Pro-secession activists in Catalonia blocked major highways, train lines and avenues across the northeastern region Monday on the anniversary of a banned referendum that was crushed by police and failed to deliver independence from Spain.

Student strikes, emotional speeches and mass demonstrations were planned to commemorate the Oct. 1, 2017, vote that Spanish courts had deemed illegal and that caused the country’s gravest political crisis in decades.

The anniversary is being marked by a fractured Catalan independence movement fractured and amid a timid dialogue with the central government, now in the hands of a minority Socialist administration.

The day began with early protests called via online messaging apps by the Committees for the Defense of the Republic, or CDRs. They are local activist groups that emerged after last year’s independence declaration, based on the referendum’s results, was never implemented. Central authorities took control of Catalonia and a judicial investigation landed top separatist leaders in jail while others fled the country.

In Girona, north of Barcelona, hundreds of activists on Monday occupied high-speed railway tracks, halting train traffic for more than two hours before they peacefully left the local station. Some protesters then moved to the local headquarters of the Spanish government’s delegation, demanding the removal of the national flag from the building.

The CDRs also shared photos and posts on social media showing road blockages on regional roads and at several points along the AP-7 highway, the main north-south artery running through eastern Catalonia and leading to the French border.

Their presence also disturbed traffic on the main roads of Catalan cities like Lleida and Barcelona, the regional capital, where marches were planned throughout the day.

Maria Vila, a protester who was placing “Republic under construction” stickers in Barcelona’s main thoroughfare, said she wanted to highlight last year’s violence and demand more progress on secession.

“The Catalan government has not done much and we are determined to make the Catalan Republic happen, in any way we can, even if it is by holding another referendum, a legal one,” she told The Associated Press.

Meanwhile, members of the regional government and other top authorities returned to Sant Julia de Ramis, the northern town that has become a symbolic place for Catalan separatists because one year ago police stormed into the local school to prevent people from voting.

Carles Puigdemont, Catalonia’s president at the time, had been scheduled to vote there but had to find an alternative polling station when anti-riot police broke the gates of the school to confiscate ballot boxes and used batons to disperse and injure voters refusing to leave.

The incidents were broadcast live and brought pressure on the Spanish central government, at the time in the hands of conservatives. Separatists claimed a victory for independence in the vote despite its illegal nature, the police violence and a lack of oversight.

In a brief speech Monday, Catalonia’s current president, Quim Torra, called on supporters gathered outside of the Sant Julia de Ramis school to remember the lessons of the referendum and to press ahead with efforts to secede from Spain.

He spoke while some people held a banner behind him reading, in Catalan, “People demand, the government obeys,” a message that could be aimed at the Spanish government that says the country’s constitution doesn’t allow a referendum on a region’s secession, but also at regional separatist politicians who have been criticized for not delivering on the promise of independence.

Torra was hand-picked by Puigdemont from Belgium, where the separatist leader successfully fought off extradition and has been advocating for an independent Catalonia. On Monday, he released a video on Twitter calling on Catalans to remain united in persevering with the goal of breaking away from Spain.

“Let us not stray from the only possible way to live in a full democracy: the (Catalan) Republic and its international recognition,” Puigdemont said.

Torra has asked the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to authorize a binding vote on secession, and also to release the nine separatist leaders that are in pre-trial detention on rebellion and other charges.

Dialogue between the regional and national administrations has so far delivered some economic deals for funding the region but remains mired amid internal discord among separatists on the best strategy going forward and the weak parliamentary support for Sanchez’s government.

The spokeswoman of his new center-left government on Monday called last year’s police violence “a mistake” and blamed it for damaging the country’s reputation internationally. But Isabel Celaa also said the vote didn’t succeed: “There is nothing to celebrate” on Oct. 1, she told Cadena Ser radio.

Polls and recent elections show that the region’s 7.5 million residents are roughly equally divided by the secession question.

 
…

Nobel Prizes are the most prestigious awards on the planet but the aura of this year’s announcements has been dulled by questions over why so few women have entered the pantheon, particularly in the sciences.

The march of Nobel announcements begins Monday with the physiology/medicine prize.

Since the first prizes were awarded in 1901, 892 individuals have received one, but just 48 of them have been women. Thirty of those women won either the literature or peace prize, highlighting the wide gender gap in the laureates for physics, chemistry and physiology/medicine. In addition, only one woman has won for the economics prize, which is not technically a Nobel but is associated with the prizes.

Some of the disparity likely can be attributed to underlying structural reasons, such as the low representation of women in high-level science. The American Institute of Physics, for example, says in 2014, only 10 percent of full physics professorships were held by women.

But critics suggest that gender bias pervades the process of nominations, which come largely from tenured professors.

“The problem is the whole nomination process, you have these tenured professors who feel like they are untouchable. They can get away with everything from sexual harassment to micro-aggressions like assuming the woman in the room will take the notes, or be leaving soon to have babies,” said Anne-Marie Imafidon, the head of Stemettes, a British group that encourages girls and young women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“It’s little wonder that these people aren’t putting women forward for nominations. We need to be better at telling the stories of the women in science who are doing good things and actually getting recognition,” she said.

Powerful men taking credit for the ideas and elbow grease of their female colleagues was turned on its head in 1903 when Pierre Curie made it clear he would not accept the physics prize unless his wife and fellow researcher Marie Curie was jointly honored. She was the first female winner of any Nobel prize, but only one other woman has won the physics prize since then.

More than 70 years later, Jocelyn Bell, a post-graduate student at Cambridge, was overlooked for the physics prize despite her crucial contribution to the discovery of pulsars. Her supervisor, Antony Hewish, took all of the Nobel credit.

Brian Keating, a physics professor at the University of California San Diego and author of the book “Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor,” says the Nobel Foundation should lift its restrictions on re-awarding for a breakthrough if an individual has been overlooked. He also says posthumous awards also should be considered and there should be no restriction on the number of individuals who can share a prize. Today the limit is three people for one prize.

“These measures would go a long way to addressing the injustice that so few of the brilliant women who have contributed so much to science through the years have been overlooked,” he said.

Keating fears that simply accepting the disparity as structural will seriously harm the prestige of all the Nobel prizes.

“I think with the Hollywood (hash)MeToo movement, it has already happened in the film prizes. It has happened with the literature prize. There is no fundamental law of nature that the Nobel science prizes will continue to be seen as the highest accolade,” he said.

This year’s absence of a Nobel Literature prize, which has been won by 14 women, puts an even sharper focus on the gender gap in science prizes.

The Swedish Academy, which awards the literature prize, said it would not pick a winner this year after sex abuse allegations and financial crimes scandals rocked the secretive panel, sharply dividing its 18 members, who are appointed for life. Seven members quit or distanced themselves from academy. Its permanent secretary, Anders Olsson, said the academy wanted “to commit time to recovering public confidence.”

The academy plans to award both the 2018 prize and the 2019 prize next year _ but even that is not guaranteed. The head of the Nobel Foundation, Lars Heikensten, was quoted Friday as warning that if the Swedish Academy does not resolve its tarnished image another group could be chosen to select the literature prize every year.

Stung by criticism about the diversity gap between former prize winners, the Nobel Foundation has asked that the science awarding panels for 2019 ask nominators to consider their own biases in the thousands of letters they send to solicit Nobel nominations.

“I am eager to see more nominations for women so they can be considered,” said Goran Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and vice chairman of the Nobel Foundation. “We have written to nominators asking them to make sure they do not miss women or people of other ethnicities or nationalities in their nominations. We hope this will make a difference for 2019.”

It’s not the first time that Nobel officials have sought diversity. In his 1895 will, prize founder Alfred Nobel wrote: “It is my express wish that in the awarding of the prizes no consideration shall be given to national affiliations of any kind, so that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.”

Even so, the prizes remained overwhelmingly white and male for most of their existence.

For the first 70 years, the peace prize skewed heavily toward Western white men, with just two of the 59 prizes awarded to individuals or institutions based outside Europe or North America. Only three of the winners in that period were female.

The 1973 peace prize shared by North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho and American Henry Kissinger widened the horizons _ since then more than half the Nobel Peace prizes have gone to African or Asian individuals or institutions.

Since 2000, six women have won the peace prize.

After the medicine prize on Monday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the Nobel in physics on Tuesday and in chemistry on Wednesday, while the Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. On Oct. 8, Sweden’s Central Bank announces the winner of the economics prize, given in honor of Alfred Nobel.
…

Few Macedonians turned out to vote in a referendum on whether to change the name of their country — a move that could pave the way for it to join NATO and the European Union.

According to election officials, only about a third of eligible voters cast ballots Sunday. But more than 90 percent of those voting cast a ballot in favor of changing the country’s name to North Macedonia.

Macedonia’s electoral commission said two days ago the referendum results would be declared invalid if less than 50 percent of the eligible voting population went to the polls

Nationalists, including Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov, had urged a boycott of the vote.

Macedonians are being asked to change the name of their country to end a decades-old dispute with neighboring Greece and pave the way for the country’s admission into NATO and the European Union.

Athens has argued that the name “Macedonia” belongs exclusively to its northern province of Macedonia and using the name implies Skopje’s intentions to claim the Greek province.

Greece has for years pressured Skopje into renouncing the country’s name, forcing it to use the more formal moniker Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in the United Nations. Greece has consistently blocked its smaller neighbor from gaining membership in NATO and the EU as long it retains its name.

President Ivanov said giving in to Athens’ demand would be a “flagrant violation of sovereignty.”

He steadfastly refused to back the deal reached between Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev and his Greek counterpart, Alexis Tsipras, that put the name change to a vote.

“This referendum could lead us to become a subordinate state, dependent on another country,” Ivanov said. “We will become a state in name only, not in substance.”
…

Traditional two-handled ceramic jars known as amphoras were used extensively in ancient Greece to store and transport a variety of products, especially wine. These days they are more likely to be found in shipwrecks than in stores. But wine-filled amphoras are once again being found on the sea floor, not from sunken ships, but deliberately placed there by a special Eastern European winery. Faith Lapidus explains.
…

Prime Minister Theresa May will unveil plans Sunday to levy an extra fee on foreign buyers of homes in Britain, saying she wanted to stop it being as easy for those who do not live in the country to buy homes “as hard working British residents.”

May, struggling to unite her governing Conservatives behind her Brexit strategy, hopes to use her party’s annual conference in the English city of Birmingham this week to reset her agenda to tackle growing inequality in Britain.

Aware that the opposition Labour Party staged a successful conference last week and set out new policies targeting many of those who voted to leave the European Union, May will try to take the upper hand by launching a new social agenda.

“At Conservative conference last year, I said I would dedicate my premiership to restoring the British Dream, that life should be better for each new generation, and that means fixing our broken housing market,” she will say. “It cannot be right that it is as easy for individuals who don’t live in the UK, as well as foreign based companies, to buy homes as hard working British residents.”

She will say that a new surcharge will be levied on top of all other stamp duty, a tax paid on property purchases, including higher levels of stamp duty introduced in April 2016, on second home and buy-to-let purchases.

The government did not say when the new rates would be introduced but said it would consult on the stamp duty increase, which would be levied on individuals and companies not paying tax in Britain.
…

Macedonians go to polls Sunday to vote on whether to change their country’s name to Republic of North Macedonia, urged by a pro-Western government to pave the way for NATO and EU membership by resolving a decades-old name dispute with Greece.

The referendum is one of the last hurdles for a deal reached between Macedonia and Greece in June to settle their quarrel, which has prevented Macedonia from joining major Western institutions since it broke away from then-Yugoslavia in 1991.

Greece, which has its own northern province called Macedonia, has always maintained that Macedonia’s name represented a claim on its territory. It vetoed Macedonia’s entrance into NATO and the EU, and forced it to enter the United Nations under a provisional name as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia or FYROM.

Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev argues that accepting a new name is a price worth paying for admission into the EU and NATO. But nationalist opponents say it would undermine the ethnic identity of the country’s Slavic majority population.

President Gjorge Ivanov has said he will boycott the referendum.

Polls for some 1.8 million voters will open at 7 a.m. and close at 7 p.m. The question on the referendum ballot is: “Are you for NATO and EU membership with acceptance of the agreement with Greece.”

The referendum is advisory and not legally binding, but enough members of parliament have said they will abide by its outcome to make it decisive. The name change requires a two-thirds majority in parliament.

For the referendum to be valid, at least 50 percent of voters must turn out to vote and a majority of them must back the change.

Polls have indicated that a large majority of those who vote are likely to back the change, but achieving the required turnout may be difficult. While more than 80 percent of Macedonians support NATO and EU membership, many may boycott the referendum because of disagreement with the name change.

“The Macedonian people have never been so embarrassed than now with this agreement (with Greece),” said Violeta Petkoska, a 39-year-old nurse. “On the day of the referendum they want us to dig our own grave, so that from the next day the Macedonian people do not exist.”

Zaev says NATO membership will bring much needed investment in the country with unemployment rate of more than 20 percent.

“Macedonia should move forward to become a European state. We have no alternative,” said Asim Shainovski, 35, a public administration worker.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has accused Russia of attempting to influence the outcome of the referendum, which the Kremlin has denied.

Macedonia avoided the violence that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, but was later rocked by an ethnic Albanian insurgency that almost tore the country apart in 2001.

Western governments see NATO and European Union membership as the best way of preserving the peace and stability in the Balkans after a decade of wars with the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
…

Journalists are being jailed in unprecedented numbers across the globe, with 262 detained for their work at the end of 2017, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“The jailing of journalists is a brutal form of censorship that is having a profound impact on the flow of information around the world,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon told a press freedom event Friday at the United Nations.

At the end of 2017, the worst offenders were Turkey, with 73 journalists jailed; China with 41; and Egypt with 20.

CPJ says that slightly more than half of all imprisoned journalists were jailed for reporting on human rights violations.

WATCH: A Pakistani American Startup Fighting Media Censorship

Simon said the United Nations has not been a strong enough voice on the issue because it has a culture of rarely naming and shaming its member states.

The event, organized on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly annual meeting, highlighted the cases of five reporters CPJ says have been unjustly detained. They are nationals of Bangladesh, Kyrgyzstan, Egypt and Myanmar.

The two most high-profile cases are of Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo in Myanmar. The two men were detained in December 2017 while they were investigating the mass killing of Rohingya Muslim men and boys by Buddhist villagers in the Rakhine state village of Inn Din.

Myanmar’s military launched a crackdown on the minority Rohingya in August 2017 after Rohingya militants attacked several police checkpoints and killed a dozen Myanmar police officers. In a matter of a few months, 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh. Survivors gave accounts of horrific abuses, including widespread rapes, torture, and the looting and burning of their homes. The United Nations has deemed the atrocities a “textbook case” of ethnic cleansing. 

British barrister Amal Clooney is representing the two Reuters reporters. She says the Myanmar authorities did not want their story about the massacre at Inn Din to come out.

“So police planted government documents on the journalists while other officers lay in wait outside to arrest them,” Clooney said of how the two men were set up. “The journalists were arrested and were then prosecuted and subjected to a show trial in which their conviction was guaranteed.”

Earlier this month, the two were sentenced to seven years in prison for violating a law on state secrets. Clooney said they are seeking a presidential pardon in Myanmar for them, as it is the only avenue currently available to win their freedom.

“The attack on them is a chilling warning to other journalists worldwide,” said Reuters President Stephen Adler. “Myanmar is not the only country where attempts are made to deter investigative news gathering, scare sources and whistle-blowers, dim the spotlight of reporting, and thereby allow officials to act in darkness with impunity.”

Other arrests

Azimjon Askarov, a Kyrgyz journalist, has been serving a life sentence since July 2010. CPJ’s Simon says he was covering deadly ethnic clashes in southern Kyrgyzstan in the summer of 2010. During the trial, he and his lawyer were both assaulted.

“CPJ conducted its own investigation into the case in 2012 and found that charges against Askarov were in retaliation for his reporting on corrupt and abusive practices by regional police and prosecutors,” Simon said.

Bangladeshi photojournalist and commentator Shahidul Alam was arrested last month while covering student protests in Bangladesh. A Dhaka court ordered that he be held for seven days to determine if he violated an information law by spreading propaganda and false information.

“When Shahidul was brought into court, he screamed that had been tortured. He was unable to walk without assistance,” Simon told the panel. He remains in detention.

Since 2013, CPJ says, Egypt has been among the world’s worst jailers of journalists, often detaining reporters on politically motivated anti-state charges.

Alaa Abdelfattah, a well-known Egyptian blogger and activist who has written about politics and human rights, is one of them. He is serving a five-year sentence on charges that he organized a protest and assaulted a police officer.

“We believe the charges are trumped up and in retaliation for Alaa’s coverage of alleged human rights abuses by the police and security forces,” Simon said.

“We are witnessing a growing hatred of journalists worldwide, which unfortunately is not limited to authoritarian regimes,” said Margaux Ewen, North America director of Reporters Without Borders. “We are seeing democratically elected regimes also attack the press more and more frequently, which is why we need to continue to address wrongs as they occur.”

U.S. President Donald Trump refers to negative news coverage of him and his administration as “fake news,” and reporters at his rallies and during his campaign reported encountering hostility from his supporters.

Reporters in the United States are facing a more dangerous work environment. CPJ says at least three journalists have been arrested this year and 34 last year. In June, five people were killed in the newsroom of an Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper.

Journalists covering white nationalism and the far-right political movement have reported receiving threats, and at least 24 journalists have been assaulted, shoved or had their equipment damaged while working.

“A free press is not an adversary, but an essential component of democracy,” Ewen said.
…

Four large Finnish unions called on Friday for tens of thousands of their members to go on strike on Oct. 3 to protest against what they called attacks on workers’ rights.

The unions said the strike was over government plans to make it easier for small companies to dismiss workers.

“The obstinacy of the right-wing government … has not left us with any choice,” the Industrial Union’s chair Riku Aalto said in a statement.

Service sector union PAM, professionals’ union Pro and the Finnish Electrical Workers’ Union also called the 24-hour strike.

Finnish food industry workers had already announced plans to strike on Oct 3. against the government plans.

The government led by the Center Party has said the changes will end up creating more jobs as they will make small companies more willing to hire.
…

France’s leaders are proposing a new international coalition to revive global cooperation that they say is being threatened by countries like the United States and Russia.

Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced the plan Friday while speaking at Harvard University, calling for an alliance of “goodwill powers” that believe in cooperation and share democratic values.

Any nation could join, but the minister says he hopes it would include countries like India, Australia and Japan, along with others in Europe. He says it would go on with or without the U.S.

His speech came days after U.S. President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that he rejects “the ideology of globalism.”

French President Emmanuel Macron countered with calls for greater cooperation and said “nationalism always leads to defeat.”
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Hundreds of Russians braved the cold and rain to queue for days outside a Moscow phone store ahead of the release of the new Apple iPhones on Friday, but when the doors opened none stepped in to buy.

Instead, they tried in vain to sell their queue places to genuine Apple enthusiasts outside the first Russian store to sell the new iPhones XS and XS Max in central Moscow.

Banking on strong enthusiasm for the phones, which have drawn days-long queues outside stores in Singapore, Sydney and elsewhere, the queue sellers set the price of the first place at 450,000 rubles ($7,000).

Reductions were offered for places further down the line, but in the end all went unsold as shoppers were happy to wait for the chance to buy the 87,000 ruble ($1,300) iPhone XS or 96,000 ruble ($1,500) XS Max.

The store manager called out ticket numbers to invite in the first buyers, but his calls went unanswered.

Eventually, ticket holder number 247 came to the door and Russian photographer Anatoly Doroshchenko, who had arrived that morning and didn’t pay for the right to queue-jump, became the first purchaser in Russia of one of the new phones.

For the group of queue jump sellers, some of whom ripped up their tickets and adverts selling their places, the exercise wasn’t a complete waste of time.

 
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Pope Francis has defrocked the Chilean priest at the center of the global sex abuse scandal rocking his papacy, invoking his “supreme” authority to stiffen a sentence originally handed down by the Vatican in 2011.

In a statement Friday, the Vatican said Francis had laicized the 88-year-old Rev. Fernando Karadima, who was originally sanctioned to a lifetime of “penance and prayer” for having sexually abused minors.

The “penance and prayer” sanction has been the Vatican’s punishment of choice for elderly priests convicted of raping and molesting children. It has long been criticized by victims as too soft and essentially an all-expenses-paid retirement.

The Vatican didn’t say what new evidence, if any, prompted Francis to re-evaluate Karadima’s original sanction and impose what clergy consider the equivalent of a death sentence.

 
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British investigators now say a third Russian military intelligence officer was involved in the poisoning in March this year of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the southern English cathedral town of Salisbury.

Officials say the officer, who they suspect of carrying out reconnaissance for the nerve agent attack, has been identified by the British security services. At this stage, they say, they are not releasing his name – neither the alias he might have used nor his real identity.

The disclosure comes as Kremlin officials downplayed the unmasking earlier this week of one of the suspects in the attack as a decorated colonel in the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service.

Col. Anatoliy Chepiga, a GRU veteran who is believed to have served in an elite special forces unit in Afghanistan as well as in Chechnya and Ukraine, received Russia’s top military honor, Hero of the Russian Federation, in 2014. It may have been bestowed on him personally by Russian President Vladimir Putin, say security analysts.

Chepiga was seen laughing on CCTV footage released earlier this year by the British authorities as he and a colleague, who used the alias Alexander Petrov, sauntered along a Salisbury street March 4 soon after the poisoning of Skripal, a former Russian agent who defected to Britain.

The two men have claimed they are sport nutritionists and in an interview, ridiculed by the British media and government, with the Kremlin-directed RT network, insisted they had gone to Salisbury, twice, to see the cathedral’s spire and ancient clock. Their first day trip was a failure because of slush and snow, they said, although according to weather data there was no snow in the cathedral town on March 3.

The investigative journalism consortium Bellingcat, along with the news-site The Insider, say they have identified the decorated veteran, who used the alias Ruslan Boshirov, by trawling through open-source records of the graduates of Russian military academies and then matching his photograph. Leaked data of Chepiga’s real passport provided final proof.

‘Fake news’

The Russian Foreign Ministry says the Bellingcat identification is “fake news.”

And Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday: “Like you, we are just learning of this investigation in the media released that talks about certain people resembling certain other people.” Other Kremlin officials say many people resemble each other.

Chepiga’s apparent identification as one of the likely culprits of the assassination attempt using the rare toxin Novichok leaves in tatters the Kremlin claim that it had no involvement in the attack, say British officials. His seniority in the GRU, they argue, suggests the attack was sanctioned from the top of the Kremlin.

Bellingcat says aside from its own open-source probe, “multiple sources familiar with the person and/or the investigation have confirmed the suspect’s identity.” British officials say they have no dispute with the identification. But they are not officially confirming it and have not said in detail why, arguing they are unable to for security reasons.

Locals in Chepiga’s home village, Berezovka, 640 kilometers east of Moscow in the Amur region, interviewed by the Russian newspaper Kommersant, confirm the identification and say they knew it was him even before the Bellingcat investigation. They say they recognized him from the CCTV footage British authorities released. Kommersant says the locals spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.

“Yeah, that’s Tolya,” one woman told the newspaper, using Chepiga’s nickname. She says he was a disciplined youth. “He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and never got involved with any bad crowd,” she said.

Security analysts say it is possible that Chepiga and Skripal, a former GRU officer, knew each other. If so, it would add a personal element to the nerve agent attack. Skripal also served in Afghanistan, although not in a special forces unit but with Soviet Airborne Troops and many years earlier.

Skripal and his daughter survived the March nerve-agent attack, but a local woman not connected to the original attack died in July after being exposed to the same toxin, which was contained in a discarded perfume bottle dumped in a trash bin.  

Skripal was a double agent for British intelligence in the 1990s. In December 2004, he was arrested by Russian authorities, tried, convicted of high treason and sentenced to 13 years in prison. He was included in a 2010 spy swap and settled in Salisbury.

Britain, the United States and most European Union countries responded to the Salisbury attack with expulsions of Russian diplomats and financial sanctions on Russia. The Kremlin denies any involvement in the attack and has maintained variously that the poisoning never happened, that it was carried out by Britain in order to blame Russia or that unknown third parties were responsible.

 
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President Gjorge Ivanov on Thursday urged Macedonians to boycott a referendum on changing the country’s name, saying making such a change would amount to “historical suicide.”

“On September 30, I will not go out and vote, and I know that you, my fellow citizens, will make a similarly wise decision,” Ivanov said in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

Macedonians are being asked to change the name of their country to North Macedonia to end a decades-old dispute with neighboring Greece and pave the way for the country’s admission into NATO and the European Union.

Athens has argued that the name belongs exclusively to its northern province of Macedonia and that using the name implies Skopje’s intention to claim the Greek province.

Greece has for years pressured Skopje into renouncing the country’s name, forcing it to use the more formal moniker Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in the United Nations.

It has also consistently blocked its smaller neighbor from gaining membership in NATO and the EU as long as it retains its name. 

Ivanov said giving into Athens’ demand would be a “flagrant violation of sovereignty.” He has steadfastly refused to back a deal reached between Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev and his Greek counterpart, Alexis Tsipras, that put the name change to a vote.

“This referendum could lead us to become a subordinate state, dependent on another country,” Ivanov said. “We will become a state in name only, not in substance.”
…

Former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called on Prime Minister Theresa May to rip up her Brexit proposals, ratcheting up the pressure on May as she prepares to face her divided party at its annual conference in two days time.

“This is the moment to change the course of the negotiations and do justice to the ambitions and potential of Brexit,” Johnson wrote in Friday’s Daily Telegraph, adding a six-point alternative plan for Brexit.

“There has been a collective failure of government, and a collapse of will by the British establishment, to deliver on the mandate of the people,” he wrote.

Just six months before the United Kingdom is due to leave the European Union on March 29, 2019, little is clear: PM May has yet to clinch a Brexit divorce deal with the EU and rebels in her party have threatened to vote down any deal she makes.

Johnson, one the most prominent campaigners for Brexit in the 2016 referendum, resigned in July as foreign secretary over May’s Brexit proposals which he cast in his 4,600-word Daily Telegraph article as “enforced vassalage.”

May has repeatedly said her Brexit proposals are the only viable ones.
…

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan began a three-day state visit to Germany on Thursday, the latest step in rapprochement efforts after more than a year of acrimony that pushed bilateral ties to the breaking point.

In in op-ed in the Thursday edition of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, Erdogan called for bilateral ties to “turn over a new page.”

The arrest of German citizens in Turkey has been a point of contention between the two NATO allies, and Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to press for their release. They include five Germans who Berlin says are being held for political reasons.

Turkey’s human rights record is also seen as a key obstacle in Erdogan’s talks with German leaders. Berlin is a strong critic of an ongoing crackdown following a 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, which led to the arrests of tens of thousands of people and the purging of just as many from their jobs. Erdogan last year accused Merkel of using Nazi tactics after Germany accepted thousands of political refugees in the wake of the failed coup against him.

Erdogan regularly dismisses international human rights criticism, saying the judiciary is functioning normally and merely defending democracy. Some analysts, however, say the human rights issue could sour hopes of a new Turkish-German relationship. They also say the Turkish president will be under pressure to accommodate some of Berlin’s demands.

Others predict that both sides may be keen to prevent human rights from scuppering reconciliation efforts. Berlin’s granting of a full state visit already is seen as a diplomatic victory for Erdogan.

‘Togetherness of necessity’

The Turkish leader now appears to be looking to the future, rather than dwelling on the past, according to analysts.

“It’s a marriage of logic, a togetherness of necessity — they may not love each other, but they have to come together because the strategic and geopolitical imperatives forced both sides together and there is no way out,” said international relations professor Huseyin Bagci of Ankara’s Middle East Technical University. “He [Erdogan] has seen in particular that without the German leader, you cannot do anything on the European continent.”

Erdogan is scheduled to hold several talks with Merkel during his three-day visit, as well as to attend a state banquet Friday in his honor, hosted by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Erdogan’s visit comes as the Turkish economy is facing a crisis, with the currency falling in value by more than 40 percent this year. Analysts predict the Turkish economy is likely to need considerable financial support, given that Turkey owes upward of $140 billion in foreign-denominated loans, much of which is due to be repaid over the next 12 months.

Ankara has repeatedly ruled out turning to the International Monetary Fund for help. Such a move, analysts say, would be politically toxic for Erdogan since he regularly touts freeing Turkey from dependence on IMF support as one of his most significant achievements.

Berlin, along with the wider European Union, is promoted in Turkey as an alternative to the IMF. German and Turkish finance ministers met earlier in September in Berlin for talks that reportedly included possible German financial support.

Johannes Hahn, EU enlargement commissioner, appeared, however, to rule out any wider EU support. “Turkey’s current economic problems are essentially homemade. The situation cannot be solved by the EU or single member states giving out aid packages or credit to Ankara,” he told the German Die Welt newspaper this week.

Separately, Christian Lindner, the leader of Germany’s pro-business Free Democrats, criticized the granting of the state visit, calling it a “propaganda victory” for Erdogan.

Ankara has significant leverage over Berlin in its role as gatekeeper for refugees and migrants entering the European Union. An EU deal with Ankara two years ago resulted in a dramatic drop in migrant numbers leaving Turkey for the EU. Erdogan frequently has warned of ending the agreement.

Opposition to Trump’s moves

U.S. President Donald Trump also is providing major impetus for improving relations between Erdogan and Merkel. The two leaders share opposition to Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the reimposition of sanctions.

With key trading partner Iran providing oil for Turkey, Erdogan has ruled out imposing U.S. sanctions, putting Ankara on a collision course with Washington.

Trump warned Wednesday that anyone who did not comply with U.S. sanctions would “face severe consequences.” U.S.-Turkish relations continue to be profoundly strained for myriad reasons, and in August, U.S. tariffs imposed on Turkish goods triggered a collapse in Turkey’s currency.

Aydin Selcen, a former senior Turkish diplomat, underscores that Berlin is key for Ankara in resisting U.S.-Iranian sanctions.

“The biggest ally for Turkey will be the EU, and among the EU countries it obviously will be Germany, and that is why we must watch very carefully when Erdogan is in Berlin,” said Selcen.

Erdogan is likely to be buoyed by EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini’s Wednesday announcement of an initiative to create an alternative payment system to dollars in an effort to avoid U.S. sanctions in trading with Iran.

The Turkish president is likely to be offered the lure of long-term business contracts with German companies. German media reported manufacturing company Siemens is on the verge of a $35 billion deal to modernize Turkish railways. Analysts point out Ankara will be aware that such mammoth contracts provide an essential incentive to Berlin to support the Turkish economy.
…

A group of British investigative journalists have identified a highly decorated member of the Russian military intelligence agency (GRU) as one of two men accused of trying to assassinate an ex-Russian spy and his daughter in Britain earlier this year.

British prosecutors have charged two Russians, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, of trying to kill Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, with the Soviet nerve agent Novichok in the English city of Salisbury on March 4. 

On Wednesday, the investigative website Bellingcat reported that Boshirov was actually Col.  Anatoliy Chepiga, who was awarded Russia’s highest honor — Hero of the Russian Federation — in 2014.

The New York Times reported that the Russian news outlet Insider has confirmed Bellingcat’s findings. 

British authorities say the suspects arrived at London’s Gatwick airport two days before the poisoning took place.  

Their journey from a London hotel to the crime scene in Salisbury was tracked by security cameras. The two men then flew out of Heathrow Airport back to Russia the same evening.

Boshirov and Petrov were charged in absentia with carrying out the attack. In an interview on the Kremlin-funded RT channel, they denied they were GRU agents and claimed to work instead in the nutrient supplements business. The suspects said they visited Salisbury to see its famous cathedral and did not know Skripal or where he lived.

Britain quickly rejected the claims. 

“The government is clear,” Britain said, that the men “used a devastating toxic, illegal chemical weapon on the streets of our country.” 

Skripal and his daughter recovered from the attack, but a British woman who touched a discarded perfume bottle that contained the nerve agent died. 

Ken Bredemeier contributed to this report.
…

Israel should think carefully before attacking Syria again once it obtains the sophisticated S-300 defense system from Russia, a Damascus official said.

The warning followed pledges from Moscow to deliver the missile system after last week’s downing of a Russian plane by Syrian forces responding to an Israeli airstrike.

Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad said late Tuesday that the S-300 should have been given to Syria long ago.

Israel, “which is accustomed to launching many aggressions under different pretexts, will have to make accurate calculations if it thinks to attack Syria again,” he said.

The Russian Il-20 military reconnaissance aircraft was downed by Syrian air defenses that mistook it for an Israeli aircraft, killing all 15 people on board.

Russia laid the blame on Israel, saying Israeli fighter jets were hiding behind the Russian plane, an account denied by the Israeli military.

On Monday, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the S-300s will be delivered to Damascus within two weeks. Earlier in the war, Russia suspended a supply of S-300s, which Israel feared Syria could use against it.

U.S. national security adviser John Bolton said the delivery would be a “significant escalation” in already high tensions in the region and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he would raise the matter this week with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov at the U.N. General Assembly.

Mekdad said the missiles are for defensive purposes, adding that “Syria will defend itself, as it always did” — a reference to missiles Syrian forces fired at Israeli warplanes carrying out airstrikes inside Syria over the past months.

Meanwhile, in northwestern Syria, preparations were underway to set up a demilitarized zone around the rebel-held province of Idlib, the last major area controlled by a mix of Turkey-backed opposition fighters and other insurgent groups, including al-Qaida-linked militants.

Two jihadi groups have so far rejected the plan to set up a demilitarized zone by Oct. 15. The al-Qaida-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Arabic for Levant Liberation Committee, the largest militant group in Idlib province, has not said yet whether it approves setting up the zone.

A Turkish security official said Wednesday that there were “indications” that some insurgents were leaving the demilitarized zone in and around Idlib but that it was unclear whether a “concrete” withdrawal of radical groups has started. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government rules.

Russia and Turkey agreed last week to set up a demilitarized zone around Idlib to separate government forces from rebels, averting a government offensive on the last major opposition stronghold in Syria.

Also Wednesday, Russian Maj. Gen. Yevgeny Ilyin said more than 3,150 Syrians returned to their homes in the past week, including 494 refugees. The rest were internally displaced people.

Moscow has called for international assistance for Syrian refugee returns, rejecting Western arguments that the Mideast country remains unsafe.

Ilyin, who spoke during a conference call on coordination of efforts to encourage the return of refugees, said the total of more than 1.2 million internally displaced people and more than 244,000 refugees have regained their homes.

In seven years of civil war, some 5.5 million Syrians have fled their homeland and millions more were internally displaced.
…

Danish submarine inventor Peter Madsen, convicted of torturing and murdering Swedish journalist Kim Wall aboard one of his own vessels last year, lost his appeal Wednesday against his life sentence.

The Danish version of a life sentence typically is about 16 years long, but it may be continuously extended if the court rules that circumstances call for it. Madsen had sought a time-limited term. Now the 47-year-old could potentially spend the rest of his life in prison.

His defense had argued that Wall’s death was an accident, although Madsen himself admitted to throwing her body parts into the Baltic Sea.

The prosecution had argued that Madsen’s motive was sexual and that the murder was planned.

“I’m terribly sorry to Kim’s relatives for what happened,” Madsen told the court. Wall’s parents were not present.

A Copenhagen court ruled in April that Madsen had lured Kim onto his home-made submarine UC3 Nautilus with the promise of an interview, where she then died. The exact cause of her death has never been established.

 
…

U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy speech to the 73rd session of the U.N. General Assembly drew mixed reaction from world leaders. VOA’s Elizabeth Cherneff has this report looking at the international community’s response.
…

Morocco’s navy opened fire on a boat carrying migrants off its Mediterranean coast Tuesday, wounding four.

Moroccan officials say the boat’s Spanish captain ignored orders to stop.

The wounded migrants were taken to a hospital while authorities seized the boat and opened an investigation. It gave no other information.

Meanwhile, France, Germany, Malta, Portugal and Spain reached a deal Tuesday to take in a boatload of 58 migrants stranded at sea.

The Aquarius will dock in Malta, where the 58 migrants will disembark and head for their new homes.

A dog named Bella is also aboard the ship. Her final destination has not been revealed.

Italy’s new right-wing government refused to let the ship dock, saying it has taken in enough migrants over the past several years and other EU members need to help out.

France also denied permission for the boat to go to Marseille, saying under the law of the sea, the ship needs to head to the closest port.

Two well-known charities — Doctors Without Borders and SOS Mediterranee — operate the Aquarius.

The ship picked up more than 600 migrants from the Mediterranean in June. EU nations squabbled for nearly two months over who is responsible for accepting them before several nations gave them refuge.
…

The stone steps leading into the medieval church where Serbian Orthodox worshipers enter are worn. In the half-light of the interior, some pilgrims reverentially lean on or drape themselves across the tomb of King Stefan Dečanski, considered by Serbs a “holy monarch.”

Others light candles. One young woman has dozens of tapers in her hand, lighting each one slowly and methodically after a brushing kiss and a silent prayer.

Many of the pilgrims have driven six hours from Belgrade to pray this Sunday in one of the most revered Serbian Orthodox churches, the 14th century Visoki Dečani. For many Serbs, Visoki Dečani is a besieged church, surrounded as it is by Kosovar Albanians and located deep in the territory of Kosovo, the former province that broke away from Serbia in 1999 after a U.S.-led NATO intervention brought a year-long ethnic war to a halt.

“We have had a very hard time since the last Kosovo conflict,” said Father Sava Janjic, Visoki Dečani’s abbot.

“Last” seems an appropriate word, hinting at the possibility of more conflict to come.

And taking the long, historical view, it is not hard to imagine that sometime in the future, monks at Visoki Dečani will again hear the fearsome echo of war raging around them.

The church has been plundered over the centuries by Ottoman troops, Austro-Hungarian soldiers, and during World War II, it was targeted for destruction by Albanian nationalists and Italian fascists. During the Kosovo War, the final one in a series of Balkan wars in the 1990s, the church was attacked five times. In May 1998, two elderly Albanians were killed 400 meters from its walls reportedly by the Kosovo Liberation Army for allegedly collaborating with Serbian forces.

“This is one of the most politically turbulent areas in Europe. The Balkans have always been on the crossroads of civilizations and invasions,” said Fr. Sava.

As he talked with VOA, soldiers from the NATO-led Kosovo Force of peacekeepers patrolled the grounds – as they have done every day since the war’s end.

“Since 1999, we have had three mortar attacks and one RPG (rocket-propelled grenade), bazooka attack. Thank God no particular damage was made and nobody was hurt,” said Fr. Sava. A strong advocate of multi-ethnic peace and tolerance, he likes to think of the church as “a haven for all people of goodwill.” During the war, the church sheltered not only Serbian families but also Kosovar Albanians and Roma.

He added, “I’m still trying to believe that the majority of Kosovar Albanians don’t harbor negative feelings toward us. But very often we are seen just as Serbs. This church is seen as something alien here, as a kind of threat to the new Kosovo identity.”

Now he worries about whether Serbia and Albania can put conflict behind them.

Serbs and Kosovar Albanians remain at odds over Kosovo, and the jigsaw puzzle of the Balkans map isn’t helping them.

The presidents of Serbia and Kosovo are considering border changes in a bid to reach a historic peace settlement which, if sealed, could advance their countries’ applications to join the European Union and, for Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008, secure U.N. membership. More than 100 countries recognize Kosovo as an independent state, but not Serbia. The EU has said it will not consider advancing accession talks until Belgrade and Pristina have made up.

Most EU leaders have long opposed any Balkan border changes, fearing any tweaks large or small might spark a return of ethnic violence.

U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton recently indicated that Washington could entertain the idea of border changes.

The U.S. ambassador to Greece, Geoffrey Pyatt, appeared more cautious about a land-swap deal, but kept the door open. In an interview with VOA, Pyatt said, “There are no blank checks.” “What we have been very clear on is that this process needs to be locally-owned and locally-driven and we are supporting European Union efforts to see progress.”

Under the land-swap deal, the Serbian border would be extended south to include Serbs in Kosovo’s north and some majority ethnic Albanian areas in Serbia would be traded in return by Belgrade. That would not help the majority of Serbs in Kosovo, who are spread across the south and west of the country.

Fr. Sava worries a land-swap deal, if pulled off, would amount to ‘peaceful’ ethnic cleansing. “Land swaps, where the majority of Kosovo Serbs would not just be left in majority-Albanian territory but also probably be forced to leave, would be very unjust,” he said.

Ultranationalists on both sides reject land swaps.

Serbia’s main opposition leader, Vojislav Šešelj, dismissed land transfers. “What are we talking about? Kosovo is just part of Serbia,” He told VOA. Kosovo is being illegally occupied, he said, due to assistance from the West, and especially the U.S.

“We are not exchanging the land,” Šešelj said. “They can only have the highest level of autonomy. We will not recognize their independence.”

Šešelj, a onetime deputy to Serbia’s wartime leader Slobodan Milošević, was found guilty by the U.N. court of crimes against humanity for instigating the deportation of Croats from the village of Hrtkovci in May 1992. He argues Serbs and Albanians cannot possibly live together and that they should be in separate communities. “Albanian ones in Kosovo could be allowed some self-administration rights,” he added.

Earlier in September, Kosovo Albanian nationalists led by veterans of the 1998-1999 war disrupted a planned two-day visit by Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, to Kosovo by blocking roads and burning tires. Their action showed how inflammatory the whole issue can easily become. Banje, the village west of the capital, Pristina, that Vučić planned to visit was the scene of the first crackdown by Serbian troops against ethnic Albanian separatists in 1998, which triggered the outbreak of open hostilities.

“All the wars in the former Yugoslavia were focused on territory and division, and to continue with the idea of territory is dangerous and will inflame nationalistic passions,” warned Nataša Kandić, a Serbian human rights campaigner and Nobel Peace prize nominee.

Fr. Sava harbors the same fear. “We still see people who are drawing up maps, and these maps in the 1990s became actually the killing fields. Do we still need it now?” he asked. “I am just trying to be hopeful that politicians see the risk of going into this story again.”
…

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is normally sure-footed when it comes to domestic politics, is facing an increasing challenge to his rule in Russia’s Far East, where his party suffered rare electoral setbacks Sunday amid rising anger over government plans to raise the national retirement age.

Election victories by the vehemently nationalist and anti-Western Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) of Russia have sent shockwaves through the Kremlin, which hadn’t expected to get trounced in the voting in second-round run-offs for governors in the region of Khabarovsk as well as in Vladimir region, east of Moscow.

In Khabarovsk, the LDPR candidate won 70 percent of the vote with the incumbent from Putin’s ruling United Russia party attracting just 28 percent.  In the Vladimir region, the LDPR pushed out another United Russia incumbent, winning 20 percent more of the vote than Putin’s party.

Gary Kasparov, the former chess grandmaster and anti-Putin activist, says the collective election rout should be seen as a personal setback for the Russian president.  He tweeted, “Even when every true opposition figure is banned from Russian ballots, Putin’s party has now lost two elections in a row to ‘anyone but Putin’ turnout.”

The elections Sunday followed weeks of protests across the country against plans to raise the retirement age for men from 60 to 65 and for women from 55 to 60 years.  On September 9, Russia’s ruling party suffered election defeats at the hands of the Communist Party in parliamentary polls in Siberia and central Russia as well as in another eastern region.

Crumbling aura

The election drama, with mounting reverses for United Russia in three weeks of voting, is seen by some analysts as marking a crumbling of Putin’s aura of invincibility.  With mounting popular anger at the retirement-age changes, Putin’s approval ratings have been tumbling.

According to the Levada Center, a pollster, the Russian president’s public opinion ratings are at a four-year low.

The Bell, a Russian news site founded by Liza Osetinskaya, a former editor of Forbes Russia, says the elections are a “serious test for the Kremlin’s domestic political system in the context of falling approval ratings sparked by unpopular pension reform.”

Sunday’s defeats are all the more surprising, say analysts, because the LDPR hardly campaigned, while the Kremlin sent its top spin doctors to Vladimir and Khabarovsk and dispatched top celebrities to try to ensure United Russia candidates won the elections.  There were promises by the Kremlin of more federal investment.

The LDPR is the party of 72-year-old Vladimir Zhirinovsky, considered by many an eccentric figure, who has urged Putin at various times to bomb Turkey and the Baltic countries, and in his own presidential election campaigns has called for vodka to be free.  He has campaigned for the legalization of polygamy.

Pension reform at center

Some analysts put the defeats down to the Kremlin’s backing of incumbent regional governors.  In regions where United Russia fielded new candidates, the ruling party won.

In Far East regions, many time zones from Moscow, protest votes have flared before.  And in the Vladimir region, anger at the scale of poverty has been a factor in previous elections.  But United Russia’s support for the unpopular pension reform appears to have been a key factor in the upsets, say analysts.

Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky argues a “gap” is emerging between the Kremlin’s usual managed politics and “the way people lead their daily lives” and that unfair election practices aren’t enough to overcome popular frustration.

Last week, in a gubernatorial election in Primorsky Krai, in Russia’s Far East, a Communist challenger appeared to win, but the election was declared invalid after there was uproar when his United Russia opponent was announced as the victor.  There were accusations of wide-scale election fraud, forcing the hand of the country’s elections chief Ella Pamfilova to abort the poll.

Some analysts fear the Kremlin may react by cracking down even more on dissent.  On Monday, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, the anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny, was released from jail and then immediately arrested again and sentenced to another 20 days of detention for protest violations.

 
…

A member of the Russian protest group Pussy Riot says he’s recovering after spending two weeks in intensive care with a suspected poisoning.

Pyotr Verzilov has been at Berlin’s Charite hospital since arriving from Moscow, where he had been previously treated. Verzilov tweeted Tuesday that he only fully regained consciousness three days ago after being in a “black hole” for the previous 12 days. He added he was “spending days in the great company of wonderful poisons.”

German doctors treating Verzilov said last week that reports he was poisoned are “highly plausible,” but stressed they can’t say how this might have occurred or who was responsible.

Verzilov and three other Pussy Riot members spent 15 days in jail in Russia for running onto field during the World Cup final to protest Russian police actions.

 
…

Twenty five years ago, Croat paramilitaries attacked on three sides around the time of morning prayers, leaving one obvious escape route, where they positioned snipers to pick off Muslims fleeing the village of Ahmići in the now picturesque Bosnian Lašva Valley.

The horror of that day remains as recent as yesterday for 63-year-old Hasreta Ahmić, a massacre survivor. An estimated 120 Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks, were killed.

As shells and mortars rained down, she says, “Everyone was scrambling for shelter, basements. The cellars were full mostly of old people and children, very young children. It was a horror. We did not have anything to eat or drink. There was neither water nor electricity. However, when it went quiet, I grabbed a bucket and ran to the stables. I milked the cow,” she said.

“My hands were shaking. I tried to calm down, but that was impossible,” she recalls. “At least everyone in our basement had a glass of milk.”

That night her husband, Huso, guided her and their three children to the safety of a nearby forest. As he returned to retrieve his infirm parents, he saw the family home “red and glowing.” He rushed toward it but, he says, “my feet were like lead.” When he got close he realized he would never see his parents again. “I felt totally alone, collapsed and sobbed silently,” he says.

They say the massacre of April 16, 1993 never leaves them. They have no contact with any Croats who were involved directly or indirectly, one of the paramilitaries had been a good neighbor and friend before the war.

On all sides engaged in the Balkan wars of the 1990s that left an estimated 130,000 dead anger and resentment remain, along with a feeling the gods of war have not finished with the Balkans. Reconciliation has stalled, warn rights activists.

A new generation of nationalists is appearing among Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs. Mostly working-class and resentful about the lack of economic opportunities, the young are starting to glorify the warlords of the past. Born after the wars, these new nationalists have no experience of what carnage looks like, feels like or smells like.

“I’m not afraid of an armed conflict because we are living in a conflict situation already. We are not shooting at each other, but we are actually living in something called a partial peace,” says Aleksandra Letić of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights.

Letić is based in the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska, one of the two awkward legal entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina created by the mainly U.S.-mediated 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian war.

“I’m afraid the country [Bosnia] could be sucked into a big social conflict, if nothing changes,” she says.

Youngsters get little accurate information about the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. The education ministries in both the country’s legal entities do not encourage teaching about the war.

Letic adds, “There is no joint narrative about what happened to us. The information youngsters are getting is biased. This is something they are receiving from parents, media, and politicians.” Serbia is different, up to a point, she argues. “At least in Belgrade, in Novi Sad, in the bigger towns, they have a critical mass gathered around youth organizations who are gathered around more progressive politicians,” she says.

On October 7 the voters of Bosnia and Herzegovina will cast their ballots for a national presidency and House of Representatives, as well as separate presidents and legislatures for the Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska.

Complicating the election is voting that will take place in the Bosniak-Croat Federation without an agreed electoral law in place, which could paralyze efforts to form governments in the entity afterward and lead to the suspension of crucial European Union funds.

In Republika Srpska incumbent President Milorad Dodik, who has been in power since 2010 and served previously two terms as prime minister, appears to be coasting to reelection. Frequently, he advocates that Republika Srpska should break away and declare itself an independent state, a move that would shatter the fragile multi-ethnic peace of the Balkans.

Opposition leader Branislav Borenović, president of the Party of Democratic Progress, accuses Dodik of trying to create an atmosphere that makes people scared. “We are quite independent enough,” he says.

He says the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb-controlled mini-state desperately need a new generation of politicians far removed from the ethnic mindset of the past. “The current political elites are afraid of talking about everyday issues… They are pushing very hard emotional nationalistic issues. We have had political elites controlling for the past 10, 15 years,” he adds.

Borenović hopes this election will mark a turning point in both entities. But resurgent geo-political interests and competition in the region by outside powers, including the United States, Europe, Russia and Turkey could fuel ethnic hostility. Most ethnicities welcome renewed international attention to the Balkans, but Russia is seen by many as having an agenda unhelpful for the salving of ethnic wounds and one aimed at disrupting Balkan countries from joining NATO.

Šefik Džaferović, a leading Bosniak candidate for the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, says, “Anyone who respects the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina and who’s not interfering in the internal affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina is welcome. The United States is completely like that. This is our great partner and friend. If there were no USA everything would be different here.”

He also said an improved future for the Balkans can only come with all the states joining the European Union.

“Russia has some other ambitions. Russia does not support our path towards the NATO alliance, and we have heard it openly, and this is a problem in relations,” he said.

Dodik has been playing the Russian card, seen as a traditional ally of Serbian nationalism, in his campaign, and Russian officials have been happy to lavish attention on him, determined to keep a foothold in the Balkans. In contrast, U.S. and European leaders and officials have been keeping a low-profile to avoid accusations of election meddling.

On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited Bosnia, insisting his trip had nothing to do with the upcoming polls and denied the Kremlin is throwing its weight behind Dodik. “We never advise whom to vote for, if we’re talking about elections in other countries,” he said. And he said the Kremlin remained committed to the Dayton accord.

Last year, the Kremlin was accused of being behind a coup plot in Montenegro to try to sabotage its joining NATO. And Western diplomats fear Russia is trying to influence a referendum in Macedonia on a name change for the country, part of a bid to normalize relations with neighboring Greece.

The Kremlin rejects the charge.

Dodik plans to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin shortly before the vote, their ninth meeting since 2011. And his close ties with the Kremlin are seen in the Serb mini-state as helpful in shoring up his nationalist vote.

Hasreta Ahmić has one thought as she watches her grandson romp around the garden, “Peace must be made. Do not divide. And no to the sentiment: ‘This is yours; this mine.”
…

Greece are using drones to buzz over boats running day trips on the Aegean at the start of a new effort aimed at cracking down on rampant tax evasion at holiday hotspots.

With the black economy by some accounts representing about a quarter of national output in a country which depends hugely on tourism, Greek authorities are turning to high-tech to stamp out undeclared earnings.

Finance ministry tax inspectors and the coast guard launched the drones project on Santorini, an island highly popular with tourists, to check on whether operators offering short day trips were issuing legal receipts to all their passengers.

Based on data from the drones, authorities were able to establish how many passengers were on board, then cross-referenced it with declared receipts and on-site inspections.

“We used the drones for the first time on an experimental basis to monitor how many tourists were on board,” said an official at the Independent Authority for Public Revenue. “The results were excellent”, he added.

Nine tourist vessels checked were alleged to have not issued a number of receipts, totalling about 25,000 euros ($29,460).

Their owners now face fines.

Tourism is a much-needed motor of growth and tax revenue for the economy, accounting for about a fifth of Greek gross domestic product.
…

U.S. billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) said on Monday it would challenge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg Hungarian laws that make it a crime to help asylum-seekers.

But Budapest, which accuses Soros and the liberal groups and causes he backs of trying to destroy Europe’s Christian culture by promoting mass migration, said it would not repeal the laws, whatever the outcome of the court appeal.

Under legislation named “Stop Soros,” anybody who helps migrants not entitled to protection to apply for asylum, or helps illegal migrants gain status to stay in Hungary, can be jailed. Orban has also introduced a 25 percent special tax on aid groups it says support migration.

OSF said the “Stop Soros” legislation, approved by the Hungarian parliament in June, “breaches the guarantees of freedom of expression and association enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights and must be repealed.”

“The Hungarian government has fabricated a narrative of lies to blind people to the truth: that these laws were designed to intimidate independent civil society groups, in another step towards silencing all dissent,” OSF president Patrick Gaspard said in a statement.

The provisions of the legislation are so broadly written that “they will have a far-reaching and chilling effect on the work of civil society far beyond the field of migration,” said the OSF statement.

“Will of the Hungarian people”

Budapest responded with defiance to the OSF move.

“The government stands by the Stop Soros package of laws. … as the legislation serves the will of the Hungarian people, and the security of Hungary and Europe,” a government spokesman told Reuters.

“The Soros organization attacks the Stop Soros package with all possible means as the legislation stands in the way of illegal immigration. The aim of George Soros and organizations supported by him is to flood Europe with migrants.”

Hungarian-born Soros denies trying to promote mass migration into Europe from the Middle East and elsewhere. In May the OSF announced it would shut its office in Budapest after more than 30 years and move to Berlin.

Orban, who has been in power since 2010 and won a third consecutive term in April with a big majority, has increased his control over Hungary’s media and courts and put allies in control of once independent institutions.

The legislation on asylum seekers has drawn condemnation from the U.N. refugee agency and the European Union. This month the European Parliament voted to sanction Hungary for flouting EU rules on democracy and civil rights.
…

Italy’s populist government on Monday escalated its clampdown on irregular immigration with a decree aimed at slashing the number of people awarded asylum and doubling the time irregular migrants can be detained.

The legislation promoted by Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who leads the far-right League party, comes as boat arrivals plummet and the minister refuses to allow charity ships carrying rescued migrants to dock in Italy’s ports.

“This is a step towards making Italy safer,” Salvini tweeted.

The League, which took power in June in coalition with the 5-Star Movement, has promised to deport hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants. Already, the move to refuse to let rescue boats dock has proven popular, doubling opinion poll support for the League since the election in March to more than 30 percent.

The Salvini Decree aims to limit the use of a form of international protection that has been widely used in recent years but is not strictly tied to political persecution or war.

“Humanitarian” asylum was given to more than 20,000 people last year, or 25 percent of those who sought asylum, against the 16 percent of asylum seekers awarded one of the other two forms of international protection.

It is given to migrants who are deemed to have “serious reasons” to flee their home country — a category that has often included homosexuals fleeing harsh anti-gay laws in Africa.

The decree limits humanitarian protection to victims of domestic violence, trafficking, work exploitation and natural disasters, to those needing urgent medical care, and to people who carry out “particularly valuable civic acts,” Salvini said.

“Humanitarian protection was supposed to be used sparingly,” Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told reporters. “In Italy, there has been an indiscriminate reception [of migrants] and the rules helped support this.”

Migration packaged with security

Other immigration measures include extending to 180 days from 90 the time an irregular migrant can be detained before being freed, to give the state more time to complete the deportation procedure.

The decree would also widen the range of criminal offenses that trigger the stripping of asylum privileges applied for or already granted.

Such a move could fall foul of the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, which is intended to protect all refugees, whether formally recognized or not, from being forcibly returned, except where they are a danger to public safety or national security.

Before the government approved the draft decree, a source in President Sergio Mattarella’s office had said parts of it might be unconstitutional — which could open the way for Mattarella to block it

The new immigration guidelines were packaged together with new security rules in an emergency decree, which has 60 days to secure parliamentary approval. Salvini said parliament was likely to make changes.

The security measures include heightened controls on those who rent trucks, in response to a series of attacks in Europe aimed at causing mass casualties. It also foresees stripping naturalized foreigners who are convicted on terrorism charges of their Italian citizenship.

The head of the Italian Catholic bishops’ conference, Nunzio Galantino, on Sunday criticzed the decision to link immigration and security in the same piece of legislation, saying: “We cannot consider the immigrant’s condition to be automatically that of a criminal.”
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Out of 15 countries polled, young people in China, India, Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Mexico were found to be more optimistic about the future than youths in the other countries, according to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Young people in these countries are more likely to believe they can affect the way their countries are governed and that their generation will have a more positive impact on the world than their parents’ generation, according to the Goalkeepers Global Youth Poll, conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs.

The poll surveyed more than 40,000 people age 12 and older and asked for “their outlook on their personal lives, challenges for their communities, and the direction of their countries,” according to the foundation report. Youths expressed more optimism than older people about their futures at home and globally.

In the poll, Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, the United States and Saudi Arabia were deemed higher-income countries. Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria and Russia were considered middle- or lower-income. 

Happiness ratings show general contentedness among the 15 countries, but youths in lower- and middle-income countries reported the highest levels of optimism. 

Relationships with friends and family were the most important influence on a person’s life, and was highest in Sweden, the poll found.

Mexicans, Kenyans and Americans also ranked their relationships very high, like most countries, and more important than the impact of social media. And while social media scored high among Mexican youths, it remained lower than the positive impact of friends and family.

Health or well-being, and finances followed family and friends in importance. If they could have any job, most youths said they wanted to be doctors, while most adults said they wanted to be entrepreneurs.

Optimism about the ability to find good jobs was highest in China and lowest in Nigeria. Most countries hovered in the midrange. 

Worldwide, most people, young and old, agreed “life is better for men and boys than for women and girls,” and will continue that way, and there was very little difference between male and female responses, the poll found.

“This is particularly true in India, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, the U.S. and Brazil,” the results said. Most responses said they thought conditions would improve for women.

Religion was most important to youths in Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, Sweden and Kenya, and least important to youths in China, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Mexico and Russia.

In China, both youths and adults reported overwhelming optimism in the future of their country: 90 percent of youths and 78 percent of adults feel good about the future of their country. India, Nigeria, Mexico, Kenya and Indonesia reported similar levels of optimism about their countries.

In the U.S., 35 percent of youths and 18 percent of adults reported feeling optimistic about their country. Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Great Britain and France also reported feeling less optimistic.

In response to the sentence, “My generation is better off than my parents were,” both Chinese youth (90 percent) and adults (80 percent) were most positive. Nigerian, Indian, Indonesian and Saudi Arabia youths followed in line for youths. Indian, Indonesian, German, Saudi Arabian and Swedish adults in succession said their generation was better off than their parents.

Government or political leaders, and climate change or pollution had the most negative impact on life for both youths and adults.

Both younger and older respondents cited ending poverty and improving education as paramount over other issues, including ending conflicts.

Cancer was the No. 1 health concern universally. HIV/AIDS came in second globally, with greatest concern in Kenya, Nigeria and Mexico.

The “sadness of aging” bummed out everyone, youths and adults, with responses ranking in the negatives, meaning no one was happy about aging. 
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Twelve crew members of a Swiss commercial ship have been taken hostage by pirates who attacked the vessel as it sailed off the coast of Nigeria.

Massoel Shipping said in a statement Sunday that the ship MV Glarus, with 19 crew on board, was attacked as it was carrying wheat from the Nigerian commercial capital Lagos to Port Harcourt.

Reuters news agency reported late Sunday the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) had identified the nationalities of the kidnapped crew. It said seven crew members were from the Philippines and others were from Slovenia, Ukraine, Romania, Croatia and Bosnia.

Nigerian officials said the 12 were still unaccounted for.

Massoel Shipping said the vessel was attacked around 45 nautical miles southwest of Bonny Island early Saturday.

“It is understood the pirate gang boarded the Glarus by means of long ladders and cut the razor wire on deck to gain access to the vessel and eventually the bridge,” the company said. “Having destroyed much of the vessel’s communications equipment, the criminal gang departed, taking 12 of the 19 crew complement as hostage.”

Piracy has been rising in the southern Niger Delta region in the past few years, along with the number sailors kidnapped for ransom.

According to a study published by the EOS Risk Group in July, the number of kidnappings in the region rose from 52 in 2016 to 75 last year. In the first half of this year, pirated kidnapped 35 sailors, it said.
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The United Nations, the World Bank and the International Committee of the Red Cross are partnering with technology powerhouses to launch a global initiative aimed at preventing famines.

“The fact that millions of people — many of them children — still suffer from severe malnutrition and famine  in the 21st century is a global tragedy,” World Bank President Jim Young Kim said announcing the initiative.

The global organization will work with Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services to develop the Famine Action Mechanism (FAM), a system capable of identifying food crisis area that are most likely to turn into a full-blown famine.

“If we can better predict when and where future famines will occur, we can save lives by responding earlier and more effectively,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a statement.

The tech giants will help develop a set of analytical models that will use the latest technoligies like Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to not only provide early warnings but also trigger pre-arranged financing for crisis management.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning hold huge promise for forecasting and detecting early signs of food shortages, like crop failures, droughts, natural disasters and conflicts,” Smith said.

According to the U.N. and World Bank, there are 124 million people experiencing crisis-level food insecurity in the world today.

FAM will be at first rolled out in five countries that “exhibit some of the most critical and ongoing food security needs,” according to the World Bank, which didn’t identify the nations. It will ultimately be expanded to cover the world.
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