros.

Relations remain strained between the two former Yugoslav countries and bitter foes during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, despite improvements in investments, the flow of people and capital.

($1 = 6.2688 kuna)
…

Two members of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot were briefly detained Monday after rallying for the release of a Ukrainian filmmaker outside his Siberian prison.

During Sunday’s protest in Yakutsk where Oleg Sentsov is serving his sentence, the band members unfurled a banner on a nearby bridge that read “Free Sentsov!”

Longtime Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina tweeted that she and Olga Borisova were taken to a police station following their detention earlier in the day and faced a court hearing over charges of holding an unauthorized rally.

Borisova later said on Facebook that she and Alyokhina were released after a judge found flaws in the case. It was unclear if the police would refile charges.

A Russian military court convicted Sentsov, who comes from the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, of conspiracy to commit terror attacks and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

Sentsov, who made two short movies and the 2012 feature film “Gamer,” denied the charges, which he and his supporters denounced as political punishment for his opposition to Crimea’s annexation.

The U.S. and the EU have criticized his conviction and called for his release, and numerous cultural figures in Russia and abroad have urged the Russian government to free him.

Pussy Riot is a loose collective and most of its members perform anonymously. The balaclava-clad women rose to prominence with their daring outdoor performances critical of President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s ruling elite.

An impromptu “punk prayer” at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior that derided the ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin got them into trouble in 2012.

Three band members were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for the stunt. Alyokhina and another member, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, spent nearly two years in prison.
…

Turkey is building up military forces on the Syrian border, while Turkish President Recep Erdogan steps up his rhetoric suggesting an imminent military operation into Syria. Ankara is reportedly courting Moscow for its support for a possible operation into Syria’s Afrin enclave, which is now under the control of the Kurdish YPG militia.

Ankara accuses the YPG, which controls large swathes of Syrian territory along its border, of being an offshoot of the PKK, which is fighting the Turkish state.

“We will take important steps to implement the new campaigns in the near future,” Erdogan declared Saturday to cheering supporters in the Turkish city of Malatya. “We would rather pay the price for foiling plans targeting our future and liberty in Syria and Iraq, than on our own soil.”

The prospect of a military operation has been praised across Turkey’s pro-government media. “Our greatest advantage is the leadership of a president who sees this threat exactly … and responds to it courageously, both by discourse and by action,” wrote Mehmet Acer in the staunchly pro-Erdogan Yeni Safak. He welcomed “this new attack-based security approach, which we define as the ‘Erdogan doctrine’.”

Erdogan is courting nationalist voters, with one eye on looming presidential and parliamentary elections which could be held as early as next year.

The rising political rhetoric has been matched by a reported surge in attacks against the YPG in Afrin by elements of the Turkish backed Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Turkish forces, as part of Operation Euphrates Shield, entered Syria backing elements of the FSA against both Islamic State and the YPG. The FSA is on the border with the Afrin enclave but so far further gains have been stalled.  

“Turkey’s Operation Euphrates shield was stopped by moves by both United States and Russia,” said retired senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen, who is now an regional analyst. Both Russia and the U.S. deployed military forces as a buffer against further gains by Turkish-backed forces in Syria.

“The problem facing Turkey is Russia and the U.S. are stopping Turkey from intervening,” said Semih Idiz,  political columnist for the Al Monitor website. “They are agreed on an overriding agenda [of] defeating ISIS (Islamic State). Now Turkey has this Kurdish agenda and it does not have support of either Russia or the Untied States … That is the dilemma facing Turkey.”

Moscow has deployed military forces in the YPG-controlled Afrin region, some of them reportedly close to the Turkish border. But, “Turkey sees a window of opportunity,” said analyst Selcen. “Now there is a change on ground between Russia and U.S.”

Selcen said Moscow is infuriated by the growing military cooperation between the YPG and the U.S. to drive the Islamic State from its self-declared capital of Raqqa. The YPG makes up a large proportion of the Syrian Democratic Forces seeking to capture Raqqa,  an operation that excludes the Syrian regime.

Russian frustrations were heightened in June when a U.S. jet shot down a Syrian government fighter-bomber reportedly targeting SDF forces.

Ankara has stepped up its diplomatic courting of Moscow, having announced plans last month to purchase an advanced Russia air defense system. The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusolgu, spoke on Sunday with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the ASEAN meeting in Manila.

Turkish, Russian and Iranian officials are scheduled to hold a two day meeting on Syria beginning Tuesday in Tehran.
…

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has called a meeting the three parties in his ruling coalition after a junior partner, the ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party, unexpectedly announced it is withdrawing from the pact that brought the parties together.

Fico, who called the move “absurd,” will meet leaders of the other two parties on Tuesday. He says he expects Slovak National Party chairman Andrej Danko to explain the reasons for the step.

It is not immediately clear whether the move threatens the government’s existence. The coalition is made up of Fico’s leftist Smer-Social Democracy party, the Slovak National Party and a party of ethnic Hungarians. It was created after last year’s parliamentary elections.

The Slovak National Party said it wanted to negotiate new rules for the coalition, but didn’t give details.
…

Former war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte says she is resigning from the U.N.’s independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria, decrying Security Council inaction to hold criminals accountable in the war-battered country where “everyone is bad.”

In comments published Sunday by the Swiss magazine Blick, Del Ponte expressed frustration about the commission and criticized President Bashar Assad’s government, the Syrian opposition and the international community overall.

“We have had absolutely no success,” she told Blick on the sidelines of the Locarno film festival Sunday. “For five years we’ve been running up against walls.”

Del Ponte, who gained fame as the prosecutor for the international war crimes tribunals that investigated atrocities in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, has repeatedly decried the Security Council’s refusal to appoint a similar court for Syria’s 6½-year-old civil war. Permanent member Russia, which can veto council actions, is a key backer of Assad’s government.

“I give up. The states in the Security Council don’t want justice,” Del Ponte said, adding that she planned to take part in the last meeting in September. “I can’t any longer be part of this commission which simply doesn’t do anything.”

Appointed in September 2012, Del Ponte was quoted by Blick as saying she now thinks she was put into the role “as an alibi.”

“I’ve written my letter of resignation already and will post it in the coming days,” she said.

She did not immediately respond to a text message from The Associated Press seeking comment.

In her comments to Blick, Del Ponte described Syria as a land without a future.

“Believe me, the terrible crimes committed in Syria I neither saw in Rwanda nor ex-Yugoslavia,” she said. “We thought the international community had learned from Rwanda. But no, it learned nothing.”

At first in Syria, “the opposition (members) were the good ones; the government were the bad ones,” she was quoted as saying.

But after six years, Del Ponte concluded: “In Syria, everyone is bad. The Assad government is committing terrible crimes against humanity and using chemical weapons. And the opposition, that is made up only of extremists and terrorists anymore.”

The commission issued a statement saying it was aware since mid-June of Del Ponte’s plans to leave and insisted that its work “must continue” to help bring perpetrators in Syria to justice.

Del Ponte’s resignation shrinks the commission to two members after Thai professor and former human rights investigator Vitit Muntarbhorn left last year to become the first-ever U.N. independent expert investigating violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The commission was set up in August 2011 by the Human Rights Council to investigate crimes in Syria, no matter who committed them. Since then, it has compiled thousands of interviews and keeps a list of suspected war criminals under lock and key at the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.

But Del Ponte said that as long as the Security Council didn’t put in place a special tribunal for war crimes in Syria, all commission reports were pointless.

The issue of accountability for war crimes in Syria has largely taken a back seat to diplomatic efforts to end the war in recent months.

The commission’s relevance has also come into question after the U.N. General Assembly, acting in the face of the Security Council inaction, voted in December to set up an investigative body to help document and prepare legal cases to possibly prosecute the most serious violations in Syria’s war that is estimated to have left at least 400,000 dead.

 
…

Russia said Sunday that the U.S. is soon sending its envoy for negotiations over unrest in eastern Ukraine to Moscow for talks about the ongoing violence.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made the announcement after an hour-plus meeting in Manila with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. It was the first high-level contact between the two countries since U.S. President Donald Trump last week reluctantly signed new sanctions into law to punish Moscow for interfering in the 2016 presidential election to help him win.

Lavrov said U.S. diplomat Kurt Volker would meet with Russia’s envoy for the Ukraine crisis, Vladislav Surkov. Volker last month visited eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Kyiv’s forces for more than three years. It is a conflict during which Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and more than 10,000 people have been killed.

There was no immediate U.S. reaction to the meeting, held on the sidelines of regional diplomatic talks. Tillerson ignored reporters’ shouted questions.

Lavrov said that despite the latest round of U.S. sanctions, “We felt that our American counterparts need to keep the dialogue open. There’s no alternative to that.”

The U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly for the sanctions. Trump, faced with the likelihood that Congress would override a veto if he rejected the legislation, approved the sanctions measure even as he called it “significantly flawed” with “clearly unconstitutional provisions.”

Former U.S. President Barack Obama, weeks before he left office, expelled 35 Russian diplomats and closed two Russian facilities in the United States after the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed the election interference.

Moscow did not retaliate at the time, but with the approval of the new sanctions, Moscow ordered the U.S. to cut 755 diplomats and staff workers, many of them Russians, from its embassy and consulates in Russia. Lavrov said he explained to Tillerson how Moscow would carry out the sharp cuts in the U.S. diplomatic missions, but did not publicly disclose any details.

Trump has been largely dismissive of the investigations in Washington over the Russian election interference, calling them a “witch hunt” and an excuse by Democrats to explain his upset victory over his Democratic challenger, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Numerous congressional probes are underway, while Special Counsel Robert Mueller has opened a grand jury investigation into whether Trump campaign aides illegally colluded with Russian interests on Trump’s behalf in the election and whether Trump obstructed justice when he fired former Federal Bureau of Investigation chief James Comey, who was leading the agency’s Russia probe before Mueller took over.

In West Virginia last week, Trump told a campaign-style rally of cheering supporters, “We didn’t win because of Russia. We won because of you.”

Trump said his political opponents were “trying to cheat you out of the leadership you want with a fake story that is demeaning to all of us and most importantly, demeaning to our country and demeaning to our constitution.

“The reason why Democrats only talk about the totally made-up Russia story is because they have no message, no agenda, and no vision,” he said. “The Russia story is total fabrication. It’s just an excuse for the greatest loss in the history of American politics.”

 
…

Turkish police said they were working with Australian authorities to investigate a foiled plot to bomb an Etihad Airways flight using explosives which Canberra said were flown in from Turkey.

In a statement issued late on Saturday police said they had contacted Australian authorities as soon as they received news of the foiled plot.

The two sides have “started working to clarify unclear and unconfirmed matters regarding the possibility that explosive substances were sent from Turkey three months ago,” said the statement carried by Turkish media.

Australian police said on Friday that an Australian man sent his unsuspecting brother to Sydney airport last month to catch an Etihad Airways flight carrying a home-made bomb disguised as a meat grinder.

High-grade military explosives used to build the bomb were sent by air cargo from Turkey as part of a plot “inspired and directed” by the militant Islamic State group, police Deputy Commissioner National Security Michael Phelan said.

The plot targeted an Etihad Airways flight on July 15 but the bomb never made it past airport security, he said.
…

Britain is prepared to pay up to 40 billion euros ($47 billion) as part of a deal to leave the European Union, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported, citing three unnamed sources familiar with Britain’s negotiating strategy.

The European Union has floated a figure of 60 billion euros and wants significant progress on settling Britain’s liabilities before talks can start on complex issues such as future trading arrangements.

The government department responsible for Brexit talks declined to comment on the Sunday Telegraph article. So far, Britain has given no official indication of how much it would be willing to pay.

The newspaper said British officials were likely to offer to pay 10 billion euros a year for three years after leaving the EU in March 2019, then finalize the total alongside detailed trade talks.

Payments would be made only as part of a deal that included a trade agreement, the newspaper added.

“We know ([the EU’s] position is 60 billion euros, but the actual bottom line is 50 billion euros. Ours is closer to 30 billion euros but the actual landing zone is 40 billion euros, even if the public and politicians are not all there yet,” the newspaper quoted one “senior Whitehall source” as saying.

Whitehall is the London district where British civil servants and ministers are based.

‘Go whistle’

A second Whitehall source said Britain’s bottom line was “30 billion euros to 40 billion euros,” and a third source said Prime Minister Theresa May was willing to pay “north of 30 billion euros,” the Sunday Telegraph reported.

David Davis, the British minister in charge of Brexit talks, said on July 20 that Britain would honor its obligations to the EU but declined to confirm that Brexit would require net payments.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, a leading Brexit advocate, said last month that the EU could “go whistle” if it made “extortionate” demands for payment.

Last week, the Bank of England said Brexit uncertainty was weighing on the economy. Finance Minister Philip Hammond wants to avoid unsettling businesses further.

If Britain cannot conclude an exit deal, trade relations would be governed by World Trade Organization rules, which would allow both parties to impose tariffs and customs checks and leave many other issues unsettled.

The EU also wants agreement by October on rights of EU citizens already in Britain, and on border controls between the Irish Republic and the British province of Northern Ireland, before trade and other issues are discussed.
…

The shift this Saturday morning starts early — to catch male weekend vacationers heading to the beach. The first women on the main road running through the decaying Italian seaside resort of Castel Volturno, 30 kilometers north of Naples and home now to an estimated 20,000 African migrants, are older Central Europeans, but younger Nigerians aren’t far behind.

By 9 a.m. there are about 30 sex workers touting for business along the strip — a small fraction of the nighttime contingents.

Castel Volturno is one of Italy’s ground zeros when it comes to a migration crisis roiling Italian politics and trying the patience of Italians. Anti-migrant rage is mounting, with Italians increasingly frustrated by the influx of mainly economic migrants from sub-Saharan countries — an increasing number the last two years from Nigeria. Many of them are women who authorities say are trafficked for prostitution by crime syndicates.

The sex workers on the main drag through Castel Volturno draw catcalls and lewd gestures from passing youngsters. Matronly Italian wives sitting by their husbands look away with the same disdain visible on the faces of supermarket shoppers the previous night, as a Nigerian migrant and his wife proffered a plastic bag full of the smallest coins to the checkout assistant.

The Nigerians are bolder than the Central Europeans, waving down cars occupied by single men. Some women sit on battered plastic chairs, others on discarded bricks in front of abandoned shops or by trash cans overflowing with waste.

No attention from police

On the strip today there are two police cars. But the policemen pay no heed to the bustling sex business, despite the fact that several of the Nigerians seem exceptionally young. The police are focused on checking vehicle registrations and they wield speed cameras — although the biggest risk here are fender-benders caused by curb-crawlers stopping abruptly.

The Nigerian sex workers are reluctant to talk with reporters. To get to interviews involves painstaking negotiations, and even then, the consideration can be very oblique.

On Friday night, a correspondent sat down with young women — Doress and Lovert, sisters from Nigeria’s Benin City, the hometown of the majority of the more than 16,000 Nigerian women who have arrived in Italy the past two years.

The sisters give their ages as 21 and 26. They look younger. According to the charity outreach worker, a Ghanaian who arranged the encounter, both are involved in sex work and have been since they arrived by boat from Libya last year. Their clients are both Italian and African, he says.

Lovert has been trying to break free from prostitution and has been picking tomatoes to earn money. Neither girl is willing to admit openly that she works the streets, and when they talk about the sex trade it is always in terms of their friends.

They say their journey through Niger and Libya was terrifying, and they are adamant that none of their three siblings or friends hazard the trip through the badlands of those two nations.

“It is very risky,” said Doress, who is thin and wearing a gray track suit. “I saw lots of things. Many people were raped, many people were killed, but I know that God guided me,” she added.

They say they came to Italy because “Nigeria is a very bad country” without jobs or opportunities. Their father is a farmer who earns little money. Doress says she had conversations via Facebook with friends already in Italy. “They said it was good, it was fine, and I decided to come. No one told me to come,” she said, denying she or her sister contracted with people-traffickers for the journey.

Quick money

Why do Nigerian girls work the streets?

“They want to find the money quickly,” chimed in Lovert.

“You choose what you want to do,” said Doress curtly, becoming surly when pressed about sex work. During the hourlong interview, both girls are ill at ease when the topic of prostitution is raised.

And with Doress there’s a feeling of sullen anger.

Social workers say many of the Nigerian sex workers they encounter on the streets — or who agree to break free from prostitution to enter overcrowded shelters  — exhibit pent-up rage, which can fuel sudden violent eruptions.

“A lot of the Nigerian girls clearly suffer from trauma and can be very violent and aggressive,” said Pescara-based Fabio Sorgoni, an official with the Italian charity On the Road, which helps prostitutes escape sex work.

“They can get very aggressive when faced with problems. They use their hands a lot. They beat each other,” he said. “They have been beaten lots of time themselves, probably even before they came to Italy, so for them it is normal to lash out.

“This is one of our biggest challenges. We have had fights break out in our shelters and have to call for police assistance.”

Lovert says the girls can earn up to 50 euros a day working the strip and acknowledges that would mean having sex with up to 10 men — as most girls charge clients only five or 10 euros. Most girls earn much less, and a lot of what they do earn will go to the men or women who manage them.

“They do the work because of the madam,” said Lovert. She mentions that some madams beat recalcitrant girls.

Cost of freedom

Doress said a girl can break free “if you have paid the money to the madam she has suffered to carry you from Libya to here.”

“They took a juju oath,” added Doress, explaining that for the Nigerian girls, most of whom come from poor rural areas, blood oaths made in front of a voodoo priest before setting out north are sacred. “If they break the oath, they’ll face the consequences — it will drive them crazy.”

Her sister Lovert starts shaking her head, mimicking someone enduring a fit or going crazy.

The sisters insist none of the Nigerian girls realized they were coming to Italy to work as prostitutes. “The madams say there’s plenty of work in Europe, but when they get here, they are pushed out on to the street,” said Lovert, who’s shorter and heavier than her sister and is wearing a blue-and-white-striped dress and sandals.

Many outreach workers now suspect that most girls, especially the more recent arrivals, knew what the score was before leaving Nigeria. But they didn’t know how grueling their work would be in Italy, how poorly it would pay and how long it would take them to pay off their debts to the traffickers, who charge them about 35,000 euros for the journey.

“The girls knew from the beginning what they were going to be doing; up to a point, they chose their road,” said the Reverend Carlo Ladicicco, a Catholic priest who works with migrants in Castel Volturno. “They are playing a game, but they do want to get out of the business as soon as they can, and it is an intolerable business.”   

Lovert says she worries the Italians will deport her. The sisters have applied for asylum, but it isn’t clear their applications will be accepted at an immigration hearing, which is months away, possibly even years.

Most likely, the laborious Italian immigration system will overlook them and their destiny, say outreach workers, like so many others, probably to be condemned to a twilight, undocumented existence confined to the fringes of Italian society.
…

Russian President Vladimir Putin stripped to his waist to brave the cold waters of a mountain lake as part of a three-day fishing and hunting trip in the Siberian wilderness, the Kremlin said.

Putin, 64, is renowned for his strong-man publicity stunts, which have contributed to his sky-high popularity ratings. The trip comes eight months before Russia’s presidential election next March and, though he has yet to announce his candidacy, Putin is widely expected to run and to win comfortably.

The hunting and fishing expedition took place on Aug. 1-3 in the republic of Tyva in southern Siberia, on the Mongolian border, some 3,700 km (2,300 miles) east of Moscow.

Pictures and video footage released by the Kremlin on Saturday showed Putin — who is also a keen practitioner of martial arts and ice hockey — spear-fishing, swimming and sunbathing alongside Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

“The water in the lake doesn’t get warmer than 17 degrees, but this didn’t stop the president from going for a swim,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday.

“He went hunting underwater with a mask and snorkel … The president chased after one pike for two hours, there was no way he could shoot it, but in the end he got what he wanted.”

 
…

Russia’s former ambassador to Washington, Sergei Kislyak, said on Saturday his conversations with former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn had been transparent and focussed on matters of U.S.-Russia cooperation.

Kislyak ended his tenure in Washington in July but remains a key figure in ongoing U.S. investigations into Moscow’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Flynn was forced to resign in February after it became known that he had failed to disclose the content of conversations he had with Kislyak and misled U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence about their meetings.

“We only spoke about the most simple things… but the communication was completely correct, calm, absolutely transparent. In any case, there were no secrets on our side,” Kislyak said during a panel discussion on Russian television.

“There are a number of issues which are important for cooperation between Russia and the United States — most of all, terrorism. And that was one of the things we discussed.”

 
…

A new study shows that deaths that result from extreme weather in Europe could increase 50 times by the end of the century if the effects of global warming are not curbed.

In the study published Saturday by The Lancet Planetary Health journal, scientists say weather-related disasters could kill more than 152,000 people a year by 2100, up from 3,000 per year recently. The researchers say the toll could be especially high in southern Europe.

“Unless global warming is curbed as a matter of urgency and appropriate adaptation measures are taken, about 350 million Europeans could be exposed to harmful climate extremes on an annual basis by the end of this century,” the report said.

Study’s assumptions

The study’s predictions are based on an assumption that there is no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and that no improvements take place to curb the effects of climate change.

The team of scientists looked at the most harmful weather-related disasters — heat waves, cold snaps, wildfires, droughts, floods and windstorms — across the European Union, plus Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. They looked at records of weather-related events in those countries for a 30-year stretch and compared them with projections for population growth and future weather disasters.

Heat will be deadliest

Their findings predicted that heat waves would be the most lethal weather disasters, causing 99 percent of all future weather-related deaths in Europe. The researchers said deaths from coastal flooding would also increase sharply, from six deaths per year at the beginning of this century to 233 a year by the end of it.

“Climate change is one of the biggest global threats to human health of the 21st century, and its peril to society will be increasingly connected to weather-driven hazards,” said Giovanni Forzieri of the European Commission Joint Research Center in Italy, who co-led the study.
…

The head of German automaker Volkswagen’s engineering and environment office pleaded guilty Friday in a U.S. court to charges connected to an emissions scandal involving the company.

Volkswagen executive Oliver Schmidt pleaded guilty to conspiracy and fraud charges that could land him in prison for up to seven years. He will be forced to pay a fine of between $40,000 and $400,000 for his role in a scheme, dubbed Dieselgate, to mislead U.S. environmental regulators.

In March, the company admitted to using software to fool regulators into believing Volkswagen cars complied with U.S. emissions standards. It was ordered to pay $4.3 billion in penalties and another $17.5 billion in civil settlements.

The government said diesel cars that Volkswagen claimed were clean were, in fact, releasing 40 times more nitrogen oxide emissions than is allowed by law.

Schmidt is the second Volkswagen employee to plead guilty to charges related to the scandal. Last year, company engineer James Liang admitted to helping design the devices used to beat emissions tests. The FBI now cites him as a cooperating witness.

Most Volkswagen employees charged in the scheme are in Germany and can’t be prosecuted by U.S. authorities. The company still faces legal issues in countries across the globe and has put aside more than $24 billion to handle costs related to the scandal.
…

The European Union on Friday imposed sanctions on three more Russians —  including Deputy Energy Minister Andrei Cherezov — and  have also been blacklisted over the delivery of Siemens’ turbines to Moscow-annexed Crimea.

A department head at the Russian ministry, Evgeny Grabchak, is also now barred from traveling to the EU and any assets he may have in the bloc will be frozen.

The EU said the blacklisted companies also include Siemens’ two contracting companies that moved the gas turbines to the Crimea in violation of EU sanctions, which bar business being conducted in the Black Sea peninsula since its annexation from Ukraine in 2014.
…

Italian outreach workers say there has been a significant shift in the migration pattern from Africa with many more young Nigerian women coming. And they add that many, if not most, of the young Nigerians arriving on Italian shores know they will be expected to engage in sex work.

But the women have little idea how harsh their living conditions will be and how long it will take for them to pay off the debts they owe the traffickers who recruited them and got them to Italy.

Few of them break free from the work, according to Appiah, a 37-year-old Ghanaian migrant. “I know of four women in the last few years,” he says forlornly. “Two of them had been working for years and managed to pay back what they owed the traffickers; the other two were young and fled to Germany.”

For the last few years Appiah has been working for an Italian charity in Castel Volturno, a decaying seaside town north of Naples that’s become home to thousands of his fellow countrymen and migrant women from Nigeria. Another charity in the area says that since 2010 about one hundred Nigerian women have sought its help to break free from sex work.

Italian and European authorities estimate as many as 16,000 Nigerian women, some as young as 16 or 17-years-old, have been trafficked into Italy in the past two years by Nigerian racketeers and crime gangs, the most notorious a syndicate known as Black Axe.

The number of unaccompanied Nigerian women sailing to Italy from Libya has risen each year from 1,454 in 2014 to more than 11,000 last year and the International Organization for Migration estimates as many as 80 percent of them work once they arrive as street prostitutes for traffickers often in brutal conditions and for little pay.

Like the Italian authorities, IOM argues the Nigerian women are forced unwillingly into prostitution, tricked by traffickers, who charge the women as much as 35,000 euros for the trip to Europe. The traffickers terrify the women into submission, using violence, voodoo religious rites and threats to harm the women’s families back in Nigeria, say authorities.

Threat of violence

 
But the picture is more complicated, according to charity workers and migrants themselves, who suspect most of the Nigerian women who’ve arrived in the past two years — and the ones setting out now to complete a highly dangerous journey through strife-torn Niger and Libya — were not tricked by unscrupulous recruiters but knew they’d be engaged in sex work in Italy.

They say the women, most in their teens or early twenties, don’t understand how harsh their conditions will be and how vulnerable they will be, prey to violence and manipulation in a culture they struggle to understand. Breaking free isn’t easy — the voodoo blood oaths traffickers make them take back in Nigeria weigh heavily on many of the women, the threat of violence is ever present and some fear their families will be harmed.

“The reality is that some of them, I would say most of them, know they will be involved in prostitution,” says Pescara-based Fabio Sorgoni, an official with the Italian charity On the Road, which helps prostitutes get out of sex work. “Some of them think they’ll be working in factories or cleaning. But a large proportion of them know they’re coming to do sex work,” he adds.

Anti-migrant rage

With anti-migrant rage mounting in Italy and populist parties demanding tough action to halt the record influx of asylum-seekers, charity and outreach workers fear speaking too openly about the motives and backgrounds of the Nigerian women arriving in Italy. They don’t want to erode what’s left of public compassion for asylum-seekers.

“The pattern has changed a lot,” says Maureen, a Nigerian migrant who arrived in Italy 20 years ago, starting life here as a housemaid. Working her way through school, she’s now a case officer for the charity Associazione Jerry Masslo.

“A few years ago, yes, the women were duped by the traffickers’ and expected ordinary jobs. But those days are over…the position has changed.” Partly so, she says, because of the effectiveness of outreach programs in Nigeria warning women of the dangers.

She says many of the recently arrived Nigerian women were sex workers before in Nigeria. “Some families, often mothers, sisters and aunts urge them to make the trip, arguing it’ll just be for a few months and then they’ll be rich,” she explains.

Motivated by poverty

Poverty and the lack of job opportunities in Nigeria led them into sex work in the first place, she argues. “And they don’t understand how bad it will be for them in Italy,” she says.

Says Sorgoni: “The women don’t understand 35,000 euros is lot of money. When they get here they have to stay on the streets for 14 hours a day and they get something like five or 10 euros for sex. They then realize they’ll have to be on the streets for years — forced to go with everyone, forced to have sex without a condom because many clients here demand that.”

He adds: “Many are very young, they come from rural areas and are unschooled. They don’t understand their own bodies or the infections they can get and they think all they have to do is pray, or ward off sickness with voodoo rites.”

In Castel Volturno, local doctors say nearly a quarter of the Nigerian women they treat have sexually transmitted diseases. “They fear they’ll be arrested when they arrive at the hospital,” says Dr. Beniamino Schiavone, director of Clinica Pineta Grande, a cutting-edge private hospital the government subsidizes to provide care for migrants in the area. “So they wait until their problem is terribly serious.”
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Polish authorities have questioned Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, as a witness in an investigation into the 2010 jet crash in Russia the killed Poland’s then-president Lech Kaczynski and 95 others.

Tusk, who was the Polish prime minister at the time, told reporters after the more-than-eight-hour interrogation that he would not be intimated by the proceedings, which his lawyer described as politically motivated.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the country’s ruling party leader and the brother of the former president, said Tusk “should be afraid.”

But Tusk said, “I do not have anything to fear. And Mr. Kaczynski will not scare me, no matter how badly he wants to get me.”

Kaczynski has long insisted that the crash was no accident and that Tusk was morally responsible for the death of his twin brother.

Polish and Russian investigators determined at the time that pilot error, bad weather and poor air-traffic control were to blame for the crash.

Prosecutors have said they are trying to determine why Polish authorities of the time did not take part in the autopsies, which were performed by Russians and later shown to be sloppy. Exhumations have revealed that some body parts got mixed up and were buried in the wrong graves.

Tusk’s Polish supporters see the questioning as part of a bitter feud going back years that pits him against Kaczynski, the man who directs most government decisions now.

One of the EU’s top leaders since 2014, Tusk is considered one of the most charismatic and effective politicians that Poland has had in many years, and the only one able to unite a weak and divided political opposition. Should he ever return to Polish politics, he would represent a major threat to Kaczynski.
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Three firefighters have been hurt as they battled a large brush fire south of the Greek capital, Athens.

Authorities have ordered the evacuation of dozens of homes in two communities in Lagonissi, a coastal area 30 kilometers from Athens, after several homes and cars were destroyed in the fire.

Dozens of firefighters and fire engines are taking part in the operation.

Winds up to 60 kilometers per hour were hampering the firefighting effort, while temperatures in the area reached 35 degrees Celsius.

Summer wildfires are common in Greece.

Wildfires are also taking a toll on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica and in Albania.
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Upmarket fashion magazine Vogue has featured an unexpected new model in its latest edition — London’s first female police chief.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick has posed in her uniform for the glossy magazine as part of a feature that celebrates women at the top of their game.

Dick, 56, is the first female commissioner in the London police force’s 188-year history and began leading the organization of 43,000 officers and staff in April this year.

Dick, an experienced counterterrorism officer, had a turbulent start to her new role with London’s emergency services, having to cope with a devastating fire which engulfed the Grenfell tower block in central London, killing about 80 people.

“There is something about putting the uniform on. You’ve got a role to play, to be calm, to lead other people, to go forward when everyone else is running away. It gives you a sense of, not of courage but, ‘It’s my job,'” Dick told Vogue.

Dick joined the London force, known as Scotland Yard, in 1983 as a constable and made her way up the ranks to become Britain’s most senior counterterrorism officer and national director for security during the 2012 London Olympic Games.

In the Queen’s 2015 New Year Honour’s List, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

Dick said the Grenfell fire and recent fatal attacks in Westminster and by London Bridge had meant long working hours, but the police force’s morale has stayed high.

“It’s brought the public supporting the police, even more than before. You can’t walk down the road without people coming up to you and shaking your hand and saying thank you for what you’re doing. All the staff say the same,” she said.
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The German government has condemned Vietnam’s “unprecedented and blatant violation” of German and international law by kidnapping a Vietnamese citizen seeking asylum in Berlin and returning him to Hanoi to face criminal charges.

The German foreign ministry expelled a Vietnamese intelligence officer and summoned Vietnam’s ambassador to hear a complaint that the incident “has the potential to have a massive negative impact on relations between Germany and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”

A statement issued in Berlin Wednesday said senior German officials have “no reasonable doubt” that Vietnamese security services and embassy staff carried out the kidnapping last week of Trinh Xuan Thanh, 51, an executive of the state-owned energy company PetroVietnam, which has been the target of recent corruption investigations that have ensnared government and business leaders. Thanh is accused of responsibility for nearly $150 million in losses by a division of PetroVietnam at a time when he headed that group.

Seized by armed men

A Vietnamese-language newspaper and German media reported that armed men accosted and seized Thanh in Berlin’s Tiergarten, a large forested park in the German capital, July 23, the day before he was to appear for a hearing on his request for political asylum in Germany.

Thanh, a former high-ranking member Vietnam’s Communist Party, turned up in Hanoi this past Monday. Police in the Vietnamese capital claimed he decided to turn himself in, 10 months after an international warrant was issued seeking his arrest.

The Hanoi police did not explain how Thanh made his way from Berlin or why he returned home. No pictures of him have been published and family members were said to have been unaware that he was back in Vietnam.

The German foreign ministry said Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government was demanding that Thanh be allowed to travel back to Germany immediately, so authorities there could examine both his asylum application and Vietnam’s request for his extradition. In addition, a spokesman for the German foreign ministry, Martin Schaefer, told reporters: “We reserve the right to draw further consequences, if necessary, at a political, economic and development policy level.”

In Hanoi, no comment

VOA asked the Vietnamese foreign ministry to comment on the case but received no response. Media reports in Germany said the Vietnamese embassy in Berlin was not responding to any inquiries.

Vietnam’s current anti-corruption drive marks a period of change and maneuvering within the country’s Communist Party.

“Massive corruption has been like rust eating away at the authority of the legitimacy of the Communist Party of Vietnam,” Professor Carl Thayer told VOA from Australia.

Thayer, an emeritus professor of the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defense Force Academy, explained: “This has been openly acknowledged by top party officials for well over a decade. Each major corruption case is judged not only on the financial loss to the state, but also on its impact on political stability.

“I liken anti-corruption campaigns to campaigns to end prostitution,” Thayer continued. “They are never-ending, because human greed is involved and officials will take risks.”

Quick promotions for Thanh

Thanh, a Hanoi native, graduated from the Hanoi University of Architecture in 1990 and then worked until 1995 in Germany, which currently is Vietnam’s largest trading partner in the European Union.

After returning to Vietnam, he advanced rapidly through a series of executive positions of increasing responsibility, at a state-owned technology and economic development company, a state-owned civil and industrial construction company and, in 2007, PetroVietnam Construction Joint Stock Corporation. He was chairman from 2009-2013, and was awarded a Laborers’ Hero in the Renovation Era medal in 2011.

Thanh moved into the government realm in September 2013 as deputy chief of office and head of the representative office of the Ministry of Industry and Trade in the central province of Da Nang.

In early June last year, Thanh landed in the spotlight after a photograph of him driving a privately owned car bearing government number plates was posted online.

Tripped up by privilege

An uproar ensued as people questioned why Thanh, then a deputy chairman of the southern province of Hau Giang, was assigned a government plate. After review by authorized agencies, the province’s leaders admitted they had made a mistake.

However, the outcry caught the attention of the head of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Nguyen Phu Trong, who on June 9, 2016, called for an investigation of Thanh’s activities. That scrutiny uncovered losses of $147 million at PetroVietnam during Thanh’s tenure.

In July 2016, Thanh requested annual leave. The following month, he requested sick leave for medical treatment overseas, and then disappeared.

By mid-September, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security had charged Thanh, along with four others, with mismanagement at a subsidiary of the national oil and gas giant PetroVietnam, had removed him as a member of the Communist Party, and had issued an international warrant for his arrest.

The resulting worldwide manhunt for Thanh appeared to be fruitless until the recent events in Berlin.

One report this week indicated the two governments involved had discussed the Thanh case before he was abducted in Berlin.

The Associated Press said Germany’s foreign ministry spokesman, Martin Schaefer, confirmed that German and Vietnamese officials discussed Hanoi’s request for Thanh’s extradition during a meeting in Hamburg July 7-8, on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit.

This report originated on VOA Vietnamese.
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Centers like Pontourney in Beaumont-En-Veron were to be opened in France as reintegration centers, and were to be set up in every region of France. But that will not happen now: At the end of July, officials said Pontourney is closing.
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A Georgian court on Wednesday rejected a request to postpone former President Mikheil Saakashvili’s hearing on embezzlement charges.

Saakashvili’s lawyers asked Tbilisi City Court to delay the hearing because the former president has been stateless since July 26, when Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko revoked Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship.

Calling the request unsubstantiated, Judge Badri Kochlamazashvili ruled that the hearing would be held at the court’s discretion.

Saakashvili, 49, once a lauded pro-Western reformist, served two terms as Georgia’s president, from January 2004 to November 2013. His popularity declined toward the end of his second term, in part because of a five-day war with Russia during which Moscow’s forces drove deep into the South Caucasus country, and his long-ruling party was voted out of power in a 2012 parliamentary election.

In 2015, Saakashvili forfeited his Georgian citizenship by accepting an offer from his old college friend, Poroshenko, to become governor of Ukraine’s southwestern Odessa Oblast province — a post that required Ukrainian citizenship.

Saakashvili, whom many suspect of harboring Ukrainian political ambitions, resigned as governor of Odessa in November 2016, complaining of official obstruction and corruption. He accused Poroshenko of dishonesty and said his central government had sabotaged democratic reforms required for membership to the European Union and NATO.

‘Very Soviet behavior’

Saakashvili recently told VOA that Poroshenko stripped his Ukrainian citizenship in order to eliminate his main domestic political opponent and undermine democracy in the Russian-occupied Eastern European nation.

“It’s a very Soviet behavior, very much reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s actions,” he told VOA. “First, deprive somebody of citizenship and then declare them crazy, criminal. It’s very much a déjà vu.”

Poroshenko, who announced the decision while Saakashvili was visiting the United States, said he nullified Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship upon learning that the former Georgian leader had lied on his citizenship application.

Ukrainian law requires applicants for citizenship to disclose whether they are subjects of any ongoing criminal investigations inside or outside the country.

Georgia has been seeking the former president’s extradition to face charges connected to embezzlement of public funds, the violent dispersal of protests and a raid on a private television station. Saakashvili said the charges were politically motivated.

He insisted he “indicated everything rightfully” on the 2015 document, and that Poroshenko operatives had since doctored it.

“The documents that I filed were not shown,” Saakashvili said. “We are demanding them to be shown because we need to see that everything was done legally. The fact that they are showing this [falsified application for citizenship reveals a] blatant desire to do something very illegal. We are talking about the forgery here.”

No copy of original

Asked whether he had a copy of the original application, Saakashvili said he did not.

“I happen to trust people,” he told VOA. “I have filed so many documents in my life that I don’t keep copies. I trust the state institutions; I trust people that they would do their jobs fairly.”

Kyiv officials declined to respond to Saakashvili’s assertions or comply with a request to share a copy of the disputed application.

Although Saakashvili has vowed to return to Ukraine and fight to reclaim his citizenship, it is not known whether he has taken any official steps to initiate that legal process.

On Wednesday, Kyiv officials in Washington said he had made no efforts to reach them.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Yuri Lutsenko, said he would be forced to extradite Saakashvili to Georgia should he return to Ukraine — but only if the Georgians filed a new request.

Georgian authorities unsuccessfully requested Saakashvili’s extradition twice prior to Poroshenko’s official visit to Tbilisi last month.

This story originated in VOA’s Georgian service.
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Europe is experiencing extreme weather conditions, including heat waves and flooding. The heat has caused outbreaks of wildfires in southern countries such as Croatia, Italy, Montenegro, Portugal and southern France, and drought has led to shortages of water in many areas.
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The Sistine Chapel choir is preparing for its first visit to the United States in 30 years. The world’s oldest choir, it began performing for the head of the Roman Catholic Church about 500 years ago.
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Sirens wailed across Poland’s capital on Tuesday as the country marked the 73rd anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, a doomed revolt against the occupying Germans during World War II.

Sirens sounded for about two minutes starting at 5 p.m., the hour the 1944 uprising began, bringing traffic mostly to a standstill while people stopped to pay respect to the Poles who fought and died.

President Andrzej Duda, veterans, scouts and others took part in ceremonies, as did several thousand far-right extremists who marched through Warsaw.

The German Embassy in Warsaw flew its flags — a German and a European Union flag — at half-staff to honor the victims.

The Warsaw Uprising broke out August 1, 1944, with the Polish underground taking up arms against the powerful Nazi forces, hoping to liberate the city before the arrival of the Soviet Red Army. They held out for 63 days before the Germans crushed the revolt.

It was the largest act of resistance in any nation under German occupation during the war. The heroism of insurgents who fought for national liberation remains a defining element in Polish national identity.

The Germans suppressed the rebellion brutally, destroying most of Warsaw and killing around 200,000 people, most of them civilians.

Soviet troops who had arrived on the outskirts of Warsaw in their westward push against Adolf Hitler’s forces remained on the city’s outskirts without helping the Poles who were supposed to be their allies. The Red Army’s inaction was viewed as a deep betrayal.

U.S. President Donald Trump paid homage to the “desperate struggle to overthrow oppression” during a July 6 visit to Warsaw.

Trump recalled that the Soviets “watched as the Nazis ruthlessly destroyed the city, viciously murdering men, women and children.”

The 1944 uprising by the Polish resistance came more than a year after Jews confined to the Warsaw Ghetto and about to be sent to death camps took up arms against the Nazis. That revolt also ended in tragedy for the Jews.
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On the latest leg of his first official tour of Eastern Europe, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence assured regional allies the United States will stand by their side.

Facing a crowd of Georgian and international journalists at government offices in Tbilisi, Pence, standing alongside his host, Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili, said America first does not mean America alone.

“President Trump has sent me with the simple message to you and to the people of Georgia, we are with you, we stand with you …  America stands with Georgia,” said Pence.

The vice president came to Georgia, the only non-NATO member country on his itinerary, from Estonia, a model of a successful EU-leaning transformation, before heading to Montenegro, NATO’s newest member.

Pence is the highest-ranking American official of the current administration to visit Georgia and the larger Caucasus region.

“Thanks to your help, Georgia is no longer a Soviet or a post-Soviet country,” said Kvirikashvili at Tuesday’s joint press conference.  “Today we are a democracy closely associated with the European Union.”

Kvirikashvili’s comments, in which he touted Georgia’s role as “a key strategic partner of America,” come amid an ongoing partial Russian occupation.

About 60 kilometers from the news conference, Russian tank units maintain control over 20 percent of Georgian terrain, a holdover from the August 2008 five-day war.

Pence reiterated the U.S. non-recognition policy regarding the Russian-occupied zone, condemning Moscow’s presence on Georgian soil, what many observers describe as an evolving, “creeping” occupation.

“President Trump has called on Russia to cease its destabilizing activities,” Pence said, adding that President Donald Trump will soon sign sanctions against Russia.

“Our country prefers a constructive relations with Russia, based on cooperation and common interest.  But the president and our Congress are unified in our message to Russia: a better relationship, lifting of sanctions, will require Russia to reverse actions that caused sanctions to be imposed in the first place.”

‘Reset’ jitters

Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Georgia about a year after the 2008 war.  Biden’s visit came shortly after the Obama administration’s “reset” policy with Russia, which caused concern among many Europeans that the United States would give Moscow a pass for its invasion of Georgia.

Years later, Russia annexed Crimea and destabilized Eastern Ukraine, which led the West to unilaterally impose sanctions on Russia.

Both Georgia and Ukraine are aspiring NATO members.  Some observers argue Georgia’s 2008 war and Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea could have been avoided if those countries hadn’t been denied Membership Action Plan status at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April, 2008.

“President Trump and I stand by the 2008 NATO Bucharest statement, which made it clear that Georgia, one day, will become a member of NATO,” said Pence.

According to recent nationwide polls carried by National Democratic Institute, 66 percent of Georgia’s population approves of the government’s stated goal to join NATO.  Sixty-two percent of Georgians say the country should join the European Union.  Both organizations are largely seen as security instruments that would protect Georgia independence and development.

2017 represents the 25th anniversary of U.S.-Georgian diplomatic relations.

George W. Bush is the only U.S. president who has visited Georgia, which he called “a beacon of democracy.”

This story originated in VOA’s Georgian Service. 
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An attempted escape from a Moscow courthouse has left three gang members dead, authorities said Tuesday.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said the ill-fated incident occurred at the Moscow Regional Court as the defendants were being escorted under guard in an elevator. Officials say a suspect attacked one of the guards and tried to strangle him before the defendants seized the weapons from the guards.

A shootout with court guards erupted once the elevator doors opened, leaving three of the suspects dead and two wounded. At least two guards also were injured, authorities said.

The trouble happened prior to a hearing for the defendants, who are accused of killing 17 motorists over the course of a few months in 2014.

Prosecutors said the men would lay spike strips across roads as cars were driving by, popping the tires and forcing the drivers to exit their vehicles.

When the drivers left their cars, the gang, totaling nine members, would shoot them dead, investigators said.
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Spain’s National Court has recommended the extradition to the United States of a Russian computer programmer accused by U.S. prosecutors of developing malicious software that stole information from financial institutions and caused losses of $855,000.

Stanislav Lisov, 31, was arrested January 13 in the Barcelona Airport while on honeymoon in Europe. Prosecutors accuse him of developing the NeverQuest software that targeted banking clients in the United States between June 2012 and January 2015.

The Spanish court said Tuesday that Lisov could face up to 25 years in prison for conspiracy to commit electronic and computer fraud. The extradition hearing took place July 20.

The court said its ruling can be appealed by Lisov.

The extradition, if finally decided upon, must be approved by the government.
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Russian authorities are now barring American diplomats and their families from a U.S. recreational residence on the outskirts of Moscow, part of sweeping retaliatory measures announced by Kremlin leader Vladmir Putin.

The Russian president ordered the U.S. on Sunday to cut its overall staff of more than 1,200 in Russia by 755 people, in response to new U.S. sanctions imposed against Moscow for its interference in the 2016 presidential election. It is believed to be the single largest cut ever imposed on the U.S. embassy in Moscow and consulates elsewhere in Russia, although many of those to be dismissed are likely Russians working in support positions.

Putin said the cuts would leave both Russia and the U.S. with the same number of staff and diplomats in Washington and Moscow, respectively — 455.

President Donald Trump has been silent on the issue since Putin announced his retaliatory action.

Asked about this Monday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: “Right now we are reviewing our options, and when we have something to say on it we will let you know.”

No response yet to Putin

The White House has said Trump intends to sign into law the new round of sanctions against Russia that Congress passed last week, but he has not yet done so.

The U.S. State Department said the order to reduce the number of American diplomats in Russia was “a regrettable and uncalled for act.” A spokesman said U.S. officials are assessing how to respond to Putin.

A Russian analyst, Nikolai Petrov of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said the move reflects the Kremlin’s disillusionment with Trump: “These measures are tough, and it is linked to a deep disappointment that came after the euphoria linked to the arrival of Donald Trump [to power], and to the idea that today we will start our relations anew.”

Another Russian analyst, Gleb Pavlovsky, said a return to Cold War-era hostilities with the U.S. will only boost Putin’s popularity at home ahead of another likely bid for the Russian presidency next year.

Pavlovsky, a former political consultant for the Kremlin who now is president of the Foundation for Effective Politics in Moscow, explained how U.S. efforts to “punish” Putin may have the opposite effect: “American sanctions naturally are causing a definite mass reaction [in Russia] — an anti-American, pro-Putin reaction.” If Putin wished, Pavlovsky added, he could make the American sanctions the centerpiece of his re-election campaign next year.

Russians also will feel cutback

Other experts say the vital work of the U.S. embassy in Moscow will continue despite the massive cuts.

Steven Pifer, a former U.S. diplomat now with the Brookings Institution, told VOA that Russians also may discover some unintended consequences of their president’s crackdown on U.S. diplomacy.

“My assumption is hundreds of Russians are going to lose their jobs now,” Pifer said. “And when you’re looking at priority functions of the embassy, you know, visa functions are important but they’re not as important as other functions. So my guess is that those Russians [who] want to travel to the United States are going to find that visa processing is going to take longer than usual because of reduced staff in the consular section.”

Pifer was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1986, at a time when there were several back-and-forth expulsions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. He later served on the National Security Council under former President Bill Clinton, and was ambassador to Ukraine from 1998-2000.

During his time in the Russian capital, Pifer said, American staff were called upon for “all-purpose duty” at times when Russian support staff were unavailable for political reasons.

“So, five or six days out of every seven, I would work on my normal portfolio, which is arms control,” Pifer recalled. “And then one day, I’d drive a truck. And the embassy got by. There was actually this incredible spirit in the embassy that we were going to show the Soviets that this kind of action was not going to cramp the embassy.”

Pifer said he expects the same determined spirit from U.S. embassy personnel now.

Congress approved the new sanctions against Russia last Thursday, as part of a package that also included new measures against Iran and North Korea. Russia’s foreign ministry denounced the U.S. for “extreme aggression” in international affairs and signaled the coming counter-measures the next day, two days before Putin personally announced the cutbacks in diplomatic staff.

In addition to sharply trimming the size of the U.S. mission, Russia reclaimed two U.S. facilities, a recreational retreat near Moscow and a storage facility in the city.
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Five aid groups that operate migrant rescue ships in the Mediterranean refused to sign up to the Italian government’s code of conduct on Monday, the Interior Ministry said, but three others backed the new rules.

Charity boats have become increasingly important in rescue operations, picking up more than a third of all migrants brought ashore so far this year against less than one percent in 2014, according to the Italian coast guard.

Italy fears the groups are facilitating people smuggling from North Africa and encouraging migrants to make the perilous passage to Europe, and it proposed a code containing around a dozen points for the charities.

Those who refused to sign the document had put themselves “outside the organized system of sea rescues, with all the concrete consequences that can have”, the ministry said.

Italy had previously threatened to shut its ports to NGOs that did not sign up, but an Interior Ministry source said in reality those groups would face more checks from Italian authorities.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has taken part in many of the rescues of some 95,000 migrants brought to Italy this year, attended a meeting at the Interior Ministry but refused to sign the code.

MSF objected most strongly to a requirement that aid boats must take migrants to a safe port themselves, rather than transferring people to other vessels, which allows smaller boats to stay in the area for further rescues.

“Our vessels are often overwhelmed by the high number of [migrant] boats … and life and death at sea is a question of minutes,” MSF Italy’s director Gabriele Eminente wrote in a letter to Interior Minister Marco Minniti.

“The code of conduct puts at risk this fragile equation of collaboration between different boats,” Eminente continued, adding that MSF still wanted to work with the ministry to improve sea rescues.

But Save The Children gave its backing, saying it already complied with most of the rules and would monitor constantly to be sure that applying them did not obstruct their work.

“We would not have signed if even one single point would have compromised our effectiveness. This is not the case, not one single point of the code will hinder our activities,” Save The Children Italy director Valerio Neri said after the meeting.

The Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) and Spanish group Proactiva Open Arms agreed to the conditions, but Germany’s Sea-Watch, Sea-Eye and Jugend Rettet, and France’s SOS Mediterranee abstained.

MSF, SOS Mediterranee and Jugend Rettet also called for clarity on the rules and took issue with a clause in the code which would oblige groups to accept police officers on board.

“For us the most controversial point … was the commitment to help the Italian police with their investigations and possibly take armed police officers on board,” Jugend Rettet coordinator Titus Molkenbur said. “That is antithetical to the humanitarian principles of neutrality that we adhere to, and we cannot be seen as being part of the conflict.”
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When Luxembourg’s new law governing space mining comes into force on Tuesday, the country will already be working to make the science-fiction-sounding mission a reality, the deputy prime minister said.

The legislation will make Luxembourg the first country in Europe to offer a legal framework to ensure that private operators can be confident about their rights over resources they extract in space.

The law is based on the premise that space resources are capable of being owned by individuals and private companies and establishes the procedures for authorizing and supervising space exploration missions.

“When I launched the initiative a year ago, people thought I was mad,” Etienne Schneider told Reuters.

“But for us, we see it as a business that has return on investment in the short-term, the medium-term, and the long-term,” said Schneider, who is also Luxembourg’s economy minister.

Luxembourg in June 2016 set aside 200 million euros ($229 million) to fund initiatives aimed at bringing back rare minerals from space.

While that goal is at least 15 years off, new technologies are already creating markets that space mining could supply, said Schneider.

He said firms could soon make carrying materials to refuel or repair satellites economically feasible or supply raw materials to the 3-D printers now being tested on the International Space Station.

Lifting each kilogram of mass from Earth to orbit costs between 10,000 and 15,000 euros ($11,000 to $18,000), according to Schneider, but firms could cut these costs by recycling the debris of old satellites and rocket parts floating in space.

The small European country, best known for its fund management and private banking sector, will on Tuesday begin the work of making such deals, with the security of a legal framework in place, said Schneider.

Luxembourg has already managed to attract significant interest from pioneers in the field such as U.S. operators Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, and aims to attract research and development projects to set up there.

A similar package of laws was introduced in the United States in 2015 but only applies to companies majority owned by Americans, while Luxembourg’s laws will only require the company to have an office in the country.

“I am already in discussions with fund owners for more than 1 billion euros which they want to dedicate to space exploration over here in Luxembourg,” Schneider said. “In 10 years, I’m quite sure that the official language in space will be Luxembourgish.”
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